Page 112 of Scorned Beauty

I was choosing Sloane, but until I came to grips with how to deal with Sloane and my mother, I needed to tread carefully so one didn’t resent the other.

Resentment poisons relationships.Sloane knew this would happen, and she didn’t force me to choose a side because family was everything in the mafia.

Lucy was a welcome distraction. “You’re sick?”

“Just exhausted,” she mumbled, giving our mother a kiss before heading to the kitchen.

“I brought pastina,” Ma called.

“What are you exhausted over?” Suspicion entered my tone. Sequestering Lucy to this penthouse and vetoing her return toDC didn’t keep her out of trouble. She did most of her “fixer” work through the web and on her phone. Which, surprisingly, she didn’t have in hand. She must be really sick.

“This and that.”

“Lucy…” I warned in a sterner voice.

Ma intervened and joined Lucy in the kitchen. She lovingly swiped the disheveled hair from my sister’s face. “Just no more mischief, huh?”

Mischief? She nearly started a war between the Italian and Russian mafias, and Washington. But I let her focus on Lucy.

“Mrs. Einhorn says I should marry you off, so you will stop meddling in her son’s business.”

Ma had been furious at Lucy when she said Mrs. Einhorn’s son lost a position in the attorney general’s office because she’d exposed his drug use in college where a coed died.

I grew up in a life of privilege and my mother gave a lot of passes to men because she still subscribed to a patriarchal society. Pop balanced her out and so did Aunt Ava, who wasn’t afraid to call out my mother on her shit when she was letting her spoiled-mafia-princess upbringing of the eighties derail decades of hard work for us to become the most modern crime family in the northeast.

“You’re just annoyed because you can’t marry off Dom.” Lucy shot me a snarky look. “Sorry, bro. Heat’s on me, so back to you.”

I couldn’t even be pissed at her. Ma had been lamenting the unmarried state of her children ever since Cesar and Ava’s brood started falling like flies. Matteo and Sera, Bianca and Sandro even got married twice.

My mother’s eyes followed the path to where Sloane disappeared. “Now, about the cleaner.”

“Her name is Sloane.”

Ma scrunched her nose. “Awful name.”

“It’s a badass name,” Lucy piped in, serving herself a bowl of pastina.

“Thank you.”

“She’s got exquisite features,” Ma admitted slowly. “But she’s not very cultured.”

My mother’s euphemism foruncouth.

Lucy must have sensed the stiffening of my body.

“Sloane is just rough around the edges.” Lucy swallowed a spoonful of pastina and sat at the table. “This is good, Ma. Why don’t you guys sit and eat? You’re looking long in the tooth there.” She eyed me slyly, recognizing how it was costing me not to go off on our mother’s attacks on Sloane.

“Sloane doesn’t need much to knock a man on his ass,” Lucy continued. “I think that’s why brother here is afraid to show her off in public.”

“She was at the New Year’s Eve party,” I reminded her.

“But it’s mostly our family and close associates, then. People you can control. Imagine if it was at a gala?”

“Oh,” my mother interjected, walking over to the kitchen counter and picking up a fancy-looking envelope. “This is for the Russian masked ball benefit.”

When I made no move to accept, she put it down, mouth tightening. “It’s something I’m helping Irina Zahkarov organize. It’s an exclusive event like the Met Gala. Think about it. It’s three weeks from now.”

She gave an annoyed exhalation and closed our distance. She leaned in, as if not wanting Lucy to hear, but my sister was within earshot, anyway.