Page 34 of The Deals We Make

He shoves her away playfully. “I’m not penny-pinching.”

“Babe, you turned the thermostat in the house down by five degrees after you saw the energy bill,” she replies.

Niro laughs. “This is true. Can only fuck under the covers now so little Niro doesn’t shrivel up with frostbite.”

I can’t help but chuckle as I take in all the Corinthian-style pillars flanking the front of the house. Even the James Bond-style sliding gates are black iron and gold with a giant crest on the front of them.

Our motorcycles look out of place.

Welook out of place.

Switch and Sophia climb out of their truck.

“You grew up here?” Niro asks Sophia as she walks towards us.

She points up at a window on the second floor. “My bedroom.”

“So, who lives here now?” I ask.

“Alessio. Mom goes to Miami for the winter, and not even Dad’s death was going to stop that.”

“I can actually appreciate that,” Catalina says.

“Babe.” Niro pretends to stab a knife in his own heart. “You wouldn’t be sad if I died?”

Catalina laughs at her husband’s antics. “Depends on what you were doing before you died. If you died trying to save babies from a burning building, I’d be really sad and grieve you forever. However, if you died after screwing over the Outlaws and trying to kill one of our own children, I’d probably have been the one who killed you.”

Sophia smiles, but I can see it doesn’t quite touch her eyes. Her father might have tried to kill her, and she might have killed him for it, but Catalina’s joke still lands heavy, even as Niro and Switch laugh.

“Let’s go in,” Sophia says, heading to the front door. Switch takes her hand when they reach the steps and helps her take them one at a time.

Inside is just as over the top as the outside. More columns, marble, gaudy colors.

“I don’t like it either,” Alessio says, coming from a room to my right. The guy’s a good-looking fucker. Tall. Lean but a fighter’s stance. Dark hair a touch too long and floppy. It grazes the collar of his perfectly fitted suit jacket.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just a lot.”

“Old money meets new world. When my parents arrived here in the eighties, this was all the rage, apparently. The reason I couldn’t meet this morning is I hired an interior designer and contractor to gut the place after moving my mother’s things into an apartment by The Met.”

He kisses Sophia on both cheeks. “Are you doing okay, Pupparu?”

The pet name apparently means puppeteer, because Sophia, while the only daughter, was always able to pull her brothers’ strings.

“I am. I did a reach test this morning and got further than I did last time. Shows my spinal flexibility has improved in the last month.”

He looks at her proudly. “Good to hear it. The biker taking care of you okay?”

Sophia glances back at Switch. “Perfectly.”

“The biker thinks you should keep your nose out of our business,” Switch says, half-joking, half-serious.

Alessio almost smiles. “For as long as your business includes my sister, that isn’t going to happen. I did say you didn’t all need to come.”

Niro snorts. “Yeah. The armed welcome party outside suggests we were right in covering our brother.”

“They’re always there. Being a don is not quite assimpleas being an Outlaw.”

Before they get into a pissing contest, I step in. “You have a problem with a hacker. Tell me about it?”