“A lot of people have hard lives, Francesca. Not a lot of people become tyrannical control freaks who spy on their own relatives.”
“Let’s stop talking about Mateo.” I pull out of his embrace, rolling over into my own spot. Now he’s the one engaging my protective side, and I don’t like feeling on opposite sides, especially regarding our families. Sal doesn’t understand because he has a semi-normal family. Maybe they’re not normal by most standards, but compared to mine, Sal was raised by the Waltons. He didn’t know Mateo as a kid, trying to handle everything on his own because he had literally no one in the world. I was too little to be of much help when he went through losing Adrian’s mom—and Adrian’s friendship, for a while—but I remember it. I was way too little to know how he reacted to Mom’s death a few short years earlier, but I know he found her body. I know he was a child, abandoned via death by the woman who gave him life. Left to the devices of Matt Morelli, without anything even remotely resembling a mother figure to help guide him. We may share the same monstrous father, but since I was just a useless girl, I wasn’t shown the same attention, I wasn’t raised the way he was. I wasn’t brought up to be twisted and selfish. I wasn’t brought up to rule over the family, I was brought up to respect and serve them.
I hate feeling sympathetic toward my brother, and Sal’s making me.
“I’m not trying to piss you off,” he says, frowning as he rolls on his side to look at me. “You’re usually the one coming down hard on him.”
“I know, but… he’s my brother. I’m allowed to talk shit about him.”
Understanding dawns and Sal nods. “But I’m not. Okay. That makes sense.”
“He’s also always going to be a part of my life,” I point out. “As long as we’re together, you have to deal with him—even if only through me, because he obviously doesn’t know about you.”
“Okay, I can respect that. I have siblings, I get it. It’s just hard. I know what an asshole he’s been to you, and I don’t like anyone being an asshole to you.”
“Mateo’s an asshole to everyone, but he’s still my big brother.”
“And as such, he should protect you.”
I shrug. “He has a lot on his plate. Even more now, with Vince and Mia on his radar.”
“How’s that going? That was a close fucking call. I thought I wanted Ethan to die until Mateo was hot on his trail with that girl. I realized I might feel kinda bad if I got him killed.”
I grin, rolling on my side to face him. “You big softie.”
Sal rolls his eyes.
“Maybe I could meet that sister, too. You said she and your dad don’t have much of a relationship, so it seems like she might be kinda safe.”
“They don’t, but we don’t either,” he says. “Willow and I have met a handful of times, but we don’t really have a relationship, her being a bastard and all.”
“Well, that’s not her fault,” I point out. “Technically I’m a bastard—technically Mateo’s a bastard. All of my living siblings. Only Luciana was legitimate. My dad was still married to Belle when Mom had all of us, she just ran away and he never divorced her. Technically my mom was a mistress.”
“It’s not the same thing, though.”
“Still not Willow’s fault. Does she have any other siblings, like that she’s close to?”
“She has a brother. Younger, not older. I have no idea what kind of relationship they have. I talk to Ethan more than her, and we don’t exactly search each other’s souls.”
“See. You’re an excellent older brother; you should be hers, too.”
Cracking a smile, he asks, “Why are you trying so hard to mend this relationship?”
I shrug. “I don’t get to meet your parents, so I’ll take meeting as many siblings as I can. Do you have any brothers I could meet?”
“Nope,” he says, adamantly. “I do have a brother, but he works for Dad, too, and he wouldn’t keep my secret.”
“Is he on the anti-Morelli side?”
“No, but it would be a matter of loyalty. He just couldn’t keep it from Dad. Alex is a loyal soldier type—does as he’s told and doesn’t ask why. He’s for an alliance with your family if that’s what the higher-ups decide is for the best, but he’d go to war if they said so, too.”
Dread rolls over me and I scoot closer to him, throwing an arm around his waist. “God, I hope it never comes to that.”
He sounds a lot less confident when he says, “Yeah, me too.”
As far as I know, things are okay between our families. There have been bumps, and Mateo has been convinced they were plotting against him, but that’s not an unusual suspicion for him. He doesn’t start wars over paranoid concerns, because then he’d always be at war.