His Dirty Demands (Dirty Billionaires 1)

“Maybe I should have done more checking. I guess I thought you went to some fancy school or something. I know Dante went to Northwestern and has a master’s from the Kellogg School there.”

He nods. “While I had won a football scholarship to the University of Michigan, I couldn’t leave Enzo and Dante. There was no one else who could take care of them. We only had one living grandparent at the time, my mother’s father in Florida who was in a care facility. Her brother had died years before and my father’s brother was in jail. Besides, we’ve always been close. I couldn’t leave them after everything that happened.

“I was busy working and taking care of Dante and Enzo. I got classes in when I could, which for a few years wasn’t often. Not to mention it wasn’t cheap, and sometimes we needed rent paid or a new drill more than I needed to pay tuition for a degree everyone kept telling me I didn’t need if all I was going to do was flip homes.”

“But you always knew you were going to do more than flip homes.” It’s not a question—it’s clear Cesare had his eyes on a bigger prize from the beginning.

His smile is brief. “Two-flats and condos were enough to pay the bills; however, I always had plans to do more. I knew there were things I didn’t know, and some of that knowledge would come from the street, but the rest would come from school.”

Since he’s being so open, I ask the question that’s been on my mind since I researched him. “Is it true? That your uncle helped you start your company?” His uncle Tony Sabatini is a known lieutenant of the Cappelli crime family.

I’m relieved the question doesn’t anger him. He shrugs. “It wasn’t my uncle, at least in the beginning, he was still in jail on murder charges at the time. His son, my cousin Dominic, was the one who helped me out. It didn’t matter that my father went to law school and became a prosecutor and decried his family. Once he was gone, family was family, and my cousin was the only person at my parents’ funeral who made me promise to call him if I needed anything. I promised, but I didn’t call.

“There was next to nothing left over after the estates were settled—my parents were living from paycheck to paycheck and from credit card to credit card. I managed to hide the cash we had around the house, which was almost seven thousand, and didn’t last nearly as long as I hoped it would despite us renting a two-bedroom apartment on the edge of Rogers Park before it was rehabbed.

“I kept working at the grocery store I’d been at for years and picked up another job bouncing at clubs on the weekends. At one of the clubs, a guy was drunk and wanted a fight. I was willing to give it to him. News got back to my cousin. Dominic offered me a job working for him as a collector, as his muscle. But I turned him down.

“If I had any idea just how bad things were going to get when Dante caught pneumonia three weeks later, I would have said yes right then. Once Dante got sick, I called Dominic. I told him I’d work, but I needed to keep my hands clean. There was no way I could get locked up on something that would have Enzo and Dante taken away from me. He offered me everything I never thought I wanted but needed at the time.” He shakes his head.

“What?” I barely notice when the waiter brings our plates. I’m annoyed at the waiter for waiting while we cut into our steaks and deem them perfect. Until I take a bite. “Oh my god, this is delicious.” I close my mouth as I groan at the succulent piece of steak. It has the perfect mix of fat to buttery rich, tender meat.

A flash of heat hits me, and my eyes go to Cesare’s. Oh damn, he blinks, and it’s gone. His eyes are down on his own steak. I can’t take my eyes off his hands—they are long, thick yet still somehow elegant. I want those hands on me. What? No, yes, oh crap this is bad. “What?” I blurt the word out—anything to keep my mind from going down a road where it has no business going. “What did your cousin give you?”

“He offered me a bout in underground fights. I would get two hundred dollars each fight.”

My eyes are drawn to the nose Dante mentioned was broken three times. Dante calling himself and his brothers hoods. “You needed a job fighting?”

A shoulder lifts. “I needed to hit something.” The words are bleak. Dang it, there goes that ache from deep down again. “At the time I didn’t realize I was walking around with so much anger inside me. I believed I was fine, that I dealt with it all.” God, the horror of his father killing his mother before killing himself; how could anyone deal with something like that? “I was wrong.”

“I was angry at my mother for years. If I’m honest there are still times I’m angry at her for leaving my sister and me. I can’t imagine dealing with the anger, pain, and love that’s still there despite everything that your father did. The way he left you behind, trying to make sense of something so completely senseless.

“I used to ask my grandmother why my mother left us. The why drove me crazy. My grandma said because she could.

She could, and she did, and I have to not focus on the why but what comes after. I think it would have helped to have something to hit for a while there. How long did you do it for?”

His smile is barely there as he studies me. I couldn’t look away if I tried. There’s a new feeling between us; a tension I wasn’t even aware of has gone. I find myself smiling back. “For seven months and fourteen fights. Gradually I got him to pay me three hundred a fight and ten percent of the take of a win. After a few months, I finally had serious money and was ready to put it to good use. My uncle came out of prison then, and he offered to sell me a two-flat my mom had talked him into buying for her so she could renovate and sell, only she never got around to it. He helped in that he sold it to me for only what he paid, which was a steal my mother had negotiated down.

“I had no idea what I was doing. I watched about a thousand hours of videos and earned about a hundred bruises. Enzo, me, and Dante worked our asses off, and after five months we had a two-flat that sold for twice what I paid for it. I immediately took the money we made and after paying bills, found a condo to rehab.”

“You guys set yourself apart by buying outright the properties you rehabbed. Why?”

“We didn’t want to worry about payments that ate into profits and the clock that starts ticking the minute you sign on the dotted line. It kept our jobs small and few, but it was a good thing—we were still learning with every property. I wanted us to be able to take our time, to do things right, and learn without freaking out about being on a deadline. It helped us to put out a quality product so that by the time we were on the ninth flip, we had real estate agents lining up the day it went on the market, and it was sold within six hours with a bidding war.”

“From there it was only up. I’m guessing commercial was your endgame?”

He nods. “It was. My uncle was the one who pushed me to commercial. The family had a large portion of commercial property—it was one of their few legal ways of making money in the lean times. The further I researched, I saw exactly what he was talking about and knew I wanted to go bigger than a condo or two-flat or bungalow in the ’burbs.” I swear he reads me better than I know myself. “No, after the initial sale of the two-flat the family has had no investment or anything further to do with Sabatini Properties. Both my uncle and cousin understood completely without any resentment.”

“You were lucky to have family who cared about you.” The words are out before I mean to say them. I’m not a whiner, the past can’t be changed—it is what it is and bitching about it isn’t going to change anything.

“Have you seen your mother since she left you with your grandmother?” His black eyes are concerned, and I hate it. I don’t like the idea of being pitied.

“Thankfully, no. She’s tried contacting Bethany through social media, but Bethany blocks her. Even when my grandmother died there was nothing. Probably because she knew she wouldn’t get anything. Not that there was much left when my grandmother died. She made sure of that—there was no way she was going to leave anything behind for me or my sister.”

“Your grandmother wasn’t kind?”

I shrug. “My grandmother was an unhappy woman. She felt like everyone did her wrong. She committed the ultimate sin in her family’s eyes by taking up with a Venezuelan professor at the small college she taught at. Only to find the professor had a family back home, and she was pregnant and alone. Oh by the way, the school didn’t want an unmarried pregnant woman working for them.

“She found a lower-paying job teaching at a public school. Then my mom was a pain since the day she was born, according to my grandmother. Mom was skipping school by fourteen, dropped out by sixteen doing drugs and not coming home. When Mom ran away from home, my grandmother said she was relieved until ten years later my mom showed up on my grandmother’s doorstep. My grandmother said she wasn’t surprised when after spending just one night, my mom snuck out in the middle of the night leaving me and my sister behind.”