The Beginning (The Life 1)

I flicked my eyes up to see Lance smirking at me over her head; asshole. His disrespectful ass ignored my glare of death, and he decided to put his foot in it. “So, Gia, how are you doing? It’s been a while since I’ve seen you around, even here at school. What gives?” I don’t think he knows that her trauma goes beyond what Victoria has been doing to her on school grounds, so he didn’t realize that he was putting her on the spot.

I saw it in the tensing of her shoulders and gritted my teeth while she tried to come up with an excuse. “I told Pop about your cannoli; we’re going to New York for the weekend. You’re spending the night Friday so we can leave early.” I distracted him, which isn’t hard. My Lance has the attention span of a gnat, just perfect for the police force.

“Did you just say you’re going to New York for cannoli?” Oh, she does have life in her, after all.

“Yeah, why?” She does incredulous well if the look she gave me was any indication.

“Do people really live like that?”

“Ask the twins; that’s their thing.” Everyone at the table was privy to our conversation.

“Don’t look at me; that’s Rosa. She once flew to Paris for a day to buy shoes.”

“It was the last pair, and there were only five pairs made.”

“But the designer said he’d ship them to you.”

“I needed them that weekend; how long would they have taken to get here if I waited?” Gianna’s mouth hung open in surprise, which I’m sure would only be the first of many. One of the reasons I want her to get acquainted with my sisters is for the off chance that some of what they are rubs off on her.

No one for miles around would dare step out of line with the Russo kids, and by extension, once they let her in, the same would go for her. I don’t know all the particulars yet, the twins are still working on it, but so far, it looks like Victoria had done a good job ostracizing her and getting others to follow. This way, once I take her into the bosom of my family, things will change for the better.

Then I can stop stressing over her being mistreated, and that ache in my gut will go away, I hope. “I have to go. You three take care of her.” I left before anyone could question me further and ignored the whispers and looks as I walked through the room and out the door. I wasn’t worried about being followed because no one dared, and it felt like a relief to be getting back to business.

I reached my spot in less than five minutes. With barely half an hour to go before lunch ends, I dug up the heavily coded handheld I kept hidden there and went to work. It had been easier than expected to get the information I keep there than I thought it would be. In fact, the most challenging part of all this was deciding what I wanted to do with the info once I had it in my hands.

Gramps was only too happy to share his knowledge with me about the workings of the families in the old country, as he calls it. There was slight guilt on my part about getting the info that way, but it couldn’t be helped. There’s no way I was going to ask Pop because that would be showing my hand, though I’m almost certain that he knows at least some of what I’m up to.

My only course of action is to stay one step ahead of him. Now my only worry is if there’s any difference between spilling Ricci’s blood with my own hands or using his enemies to do it.

The men on this list are his friends and foes alike, men I’ve never met but know more about than they’ll ever know. Some of them, those who rightfully don’t trust technology, have been harder to get to, but I have enough to work with. Her face flashed into my mind unnecessarily. This has nothing to do with her, so why…

I never worried about any danger to my family for two reasons: Pop has the best security in place to make sure nothing ever touches them, and two, I planned to take this fight far away from them. So why am I this worried about a girl I just met? Something was knocking at the door of my mind, which I chose to ignore.

I can’t open that shit because I never planned for what’s probably awaiting me there. Now to find a way to keep my heart out of the equation. I looked down at the screen in front of me with slightly less interest than I had the last time I was here. The fiery need for revenge was still there, but now it was tempered with images of Gianna. Gianna the way she looked the first time I saw her, with fear in her eyes as her enemies surrounded her, and the way she looked sitting on my lawn playing with the ankle biters.