Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
“Oh, shit,” the dark-haired boy proclaimed. “Did you pee yourself?”
All she could do was nod. She knew his name, and his face was familiar enough to say she had seen it around more than once, but it wouldn’t make its way to the tip of her tongue. Those tears kept getting in the way. So did her sudden hiccups.
“What are you, like, five?”
“E-eight,” she sobbed.
“What?”
His indignation didn’t help her sudden fit of tears. Without warning, the boy snagged her by the wrist and pulled her out from beneath the table. He muttered something about helping her, but Francesca said nothing back, only kept her head down, tagged along and hoped no one else noticed. And what about the mess they left behind?
Oh, God.
She didn’t really notice where he directed them until he pulled her into a room, and the door shut behind them. Already lit, a small bathroom with wood paneling and a black claw tub and matching pedestal sink caught her eye. He pointed at the closed toilet lid and demanded she sit.
So, she sat.
“Okay, okay, okay,” the boy rushed to say. “I’m sorry about that. Did I scare you?”
She shook her head and sniffled.
“A little, maybe?”
“Maybe,” she croaked. “I was holding it for a long time, though.”
“Why would you do that? Don’t you know that’s bad for you?”
“Well, yeah! But I also wasn’t supposed to be there!”
The look he gave her, all sly and knowing, said more than enough.
“I can try to find you some clothes,” he offered. “We have friends, some are girls, that come play on the weekend. They leave shit everywhere.”
Just like that, she remembered his name.
“You’re Nico, right?”
A grin twisted at his lips, but it didn’t look entirely happy.
“Yeah, Nico Russo. That’s what they call me.”
Francesca attended his last birthday party. A couple of months earlier, in the winter. Right after Christmas. He turned ten.
She didn’t go to his older brother’s party a couple of weeks ago. Not that she cared; that boy was mean.
“Do you want me to get somebody?” Nico asked while stepping backward until his fingers curved the rim of the black pedestal sink. “Your dad, maybe?”
She didn’t get the chance to say answer. The bathroom door banged open and she noticed her stepmother first. Nico’s father, a tall, large Italian man with a booming voice stood right next to Carina. She couldn’t distinguish the rest of the figures in the mix although she thought she heard her father.
Carina’s shrieking had Frankie shriveling on the toilet and sniffling from a fresh round of tears. She truly hated that woman. Every single part of her.
“What have you done?” Carina snarled Nico’s way as she rushed inside. All that venom in her words might have been spewed at the boy, but the way she grabbed Francesca off the toilet would surely leave a new bracelet of bruises.
Maybe she would get another puppy. Or a kitty this time.
“Did you touch her?” her stepmother demanded. “What did you do to her? There’s pee everywhere, you little shit!”
“No!”
“Nico, you tell me the fucking truth right this second.”
Nico’s attention snapped to his father who loomed closer to the boy as Frankie got dragged out of the bathroom. That aghast look on his face was the last thing she saw before Carina threw her into the waiting arms of Salvatore.
“No, I did not!” she heard Nico yell.
The bathroom door slammed closed again. It didn’t hide the sudden sounds of slaps or the stark cries that answered every hit.
“Daddy,” she whispered to her father, “he didn’t.”
Frankie tried to tell Sal. She even tried to tell Miss Sissy that night when she tucked her into bed. Nobody seemed to listen or hear her, or maybe they just didn’t care. What was done was done, they all said.
She did, though. Francesca cared.
But she wouldn’t see that boy for another nine years. And that lie they all told on him? She never forgot it. She couldn’t.
1. — when problems are piling...
Staten Island, New York
Salvatore Gallo, Russo Estate
“He’s feeling some kind of way today, Mr. Gallo. Mind yourself.”
The consigliere of the Russo crime family gave the enforcer standing guard just beyond the opened office doors a once over. “I’ll mind the boss’s moods, Matty, not you.”
Salvatore had that guessing game down to a science. Half his job came down to knowing whether Giorgio Russo had shit sideways in the morning or not.
“I’m just sayin’ is all.”
“Well, don’t,” he warned the younger man. Matty should really heed what he was lucky enough to be told but Sal had at least thirty years on the man and a hell of a lot of lived experience with Giorgio. Sal had to keep in mind that Matty was new on his post for the boss, barely a few months in. He still had things to learn, but he wouldn’t have much longer to figure it out. “He hears you telling the wrong person to watch themselves around him, and he might take that some kind of way. Got it?”