Lucian (Filthy Marcellos #1)(14)

Antony wouldn't outright apologize; it wasn't in his character unless the remorse was directed to his wife and only in private, Lucian knew. But, calling his son by the endearing term he'd used when Lucian was a young boy was as good as one. Little mouse, it meant. Because Lucian had spent so much of those first few months in their home sneaking, hiding, and being as quiet as a mouse. Eventually he outgrew the petname-a long, long time ago.

Occasionally it still snuck out of his father's mouth as a way of expressing his love without saying it. Lucian didn't mind, and took it for what it was meant to be.

"What now?" Lucian asked.

Antony shrugged, pushing in his chair to the table. "Be very careful about your choices, son. There is a difference between wants and needs. Figure out which one is yours. This is not as simple as it seems, and I don't want to think of you putting yourself in a situation where I can't step in. But at some point, I can't, anyway. You have to do it on your own. And I have given you every learned ability to do just that if you need to.

"She's all there," Antony repeated, waving at the forgotten file. "Please understand why I did this for you, son. I love you. But how she lives  …  Lucian, that's all she's ever known."



       
         
       
        

Antony left the kitchen, Cecelia following fast on his heels.

For a long moment, Lucian said nothing, only breathed deeply and stared at the spot where his father disappeared.

"Didn't know you were interested in someone," Dante said at the end of the table. "You could have told me. I don't care who she is, you know."

"It wasn't like that. I'm twenty-seven, not sixteen. I didn't know anything about her, but for the fact I couldn't stop thinking about her. This isn't even remotely the same as when we were younger, Dante."

Gio cleared his throat, looking mighty awkward across from his older brother. "What are you going to do now?"

Lucian smirked, because really, what the fuck else could he do?

"If she's all in that file like Dad said, he just gave me something."

Dante seemed to pick up on Lucian's innuendo right away. "And he likely knows he did it, too. That says something."

"What's that?" Gio asked.

"Her address."



• • •



A day later, Lucian sat in his Lexus LFA, nervously rapping his fingers to the red leather steering wheel. The shoddy neighborhood and crappy apartment buildings surrounding his vehicle left little to be desired.

This wasn't his first rodeo spending time in this kind of neighborhood.

What was he going to do, now? Knock on her door, apologize, and then what? Apologize for what, exactly?

What he even doing here?

Jordyn made it perfectly clear a week ago she wanted nothing to do with him.

Something inside wouldn't die, though.

"You okay?" Dante asked from the passenger seat.

"I don't know," Lucian answered honestly. Gio laughed in the backseat, leaning forward to flick his cigarette butt out the window. "If you burn my seats, I'll kill you."

His car was his baby. It didn't get driven nearly enough. Gio had a serious lack of respect for the beauty that was cars.

"Listen," Dante said as he turned to face his brother. "This isn't difficult. Figure out what you need here. That's what Dad said, right? So, go see if she's home. If she is, have a chat. It'll either be abundantly clear there's something there, or not."

Lucian frowned. "And if she isn't home?"

"We come back another day. It's not like we're regular nine to fivers, here."

"How would you know about anything being there?" Lucian asked. "What in the hell does that even mean?"

Dante shrugged. "You're asking the wrong man. I don't make time to find love, I make an effort to find a good fuck." 

"Classy," Gio mumbled around a freshly lit cigarette.

"Like you're any different," Dante replied, unaffected. "Deny it, I dare you."

Lucian quickly decided this conversation was going nowhere.

"This could be bad," Lucian muttered, shooting a glance at the apartment building which may or may not house a woman who just wouldn't get off his damned mind. "She said it herself, I probably got her in shit as it was. It's complicated. She's mixed up in bad people."

"We are the bad people. You are aware what we do for a living, right? How many people have we whacked, again?"

Dante had him there.

Lucian flipped him off. "Not what I mean."

"I know what you mean, idiot. Quit stalling. I promised Mom I'd take her to dinner with Jessica later."

Lucian cringed. Their mother had some sort of crazy idea Dante was in love with this Jessica chick. She was not wife material, but no one wanted to break their mother's heart by telling her the truth. "Christo, Dante. You need to put a stop to that before it continues. The next thing you know, Mom will be picking out wedding colors and nursery schemes. Once she starts doing that nonsense, she's in it to win it and you'll be screwed."

Forget wife material. Dante wasn't husband material.

"Tell Mom I let Jess suck my dick at the last get-together we had," Gio put in from the back. "Problem solved."

"Seriously?" Dante asked, staring in the review mirror at their youngest brother.

Gio shrugged. "What? She offered. It wasn't like she was particularly good at it, so I forgot about it."

Jesus.

Lucian didn't even know what to say to that.

Dante nodded, smirking. "That could work."

"All right, I'm done," Lucian said with a sigh. "You two bond over mutual exploits, I have better business needing attention."

"Good luck," Gio chimed from the backseat.

Dante met his brother's stare and spoke nothing, but what lay behind his eyes said everything.



• • •



Lucian knew instantly something was wrong when he arrived at Jordyn's second floor apartment. The building was definitely crap, locks were practically nonexistent, and some of the tenants were probably suspect, to say the least, but that wasn't what gave him the hint.

Jordyn's door had been kicked in, and recently, by the looks of it.

There was a large crack in the framing preventing the door from closing properly. Lucian simply pushed on the wood and the door tried to open, albeit a metal chain that wasn't worth shit kept it from swinging open completely.

Lucian called her name once through the small crack opening the door created, but received no response. He couldn't see very much inside the apartment, and what he could see, he didn't feel all too great about. There was a mess, but he couldn't make much of it out.

This was wrong. He just knew it.

A quiet little voice from behind Lucian jerked him back into the present.

"Hi. My name's Nevaeh."

Lucian looked at the little girl poking her head out of her own doorway that was directly across from Jordyn's apartment. She was maybe five, possibly six-years-old. Cute, for a kid. Truthfully, kids kind of freaked him out. It wasn't like he knew what to do with them.

"Hello, sweetheart. I'm Lucian. Do you know Jordyn?"

The little girl with her dark eyes and hair nodded, smiling wide. "Sometimes she watches me when Mommy doesn't get home until late. And she takes me to the school so I don't have to walk alone. She's my friend."



       
         
       
        

Oh, Jordyn.

Jesus.

Something about the little girl's words cracked him straight in the chest. Lucian had taken the time over the last day to carefully read over the file his father provided. Sure, it felt like an invasion of Jordyn's privacy, but Lucian needed to know about her.

Desperately, he wanted to know this woman.

It was very likely she found a kindred spirit in this little girl. Something similar between them.

"Shouldn't you be in school?" he asked the girl.

Nevaeh shrugged. "It's Saturday."

"Oh." Lucian shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling uncomfortable. "Did you have school yesterday?"

"Yep, but I didn't go."

"School is important. Why didn't you go?"

"Mommy slept in, so she couldn't take me. Jordyn was sick, I think. The big men came. I heard them yell at her. They broke her door. See?" She pointed at Jordyn's door with a frown. "When Mommy woke up, and I told her, she said I couldn't visit Jordyn anymore. I don't know why. I like her."

Lucian's heart stopped beating. He was sure it did.

If what this child said was true, what lay behind Jordyn's door might not be a pretty sight. Especially not for a little girl who thought of the older woman as her friend. It didn't matter, though. Lucian was going in anyway once he got the girl back inside her own apartment.

He did take into account the chain had been locked, so at some point, Jordyn managed that.

That had to be a good sign. It just had to be.

"Go inside, okay? Thank you," he told her, trying to smile, but it didn't feel right. "And make sure you go to school on Monday, even if you have to find someone new to walk you."

The little girl nodded. Once her apartment door shut, Lucian turned back to Jordyn's. He called her name through the crack once more and still, nothing and no one answered him. Without thinking about it, he slammed his booted foot into the wood just beside the doorknob. The powerful kick effectively broke the weak chain and allowed the door to swing open with a bang.