“Exactly.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about helping the mob.”
“You’d be helping me. Hell, you’d be helping yourself. Fuck the mob.”
“Still. I don’t want to help them hurt the Spiders.”
“We won’t.”
“We will if we don’t control this.”
“I want to tell Vince.”
She shook her head. “No. We can’t.”
“We can trust him.”
“Rafa, I don’t know him. He doesn’t care about ne. We can’t tell him.”
“He dislikes the sex trade almost as much as you do. Believe me, he won’t want to hurt the Spiders.”
“Please, Rafa. We can’t tell your people about this, not yet.”
Just then, there was a knock at the door. I walked over and opened it. A staff member wheeled a cart inside and left it next to the kitchen table. I tipped him and hustled him back out.
On the cart was a bottle of good whisky, a bottle of sparkling cider, and two beautiful lobster tails. Despite her anger, I could tell she was interested in the food.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s toast and eat first. Then we’ll decide what to do.”
She stood, frowning. “I guess we can do that.”
I grinned at her. All it took was a little food and she was calmed down.
But maybe she had a point. Vince wasn’t as invested in this as we were, and I didn’t know how he’d use this information. He needed leverage against Ernesto, and this sort of thing could be exactly that. But it could lead to an attack against the Spiders, and that was exactly what Cassidy wanted to avoid.
I poured her some sparkling cider and poured myself a whisky. We toasted.
“To a job well done,” I said.
“To not getting tortured.”
I laughed and drank my whisky back, pouring another. She sipped her drink and then sat down as I placed her meal in front of her.
She sighed and took a bite. “This doesn’t mean we’re done talking.”
“I know.” I grinned at her and sat down in the other seat. “But we can call a truce.”
“Fine. A short truce.” She brandished her fork at me. “But don’t get comfortable.”
“Or else you’ll stab me?”
She shrugged and started eating. “Maybe,” she said between bites. “I’m pregnant, remember?”
“You might be pregnant,” I corrected. “We haven’t confirmed yet.”
She looked up at me. “That’s true.”
“And we can’t for another couple weeks.”
“That’s also true. But we have to assume I am.”
“No arguments here.”
“I’ll take the test as soon as I can.”
“No rush.”
She eyed me again and then went back to eating. I wasn’t hungry, so I poured myself another drink and leaned back in my chair.
The idea of fatherhood hadn’t seriously occurred to me before. It wasn’t like gangsters didn’t have kids. They actually tended to have a lot of kids, since gangsters tended to like to fuck a lot.
I liked to fuck a lot. But I didn’t like having to take care of a kid or having some serious responsibility. I was a fucking mobster for fuck’s sake. I didn’t know how to raise a kid, let alone raise a decent fucking kid. I didn’t even know what it meant to be decent.
Would I want my kid to follow me into the mob? I had no clue. I didn’t know if I wanted this life for my child. It wasn’t an easy life, though it did have its perks. Still, it would be life and death all the time for him, and I didn’t know if I wanted that for my child.
Maybe we’d have a girl and I wouldn’t have to worry about her going into the mob. I’d have to worry about her fucking some stupid mob guy instead. Girls had their own god damn problems.
For some reason, I wasn’t freaking out. I had been assuming that she would give the kid up for adoption, but as I thought about it I realized that I didn’t know what she’d really want to do.
Since all of this had started, it had been nonstop action. We hadn’t known where we had stood, and my first thought had been to do anything to keep her safe. But now, when something had finally gone right, I had a second to stop and think about what I had done.
I was going to be a father, and I wasn’t freaking out about it. That itself almost freaked me out a little bit. The idea of being with Cassidy, really fucking being with her, didn’t repulse me like that thought had with so many other women. I could see something in her, something that made me want to change.
And I wasn’t the changing type.
She finished her meal and sat back, smiling at me. “Okay,” she said. “That was really good. I admit it.”