He grinned at my reaction and kept talking.

“Like I said, bein’ straight up, Frankie. You should know I’m not fallin’ for your shit. So whatever girl you got lined up to help you make your getaway, get that shit out of your head. Old lady Zambino saw what you did on TV. She knows you took one for family and she’s all over keepin’ you safe and settled, recuperatin’ at my house. Probably half a second after my chat with her enlisting her officially in the cause, she was on her phone with that bowlin’ posse of hers and, swear to God, I saw one of those women in her Chrysler, cruisin’ the alley when I got home. You’re stuck. Give in to that and this’ll go a whole lot smoother.”

Old lady Zambino lived across the street from Benny. Old lady Zambino was Italian. Old lady Zambino was nosy. And if she knew anyone referred to her as “old lady Zambino,” she would hire a hit on them.

She was in her eighties, but she looked like she was in her fifties. She had peachy-red hair she wore up in a puffy ’do fastened at the back through curls. She was trim and fit. She wore jeans, nice blouses, and high heels. She had weekly manicures done to her talons and was never without one of her signature nail polishes: gold or wine red in the winter (scarlet red for the Christmas season); silver or fuchsia in the summer (pale pink for Easter). Her face was always made up perfectly, and she was the poster child for a good skincare regime because she had wrinkles, just not many of them.

She power walked daily and she did this in sporty athletic gear that many would say she should leave to the twentysomethings, but she worked that shit like no other.

She also played with a team of old lady bowlers in three different leagues and they took that shit seriously. If there was a senior ladies tour, she’d be the champion. Her famed ball was a marbled black with hot pink, gold, and silver veins, and she carted her ass and that twelve-pounder from alley to alley without effort and with a great deal of determination.

If she and her bowling buddies intended to keep me at Benny’s, they’d succeed.

In other words, it was time for me to act on the fly and hatch a different scheme.

So I did it.

“Does it bother you in the slightest that I don’t want to be here? That I don’t want this talk you wanna have? That I don’t wanna let Theresa have a sit-down with me? That I don’t want your dad to say his words to make amends? I just want to get on with my life after seven not-very-great years, and before that, six years with Vinnie that I realized too late weren’t real great, all of that ending with me running through the forest with a woman I did not know, and a grand finale of blood and bullets and a fair amount of gore. Which, luckily, wasn’t all mine, but watchin’ Cal blow a hole in that man’s head was not fun, even though I hate that man and I’m glad he’s rottin’ in hell.”

“Frankie—”

I shook my head. “No, Ben. I’d really like to get in your truck and for you to take me home, then leave me alone. I think I made the leavin’-me-alone part pretty clear the night I got shot because I told you that, straight up. Then I made it clear a more subtle way, hopin’ you’d get it, fakin’ sleepin’ every time you or one of your family showed at the hospital. Now you’re bein’ straight, I’ll be straight right back. I do not want what you want; I want to be left alone.”

I should have known by the look on his face that I liked way too much that what would come next would be a blow, but I stupidly didn’t brace.

So when he whispered, “But…you’re family, baby,” it was a blow.

Because it was the wrong thing to say.

It hurt. Too much.

Emotional pain was far worse than a gunshot wound and I was in the position to know.

I’d wanted that…once. I got it…once.

Then they took it away.

“Family doesn’t turn their back on family for seven years, especially doin’ that shit when one of their own loses the man in her bed.”

I saw his flinch. He tried to hide it, but I saw it.

He recovered from my hit and his voice was gentle (and, thus, beautiful) when he asked, “So you know what family does, cara?”

“Uh…yeah,” I snapped. “I know what family does.”

“Then where’s your ma?”

I clamped my mouth shut.

“Where’s Enzo Senior?” he went on.

I glared at him.

“Where’s Nat, Cat, Enzo Junior? Talked to Cindy and the girls at the nurse’s station. Not a visit. Not from one of them.”

“Ma’s in Florida,” I reminded him.

“Babe, you were shot. The only excuse she can give not to be at your bedside after that kind of shit happens is she’s on the fuckin’ moon and NASA declared there’s no safe reentry without burnin’ up.”

“You know Ninette is not the bedside-vigil type of mom,” I reminded him.

“I know not one of those folks you count as blood is the bedside-vigil, takin’-care-of-their-girl type at all. That is not family, Frankie, and it proves my point. You don’t know family. You did, you’d know that shit is not right. Fuck, your dad, Nat, and Cat all still live in the city and they didn’t haul their asses to the hospital to see you.”

“Nat works nights,” I pointed out. “She has to sleep during the day.”

“She works as a cocktail waitress,” Benny returned. “She’s not an ER doc who takes the night shift and has to get her shuteye in ’cause, if she doesn’t, she could make a mistake the next day that might cost someone their life.”

He’d been annoying me.

Now he was pissing me off.

“Why are we talking about this?” I hissed.

“Because, for some fool reason, you’re denyin’ yourself somethin’ you want.” He shook his head. “No, somethin’ you need. Somethin’ I’m handin’ you and you refuse to reach out and take it.”

“What I’m tryin’ to get through that thick head of yours is I don’t want it, Benny. I definitely don’t need it. I want to move beyond it.”

“That’s a straight-up lie,” he shot back.

“It is not.” My voice was rising.

Suddenly, his face was in my face and all I could smell was his aftershave, all I could see were his eyes. “So you’re sayin’ I kissed you right now, you would not want that?”

I stopped breathing.

The slightly good thing about that was now I had confirmation about what Ben’s talk would be about. I had guessed, now I knew.

That was the slightly good thing.

Slightly.

“I’m your brother’s girlfriend,” I reminded him.

“You were Vinnie’s girlfriend,” he retorted immediately. “Now you’re just Frankie.”

“If you don’t think he’s always gonna be between us—the history of bad blood your family clung to for seven years and the shit they laid on my shoulders for years before that isn’t gonna be between me and them—you’re cracked.”

“I think we give this a go, we’ll both get to the point where we remember we loved Vinnie and that’ll be all there is about Vinnie. Gettin’ to that, there’ll be shit we hit that’ll be awkward and uncomfortable, but we’ll power through it and get there in the end.”

“You’re so sure?” I asked snidely.

“Yeah,” he answered firmly.

“And how are you so sure, Ben? Hunh? Tell me that.”

“’Cause if I didn’t waste seven fuckin’ years, that would be where we were now if I had finally pulled my finger outta my ass and made my move on you then. Instead of sittin’ on this bed arguin’ with you about where we should be goin’, I’d be doin’ somethin’ else to you in this bed while our kids were at Ma’s house, tearin’ it up.”

His words hit me so hard in a way that felt dangerously good, I sucked in a painful breath. But Benny was not done.

“’Cept I did it back then, we’d have to live with Vinnie knowin’ I stole his woman. Until he got whacked, that is.”

The word “What?” came out of me in a gush of breath.

“Francesca, you givin’ me a week and a half to think on all this shit, things got clear. And what got clear was that the minute Vinnie became a made man, you lost him. I lost him. My family lost him. He stopped bein’ ours and he became Sal’s. Say it didn’t end in his bein’ dead. Do you think Ma would let that kind of man sit at her table for Christmas dinner?” He shook his head again. “No fuckin’ way. Ma and Pop are stubborn. They were holdin’ on to hope. But it was slippin’ and he was cruisin’ straight to bein’ disowned, dead to them in a different way, and you know it.”

I did. Vinnie Senior and Theresa were gearing up to let him go. I knew it then. I felt it. It hurt. Vinnie felt it. It killed. There were a lot of things family forgave, looked beyond, got used to, sucked it up for, and they could shift the blame to me for a lot of shit.

But he’d been made in the Mafia. The things he was doing were going to get harder and harder to blame on me. The things he was doing were all on him. He knew it and they were figuring it out.

And once you were made in the mob, you never got out.

There was no turning back.

For him.

For me, now, that was another matter.

And Benny immediately got into that matter.

“And I know you. You would not let him plant babies in you—not go out and do the shit he did for Sal, come to you with blood on his hands after puttin’ drugs on the street or shakin’ people down or whatever the fuck they do, and let him put a baby inside you. I know that, Frankie. He was livin’ on borrowed time in more ways than the one that got him and we both know it.”

“So you were gonna move on his woman?” I asked.

“Why do you think I was so fuckin’ pissed when you made that move on me after we put him in the ground?” he asked back. “You stole my show, babe. And you did it too fuckin’ quick. I was not ready, you were not ready, and I got pissed. Too pissed. Held a grudge. Pissed away time. Now we’re here.”