Star-Crossed (34 page)
She taped the note on the door, and without a backward glance she left her house and her life behind, not knowing when she’d come back. Something told her she’d see Wyatt again—twins didn’t separate forever, it just didn’t seem possible to Jules, but maybe it was time they started learning how to live on their own.
“We need cash,” Jules said as she and Romeo worked at packing her Mercedes.
“We should stop at an ATM now. I got three separate accounts. How many do you have to drain?”
“I got cash, Juliet,” Romeo assured her as he tossed the gun bag into the trunk.
“No, that’s got to go in the front seat.” Jules grabbed the bag herself and headed around to the passenger side. “Easy access.”
“Are you expecting to be attacked on the road?”
“I ain’t ruling it out, and you shouldn’t either. I still think we ought to get as much cash as we can. You don’t know how long we’ll have to operate without credit cards.”
“I got plenty of cash,” Romeo said as they worked at moving his luggage over from the Ferrari parked behind her car on the long driveway. “I’ve known this could happen for a while. You think being prepared means carrying a shotgun in your truck; I think it means carrying a suitcase with half a million in it.” Jules turned to arch an eyebrow him. “Is that how much you got?”
“About that, yeah, maybe a little more. I’ve been adding to it for ten years. I save all my large bills. It’s like a hobby; one finds its way into my hand, and I stick it in the
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suitcase in my trunk.” Romeo held up his hands. “You’re always preaching about being prepared. Well, I’m prepared.”
“You’re driving ’round in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar vehicle with a suitcase filled with cash in your trunk? Do you want to get carjacked?”
“You know, funny thing about that, no one carjacks me,” Romeo said sadly as he loaded another suitcase into Jules’s trunk. “Everyone in our neighborhood knows us, and they sure as shit know my car. My brother is Nova Moretti. I could have twenty million in my trunk and it’d be safe.”
“People in Garnet don’t know Nova Moretti from Adam.”
“When was the last time a car got jacked in Garnet?”
“Good point.” Jules poked her head out from the backseat where she’d tossed her carry-on. She slipped on a thin sweater to combat the crispiness in the spring air. “Once we get on the road, we got some talking to do. If you’re carting ’round that much cash on the off chance you’ll have to run for your life, I think I deserve to know why.”
“We’ll talk,” Romeo promised her.
Jules nodded and walked around her car. Seeing that everything had been loaded, she got into the driver’s seat. Romeo came up to her open door and surprised her by leaning down and kissing her.
“I love you,” he whispered against her lips. “I’m glad you’re coming.”
“Me too,” Jules said with a soft smile. “Now let’s get out of here before Wyatt comes home.”
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Chapter Nineteen
Romeo left the keys to the Ferrari under the mat at the front door of the lake house. He couldn’t handle saying good-bye to Tino a second time, and he surely didn’t want Jules to see him come apart.
He was thinking Tino was already four shots to getting shit-faced and hadn’t noticed them pull up when he spied the crack in the curtains at the window. The small streak of light broke into the darkness, and Romeo could just picture Tino, paranoid as all hell, 9mm in hand, checking to see who it was.
Tino knew they were there, but he didn’t come out. He wasn’t up for another good-bye either, or just as likely, he didn’t want Jules to see him crying any more than Romeo did.
Even still, Romeo found himself walking up to the window. He placed his palm against the cool glass, and after a few seconds Tino’s hand pressed against the other side. They stood there for a few seconds until Romeo felt his eyes getting watery and he turned away.
He got into Jules’s car. There was a brief battle with the passenger seat as he pushed it back far enough to make room for his long legs.
“We’re good?” Jules asked softly.
“Yeah.” Romeo choked, letting his head fall back against the seat, swallowing hard against the urge to break down.
“Okay.” Jules backed up down the driveway.
Romeo let himself feel the throb inside his skull, using the concussion to distract him. Jules had upped the ache in his ribs when she jumped on him, and they hurt
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enough for breathing to be hard. He should have more than enough to distract him, but it wasn’t working.
As Jules pulled onto the long, dark back road, Romeo found himself saying, “My ma was beautiful. You can see a lot of her in Tino. She was Sicilian, second generation.
She actually spoke Italian, which isn’t as common anymore, but that was her parents’
first language, and it was all they spoke at home.”
“You didn’t know your grandparents?”
“No, they disowned her when she had me at seventeen. I never cared to know them.”
“Oh,” Jules said softly. “I’m sorry.”
“When I was six, my ma met a guy named Frankie Moretti. He was handsome and rich and charming. He bought her nice things and made life a little less hard for us.”
“I can see why that’d be appealing to a young, single mother.”
“Frankie’s the only son of Aldo Moretti, head of the largest crime family in New York,” Romeo admitted, feeling like he was spilling out poison. “I think my ma was compelling to him—old-school, a throwback to days gone past. She was his
goomah
for a while before—”
“Goomah?”
“Girlfriend…on the side,” Romeo clarified, wincing as he added, “Frankie’s married.”
“Okay.” Jules sounded surprisingly nonjudgmental.
“He was pissed when Nova came along.” Romeo closed his eyes. Just saying Nova’s name made him hurt. “Goomahs aren’t supposed to get knocked up. He had no interest in him, but he still wanted my mother. He stopped coming over to our house.
He didn’t want to see the baby, but my ma still met him places.”
“She kept seeing him after he rejected his son?” Jules turned to give him a look.
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“Yeah.” Romeo couldn’t blame Jules’s judgment for that when he agreed, but despite the bitterness a nostalgic smile tugged at his lips. “But it’s a good thing she did.
We got Tino two years later, and he was the cutest baby. He was a lot of fun. They both were.”
“What’d Frankie do when your mother got pregnant a second time?” Romeo shrugged. “He was sort of ambivalent at that point. My ma wasn’t one to force the kids on him, and she didn’t ask him for extra to support them. They were hers, and I guess he figured if she wanted a houseful of little mafioso brats, what the fuck did he care? He didn’t buy things like he did when they first met. We were poor, and Frankie was fine with that too. He didn’t give a shit if my ma was working two jobs to feed his sons.”
“I get the impression there’s no love lost between you and Frankie.”
“He’s the one we’re running from.” Romeo raised his eyebrows when Jules turned to look at him in surprise. “I’ve always hated him, and I was very vocal about it.”
“Can’t say I blame ya for that.”
“By the time Tino was born, we knew there was something special about Nova.”
“Special how?”
“He talked really young. He started reading before he was two.”
“Reading?” Jules repeated in surprise.
“Yeah, and he understood the stuff he read. It was the weirdest shit you’ve ever seen,” Romeo said with a laugh and then gripped his ribs again. “And he has a memory that’s insane. You couldn’t say something in front of him without being prepared for him to just repeat the whole conversation at a later date like a little recorder, usually when it was really inconvenient. My ma would say something bad about the butcher, and two months later Nova’d remind her she thought he was crazy as bat shit right in front of him.”
Jules laughed. “That
is
inconvenient.”
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Romeo smiled, thinking of the strange envy he’d always had for Nova. It was all so crystal clear in his mind, nothing faded. It was like the past lived on forever with him.
“He remembers
everything
, Juliet. Everything he hears, everything he sees. It’s all right there, like a hard drive that he can access whenever he wants. He can tell you what we ate for dinner January third, ninety-eight. He could tell you what his homework was. He could recite every problem he did, and then he could tell you what Tino’s homework was because he’d looked over his shoulder while he was working on it. He could tell you what our ma was wearing.”
“That’s amazing. How rare is that? You just don’t hear ’bout people like that.” Jules turned to look at Romeo with wide eyes. “And he doesn’t come across like a genius. No offense, but he just seems like a regular ol’ bully with a chip on his shoulder.”
“It was by design. My ma was afraid Frankie’d take him away from her if he found out. We started teaching him to hide it, and we had Tino to help him, ’cause Tino was the most stereotypical little Italian kid you ever met. It gave Nova a guidepost: this is how normal kids act. I was too old, but Tino was perfect and Nova was a fast learner.
By second grade none of his teachers knew there was anything special about him. He did good in school but not amazing. They didn’t know he was helping me with my algebra when he got home.”
“That seems like such a waste.” Jules frowned. “Think of what he could have done with a mind like that.”
“I do think about it,” Romeo assured her. “I can’t
stop
thinking about it. Ma and I used to argue all the time ’cause I hated that we were dumbing Nova down to the public just ’cause of Frankie. Turns out she was right.”
“How so?”
Romeo rubbed a hand against his forehead; the exhaustion and headache made his vision blur, and he closed his eyes against it. “When my ma got sick, money got 282
tighter. She couldn’t work, and I was trying to make up for it working part-time after school. We were on public assistance. She eventually got disability, but it still wasn’t enough. Then Nova started showing up with money, and we needed it so badly we didn’t ask where he got it. We were scared to know.”
“Did Frankie give it to him?”
Romeo snorted. “Fuck, no. He was gambling.”
“How old was he?” Jules asked in disbelief.
“Young, but people knew he was Frankie’s bastard kid. He was a novelty. We’d kept to ourselves before that, but Nova started muscling in on some of the underground poker games out of desperation. I dunno why he thought that was the only place to get cash, but it was easy money and it was untraceable so we wouldn’t lose our benefits.
Can you imagine? Some eleven-year-old kid showing up wanting to play poker with a buncha old guys—and winning.”
“That’s seems immoral, letting a kid that young—”
“They’re mafia,” Romeo reminded her. “They aren’t moral.”
“What happened then?”
“Word got around, and Frankie started showing up at our place.” Romeo sighed heavily. “By then my ma was dying. She wasn’t all there anymore, stoned outta her friggin’ mind on pain meds. I tried to stop him from moving in, but Ma thought she wanted it, and the kids were curious about him. I lost the fight.”
“Did he find out about Nova?”
“On his own turf it was harder for Nova to curb himself. Frankie started noticing things. Not to mention the small fortune he made gambling. They all knew he was rigging the game in his favor. I think they started setting up those games just to watch him and figure out how he was doing it.”
“And figure out how to capitalize on it.”
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“Exactly. Not that it helped them. He was counting cards, and who the fuck can do that?”
“What happened when your mother died?”
“The state gave me custody of Nova and Tino,” Romeo said, still surprised by the small stroke of luck. “I was working a legit job at the time. We were still on benefits, but we were making ends meet. The kids wanted to be with me, and Frankie’s wife sure as shit didn’t want them. At first Frankie was fine with letting me have them as long as I let him
spend time
with them.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Fuck no,” Romeo spat bitterly. “The last thing I wanted was them mixed up with Frankie’s bullshit. Ma was gone. The only one I answered to was myself. I forbid them from seeing him, and neither of them was too torn up about it. He’s an asshole. They were young, but they figured that out real fast.”
“Even now they don’t like him?” Jules asked.
Romeo snorted, thinking of Nova stealing Frankie’s job. “Especially now. There’s no love lost between the three of them. Nova tolerates him for business reasons, but they don’t get along.”
“Then how’d they get mixed up with him if you blew him off?”
“Frankie was pissed,” Romeo said simply. “He started threatening me when I stopped Nova from gambling. When I ignored his threats, he made up some bullshit and reported us to the state for fraud. It was a lie. I wasn’t making that much, but he had someone in his pocket and we lost our benefits. No food stamps, no housing, no fucking insurance for the kids. I was about to lose custody, and the state would’ve got them because Frankie’s wife still fought against taking them in.”
