Naz scrubbed a hand over his face, and blinked up at the ceiling of his bedroom. He reached out to find the phone he’d left sitting on the nightstand the night before. His mind was only on one thing. He wanted to call Roz, and make sure she was still up for going out with him that morning.
“I forgot how lazy you can be in the mornings when you want to be,” came a familiar voice from Naz’s bedroom doorway.
If he hadn’t been fully awake before, he sure as fuck was now.
Naz straightened in the bed like a rod had been driven into his spine, and forced him up. It sent the blanket around his body pooling at his waist. The man grinning in the doorway of the bedroom was lucky Naz had even bothered to throw on a pair of boxer-briefs the night before. Usually, he’d hit the bed fresh out of a fucking shower because he was too damn tired for anything else after running all day.
So was the life of a made man being mentored. Their life was not their own. It was now owned and controlled by whoever the fuck had a button in Cosa Nostra. Someone called, Naz answered. Someone needed something, then he had to go out and fucking get it for them.
Naz didn’t mind a lot of the times. A made man was what he always wanted to be. Like his father, and his grandfathers. This life was as natural to him as breathing. It was bred into his very blood. He would be the fourth generation of Donati blood to be made—how the hell was he supposed to even consider something else?
“How did you get in my fucking place?” Naz demanded.
His father’s lips quirked up at the edge, and Cross cocked a brow. There was no need for Naz to wonder where his attitude and arrogance came from when he had this man standing right across from him. From his looks to his mannerisms, and far too much in between … he was just like his father.
Twins, his mother would say.
Not entirely.
But damn close.
“Really,” Cross murmured, giving his son that look, “you wonder how I got in here?”
“Without me knowing, yes.”
Naz knew his father could pick a lock like nobody else. Cross just needed a few minutes, and some inspiration to get a door open. That didn’t negate the fact Naz had his entire apartment wired to let him know if someone had gotten in while he slept.
Another benefit of being a genius, he supposed. All that work with electronics came in handy more often than it didn’t.
“Nothing tripped when I got the door open, son,” Cross said.
Naz’s brow furrowed, and he did grab a hold of his phone, then. A quick check of an app he’d personally developed, tested, and installed for his security system told him that yeah, he hadn’t even turned the final checks on the night before to set everything.
Well, fuck.
“Distracted?” his father asked.
Naz glanced sideways, and willed his father to shut up and stop asking questions. He didn’t need an error like this pointed out to him at the moment. He had far too many other things on his mind, and he really couldn’t afford to be off his game in life.
That only spelled bad things.
“Tired,” Naz offered instead.
Cross nodded like he was considering that. “Zeke did have you running all over New York and back yesterday, didn’t he?”
“More than usual, yeah.”
“Suppose there’s a reason for that?”
Naz stiffened as he started to move out of the bed. He took a brief moment to consider his father’s words, and then went ahead with getting out of bed, and grabbing the clean slacks and dress shirt he’d left sitting in a garment bag after snatching it from the dry cleaners before he came home the night before.
His father said nothing as Naz shrugged on the shirt, and pulled up the pants. He let his son get dressed in peace, thankfully.
“I hadn’t considered there was a reason he sent me running, no,” Naz said. “He’s your right-hand man, Dad. He’s made—I’m trying to get the button. He can send me wherever he likes, at whatever time of day or night he likes. That is how this goes, right?”
Cross chuckled. “It is, yes.”
“But now that you mention it …”
“He was in the next room when you called Roz yesterday morning. He also has cameras on his house … like every other made man in this state, Naz. And nobody missed how close you and she were at Cece’s engagement party, son.”
“So, my Godfather is trying to keep me away from his daughter. Is that what you’re telling me?”
Cross grinned when Naz looked to him. “I think … well, I think he’s trying to figure out what you’re doing with his daughter. Or rather, what you plan on doing. Look at it like that, son.”
Naz sucked air through his teeth. It was better than telling his father to let Zeke know he could go fuck himself straight up the closest wall he could find.
Damn.
That urge was strong, though. It kind of fucking shocked Naz how much he wanted to say it, too. Like the very idea of someone keeping Rosalynn away from him was going to make him do some kind of brilliant violence just because he could.
His father didn’t miss it, either.
Cross knew him too well.
I was you once, his father liked to say every time he stepped in on one of Naz’s plans to thwart them. His father always knew what he was going to do before he ever even did it. Most of the time, anyhow.
“Ah,” his father murmured. “So, that’s how it is, then.”
“How what is?” Naz asked.
He focused his attention on buttoning up his shirt, and not looking at his father. It was easier, really.
“Roz,” Cross said. “That’s how it is with her, hmm?”
“Again, like—”
“You think you love her.”
Naz’s cheek twitched. An involuntary reaction at the word think coming out of his father’s mouth in conjunction with his feelings for Roz. Like Naz didn’t know what in the hell was going on inside his own mind.
“Not think,” Naz muttered under his breath.
He didn’t miss the way his father’s brow lifted out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t turn to face him fully. Cross didn’t seem to mind.
“You’re sure?”
“Don’t ask that,” Naz countered, strolling into his walk-in closer to grab a pair of socks and shoes. “Don’t question my mind. Don’t ask me to explain what happens in my brain. I don’t do that. I know what it knows, and this is what it knows.”
That’s just how his brain worked.
Fucking genius thing again.
And it knew from the second he looked at Roz who she was, and what he wanted with her. He wasn’t going to apologize for that, or try to explain it.
“Must be confusing, that,” Cross said, leaning against the door jamb with his arms crossed over his chest. “To just … turn around, and bam, there it is.”
Naz slipped on the socks and shoes, before standing straight, facing his father, and giving him a smirk. Walking past Cross in the doorway, Naz said, “Must fucking be, huh?”
“Sometimes, you make me want to bust your mouth with that attitude.”
Yet, his father never did. Never once even raised a hand to him. If anything, his father encouraged Naz to have a loud and opinionated voice. Demanded it of him, really. He made sure his son knew to never allow someone else’s voice to overpower his just because he was younger, or anything of the sort.
Cross made a noise under his breath. “Just … be the man I raised, Naz.”
“I don’t know how to be anything different, Dad.”
“I know. Zeke, on the other hand … well, he no longer has to figure you out as his godson, and this brilliant boy he watched grow up, Naz. He’s got to figure you out as the young man who has suddenly found himself very interested in his seventeen-year-old daughter.”
Naz hesitated in the hallway, even though his father was following close enough behind him to see the action. “Is that what it is—her age?”
Seventeen was legal in New York. He wasn’t robbing a fucking cradle. The woman was old enough to make choices, according to the law. And hadn’t she practically been living as a young adult for a while now?
“I don’t think it’s the age, really,” Cross said, “more … everything else.”
“Everything else,” Naz echoed.
His father walked past him in the hallway, and clapped him on the shoulder. “She’s still his daughter. I know you don’t understand, but I sure as hell do. Keep that in mind while he figures things out, too.”
“Things like what?”
“Oh, Naz.”
That time, his father patted him on the head like a puppy.
“For being so damn brilliant,” his father said, smirking, “you’re terribly fucking dense at times, son.”
“Rude,” Naz grunted.
“Yeah, well … enjoy your breakfast with Roz,” Cross said. “And don’t ask how I know that, either.”
Jesus Christ.