I was staring at a college photo of Tristian West and kicking myself.
After getting home last night, I pulled him up to see what I could find.
We’d grown up in the same neighborhood, but while I went to the public school, he went private, and it hadn’t stopped there. Columbia for his first four years, then to Yale for his MBA. He was now a Wall Street guy.
I remembered joking to myself about how his shoes looked like a Wall Street guy attending a hockey game, because that’s what he’d been.
And he owned Katya. Big shock there. The guy was my second boss. No wonder Anthony had been having a fit. Tristian, or Trace to his friends, owned it with his best friend, Ashton Walden, who’d attended all of the same schools as Tristian. Same high school. Columbia. While Tristian was at Yale, Ashton went with him, but he started his first business, something in cybersecurity. Tristian graduated, and both returned to New York.
And after getting a job on Wall Street, he and his friend Ashton started their first joint business and since then were operating a whole list of them.
Each was wealthy, but together, they were a whole other force.
There wasn’t much on Tristian other than the obvious. He’d been in the system because he was arrested when he was sixteen on drug charges. He and Ashton were both arrested on the same day, but no charges were pressed. Their lawyers would’ve come in and made it go away. But the kicker, the real kick in your teeth about all of this, was his uncle.
Stephano West, head of the West Mafia family.
Goddamn.
Tristian West was the nephew and, according to my report, considered “like a son” to a Mafia boss. And I turned my phone over because that last text last night hadn’t been Kelly.
Unknown: I would like to see you again. Here’s my number.
“Morning!”
I was at the kitchen table and shut my laptop when the door opened and Kelly came in, but she wasn’t alone. Justin trailed after her. He glanced my way, a sheepish look on his face as he put his hands in his jacket’s front pockets.
The dude worked fast.
Kelly had showered, and she sailed over to me, then threw her arms around my neck and pressed her cheek to mine. I was still sitting, so she bent down, and I could smell Justin’s shampoo. Head & Shoulders.
She squeezed my neck a little. “Hmmm. You smell so good.”
I had to chuckle. When Kelly got laid, she thought everything was perfect and magical in these early days. “You’re in a good mood.”
I got up, grabbing my coffee mug because I needed a refill.
I caught the blush before Kelly grabbed her purse. “I need to change clothes. Be back!”
After pouring my coffee, I set the pot back. “You needing some of this?”
Justin chuckled. “God yes. Your friend is, uh, she’s got stamina.”
I gave him a look. “Don’t go there. I love her, but I do not want the details.”
He chuckled again, finding where we kept our mugs and moving so I could pour him the last of the coffee. I nodded to the cupboard. “Sugar there. Creamer in the fridge.”
“Thanks.” He glanced over his shoulder as I moved back to the table and lifted up my laptop once again. “What happened last night? I saw Anthony call you to his office.”
I didn’t need the reminder. “It’s nothing.”
He looked unconvinced.
“I mean it.” I gestured toward Kelly’s room. “You move fast.”
That sheepish look came back over him, and he shuffled, moving around before settling back against the same counter. “I like her. A lot.” He gave me a meaningful look.
“I saw how you looked at her last night. You’re already half-gone on her.”
His eyes got big, and he’d been taking a sip of coffee but half snorted on it. “Jesus. Don’t tell her that, please.”
My phone buzzed again.
I refuse to put his name in my phone: We need to talk.
God. This guy.
Me: BLOCK
I refuse to put his name in my phone: Now.
I blocked him.
I needed to forget meeting him, forget talking to him, forget touching him, forget his kisses. Forget how I felt with my body over his in his vehicle last night. All of it. Done.
The end.
My phone buzzed again, but this time it was my other boss.
Leo: I need you at your mother’s house.
Those texts were never good.
Leo was standing on the front steps when I got there, and he did not look happy. He’d been smoking a cigarette, but at seeing me, he tossed it on the ground and put it out. He was in plain clothes, wearing an open jacket over jeans and a sweatshirt beneath. Leo was old school. If he wasn’t working, he was at the neighborhood bar having a beer and watching whatever game was on the television. All the years I knew him, I’d never seen him drunk, so I always suspected he sipped one beer the whole time.
Some days, like today apparently, he was here checking on my mom.
I parked and walked over to the sidewalk. “What’s wrong?”
I looked behind him. The door was shut, the curtains drawn closed. I wasn’t hearing yelling or anything behind him.
One of his hands moved inside his jacket pocket, and he indicated the house. “You were here a few days ago?”
I frowned. “Monday. I stopped over. Why?”
“You go through her stash?”
Christ. We were dealing with this? “I found a new vodka bottle in her bathroom and watered it down.”
“That’s it?”
“Yeah. What’s going on?”
“She’s having a conniption, saying you emptied all of her bottles.”
The irony of my mother throwing a tantrum to one parole officer because another parole officer watered down one of her stash was just . . . I was at a loss. “What sort of conniption? What’s the damage?”
“I’m standing out here to greet you. That should tell you something.”
For fuck’s sake.
I walked up the stairs to face my mother.
“Be prepared. She . . . she went overboard today.”
I skimmed another glance his way. He moved back a step, not giving me anything else. I tried the doorknob, found it was locked, so I pulled out my key and unlocked it. Opening it, I wasn’t even going to focus on how she’d locked the door on Leo. It was Leo. He’d been best friends with my dad. He was family.
I stepped in, not hearing any movement, no sounds.
But the smell hit me next, and I almost bowled over. “Mom!”
I heard a lumbering footstep above, then a groan and a thump.
I took off, taking the stairs two at a time.
There was blood on the floor, and I rushed into her bedroom. More blood. A trail of it, leading to her as she was on the floor beside the bed. “Mom!” She was in her bathrobe, and I knelt down, avoiding the blood.
She let out a moan, her head moving a little.
“Mom. Mom.”
“No.” Another moan. She reached out, trying to push me away. “Go away. Don’t want you here.”
Her breath was rank. She’d been busy drinking.
I rolled her over, moving gently, and began searching for where the blood was coming from. Her vitals were good at first glance, but I grabbed her wrist, counting her pulse as I kept looking over her body.
“Oh my god—” Leo came in from the door, kneeling at my other side. “She—she wasn’t like this when I stepped outside. She’d been drinking and she was angry, going on a rant about you. There’s a bunch of plates downstairs on the floor. She must’ve stepped on them.” He added the last bit as I ran a hand down her body, lifting up her foot and seeing the blood there. It was a massive cut, deep. “She’ll need stitches.”
“No. No stiches,” she grumbled, before her head shot to the side, her body following, and she threw up.
Vomit landed just past me.
I jumped out of the way but cursed and went back to finish my assessment. She had cuts on both her feet and one on the palm of her hand. None of them looked self-inflicted, which was a relief on this shitty Saturday.
“Here.” Leo must’ve left to grab some gauze. He knelt back down, the first aid kit in his other hand.
I took it, pressed it to her foot. She started to balk, but she was so drunk that a second later, she was passed out.
I hated dealing with drunk people, but it was always worse when it was your parent.
We worked in silence as I cleaned all of her cuts, disinfected them, and then bandaged each one. I wrapped both her feet and her hand, and as one unit, we both bent to pick her up and placed her on the bed.
I stepped back.
Her breathing was deep but ragged at the same time, and her bathrobe fell open. She was still in her pajamas. “She needs stitches.”
Leo nodded, his phone in hand. “I know. I’ll make a call.”
A call.
Right.
Easier to handle this having them come here, then taking her in.
Leo was saying, “Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Ben. She’s passed out, so the sooner the better.”
He’d called one of the medics that he played poker with, which made sense. Ben could do the stitches, no problem, and Ben wouldn’t say anything. He never did. We were a community in that way, but for a moment, I wished he would say something because this was not the first time Leo had called Ben over for something like this.
I knew it wouldn’t be the last either.
He hung up and moved to the bed. “We need to put her in clothes. He can’t see her like this.” Meaning he didn’t want Ben to see the vomit.
I put a hand on his arm, stopping him. “He can see her like this.”
“Your mom would be horrified.”
I nodded at her. “Obviously not because she’s in this state. He’s seen worse.” I gave him a look, moving for the door. “We’ve all seen worse.”
I went downstairs because while I couldn’t do anything more to fix that mess, not unless I wanted to finance another trip to rehab, I went to find the mess that I could clean up. Rounding the corner for the dining room, I saw all the smashed plates on the ground.
My mom had been ambitious in her drunken fit. She’d cleaned out all the expensive dining sets she got from her mother-in-law. I started cleaning.
There might’ve been a joke there somewhere. I was too tired to find it.
Ben had come and gone.
My mom was sleeping it off. Her clothes had been changed and she was snuggled into her bed. Leo found me in the living room, a beer in hand and the game on the television.
He sighed, taking the second beer that I handed to him, and bypassed me for the lounge chair that my dad used to sit in. He sank down and put up his feet. “Score?”
“Twenty to seven.”
“Fourth quarter. They need to get going, don’t they?”
I ignored that because we were pretending we were both rooting for our city’s team, but Leo was really a Rams fan and I was actually a Bengals fan. Neither team was playing today. “This was really all because I watered down one of her bottles?”
He shrugged, gripping his beer and taking a long drink. “Who knows. She mentioned a call from her sister.”
“What?” My attention snapped to him. The game was forgotten. “My aunt?”
He looked up, dragging his gaze from the television before clueing in that this was a big deal. A real big deal. His eyes widened a little. “Yeah. She’s got two sisters, right?”
“Which one was it?” She didn’t care for the older one. My mom always griped she was spoiled, but the younger one was a whole different ordeal. They’d been close growing up until my aunt met her current husband and conversation had come to a halt. It wasn’t a good situation. “She live up north or the one who lives in Alabama?”
“The one up north.”
The younger one.
I sat up straighter. “Did she say anything? How’d the call go? What’d my aunt say?”
He was frowning at me, and I was clueing in here, too, because I was realizing it was the aunt that we didn’t talk about. Leo was family, but I was guessing he didn’t know about her.
“She didn’t, just said she called and that was it. She started in about you right away, and I took my cues from there.”
Fuck.
That’d been it?
Damn.
I’d have to come back and talk to my mom when she was sober and not wanting to hate me.
I reached up, fixing my hair before I sighed, needing to let it go. I couldn’t do anything about it right now. “You staying?”
He was quiet before a long, “Yeah. I’ll stay.”
I stood, grabbing my coat.
“That’s it? You’re leaving?”
I turned back in the doorway and shrugged. “We both know how this goes. I don’t know why you’re choosing to stick around, but if you are, then I’m leaving. I have to work tonight anyways.”
His whole face flinched, and he took a drag from his beer. “You shouldn’t be working at that place. You need extra money, there’s other places.”
“What do you know about where I work?”
He’d brought this up before, but I never pushed. I always assumed it was because it was a nightclub and thought he wanted me to work at the local pub where he spent time, where others in our industry hung out. Now knowing what I knew, did he know too?
“Nothing, just . . . there’s rumors about that place.”
“About Tristian West?”
His face slackened, and I swear he paled just a little bit. “What do you know about that name?”
“Just that he grew up not far from here, and he owns Katya.”
He was studying me. “He’s some local hotshot, isn’t he?”
I shrugged. “I guess, but he never crossed paths with me when we were kids. Don’t feel it matters now.”
Or did it?
But Leo shut down. I could tell in the resolved expression on his face. He wasn’t going to say anything anymore, and I did have a shift to get to.
“Okay.” I started for the door. “See you, old man. Get some sleep. Don’t let my mom take advantage of you too much.”
He chuckled. We both got the joke. He took care of her for my dad, and the few times he stayed, like tonight, when I came by the next morning, I found him passed out on the couch.
“Be safe out there, kiddo.”
