Chapter 1 Bah Humbug

SAL

Islam the things I need to clean my gun on the kitchen table.

Solvent. Thwump.

Bore pole and attachments. Thwump.

Toothbrush black from use. Thwump.

None make the satisfying crack I want and I don’t have the outlet of turning the air blue around me with curses. Ilaria is making the pasta for dinner.

We've always had enough money to hire staff, but she likes to cook. The first time she roped me into helping her, she ended up naked on the countertop and we both had flour in our hair and everywhere else afterwards.

The memory soothes my mood enough that each piece of my gun lands softly on the table as I disassemble my gun, movements quick and natural after three plus decades as a made man.

I've been cleaning my guns on the kitchen table while Ilaria makes pasta with her grandmother's recipe, or cannoli the way my mother did since the second year of our marriage.

Show me a man who doesn't clean his own guns and I'll show you a man ready for retirement, permanent or otherwise.

This has always been the time we took to discuss the things that matter. It's been a while since we had one of those talks.

"Is everything ok?" Ilaria lays the fresh pasta in layers of wax paper ready to boil later. "You seem a little agitated, Sal."

When did Ilaria stop calling me caro? Or amato?

I don't know, and that says more about me than it does about her.

"I'm fine," I say by rote as my mind continues to ponder the question of when my wife stopped using endearments with me.

But wrack my brain as I might, I can't remember the last time she called me caro, much less amato. Ilaria deserves better than for me not to have noticed.

My only excuse is that life has been harder since Enzo's death. After my brother died, my world shifted on its axis. Even more so than when papà and mamma passed.

Enzo was my best friend as well as my don. I miss him every day, but hell if that could come out of the mouth of the capo I was, much less the consigliere's I've become.

Besides, Enzo's son needed my support when he became the youngest don in the Five Families. Now at 36, Severu is the youngest godfather in the history of the Cosa Nostra in either Sicily or America. I'm proud of him, but I still miss the days his father was don.

Shoving my grief under a heavy workload helped to hide it from those that might see me as weak because of it, but it also cost me in my relationship with Ilaria. We aren't as close as we were seven years ago.

She nods and turns away, like she's going to leave the kitchen. There was a time she would have pushed for more, that she would have insisted I explain my bad mood.

Realizing that if I don't say something else, she's going to leave me to my gun cleaning and bad mood, I quickly say, "Everything is changing."

Including the way my wife reacts to me. What can I do to fix that?

Ilaria turns back to me, her bright blue gaze unfaded by her 53 years fixed on mine. "Life is all about change."

"My mother used to say that."

My wife's lips tilt in a small smile. "Where do you think I learned it?"

My mother adored Ilaria and Aria both, but Ilaria blossomed under my mom's approval and took her every teaching to heart.

"Some things shouldn't change," I grumble, shoving the bore cleaner into my gun's barrel harder than I need to. "Angelo is going to marry that stripper. He wants to propose at the family Christmas get together."

"He does? That's wonderful!" Ilaria's voice vibrates with delight at the prospect of our adopted nephew marrying the woman he's been obsessing over for months.

"She's a stripper, for gah…" I clear my throat. "Goodness sake."

"Have I ever told you how charming I find it that you absolutely refuse to curse in front of me?" Ilaria's smile for me is full and reaches her eyes this this time. She winks. "Except in the bedroom."

I'm not ashamed to bask in her approval. "You have, but it's been a while."

I'll never disrespect my wife in that way and it's the one area I do not allow my son or my nephews to slide either. Although, once Severu became the Don of the Genovese, I took him aside privately to remonstrate with him about cursing in front of his aunt or his mother.

I do the same for him as godfather and now that my nephew, Miceli, is my don, I extend him the same courtesy. However, I don't allow either man to slip in front of me without bringing it up later.

Their father taught them better than that.

Not that they're following Enzo's teachings in everything.

"Angelo is happy." Ilaria tsks. "You should be glad he found Candi."

"What is happy? Are we some Hallmark special? We're the mafia…" I have to bite back another set of curses. "Angelo should marry for the sake of la famiglia."

Ilaria's not smiling now. "Maybe that's not such an important thing anymore."

"Severu did his duty to the family, so did Miceli." Our own son, not so much.

But his marriage was ordered by his don, so there is that.

I do not begrudge Salvatore finding the love of his life, but did she have to be a former stripper too?

"Are you ever going to accept Bianca fully?" my wife asks, showing she knows what I'm thinking like she has for the past almost 35 years.

"I accept Bianca." I do.

But that my son chose to claim her when he could have married to strengthen the family is a harder pill to swallow.

"Then, if you have no trouble with our daughter-in-law's former profession, what's your problem with Candi?"

"For starters, what kind of woman calls herself a sweet? she's got a perfectly good name. Kathleen, but she insists on going by her stripper name."

"Don't let Angelo hear you calling her a stripper," Ilaria warns me seriously.

We all know how unhinged the enforcer is when it comes to his woman. The fact my wife is worried about me in the face of the younger man's wrath does not warm my heart. I can take care of myself and her, damn it.

"He prefers the term exotic dancer," she adds like that makes a difference.

"Doesn't change what she did for a living."

"No, it doesn't. Nor should it." Ilaria isn't smiling at me now. "What difference does her former job make when she's so perfect for him? Do you think a man like Angelo Caruso can find love so easily?"

"You can be happy in your marriage without being in love." That's something my father used to drill into me and Enzo.

Ilaria goes stiff. "Yes, you can. That doesn't mean I wish a loveless marriage on our son or the man as good as a nephew to us."

"Severu and Miceli love their wives," I point out.

"Yes. They got lucky."

"Like we did." I study my wife's beautiful features for a sign of what she's thinking because she sure as hell isn't saying anything.

Right now, she's more of an enigma to me than she was when we first got married. There's no soft smile like those words would have elicited before.

What the fuck is going on with my marriage?

Wiping my hands on the cloth I keep on hand for that purpose, I stand up and then stalk toward my wife. Her eyes widen and she backs up, bumping into the cabinets.

A predator's smile curves my lips.

This, at least, is as good as it ever was.

She opens her mouth to say something. In no fucking mood to hear it, I put my hands on the wall on either side of her head. Leaning down, I slam my mouth over my proper wife's parted lips.

It takes her a few seconds longer for her to melt into me than it used to but melt she does. And I shove my knee between her thighs to hold her up for my onslaught just as her knees buckle.