Antony (11 page)

“I said so.”

Antony nodded in an exaggerated fashion. “Uh-huh. I get it.”

Vinnie, Liliana, and Cecelia continued chatting about the baby while Antony and Johnathan moved further down the hall, going toward the kitchen. Christmas was always a huge celebration in an Italian family. They’d spent half the day at church and now Antony was practically starving. His stomach was going to eat itself if he didn’t fill it with food soon.

“What’d Cecelia get you this year?” John asked.

Antony smiled. “Custom-made knife with my initials engraved on the hilt. Solid silver. It’s nice.”

“She’s given you one for every Christmas since you married, right?”

“And anniversary,” Antony replied.

It had become a tradition of sorts between him and his wife. He sported a nice little collection now. How Cecelia kept finding new ones that continued to impress him, Antony wasn’t sure. He was grateful, though.

“Where the fuck do you put them all?”

“In a box. I have to find a place to display them. Somewhere they can be seen but not touched.”

Nobody but him touched his knives. Not the ones Cecelia gave him, anyway.

“I didn’t expect to see you here tonight,” Antony said.

John shrugged. “I did the family thing this morning and Vinnie asked me here, so why not, right?”

Family thing?

Antony stared at his friend, coming to a stop. Confusion settled in his stomach like a dead weight.

Johnathan had very little to do with his family now that he was thoroughly integrated into the Catrolli crime family. Mixing business with other families was a risky thing, even if you were related. Vinnie had made it clear they were to stay far away from the Grovatti family until their mess with the Capos blew over. John wasn’t one to break those rules considering he was Vinnie’s underboss and it wouldn’t look good.

“Family thing?” Antony asked.

John coughed, hiding his lie miserably. “You know, church and shit.”

“With your father, you mean?”

“Yeah, sure … my father.”

His friend was lying right through his teeth.

What was John hiding?

“John—”

“Let’s eat!” Antony heard Vinnie shout.

“The boss calls,” John said, leaving Antony silent and stunned behind him.

Chapter Twelve

February, 1988

Cecelia’s kisses peppering down Antony’s bare chest didn’t relent as the phone rang.

“
Cristo
,
bella
, slow down for a minute. I have to get that. It could be important.”

“Nope,” his wife said, popping the word out as she unsnapped his pants.

Antony’s air cut off as his trousers were pushed down along with his boxers and his wife’s mouth caught his cock between her soft lips. Cecelia’s hot, wet mouth engulfed the length of his erection with burning intent, taking away his ability to think or speak. The only thing Antony could do was fist her silky hair and let his wife do what she wanted.

Which was apparently to suck his dick.

Antony didn’t pretend to understand pregnancy. He didn’t act like he knew why his wife went from zero to sixty with her desire for sex. He simply enjoyed the results of it and all the other times when she was a hormonal mess, he gave her whatever the hell she wanted or needed to make her happy.

To him, it was a fair trade.

“Oh my fucking God,” Antony groaned as Cecelia’s cheeks hollowed and her teeth scraped along the pulsing vein on the underside of his shaft.

The phone kept ringing.

Fuck, that was probably important.

Or something …

Antony didn’t care.

The phone stopped ringing.

He focused on the feeling of his wife’s lips tightening around his dick and the way her tongue circled the head of his cock every time she came to the tip. Cecelia’s hand slipped under his shaft and palmed his balls, making the pressure in the base of his spine climb to an unbearable point.

Antony had little to no control when his wife sucked him off. There was something about seeing Cecelia on her knees, taking him like she was, that really did it for him. To the outside world, Cecelia probably seemed subservient and sweet. She was, in a way. Mostly, she was independent, fierce as fuck, and sometimes a little crazy. The perfect wife for him. Like this though, she was just
his
.

Cecelia grinned around his cock, glancing up at him through thick lashes.

“Damn, you look mighty fucking good like that,
Tesoro
.”

When the phone started ringing again, Antony squeezed his eyes shut and wished he could ignore it. He couldn’t.

“Don’t fucking stop,” he told his wife, reaching for the phone hanging on the wall by the counter. He answered it on the third ring. “Yeah, shit,
ciao
? Marcello speaking.”

Answering the phone was a bad idea. Especially considering his wife seemed to take that as a personal challenge to break his control while he spoke. Cecelia took him deeper into her throat until his entire shaft had disappeared between her pink lips and a wicked gleam glimmered in her eyes.

“Antony?” John asked on the other end.

Fuck.

Hell.

Yeah, hell. That’s where Antony was going.

Straight to fucking hell.

“What?” Antony asked, mumbling the word against his palm while he fisted his Cecelia’s hair with the other hand.

“You okay?”

“Busy at the moment.”

“Well, un-busy yourself. Something’s happened.”

Antony’s heart dropped to his stomach. “What happened?”

Cecelia seemed to pick up on Antony’s sudden anxiety. She said nothing as she released his member, kissed his inner thigh, and pulled his pants back up before re-buttoning and zipping them. Antony cupped the side of her face in his hands as she stood with worry drawing her features dark.

“John, what happened?” Antony asked again.

“Kate was visiting her mother today …”

Antony rolled his eyes, already frustrated. Anything that included Kate’s name was liable to be utter crap. How Johnathan put up with his new wife, Antony wasn’t sure. His friend had Antony’s respect in the tenfold for it, though.

“Did she cause some kind of shit that you need to clean up again?” Antony asked. “Because if you called me and interrupted my time with my wife for that nonsense, I’m not going to be pleased, John.”

“No,” John murmured. “Something happened when she was there. I wanted to be the one to call you, not anyone else.”

“Stop messing around and tell me.”

“There was a bunch of guys there. You know how Vinnie is. He has dinners all the time with Andino and the older Capos.”

“John, what the hell—”

“Andino collapsed at the table, Antony. They didn’t even get him turned over onto his back before he was dead.”

Antony’s mind shut down. His heart might as well have stopped beating.

It wasn’t possible. Andino was a healthy man as far as that went. For his age and lineage, he had a strong heart and an attitude to match.

“But … no, John, I was just talking to Andino this morning. I knew he was going over to the boss’s place. He was fine. Kate must have been mistaken and—”

“Tony, stop it. Listen to me, man. She was not mistaken. I talked to Vinnie, too. I’m so sorry, but I didn’t want you hearing it from someone else. Kate called me from her parents’ place a few minutes ago. After I let you go, I’m going to come and pick you up. You have to tell your brother, too. Just … I’m so sorry.”

Antony hung up the phone, not wanting to hear more.

“What’s going on?” Cecelia asked.

“Nothing,” Antony said quickly.

He didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it would make it all real. Antony thought it was better if he could just shut off all feelings and pretended like it wasn’t happening.

Not his grandfather.

Wasn’t it bad enough that he didn’t have practically anyone left now?

“Antony, breathe,” Cecelia snapped, grabbing his face and forcing him to look at her. “Breathe,
bello
.”

He couldn’t.

“What happened?” she asked.

This was life.

There was no guarantee.

Antony could wonder why and ask for answers all he wanted, but God didn’t have to give a reason. He supposed that’s what he hated the most about his chosen deity.

Giveth and taketh
.

Antony reached out and pressed his hand to his wife’s swelled stomach, feeling his child move under his palm.

“Antony?”

“If the baby is a boy, we’ll call him Dante, okay?”

“Dante?”

“For Andino. That’s his middle name, and it was his father’s name. Dante, yeah?”

Cecelia wiped the wetness that escaped the corners of Antony’s eyes. “Okay, we’ll call him Dante if he’s a boy.”

• • •

April, 1988

Dante Antony Marcello made his way into the world quietly in the middle of the night with little fuss. He cried for the first two minutes of his life on earth and then his father held him, and the boy stilled, watching Antony with hazy eyes, contented.

Antony knew love. Of course, he knew love. His family, his wife, and his life. Antony loved all of those things. To varying degrees and in different ways, sure, but he loved them.

Dante was not the same.

It was instant. Like peace in Antony’s soul, pride in his heart, and life in his arms.

Right there …

In his arms.

Life.

He
made
that.

“
Oh, mio bambino
,” Antony whispered to his son, taking in all the newborn’s features for what felt like the millionth time. Dante looked like his father but with a good dose of his mother mixed in as well. “So perfect, my boy. You are so perfect.”

And loved.

He was so loved.

Cecelia thought the baby would be a girl. In fact, she’d been so sure of the gender she bought very little boy clothes for Dante. Even the child’s nursery had been painted a pale yellow, although Antony was correcting that issue. Dante would go home to a room fit for a little
Italiano Principe
. Complete with four blue walls.

Antony reminded himself to thank Paulie for doing that.

“Damn, he’s a handsome boy, man,” John said, coming to stand at Antony’s side. “He looks just like you.”

“And Cecelia.”

“Yeah, but … you couldn’t deny this kid, Antony.”

Antony grinned, proud as hell. “I know.”

“When you hand him over to your wife for five minutes, we should go celebrate with a cigar and a bottle of wine.”

Antony laughed. “Yeah,
if
I hand him over.”

“You’re going to have to sometime. He needs to eat.”

True enough
…

“Be his Godfather,” Antony said to John.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, John. Be my son’s Godfather.”

“I’d be honored.”

John reached out to stroke Dante’s little head, a smile playing on his lips. The sadness lingering in his gaze, however, didn’t escape Antony’s notice.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” John murmured.

That seemed to be a mantra for his friend lately.

• • •

Fall, 1989

“Vacation?” Cecelia asked, balancing a squirming Dante on her hip.

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Kind of?”

“Of a sort,” Antony added.

Cecelia’s gaze narrowed before she put Dante to his feet on the floor. Instantly, the nearly two-year-old boy shot toward his father with arms outstretched.

“
Papà
!”

Antony picked his son up without missing a beat and said, “Of a sort, Cecelia. We’ll do whatever you want, but there are some things I want to check out in Italy. Andino had property from the family over there and it’s mine, now. Besides that, he owned a few businesses. So yeah, of a sort, okay.”

“Work, then. You’ll be working.”

“Milk,” Dante said, smacking his father on the cheek with his tiny palm.

“Ouch, shit, Dante, don’t.”

“Shit,” his son mocked.

“
Cristo
, don’t say that,” Antony chided. “Bad words, Dante. Bad. No, I said.
No
, son.”

“No, no, no!”

“Exactly, no.”

“Shit no,” Dante said, grinning.

Antony couldn’t help it. He laughed. Now that his boy had finally figured out how to talk and mimic other people, Dante’s bad language couldn’t be stopped. It was a losing battle.

Cecelia, on the other hand, didn’t find anything about the situation amusing. “How am I supposed to explain his cussing when we go to church, huh?”

Antony shrugged. “However in the hell you want to, Cecelia. He’s a kid. He doesn’t know any better.”

“It’d help if you would stop taking him everywhere with you.”

Nope, wasn’t going to happen.

“He likes spending his days with me,” Antony said.

“And what does he see, anyway?” Cecelia asked.

His future, likely.

Antony chose not to say that.

“Are you going to take this trip to Italy with me or not?” Antony asked.

Cecelia’s hand fell to her slightly rounded midsection. Their second child had come about almost as soon as Cecelia stopped breastfeeding Dante. Conceiving their first child had taken years. The second? Not so much.

Antony understood his wife’s hesitance, though. This pregnancy had not been an easy one. She spent most of it being sick, tired, and in bed. Which was one of the biggest reasons why he wanted to get Cecelia away for a while and give her time off from life before their baby made his or her appearance.

Antony was kind of hoping for another boy. Girls scared the shit out of him. Boys he could handle. Girls … probably not.

“A vacation would be good for you,” he said quietly.

“I don’t know if I should be flying at this point, Antony.”

“You’re not due until mid-January.”

“What about work here?”

“It’s a two-week trip. I’ll have it all handled.”

Cecelia still didn’t look convinced. “But—”

“It’s Italy, Cecelia.
Italy
. Our families came from Sicily and neither of us has ever been. I want to let my son see where his roots were first made.”

She glanced at Dante in Antony’s arms.

“It-lee,” Dante babbled. “It-lee.”

“All right,” Cecelia said, laughing. “A kind of, sort of vacation it is.”

• • •