Truth.
Tino and Nova didn’t grow up in one of those houses where kids got time-out. When they fucked up, they felt it. They weren’t pampered. They really couldn’t be, not where they came from. Babying them would’ve hurt them. They needed thicker skin, and they had it. They could both take a beating.
When that belt hit Nova, buckle side up, the look on his face, the way his eyes went wide, it was like he couldn’t believe how much it hurt.
The second hit had Nova on his hands and knees.
Tino was not going to be able to do this. He certainly wasn’t pulling it off and maintaining any sort of street cred and pride. He wasn’t going to be kneeling there on his hands and knees and just taking it.
Truth again.
Nova was not normal.
Granted, that was a given. He was a freak by default and most everyone picked up on it pretty fast, but there were little things to his weirdness that only people who lived with him his whole life knew about.
What Tino knew and these motherfuckers didn’t was that Nova had an insanely high pain tolerance. As in, something-wrong-with-his-brain, not-feeling-things-like-a-normal-person type of issue.
Tino asked him once if that affected his jacking off, ’cause yeah, he was curious and he was twelve, and that was sorta what he spent most of his time thinking about before his life went to hell.
Nova told him to fuck off with his questions.
Which meant it probably did affect it.
That seemed like a really fucked-up trade-off to being a genius, but right now, Tino would give up jacking off for the rest of his life if he could have Nova’s pain tolerance.
He seriously hoped his brother was acting and doing a spectacular job of it as Nova dropped his head to the ground. He fisted both hands in his hair, like everything in him wanted to protect himself.
Tino was watching his face, but when he started sobbing, biting his shirt so hard a red stain blossomed on the white material, Tino looked away.
It was a street thing.
Not to acknowledge it. To give him the space so they could pretend later Tino didn’t see it, but looking away meant he saw his back.
Oh fuck.
Screw street cred.
Tino’s father was going to beat him to death.
There was something about that buckle and the way he did it that was cutting Nova. There weren’t welts on Nova’s back. There was blood. Lots of it. Tino didn’t know if Nova was sobbing from the pain, or from the knowledge that Tino was going to die from this shit.
What sort of candy-coated, edited-for-television world had Tino been living in that let him survive without considering what went into his father being underboss of the largest crime family in the country?
What the fuck was Nova thinking to throat punch him?
And what the hell had Romeo been thinking to keep them in New York?
They should’ve all run to fucking Siberia to avoid this motherfucker. He was second in charge of the fucking mafia.
The rip-people-apart-with-blowtorches mafia.
Not like they had some golden seal of approval from the church like Carina that made Frankie fucking obligated by God to keep her alive.
They were bastards.
They were expendable.
Tino in particular.
But Romeo had been so worried about Nova.
So fucking bothered over the idea of him getting involved with something criminal.
And Nova had been so caught up in saving Romeo once he did go down. So mad his brother had gone to jail he throat punched a mafia underboss.
Tino wanted to run; he really did and it must have shown, because one of the guys behind him said, “Don’t. It’ll make it worse.”
Worse?
Was he fucking joking?
Tino was already willing to sign up for the third option.
The put-a-bullet-in-Tino’s-brain option.
“Come on, Frankie.” The same guy groaned, as if he was taking personal offense. “It’s Sunday. I don’t wanna kill a kid on Sunday. Can we get it over with?”
“Fine. Hold him.” Frankie stopped hitting Nova and fisted his hair, jerking his head back again. “You move. You take that shirt out of your mouth. You do anything but lie there and watch, I’ll double it. Got it, champ?”
Tino would end up having a very close relationship with death. He would touch it from all sides too many times, and there was something morbidly serene about it. When it got close enough, people often froze rather than run. They would stand there and let it slam right into them.
Other hit men didn’t understand it.
But Tino did, that slowing of the world around him as they forced his shirt off. When his father jerked his head back, his voice sounded far away as he asked, “Tell me how many?”
Tino considered lying, but at this point, he was pretty sure that wouldn’t help. They’d have to be stupid not to know Tino had been counting.
So he used his kick-ass math skill and whispered, “A h-hundred and twenty,” before they shoved his shirt in his mouth and showed him firsthand why Nova’s eyes had gone wide.
Chapter Thirteen