Page 82 of Brox Boar

“My father was… absent. Meetings. Shipments. Negotiations. Wars. He ruled everything except his own home.”

I clench my jaw.

“Still,” Brox says quietly, “I’d slit Don Giacomo’s throat ten times over by now.”

A murmur of agreement ripples through his men.

“My men agree with you,” he adds, gesturing to them. “But Don Giacomo’s wife–Constanza–she is like a mother to me.”

Brox’s voice cuts clean through it. “You mixed up your priorities, Rex. That’s on you.”

Rex exhales, shoulders dropping. “Yeah. I know.”

“What about your mother?” I ask.

“She died when I was a baby,” Rex goes on, and as if he’s had enough of talking about his own miserable life, his gaze lifts.

“Now,” he says, “about you.”

The air tightens.

“This afternoon, Constanza called me. Probably because she heard about you coming to the bar,” he takes a large gulp of whisky. “I knew my father had another family before marrying my mother. But he never spoke of them. So Constanza told me this afternoon that a man named Sorrentino took away my father’s first family. He took his children and killed his wife. There were rumors that he killed the children, too.”

Brox and I look at each other.

Rex’s eyes sharpen. “Seeing you here… I think he didn’t.”

“Lupu Boaru,” I mutter. “The Wolf.”

“You speak Romanian?” One of the men sitting behind Rex asks me.

“No. But somehow, I know Lupu means wolf.”

“How do you spell your surname?” Brox asks.

Rex spells it. “B-O-A-R-U.”

“Boar,” Brox mutters and looks at me. “At least that motherfucker left us the name.”

Rex frowns. “Who did?”

“Sorrentino,” Brox says. “Our foster father.”

Rex’s eyes widen. “Wait, foster father?” He blinks once, then again. “You were living with him? Here, in the States?”

“Miami.” I say.

A low whistle cuts through the room from somewhere behind him. One of his men shifts, his gaze moving between Brox and me.

“That’s messed up.”

“Wrong.” A man seated on the sofa mutters.

“Sounds like you’ve got reinforcements now, Rex–two brothers’ worth,” someone says, half-amused, half-aware of the weight behind it.

Rex doesn’t smile. He doesn’t answer right away. He studies us instead, like he’s recalibrating his understanding of the world in real time.

“Sorrentino killed our mother,” Brox says slowly, “and kidnapped us.”