“The fuck? And you’re just telling me now?” He was giving me a hard time, but I could hear the excitement in his voice.

I raised my eyes to peer at him, the corner of my lip lifting in a smirk.

Leo charged at me, wrapping his arms around my middle and hoisting me in the air with a whoop. “I knew my boy was gonna make it. You’re in the bigtime now!”

“Put me down, dickhead,” I barked on a laugh.

Leo dropped me before nailing me in the shoulder. “That’s great news, so what’s with all the attitude? How come you were pissed enough you almost took my head off?”

I bent between the ropes and dropped down to the ground outside the ring. “Seeing Enzo just brought back a lot of shit I didn’t want to think about.”

“Ah, Sofia,” he mused knowingly.

“They fucked with my entire life. It’s not just her.” I wasn’t sure which one of us I was trying to convince.

Judging by his smirk, Leo wasn’t buying it any more than I was. “Whatever you say, boss.”

“Don’t you start calling me that.”

“Call you what?” asked Kayla Barone, one of the resident gym bunnies as well as one of my go-to stress relievers. Her toned body could have graced the cover of Women’s Fitness, and she wasn’t shy about showing it off. Not only was she highly sexual, but she craved the attention.

I met Kayla before I started training at Joe’s Gym. It was a couple of years after I’d been made, and her father had introduced us at a party. We were celebrating some birthday or holiday—I couldn’t even remember what the bullshit excuse was—but a number of us had gathered to sip on gold-label drinks in fancy clothes. I hated going to those things, but it was a part of the business. Kayla was wearing a silver tube-sock of a dress that barely covered the bottom of her ass cheeks. She had batted her eyes and giggled at me enough times to convey she was fair game, but her father was a capo, and there was no way I was going to sign my own death certificate. When I wouldn’t take the bait, she went so far as to lean over a chair and expose her bare pussy to me. I left the party as quickly as I could before I did something stupid. It wasn’t until I started going to Joe’s and heard about Kayla playing hokey pokey with half the guys there that I gave in. She’d proven good for a quickie in the locker room or acting as a plus-one should I need a no-strings date. Kayla definitely had her uses, but nothing about her appealed to me on a deeper level.

No woman had since Sofia.

“I called him boss. This guy was just named capo,” offered Leo with a pat on my shoulder as he made his way to the locker room. Ordinarily, we didn’t discuss that shit in public, but our gym was family owned. Everyone there was connected in one way or another, even Kayla.