Dirty Money Read Online Free Page A

I guess that meant she meant business.
    “Seriously, what right do you have to be so pissed?”
    “Umm, guys,” Ryan interrupted, his mouth full of peanut butter. “What’s going on?”
    “Cooper has decided it’s okay to push me around.” Reese caught his eye so he would get it.
    “Dude.” He turned to look at me, confusion clouding his face. “You hit my sister?”
    “No.” I wasn’t going to play her bullshit games. “That’s probably normal in your family though, right? I mean in the mafia it’s okay to hit women.” I shrugged.
    “What?” Ryan managed to swallow.
    “Well, I just found out that the DiGiovannis are the biggest fucking crime family east of the Mississippi,” I shouted.
    “If you really want to know,” Reese shouted back. “They’re not the biggest. There are at least three others just as big.”
    “You have got to be fucking kidding me.” She glared in response. “Your mother was, and I quote, a mafia princess. What does that make you? Are you guys mafia royalty too?”
    “Oh, fuck,” Ryan murmured.
    “And Cooper decided to scream all of this at me on a street corner. A street corner, Ryan. When I wouldn’t scream back, she tried to throw me in the car,” Reese said.
    “Shut the fuck up. Don’t try to make me the bad guy,” I tossed back at her.
    “Okay.” Ryan stood, swayed, and caught himself on the back of the couch. “I am not going to mediate your relationship. I don’t know what happened.” We both opened our mouths to tell him, but he continued, “And I don’t want to know. Cooper, if you hurt my sister, I’ll kill you.”
    “All right,” I conceded.
    “Reese, don’t twist shit around to make it sound different than it was.” He pointed at her.
    “Fine.” She scowled.
    “When you’re done shouting at each other, I guess we’ll need to talk.” Ryan turned back to me. “I’m sorry. Really, really sorry.” With that, he picked up his sandwich and water and went into his room.
    Reese and I watched to see who would make the first move. It was her this time.
    “Never, ever, pull a stunt like that again.”
    “A stunt like what?”
    “Grabbing me and pushing me around. I’m not a child and I don’t enjoy that kind of abuse.”
    She was right. I shouldn’t have touched her.
    “Neither do I,” I shot back.
    “When did I abuse you?”
    “Mafia,” I spat the word, letting it explain me.
    “You knew,” Reese insisted.
    “No, I didn’t.”
    “Yes, you did.”
    This conversation was going so well. “I figured out they were organized crime. I had no idea they were so big. Your family is legit, buttercup.”
    “Actually, they’re not,” she said. I think she was trying to be funny.
    “I’m not in the mood to fuck around.”
    “Okay, you want to be serious? Yes, our mother ”―she really emphasized mother―“was very involved with the family business. If things had turned out differently, she would be running it right now.”
    “You say that like it’s normal,” I said incredulously.
    “For them it is.” Reese let that hang for a few moments. “You think I like that I’m a DiGiovanni? That my family runs guns and drugs and girls and sells them like…like I don’t know.” The careful mask began to fall so her mouth trembled and her eyes looked like wet shale. “They sell guns and drugs to children and then they sell children like guns and drugs.”
    “Eloquent.” Right then, I didn’t give a shit what they did to make them bad guys, I just cared about how hard they were going to come after me.
    “You asshole,” she screamed. I half expected her to stomp her foot. “I don’t have to tell you this, you know?”
    “Yeah, it’s just my life.” I shrugged at how insignificant that was becoming. The color started to drain from her face. “You’re right. I probably don’t need to know that the guys chasing me are hardcore mobsters. Sure, I just fucking killed two of them, but that’s no big.” She looked like she