Page 99 of Has-Been
“Stitchishis real name, babe. At the club, that’s who he is, but there’s no way anyone would think you’re disrespectful, and if they do, they can go fuck themselves. I just know it’s how a lot of us prefer to be addressed. Try calling Ice by his ‘real name’, or my god… or Torch. They hate it.”
“I don’t even know them as anything other than Ice and Torch.”
“Exactly, and I think you’ll make your brother’s day the first time you call him Stitch.”
Has-Been
Itwasamerehour later, when Stitch visited our room, and asked for some alone time with his sister. I mean, I hated being away from her, but I’d never come between her and her brother, so I agreed, saying I’d check in with Ice and Tesio after whatever the fuck had happened earlier.
Apparently, as Stitch had explained it, the person who’d been randomly hacking the system had managed to wipe all of Ice and Tesio’s drives of data, and that, had there not been an offsite backup that nobody knew about, all would be lost.
One of the first things Tesio apparently did was set up a regularly scheduled upload of all data to an off-site server of his, with Reacher’s approval, just to keep us covered. All protections were in place to keep our files for our eyes only, but for the time being, this was all being kept quiet.
It was for that reason that I found Ice slumped on a sofa in the bar, waiting for Tesio and drinks.
“Hey, man. You look like you took a major kick in the nads today.”
He grimaced, sitting up a bit.
“You been updated?”
I nodded, knowing he’d know that I was in the real know, and not operating on the story everyone else was getting. He cleared his throat, and spoke a little louder than usual.
“I’m losing my fucking mind, man. How the fuck did someone even get access, let alone wipe so much shit?” Just in case the culprit was in earshot, we were letting them think they’d been successful. Once again, I hated the fact that we had to put on a show to weed out a fucking saboteur among our family, our brotherhood.
Tesio joined us, sliding beers in front of me and Ice. I frowned as I thanked him, because I hadn’t ordered anything, but I’d sure as hell take a drink right now. I noticed that Ice’s beer was his usual no-alcohol stuff too.
“Has this all been cleared as safe?”
Tesio smirked, jerking his head toward the bar, where Tommy was packing supplies into the fridges from boxes on the counter.
“All new shit, courtesy of the Rossi family. You guys are really stacking up those favours for him to recall at some point,” he murmured softly.
I exchanged a worried look with Ice.
“Seriously? How deep are we?”
Tesio started chuckling, sipping at his beer in between his laughter.
“You guys are so easy, honestly. It’s all good. It was a gift from him, since he didn’t want his daughter ‘stuck in this hellhole without sustenance’.”
“It’s hardly the time to be fucking joking around, dipshit.” I could see Ice was on his last nerve, even though nothing had genuinely been lost. The mere fact that there had been any intrusion into his systems would be fucking him up, because that was his domain, and he normally had perfect control over it.
“Yo Grease, wanna shoot some pool?” Tesio turned and caught Rocket’s eye, laughing loudly.
“Yeah, man, rack ‘em up, I’ll be right there. Gonna take the rest of your money tonight though.”
“Eat me.”
I grinned, enjoying the banter, and that brief return to normalcy.
“Nice to see you’re making friends here.”
The mafia guy smirked at me as he stood up and straightened his cut.
“I could get used to this life, man. I can see why you stuck around.” I knew he was playing his part, but his words actually rang with a little more truth than I’d expected. He mock saluted us, and wandered away with his beer, heckling Rocket the whole damn way.
“How’s it been, working with him?”
