Aventine University Series: A Dark College Bully Romance - SIGNED PAPERBACKS (Books 1-3)

 

This was a mistake.

That’s what was going through my mind as I watched everyone milling around the reception venue. Some things never changed. It was pretty much the same crowd that had been at every wedding, baptism, and funeral since I was born: dark-haired men packing heat under their suit jackets while their overly made-up wives gossiped, holding champagne glasses carefully so they didn’t mess up their freshly manicured nails. The men were talking business — they were always talking business — but they were also watching the younger women in the crowd while they pretended like they weren’t.

Probably scoping out a round of new mistresses.

Ew.

I caught the bride watching me and forced a smile. She smiled back, but it wasn’t happiness I saw in my mother’s eyes.

It was relief.

 

I guess that’s what happened when your ex-husband informed to the Feds and you got a chance to redeem your name with the biggest Ma!a don on the East Coast.

That would be Roberto Alinari, the man standing at my mom’s side. I had to admit, he looked handsome and elegant in a tuxedo, more like a trust fund billionaire than a Mob boss notorious for his brutality.

I suppressed a shiver when I realized he was staring right at me, regarding me coolly while pretending to engage in conversation with a couple I didn’t recognize.

“How are you holding up, Willa?”

The voice came from my shoulder, and I turned to find my best friend, Mara, standing next to me.

“Oh, you know,” I said, “my sister’s still missing, my disgraced mother just married the most infamous Mafia boss in the country, and thanks to my dad, I’m a social pariah, but otherwise, life’s just grand.”

“Oooookay,” Mara said. “Someone needs more champagne.” She plucked a glass from a passing tray carried by one of the uniformed waitstaff and handed it to me.

I drank greedily, even though I’d promised myself I was going to be responsible at the wedding. I’d done enough partying in the year I’d been traveling to last a lifetime.

What could I say? Everyone processed grief differently. My mom had barely been able to get out of bed when it became clear that my sister, Emma, was really missing, and I’d run for the nearest airport the second I’d turned eighteen.

I felt ashamed of it now. I probably shouldn’t have left my mom alone, even though she’d seemed more than happy to let Roberto Alinari help her pick up the pieces, but at the time, I’d been drowning in my own grief.

Grief and the deeply felt sense that something very bad had happened to my sister at Aventine University.

Running, leaving it all behind in a trail of jet fuel and far-flung beaches, had seemed like the best way to forget. It had worked too — until my mom’s engagement to Roberto Alinari had broken through my party-til-you-forget haze.

Mara scanned the crowd, her curly brown hair brushing against her shoulders, which were bare under her violet off-the-shoulder dress. She hadn’t changed at all in the year I’d been gone, and I could still see shades of the apple-cheeked kid she’d been when we became best friends in first grade.

She froze, her brown eyes lighting with interest. “On the plus side,” she said, “you now have the hottest stepbrother in town.”

I followed her line of sight to the guy standing against the wall, his murderous gaze trained on me.

“Gross,” I said. Antonio Alinari — otherwise known as Neo — might have been beautiful, but he was also the biggest dick in our extended crime family.

And not in a good way. At least, not that I knew of.

“You have to admit it’s true,” Mara teased. “I’m wet just watching him watch you.”

I scowled. “That’s all kinds of fucked up.” 

I would never, and I did mean never, admit Neo was hot.

Not out loud anyway. It was bad enough before our parents were married when he was just a garden-variety douchebag.

Now he was also my stepbrother.

Secretly, though? That was another story. In the privacy of my own screwed-up mind, I had to admit he was gorgeous, with dark hair that shone under the lights in the country club and a muscled physique that strained the seams of his tailored suit.

A tattoo snaked up his neck from under his dress shirt, and I knew from a “family” pool party that what looked like snakes were actually strands of hair streaming from the elaborate angel inked onto his chest.

Mara shrugged. "You’re not even blood-related.”

“It’s not about that,” I said. “He’s a dick. I refuse to give him a pass because he’s good-looking.”

“So you admit he’s good-looking,” she said triumphantly.

I sighed. “It doesn’t matter. He’s a total douchebag, remember?”

She turned her eyes on the two guys standing next to Neo. “What about Rock and Drago? Do they get a pass?”

“No,” I said, glancing at Neo’s sidekicks.

Rocco Barone studied the crowd, his gaze casual and curious. His blond hair was an anomaly we shared. My “uncles” had been commenting about my fair hair since I was a kid, making jokes about the mailman even though my mom was a natural blonde.

I wondered if Rocco had been the subject of the same kind of teasing or if that was yet another thing only the women in our world had to endure.

Oscar Drago (I couldn’t remember when we’d all stopped calling him Oscar in favor of his last name) stood on the other side of Neo. His hair was black as a raven, his eyes nearly as dark as he surveyed the crowd with something like hunger.

“More for me,” Mara said. “I’ll be the bologna in a Neo, Rock, and Drago sandwich any day.”

That would be stupid.

They’re not just jerks, they’re dangerous.

They might have something to do with Emma’s disappearance.

I forced myself to swallow the words. Mara was just dreaming, and who could blame her? In spite of their personality deficits, Neo, Rock, and Drago had been the three hottest male commodities in our little world since they’d turned sixteen, started marking their bodies with ink and piercings, and developed muscles that took the focus off their vacuous brains.

Okay, that wasn’t fair. I actually didn’t know them well enough to know if they were stupid, but it made me feel better to think so, because being smart and that hot? Well, that would be the ultimate injustice.

Besides, there was no proof Neo, Rock, and Drago were involved in Emma’s disappearance. She’d last been seen on the Aventine campus, but no one had copped to any information about why she’d been there, three miles from Bellepoint Academy, the all-girls college she’d attended.

The police had looked at all the security footage and interviewed Aventine’s entire student body, but none of it had turned up a thing. All of which meant absolutely nothing. I’d learned a lot of things as the daughter of Frank Russo, but the most valuable was that everyone could be bought.

Lesson number two? Loose lips sink ships, and the rats get dropped into a deep body of water with cement blocks around their ankles.

It made me sick to look at Neo, scanning the crowd like a fox with access to every henhouse in the Northeast, while my sister was missing.

Probably dead.

No. I couldn’t afford to believe that. Emma couldn’t afford for me to believe that.

“I’m going to the bathroom,” I said to Mara.

“I’ll be here,” she said, her eyes still on the three tools across the room.

I wove my way through the crowd, smiling and waving at the people who made up my extended family by virtue of their involvement in the criminal underworld, even though I knew they talked shit about my family behind our backs.

I didn’t trust a single one of them.

I’d vowed to someday be free of this world, to make my own way without stealing and hurting people. But first, I had to find Emma, and that meant attending Bellepoint when school started again in two weeks. I needed to get cozy with the people who knew Emma, people who weren’t part of a world where telling the truth could mean getting your tongue cut o!.

The fact that Bellepoint and Aventine were both on the outskirts of Blackwell Falls was a bonus. Emma had told me the two schools partied together all the time, so I’d be able to do some low-key digging in both places. I hadn’t told Mara I was going to Bellepoint yet — she had her heart set on my new stepdad pulling strings for a last-minute admission to Columbia so we could go to school together like we’d always planned — but I would.

I just needed to get through this stupid wedding.

I turned the corner from the noisy dining room and entered a long wide hall. The line for the ladies’ room came into view. Of course, it was a mile long.

“What a surprise,” I murmured.

I eyed the line, then looked under the sign for the men’s room.

Not a man in sight. Typical.

I pushed through the door. I was glad to find it empty, but that wouldn’t have been a deal-breaker. Money had been tight since my dad bailed on us, so I’d chosen the cheapest hostels I could !nd during my year of travel. I’d also found myself with my ass poised over fallen leaves in a Costa Rican forest and squatting over a ditch in the fields of Nepal. Using the men's room at a tony country club in Long Island was a piece of cake by comparison.

I stopped at the mirror and veri!ed that my long blonde hair was still wound into the complicated knot insisted on by my mom. A few tendrils had escaped during the long day, but it worked. My makeup was still mostly intact, in part thanks to the semi-natural look I’d nailed with light eye makeup that highlighted my green eyes and the sheer lip gloss I’d chosen.

Satis!ed, I used one of the stalls to pee and was working to rearrange my emerald green dress without letting it fall into the toilet when I heard the bathroom door open. I hurried to finish, then unlocked the door, stepped out of the stall — and came face-to-face with Neo Alinari.