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KINGPIN

He phoned Chris and complained that he was bored. “Come to the house,” Chris said. They were at the pool. “The wife’s here with the kids.”

Giannone invited Tea, who’d never seen Chris’s condo complex just four miles away. When they arrived, Chris, Clara, and the two boys were splashing around in the pool, enjoying the sun. Giannone and Tea said hello and made themselves at home on some deck chairs.

Chris looked stunned. “I see you brought your friend,” he said to Giannone testily.

Clara knew Giannone, the babysitter, but had never met Tea. She looked at the stranger, then at Giannone, then back at the Mongolian, awareness and anger creeping over her face.

Giannone realized he’d made a blunder. The two women looked uncannily alike. Tea was a younger version of Chris’s wife, and at a glance, Clara knew her husband was sleeping with this woman.

Chris pulled himself out of the pool and walked around to where they were sitting, his face neutral. He squatted down in front of Giannone, his hair dripping water onto the concrete. “What are you doing?” he said in a low voice. “Get out of here.”

They left. And for the first time since she joined up with Chris Aragon and his gang, Tea felt dirty.

Chris wasn’t angry—he got a guilty, alpha-male pleasure out of seeing Tea and Clara in the same place. But Tea’s crush was becoming a problem. He had genuine affection for her and her quirky ways, but she was becoming an unwanted complication.

There was an ideal solution at his disposal. He bought her a plane ticket to visit her home country for an extended vacation, literally banishing his overardent paramour to Outer Mongolia.

With Chris distracted by his tangled love life, Carders Market was consuming more of Max’s time, and he still had his business as “Digits” to run. He was working in the food service industry now, and it was paying off big.