Ask Me A Question.

A Three Rings short: Issac and Felinus

One of the most interesting thing about how I decided to write this series is the simple fact that while the couples from the previous books are no longer the POV characters, their stories keep on going. They continue to grow and develop both as a couple and as individuals with the passage of time but in the books we can only see small pieces of it when they show up. This is why I have these shorts, to give windows into the “mundane” moments that happen in the Three Rings that you wouldn’t see in the other books. This is one of those stories.

WARNING, the following contains spoilers for The Cat’s Maus and minor spoilers for The Dog Trainer’s Secret. Both books can be read on Kindle Unlimited and are available for purchase. Reading The Cat’s Maus is strongly encouraged before continuing.

Relationships are, at the core of things, a series of events that bring two people closer together. This is true of romantic and platonic relationships and no two relationships are exactly the same. Every person handles stressful situations in their own way and a mark of a healthy relationship is learning how best to support them in those moments while not setting yourself on fire. While reading this short, readers should recall a conversation had between Felinus and Issac in The Cat’s Maus where Issac has them trade questions so he wouldn’t panic and run away. I wrote this story in part to show how far the two have come but also how parts of their relationship are much the same as it was from the beginning.

Without further ado, “Ask Me A Question.”

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“Issac?”

Issac twitched at the strangely familiar voice and glanced over his shoulder, looking the man he had sensed watching him from the shadows of the alley up and down. Pistol, knife, knuckle tattoos. One of the Russian’s men but there wasn’t any sign of a Russian accent in his voice. He focused on the man’s face, frowning at him for a moment, then cocked an eyebrow in surprise. “Will?”

Will grinned at him, holding out his hand. “Thought that was you,” he said easily. “How have you been?”

“Pretty good,” he said, taking the other man’s hand and feeling him squeeze his fingers without crushing his hand. It made him smile. “How about you?” He turned Will’s hand over, raising a pointed eyebrow at him.

The man laughed softly. “Yeah, I got a bit sucked in to everything you avoided.” He shrugged. “Juvie was alright. They have programs in there that make sure you graduate with a diploma of some sort and they push hard for either going to the community college or trade school if you’re still in at eighteen.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Issac nodded, letting go of his hand. “Seems like a good program.”

He shrugged again. “I took up welding. You know I never did well in a classroom. I like it well enough, pay’s pretty good but,” he made a show of rolling up his sleeves and Issac saw the spider with three rings on its back crawling up his forearm, “I think we both knew I wasn’t going to live an honest life.”

Issac chuckled. “Yes, I think we did.”

Will’s head cocked as he folded his arms, the tattoos on full display. “I have a question for you.”

Issac mirrored him. “I may have an answer. I may not.”

He grinned again. “Still the same smart ass.”

“I think we both knew that wasn’t going to change,” he said, smiling as Will’s head threw back in a laugh.

“I missed that mouth of yours,” he laughed, wiping at one eye. “Seriously though. There’s a rumor going around the ranks of a guy. They are calling him a Russian name that someone had to translate for me. ‘Little Mouse.’ Rumor has it the guy is this tiny dude with, I quote, ‘soulless eyes’ that has the interest of all of the higher ups peaked.” He gave Issac a look up and down, focusing on his eyes in particular. “That you?”

Issac sucked his teeth, mildly annoyed on how the rumor made him sound. He was aware of the nickname Emil had given him just as he was aware of the one the Italians dubbed him. “Little Mouse” was hardly the worst thing they could have called him and he supposed it was better than everyone whispering about “Issac” if it got too twisted up. Rumors like that are what got people hauled into interrogation rooms or tied up in trunks if they got out of hand. “You know better than to listen to rumors, Will,” he said casually.

“Yeah, I guess I do,” he said, still studying him. “But I also know better than to put anything past you. You always kept a low profile but you and I know there’s something really twisted in you.”

“Baby boy.”

Great, Issac thought, looking over his shoulder as Felinus crossed the street. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Will look around then take a step back, clearly recognizing the Italian Cat.

Felinus really was something to watch. That smooth stride, the way his tailored suit moved with him, keeping the gun and knife he had hidden but easily accessible. He was a picture of a modern Italian gangster, suave but dangerous.

“Felinus,” he said, feeling the name purr out of his throat and seeing Will shoot him a look. “Took you long enough.”

The gangster gave Will a sweeping look as he came to Issac’s side, one arm snaking possessively around Issac’s waist, then down to him. “Parking around here is limited,” he said, his expression softening just slightly as their eyes met, “and we’re too early for valet. Have you been waiting long?”

“No more than five minutes,” Issac told him, leaning into him and rising onto his toes to brush his lips against his. He had half a mind to drag Felinus down and kiss him until they were both breathless, but if he did, Felinus might try to take him home and they did have a meeting to keep. “Amore,” he said instead, waving a hand towards Will. “This is Will. A high school classmate. Will, this is Felinus, my boyfriend.”

He glanced at Will and saw him fit Issac easily into the rumors he had heard as he looked Felinus up and down. Issac was sure when Will approached he had already known he wouldn’t be getting a yes or no to his question. There was nothing in their history that would make Will believe he would but Issac was sure that the rumors had included the Cat. Every member of the Family knew that Topolino belonged to il Gatto just as every Clover knew Felinus belonged to Issac, he could only assume that the Russians wouldn’t have left out that juicy bit of gossip no matter how twisted the narrative got. For Will’s credit, he held out his hand to Felinus just as easily has he had to Issac. “Nice to meet you.”

“You too,” Felinus said coldly, taking Will’s hand.

Issac glanced down and resisted the urge to roll his eyes. They were both trying to crush the others hand. Petty gangster bullshit. “It was nice seeing you again, Will,” he said when they finally let go. “We have reservations to get to.”

Will glanced back at the steakhouse behind him, the elegant sign that simply said “Tony’s” not yet lit in the dying light of the evening. “Gotcha,” he said, tilting his head at the sign. “I have someone I’m suppose to be meeting soon, anyway.” He looked at Felinus then back to Issac. “See you around, Issac.” He nodded to Felinus. “Felinus.”

“Will,” Felinus replied, watching the thief walk away. “High school classmate?” he asked, still watching Will move down the street.

“Later,” Issac promised him, reaching up to run a finger along Felinus’s jaw. “We should head in. Some of them have already arrived.”

Felinus hummed softly but didn’t argue, instead turning away all at once to lead them into the restaurant.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Despite the early start to the meeting, it was near midnight when Felinus and Issac finally stepped into their apartment, going immediately to the bedroom. Mario and his wife Bianca had practically cornered the two of them, the not so subtle prying to ask when they would be taking “the next steps” and generally being nosy if well meaning in their pointed questions and statements about family and marriage. Felinus would be lying if he hadn’t somewhat enjoyed Issac casually pointing out that children in a marriage between same-sex couples wouldn’t be as quick to join the union to Bianca’s rather break neck timeline. What with either having to find a donor or go through the adoption process, it was expensive and could take years.

“Felinus, ask me a question.”

He blinked, looking around to see Issac sitting on the bed. He had already removed his jacket, shoes, and tie from the evening and retied his hair from a tight ponytail at the top of his head to a lower looser position at the nape of his neck. He frowned.

Ever since that first charity event where Issac had come face to face with Fergus for the first time, the phrase ‘ask me a question’ had become something of a code. It meant Issac wanted to tell him something but that voice in his head that had kept him safe for fifteen years was preventing him from talking about it. The last time they “played” Felinus learned that the morning after Issac downed a bottle of gin in desperation to escape his nightmares hadn’t left him with just a hangover once his foster father had found the bottle.

“Has Bianca brought that all up to you before,” he asked, easing into things as he removed his own coat and tie. “Marriage and children?”

“Damn near every time the ‘wives’ get together,” he said, making air quotes around the word. “I can’t wait to start dragging Nate to those. I need some fucking testosterone in the room and they are going to lose their minds when they see his outfits. How about Mario to you?”

Felinus laughed softly, walking over to the bed and sitting down next to him. He could only imagine how Nate’s love of crop tops and short dresses would go over with the other partners of the Family’s upper ranks. For the majority, they were accepting of “nontraditional” relationships but many of them struggled to fit a man into the mold that was built for a traditional mobster’s housewife. If they thought Issac was difficult, they weren’t prepared for a man who was raised to be a Don only to become a dog trainer and be the most colorful, noticeable thing in the room. “Mario’s never mentioned kids before unless he’s talking about his own. Did you eat enough?”

“As if I could go even mildly peckish in a room full of Italians,” Issac scoffed, worming his way under Felinus’s arm and straddling his hips. “Did you not see your mother and Nona add to my plate if it dared to be less than half full?”

Felinus smirked up at him, hands finding their way naturally to his hips. “I may have noticed some exasperated sighs. Still amazes me that I get back talk and sass about suggesting you eat more and they only get quiet sighs and resignation.”

“That would be,” Issac said, drawing a line along Felinus’s jaw with a finger, “because back talking and sassing you is fun while crossing an Italian mother is just bad for your health.”

“Literally a mobster, baby boy,” he murmured.

“And you’ll agree with me,” Issac countered, his lips brushing against Felinus’s. “Your question, Amore.”

Felinus breathed in slowly, wanting nothing more than to turn them over and finally give Issac the kiss he’d been dying to give him all night. But that wasn’t something he could do, not when Issac asked for questions and there was nothing else he could really use to avoid the real thing he wanted to know. “When was the last time you saw your classmate?”

“He went to juvie when we were seventeen,” Issac said quietly, keeping his eyes locked on Felinus’s. “Haven’t seen him since. What did you think of him?”

“He seemed… comfortable with you,” Felinus growled softly, unable to get the image of the way the other man had been looking at Issac out of his head.

“Does that bother you?”

“It’s my question, baby boy,” he whispered, not wanting to answer that yet. He wasn’t concerned about Issac around other men but he’d never seen anyone act so familiar with Issac since Dimitri.

Issac shrugged then nodded for him to continue.

“Were the two of you only classmates?”

“No,” Issac answered without hesitation, then pressed a finger lightly against Felinus’s lips to halt the words trying to form. “We were both in the foster system,” he continued quietly. “He was in the same group home with me.” His finger traced over Felinus’s bottom lip. “He was there before me. Since I was smaller than all the other teenagers, I was a target to some of the more… temperamental boys. Will wasn’t nearly as big back then as he is now but he was scrappy and he didn’t like me being a target just because I was small. He started intervening. We formed an alliance of sorts. I helped him with school work and he made sure people left me alone.”

“Does he know about your parents?”

He drew his finger back along Felinus’s jaw. “You were the first person I ever told about that,” he whispered, not calling Felinus out for asking two questions in a row. The signal that this was what he want to talk about, this run in with a boy he had known when he couldn’t allow himself to be seen. “He figured out that I knew about the underground. He pressured me to teach him some of the things I knew. Since he was constantly standing between me and the other boys who would have taken advantage of their size and connections to make hiding harder, I gave him some. How to spot made men. How to tell if someone is carrying. Basics like that. That ended up saving his ass a few times when the more troublesome boys tried to bring older men into their fights.”

“You mentioned he went to juvie,” he breathed. “What for?”

Issac’s brow shifted and his lips thinned. Regret. “I told you once,” he said, “that I had had brushes with wannabes and recruiters. I’m sure Snake told you about my social workers’ extensive reports and the group home’s reports about being a— how did they phrase it? ‘Ringleader of delinquents.’”

Felinus’s eyebrow shot up. “He didn’t mention anything about you being a ringleader. Have you been holding out on me, baby boy?”

Issac huffed a laugh, shaking his head. “I was hardly a ringleader. I made a point not to be a leader at all but… I was persuasive. Will wasn’t the only boy I’d eventually have between me and others. All of them got something out of the arrangement but it was them who would take the brunt of the trouble. A couple of them rolled and blamed me but there was never anything more than their word and I always had solid alibis and was a better liar than they were. Most of them wouldn’t admit to anything but adults started catching on that they were acting too smart. Like someone was feeding them what to say. I had an uncanny amount of knowledge about how to keep your mouth shut and that was something I was more than happy to teach all of them. Nothing ever got pinned on me. A lot of them all knew they were going to jail one way or another. They were too angry at the world and while I channeled mine into my parents’ dream for me, they lashed out. They knew where they were going when they got caught, there was no point in dragging me into this when all I did was make suggestions and point them in a particular direction.”

“Was Will angry at the world?”

“Furious,” Issac whispered. “He hurt so much from the things he went through and all he knew how to do was use his fists. I won’t lie to you, Felinus. In the three years, we shared a living space that rage had been aimed at me a handful of times.”

Felinus’s hands tightened on Issac’s hips and Issac cupped his face.

“It was never a beating,” he said, thumbs brushing under Felinus’s eyes. “Never more than a single hit or kick or one time a backpack being thrown at me. He was angry, Felinus. Everyone in his life turned against him and he had nothing to look forward to. He was hardly a threat to me. Usually after one of those explosions he’d make a point to apologize by giving me his desserts or get one of my favorite things at lunch so I could have it.”

“I really don’t like how many men you have in your past who you’ve forgiven for hurting you like that,” Felinus told him, unconvinced. “You are too forgiving, baby boy.”

A smile tugged at Issac’s lips. “Maybe,” he agreed. “But I could only hold so much hate myself and Finnegan and the Clovers took up all the available space. Besides, holding Will’s tantrums against him would have been counter productive. I needed the protection he offered. Even if he was still mad at me for whatever reason, he wouldn’t let anyone else touch me. He would say I was still his friend and no one touched his friends.”

“Just friends?” Felinus asked, feeling that viper of possessiveness start to rise.

“Will’s straight,” Issac said simply. “Some boys would experiment and make do with other boys regardless of their orientation because the girls were kept in another building but not Will. He didn’t even like seeing a guy changing but he’d stare at girls all day given half a chance.”

Felinus frowned at that. What he had seen was a man who was very comfortable with Issac, who had looked at Issac like he was something to be admired. Issac was something to be admired, something to be cherished.

“Felinus Drago,” Issac said slyly, running his fingers over his face, “were you jealous?”

“I don’t get jealous, baby boy,” he growled immediately.

“So trying to crush Will’s hand was just to test his strength for fun,” Issac teased, his lips just above Felinus’s.

A growl of frustration slipped out of his throat, leaning forward almost closing the gap. “You never told what Will did to go to juvie,” he whispered against Issac’s lips.

“He beat the shit out of a wannabe who claimed to know who I was,” Issac answered quietly. His arms wrapped slowly around Felinus’s neck, pressing closer to him. “He was a guy who was about to age out. I don’t know if he actually knew anything or not but something he said cracked through the wall I had put up. Will didn’t hear it but he saw my face. The bastard didn’t see it coming. It took four people to get Will off and restrained. The other guy was taken away in an ambulance. Will was taken away in the back of a police car. I never saw either of them ever again until Will approached me today.”

“He sounds like a good friend,” Felinus murmured, remembering how close he had been to breaking Dimitri that night outside of the library. If a frightened teenage Issac had been anything close to that, Felinus wasn’t sure he would have done anything different, particularly at seventeen.

“I blamed myself for so long after that day,” Issac breathed. “Will wasn’t a bad guy. He was probably always going to become made but he had a good heart under all that anger. I was so sure I had ruined his life. I had known about the scholarships and programs for getting people like us into college but I didn’t know about everything being sealed until a year later. I distanced myself from everyone. I still had boys that would keep others from fucking with me but I stopped trying to make connections with anyone. I focused only on my studies and ignored anyone trying to get close to me.”

“That explains your entire relationship with Dimitri,” Felinus scoffed softly. He frowned when Issac didn’t react and moved his hands to stroke his hair. “It wasn’t your fault, baby boy,” he said, fingers wrapping around the back of his neck and drawing him closer. “Will made his choice and clearly he’s not doing too bad for himself. The Russians handle a lot of businesses and pay far better than anywhere else in the city.”

“He mentioned he does welding now.”

“That pays extremely well,” Felinus told him, letting his lips brush against his. “You shouldn’t feel guilty about what happened, Issac. Did he say something about it?”

“Not about that day,” he said, his fingers finding Felinus’s hair. “He asked if I was the little mouse he’d heard rumors about.”

Felinus raised an eyebrow. “There are rumors now?”

“There have been rumors for a while, Felinus,” Issac scoffed. “From the moment you showed up at the university and told two girls you were looking for me. You are very hard to ignore for a man who makes rats disappear.”

He laughed softly at that, remembering that night all too vividly. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him he knew better than to listen to rumors,” he said, an edge to his voice

“But?”

“He said we both knew there’s something really twisted inside of me.”

Felinus caught Issac by his arm and the back of his neck when he tried to pull away, holding him tight. “He’s not wrong. You are a man who, in another life, would have put my reputation to shame. A man of contradictions in everything you do. You are fearless yet cautious. You are stubborn but reasonable. You are combative but compassionate. You can stare down a Capo without flinching but will bend to the will of his mother.” He kissed him gently, bringing Issac’s hand back to wrap around his neck and felt him lean into the contact. “You’re a complicated man, Issac Maus,” he said firmly. “It’s one of the many reasons why I love you. I wouldn’t have you any other way. Don’t ever doubt what an amazing, incredible man you are. I know there are still a lot of things that you have kept locked away, a lot of things you don’t know how to share. That’s okay. I’ll always be right here, ready to ask you dozens of questions until you can tell me what is on your mind.” He felt Issac’s hands return to his hair, the slow shuddering breath against his lips. “Don’t ever doubt yourself, baby boy, because I will never doubt you.”

Issac’s lips pressed into his, claiming Felinus’s mouth for his own. A soft moan escaped him as Felinus kissed him back. They battled with tongue and teeth, hands pulling the other closer. Only the need to breathe broke them apart. “Ich liebe dich, Amore,” he whispered, cupping Felinus’s face in his hands.

“Ti amo, Geliebter,” Felinus answered, smiling at the mix of their fathers’ languages on each of their tongue “Let’s go to bed.”

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