Michel Marcello liked pressure. He worked best when someone was right over his shoulder, reminding him that time was ticking down. His greatest educational achievements came from times when his life was thick with tension, and he could lose himself in textbooks. His highest test scores came from moments when the pressure was so high that anyone else might have cracked under it.

Not him, though.

He just worked better.

Books weren’t a problem for him—from the time he was young, he found learning was the easiest obstacle he had to face in his twenty years. It helped that he loved to learn, and took joy from understanding something that before, had been entirely foreign to him. It was like a new challenge. Something else for him to master.

But exams?

Fuck.

He found exams boring as hell.

Maybe it was because he’d spent the entire first year of pre-med learning everything in front of him, and he hadn’t struggled with any degree of difficulty to write his final exam on biochemistry. Hell, that had been his favorite subject for the past year.

Around the halfway mark of the final exam, he was already sighing. And fighting a migraine from wishing he could read faster. It wasn’t that he didn’t know the answers—he knew them too well. It felt like he was just going through the motions, and the exam was never going to be done. His laziness was where he made mistakes despite being as book smart as he was lucky to be.

Except this was what he wanted.

More than anything.

To be a doctor had been Michel’s dream from the time he was eleven. He’d been out with Dante, his father, when a new recruit for a gang from the inner city thought to earn his way in by attacking the infamous Marcello mob boss. Michel’s dad, that was.

It was the first time that Michel truly understood what it meant to be a Cosa Nostra family, and the dangers that came along with it. Before that day, the mafia had never touched Michel in a real way. He heard the whispers in his family about what his uncles and father did, and he thought he knew what it meant.

He didn’t know anything at all.

The stray bullets missed Dante.

They hit the enforcer protecting Michel.

Pandemonium followed utter chaos after the attack. He remembered his father shouting no cops, no cops as the bleeding enforcer was dragged into an alleyway. A car quickly pulled up less than a minute later, and they all piled into the back. It was in the backroom of a Brooklyn medical clinic that he watched a trauma surgeon hired by his father, to stay on call just in case, save the life of that enforcer.

And there Michel was—all of eleven, but almost twelve, tucked away in the corner of the room because his father was busy focusing his energy on making sure his man was saved. He watched the whole thing. The blood … the man on the table, awake without anesthesia, and the doctor, who even terrified, did his job.

He did it with steady hands.

Michel aspired to be that man. He was sure some people assumed, in one way or another, he would take after his mafia Don father and join the family—impossible with his bloodline and history, although the Marcellos would have made room if he truly wanted to become a made man. Or even, maybe he would take after his mother; a Queen Pin who ran the majority of her drug dealing business out of California.

Both things fascinated him. He respected his parents, their lives, and the choices they made. He grew up in the illegal, underground world of the mafia, and surrounded by criminals. That was all he knew. Even his best friends—his cousins, John and Andino—chose to go into the family business as soon as they were old enough to join.

Him, though?

He was going to be a doctor. Specifically, a trauma surgeon if all went well. And it would go well because he would make sure of it. Nothing was going to ruin this for him, not even himself. He wouldn’t let his boredom get to him, not now.

Michel stared down at the exam in front of him, and blinked at the next question. Like the others, he knew the answer, and quickly circled the appropriate dot on the answer card. The promise of a migraine was still fighting its way through the front of his skull behind his eyes even as he worked his way through the next two pages of the exam.

He glanced up, and checked the time on the clock at the front of the room. It rested just above the large white board that the professor liked to use to doodle on as he gave nonsensical lectures—yet another thing that gave Michel the fastest migraines of his fucking life. He was going to be glad to get this first year of pre-med over with, and move on to something a little more challenging.

According to that clock, though, he had another two hours of this. Two goddamn hours, and he was already a quarter of the way through this exam. The only good thing he could see about this situation was the fact he was soon going to be getting to the written portion of this exam, and his brain would have to work a little harder.

He just needed to get to that point.

Slipping his hand into his pocket, he pulled out a bottle of over the counter pain meds, and popped off the cap. He shook the bottle, and two pills fell into his palm. Next to him, the guy raised a brow at him as Michel tossed the pills into his mouth before grabbing the water on his desk to help swallow them back.

The student at the desk next to his shared a look with him that said, I get you, man. The guy looked like he was about to drown, and he could already see his failing grade staring back at him. Hell, maybe he could.

Honestly, all Michel needed to do was take a look around this classroom, and he could easily pick out probably at least twenty percent of the students that wouldn’t make it to their second year. No one truly understood the hell of pre-med until they were in the thick of it, and there was no getting out.

They went in thinking one thing …

And changed their direction after year-one thinking another.

Not Michel, though.

He knew what he wanted.

This.