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One bullet.
And suddenly, one man slumped on the table with a bleeding hole in his head.
Leo.
He’s looking at me, but he can’t see me. He can’t see the splatter of blood on my face. His blood. I’ve killed countless men in my life but never has their blood burned. It feels like acid, but rather than burning through my skin, it’s eating its way into the core of my me, corroding some part of me I hadn’t known existed.
I’m on my feet and out the door in a flash as tires squeal and a black Beamer flies out of the bar’s parking lot.
I squint, catching what I can of the license plate, but there’s no need to wonder who’s responsible for the shot.
Romano came for blood. The man has guts, doing it right in my club while the man was sitting next to me.
But thank fucking Christ that he had.
Chapter Three
Nico
“I never saw it coming,” I admit, sitting back in my chair and staring pensively into the near-empty glass of whisky I’ve been nursing for the past half hour. Dante sits across me on the long conference table in the Vitelli library, his usually laughing eyes somber. He’s a near-replica of me, aside from his flinty gray eyes and long hair.
Our father sits opposite Dante, his fingers steepled over his abdomen and a deep furrow between his dark brows. At sixty, Vito Vitelli still has a full head of hair, though it’s heavily streaked with gray now. The lines on his forehead and around his eyes are more severely etched than usual. His eyes, though, are clear blue, like mine and they don’t miss much.
“It’s perhaps all for the best that things unfolded as they did,” my father continues. “I know the burden of a friend’s blood on one’s hands; it is not one borne lightly.”
No, it isn’t. But it’s one I would have carried. By right, it should have been mine to carry.
“It is what it is,” I say as I stand up. “It’s not a mistake I’ll allow to happen again.”
My father sighs, looks like he wants to say something but thinks better of it and just nods. These days, I literally have to drag things out of him.
I was shocked when he decided to retire three years ago, making me the Don at the age of thirty, but he had his reasons. While I hadn't expected to take over the empire so soon, I can’t say that having Vito Vitelli as my consigliere does not more than make up for it.
“I have some loose ends to tie up. I’ll be back in a few hours,” I say, downing my whisky and standing. I accept my father’s nod and ignore the glint of interest in Dante’s eyes. I turn and leave the room before he can offer to ‘drive me,’ in other words, tag along.
I usually don’t say no to those requests, afterall there aren’t many men alive who can do what Dante does with a car and a gun in tandem, but I’m not in the mood for company tonight.
Falzone, a giant of a man who has served my family for over three decades, is waiting for me at the front door with a legal-size envelope in his hand. His shoulders have begun to stoop with age, but even so, he’s still several inches taller than I am, at 6’4”.
“It’s all here, Signore,” he hands me the envelope, his fingers slightly gnarled with arthritis.
“Grazie,” I thank him, then leave without another word.
Outside, I drop the envelope on the passenger seat of my black Mercedes SUV and drive out through the Vitelli estate’s gates and across town to Maria’s motel, doing my damnedest not to think about Leo and his lifeless eyes that had stared up at me from the bar’s scratched wood table.
I park in front of the last motel door on the left and cross the cracked pavement to a weathered white door. I knock, using the signature rhythmic rap Leo and I have used right from childhood, knowing there’s no way that Maria wouldn’t recognize it.
Of course, Maria answers. She probably didn’t even stop to check the peephole. She’s barely five-foot-two, with brown hair and a roundish face, but when she smiles, it stretches from ear to ear and lights her up from the inside.
She isn’t smiling today. She looks up at me, and something in my eyes makes her whole countenance change. Her bottom lip quivers and her eyes fill with tears as her shoulders slump. She wraps her arms tight around her like she’s trying to hold herself together while her body starts to shake.
She knows.
And then she begins to cry. No, ‘cry’ isn’t the right word for it. She wails in great, gasping sobs that wrack her from head to toe as she stumbles further back into the room. I’ve never seen a human being crumple before, so thoroughly go to pieces right in front of me.
Four-year-old Victoria is asleep on the bed, but the moment Maria starts to wail, her eyes fly open. Her bottom lip quivers and her eyes fill with tears, and then the child, a near-replica of the mother, begins to wail too.
Fucking Christ.
