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“What are we doing?” I looked to Pete for the answer. “Leaving him here for Enzo to find him?”
Antonio coughed and then rolled onto his side.
“Fuck.” Marco shoved a hand through his dark, wavy hair and frowned. “He’s still alive.”
“Good thing we got enough H to kill a horse,” Pete said with a wicked grin.
What a sick fucker.
Pete shoved his hand into his pocket to retrieve a syringe. He handed it to me without any instructions. It was obvious he wanted me to finish the job. Gia would be sick to her stomach if she knew what I was about to do.
I dropped to the ground, balancing myself on the balls of my feet, and removed the cap from the syringe. My hand trembled from the needle clutched between my fingers almost pricking my skin with the toxins inside. Bile rose up from the back of my throat, suffocating me. I had only killed a few men, all of them deserving of the bullet I’d buried in their sku
lls. Torture was different. I was giving those men a chance to beg for mercy. Antonio wasn’t even awake enough to know he was about to die. Maybe it was for the best.
Enzo deserved a lot worse for going behind our backs to start a war against my family. He was one of my father’s oldest friends. But it didn’t make the situation any easier to swallow. Not every kill was the same, even though I tried to tell myself they were all faceless men who’d earned the punishment to match their crimes. I wasn’t the judge and jury. I didn’t make the decisions—Pete did. I was nothing more than this man’s executioner.
I hovered over Antonio’s limp body. Staring down at him, I wished his father had come to one of us before he went behind our backs to the boss in North Jersey.
“Just do it,” Pete growled, standing over me with his hands on his hips. “Stop acting like a pussy. This is business, Angelo, and Enzo fucked with our business. He would have killed himself with the drugs anyway. You’re only saving him the pain of having to man up and do it himself.”
I slipped the cap back onto the needle and stood up to face-off with my older brothers, holding out the heroin to Pete. “You do it then if it’s so easy for you.”
Pete had no feelings—just like my father. When it came to death, Pete never blinked or hesitated, completely desensitized to the sight of brain matter and blood. His hands were always steady and careful like a surgeon in the operating room. I wasn’t soft, not even close, but when it came to murdering people, it was my least favorite part of being a Morelli. Death was nothing more than a means to an end. And crime was part of the very fabric of our existence.
“What do you think Dad will say about his bitch-ass son when I tell him you couldn’t finish the job?” Pete pushed his dark wavy hair off his forehead and smirked.
I wanted to lay his ass out so bad. My father had groomed Pete to take over from him. It’d taken my father most of his life to place our family in this position of power. So, I had to separate my personal feelings from business and do what was necessary. I had to act like a Morelli.
Of all the things I’d done in my life, this was one of the hardest. Pressing the barrel of a gun to the back of a stranger’s head was not the same as sticking a needle in the arm of someone I’d once considered a friend.
Pete clenched his jaw in anger. “Do you need a reminder of how things work in this family?”
I shook my head. “Just give me a second, would ya?”
Marco cupped his hand on my shoulder, and I flinched from his touch. “Don’t think about it, bro. Just do it.”
“But,” I muttered, shaking my head.
“Right now,” Marco said. “He’s not the Antonio you know. His father is a fucking rat and a traitor. Remember that. Enzo would have put a bullet through your skull to get back at Pops and wouldn’t have thought about it for a second.”
He was right. I had to do this if I wanted to survive.
“Let’s go,” Pete growled in my ear, leaving the heat from his breath on my skin. “I don’t have all night to waste. Stick the fucking needle in his arm so I can go get my dick sucked.”
No compassion whatsoever.
Sex, murder, and drugs was my brother in a nutshell. If Antonio were anyone else, I wouldn’t have stopped to think about what I was doing. Like a machine, I would do it. But I had to act before my brothers reported back to my father I couldn’t finish the job.
I took the syringe from Pete’s open palm, sunk to the ground, and plunged the needle into Antonio’s arm. Pete handed me another needle, forcing me to empty the contents into Antonio’s lifeless body. He wanted to be sure Antonio wouldn’t survive the amount of heroin I’d shot into him.
It didn’t take long before Antonio’s body began to seize, and drool formed at the corner of his mouth.
Pete bent down to check his pulse and nodded. “Drive us to Scores,” he told Marco. “And make sure the girls are ready.”
Chapter Six
Angelo
