AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 38
Niccolo
6.5 Weeks Later • February 10th
“The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre of 1929 is the most infamous of all gangland slayings in the United States.” Muffled yells echo through the abandoned building as I pace from one end to the other. “Seven members of a Chicago gang were lined up in a garage and lit up with over 90 bullets from submachine guns, shotguns, and a revolver. The four men who did the job were dressed as police officers.”
When I got up this morning, I thought about asking Dante to get me a cop uniform for what was supposed to be tomorrow’s event. But Giovanni ruined our plans.
Instead, I had to settle for my wedding suit with a meticulously tied double Windsor knot, lapels, a neatly folded kerchief in my breast pocket, and a pair of expensive cufflinks passed down from my father. Just hours ago, I was wearing this while I pledged to love Christine for the rest of our lives. Now it’s covered in blood.
“People think Al Capone ordered the hit. Did you know that?” I turn sharply in my worn dress shoes. There are scuffs along thetoes from our fight in the parking lot. “I feel like that’s something you would know.”
In the center of the room, Giovanni sits tied to a metal chair. His suit from the wedding reception has been stripped and torn. The tie he was wearing now acts as a gag, muffling his arguments. Blood trickles from a cut above his brow. I had intended to bring him here unscathed, but unforeseen complications arose when we were kicked out of the reception.
“Speak up, Giovanni,” I shout at him, my voice echoing off the walls of the empty room. “I can’t hear you.”
Dante snickers in the corner. He leans up against a wall next to a strung-up Marco. With a pair of chains wrapped around his wrists, he remains helpless. Every time Marco displays a flicker of anxiety, Dante lands a measured blow to his gut, exacerbating his torment.
“It’s really disappointing that you aren’t more attuned to the history of this thing of ours. You,” I point at him with the metal baseball bat in my hands, “who have been a part of this longer than I have.”
Giovanni looks murderous. If he weren’t tied up, he’d have his hands around my throat. Unfortunately for him, Luciano got his cast off last week.
Luciano, the little brother of mine that Giovanni thought he’d teach a lesson by branding him with the Lucatello crest.
Luciano, the literal Boy Scout of the Terlizzi brothers with a badge in knot tying. Giovanni isn’t getting out of that chair until we say he can.
I cast a nod in Salvatore’s direction. “Remove the gag.”
Sal walks up to Giovanni and crouches down to be at his eye level. “If you bite me, I’ll knock your teeth out,” Salvatore warns, seizing the tie encased within Giovanni’s mouth and gradually extracting it.
To his credit, Giovanni doesn’t bite my brother. He waits until Salvatore drops the saliva-soaked tie into his lap before he spits on him.
My brother reaches up to wipe the glob of spit off his face, nonchalantly smearing it across Giovanni’s once pristine white shirt. “Animale del cazzo. Pagherai per quello che hai fatto.” You fucking animal. You will pay for what you’ve done.
“Go to hell,” Giovanni glares at Salvatore before turning his attention to me. “And fuck you, Terlizzi. When I get out of here?—”
“If,” I interject, my voice icy and devoid of mercy. “Ifyou get out of here. I haven’t decided if you should live or die just yet. So if I were you, I wouldn’t be making plans for breakfast with one of your underage mistresses.”
A vivid scarlet hue permeates Giovanni’s face, his anger morphing into a kaleidoscope of rage. Under his breath, in a barely audible whisper, he utters a string of death threats barely loud enough for me to hear.
“I thought long and hard about what to do with you. Marco is pretty innocent.” I toss the enforcer an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry you have to be here for this. I always liked you.”
Marco’s glare deepens, but he remains stoic, refusing to dignify me with a response.
“You, on the other hand,” I turn back to Giovanni, “you’ve always been a prick.”
Giovanni hasn’t flinched since we approached him at the reception. I have to give it to him: he isn’t a man who backs down from fear. If we were on the same side, I might actually admire him.
“I told my sister you were a lecher when she married you,” Giovanni spews, his voice oozing contempt. Despite the chill of the February air, sweat forms rivulets on his brow. He might face fear head-on, but he isn’t stupid—he’s still afraid.
“I told her if she ever caught you cheating, I’d cut off your balls. When she told me you wanted to become a professor, I thought about doing it anyway.”
I tap the baseball bat against my shoe, feeling rage well up inside of me like a hot spring. I force myself to do nothing, but every bone in my body is screaming at me to take the bat to his head.
“I knew the second you went off to college that you’d be fucking around on my sister with barely legal teenage girls. Color me shocked that the barely legal teenage girl you targeted was her own daughter.”
Sometimes I swear Dante knows me better than I know myself. Like now, for instance, as he steps toward me with a look on his face that stops me in my tracks. “Don’t kill him,” is all he quietly implores.
