“Seems you don’t know us very well,” I chuckle, ramming two fingers in her ass. Her eyes shut tight. “We do not take kindly to those who try and harm the things we hold dear.”
“It was an initiation killing!”
“It that what you think? Are those the lies you were told? Did you even think to ask Sal? Or for that matter, your brother?”
“My brother had Lydia Kettles murdered in cold blood.”
“Because she sold Iris to Entropy!” I hiss, losing my shit. The facts may be accurate, but her loose lips are getting stitched. “And you sold us out because you cannot stand the fact that Dom and Sal will protect Iris over you.”
“I deserve better!”
“You deserve death. That is what you deserve. You did things to harm our agenda, and I’m adjusting your focus until all you see is red.” Falling against her bruised body, I snap my teeth on her ear and warn, “And the next time you betray my brothers…it won’t matter what Sal says…we’ll do this my way. And you’ll be keeping your shoes on, bitch—because this is personal.”
Find humor in everything.
74
Sunshine Storms
DOMINIC GENNARO
Laying a little track beforehand
is sometimes all you need.
“I want to thank you for meeting with me,” Marcello says in the empty, small Italian restaurant. “Your willingness to finalize our deal shows real promise, Dom. I’m sorry about the incident.”
Sipping my red wine, I scan over the aging Marcello Campanelli. “I just need to make sure we are on the same page before agreeing to release my business in Chicago to you.”
“I’m very clear,” Marcello assures, scanning over the joint. Both men brought members of their outfits to the meeting, closer to an international peacekeeping treaty being signed before all hell broke loose. “You take your three nephews—Enzo, Franco, and Silvano—and depart Chicago, we absorb the remaining Gennaro family business, and I promise never to come after The Unholy.”
“That is the agreement.”
Marcello strokes his chin. “Tell me something. Did Raniero turn down your request for funds or is he busted, too?”
Expecting the inquisition, I snicker, “Hardly. I’m busted because I cannot seem to stay married, but I realized Chicago isn’t worth the fight of becoming that indebted to anyone.”
“I heard the divorce with Ashley was brutal.”
“It was.”
“I’m sorry about your loss,” he says, lighting a cigarette. “Are you going south?”
“I’m going home to New Orleans where I belong,” I say, no longer caring if Campanelli knows of my location. “Where I probably should’ve been all along.”
“The Unholy is going after Cinco… Immortal… Lotus.”
I smirk.
Some things he doesn’t need to know.
“You are going into the belly of the beast, and I can’t say as though I envy you in the least. It’s tough enough here with the increasing Lotus tension and Immortal bubbling up on every corner.”
“I’ll see what I can do for you,” I offer, making good on my word to Sal. “We’ll take some of the pressure off.”
His beady eyes scan over me. “… And what of Cesario?”
“I wouldn’t trust that snake if you caught him, sliced his head off, and grilled it on a fire pit,” I casually remark, clasping my hands together. “He is as ruthless as they come.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Keep in mind the promise to not come after The Unholy. We wouldn't want a war in the famiglia.”
Truth be told, the Raniero’s and Gennaro’s had been quietly one-upping each other for years. It was only a matter of time before the dam of the Italian-American mafia burst. All out war would ensue, and I knew Campanelli would come after the Gennaros first. Better to surrender and allow his absorption of my past than to risk a war in the future that I cannot win.
Cesario Raniero will eat Campanelli alive.
“The only thing that will come from a battle between us is more bloodshed, and I think we’ve both suffered enough. But do not let Deacon Cruz ever step foot in this town, or I will do what should have been done many years ago.”
“Saint is more of a Southern gentleman.”
“Cruz is a dirty biker with a club building at a phenomenal rate. He and Iris Kettles are responsible for my daughter’s death.”
Not really.
His daughter, Krystal Campanelli, was a junkie. Deacon just provided the means; she pulled the trigger—or in her case, pushed the loaded syringe.
“He will not be a problem.”
“You’re not fooling me. I know Cruz and Raniero are in cahoots and one man’s army belongs to the other. All about sharing the lust in your neck of the woods.”
I’m marginally offended, but pay Marcello no mind. It won’t be long before he gives the business over to his sons—Delano and Raphael. They’re both in their young thirties, and he’s been priming them since birth. Their existence plays heavily into my leaving. I have no children old enough or brothers to fight the war and those I trust are in The Unholy. My nephews’ great interest and overexcitement to be “mobsters” has led to Enzo’s one-time, six-month incarceration and Franco and Silvano’s repeated dances with death.
With the full support of the family, we understand moving all three solidifies the closure of a legacy. Their father, Vito Benedetti married my sister, Edith. Edith’s twin and my other sister, Eleanor, married Gio Tollo. They have six children. All of them—my two sisters, their husbands Vito and Gio, and all nine children—have helped to try and resurrect our father’s disintegrating business. We cannot recover from the mistakes of Angelo Gennaro.
No one wants Chicago.
Not anymore than Boston wants Boston.
The hotbed of upstart gang activity lends to deeming the whole region out of control. The presence of Lotus and Immortal doesn’t help. If Campanelli wants to fight for his dying outfit, let him. He believes I have no money, but I have plenty of funding. No doubt Sal would have dropped a substantial loan in my lap if I asked, but I simply had zero desire to waste the cash or risk the lives.
For me, it isn’t a battle worthy of the continuous fight. My grandfather, Giuseppe Gennaro, built the outfit, and my father, Angelo Gennaro, expanded it into a thriving, profitable business until a few affiliations in his later years would prove irrecoverable. The time isn’t right for me to be making emotional decisions. My father would disown me for this, but he is long gone thanks to my girl, Iris Kettles.
Her loyalty to me is steadfast.
“I promise you,” I vow, polishing off my wine. “Raniero and Cruz will stay out of your way, if you do the same.”
“We need to discuss certain events which occurred eight years ago in New York.”
Rubbing the handle of the polished silver spoon between my thumb and forefinger, I gaze up, not wanting to be fucked with, but I know where this is going. With a low growl, I mutter, “Nick Veramonte.”
“He should never have been there.”
“I agree,” I state, maintaining my poker face. I know exactly who murdered Nick Veramonte and why. The same bitch who caused The Unholy most of their issues.
“I need to know who killed him, Dom.”
“Are we even now?”
“Why does it matter?” Marcello rhetorically asks. “We’ll never be even and you know that, but we both know Nick Veramonte didn’t die by a whore in a hotel room.”
Actually…he did.
I am well aware of the meeting he speaks of—the right-handers of Cristos, Raniero, and Gennaro—Jonathan Finkle, Vinny Veramonte, and Marcello set forth a united front against the growing threat of the bigger cartels like Lotus and Immortal.
For reasons no one understood, Vinny’s son, Nick Veramonte showed up and made a pass on Jaid. Sal had sent her in to watch over the meeting, but Nick’s presence was an unexpected glitch. He attacked her in the parking lot and Jonathan
Finkle rescued his boss’ daughter.
Amber Rosen didn’t take kindly to the assault because it disrespected someone Sal loved. Unbeknownst to any of The Unholy, Amber went to a hotel room and killed him without fully understanding the ramifications of her actions. She was no better than a high-priced call girl, but her moral compass spun wildly out of control.
Amber liked shooting random people—from Raniero’s right hand man’s son, Nick Veramonte, to Javier Diaz, who led Delerium MC. Her botched attempt on Virginia Archer, the biggest baby dealer in the South, put a target on our backs as real trouble. She may have been Sal’s mistress, but her agenda deteriorated our reputation.
While The Unholy were trying to elevate their standing as an up-and-coming establishment, Amber’s antics pushed us to a place of bandannas and turf wars. We weren’t four respected gentlemen trying to get our foot in the door of the international crime circuit but viewed as a fledgling street gang.
It was not our ideal.
Amber diluted The Unholy.
By the end of Sal’s stint in prison, none of the big boys would even meet with us. The problem with that was Sal needed Lotus and the respect of The Chairman if he was ever going to claim Iris.
Amber's eagerness to go rogue didn’t earn us the right to have The Suits’ attentions, and without them, we were essentially dead in the water. We needed the big deals with big shipments and big money in order to grow.
We quickly lost interest from Lotus, which took almost three years to earn back. We were nothing better than middlemen and street thugs to the ones on the top of the mountain.
And Amber’s hit of Javier Diaz put the proverbial nail in the coffin on any large-sized outfit wanting to deal with The Unholy. We kept two under the table deals which we exploited to our full ability when we could: Sal’s long-term relationship with Delarte Cristos and The Brethren ran by father and son, Zachariah (“The Preacher”) and Ezekiel Evans. But we also knew if Amber did one more thing wrong, we would be eliminated—game over.
By the end of summer 2015, The Unholy acknowledged we were at the end of our rope and we needed some serious damage control to counteract the actions of one renegade mistress. I played my final card—pictures of Amber taken with Sal’s newborn baby daughter, Raine—and ended her time in The Unholy. As I suspected he would, Sal immediately broke ties with Amber and we strategized a plan to rebuild our status.
Sal maintained his relationship with his father, Cesario Raniero, by continuing his work at Raniero Enterprises, and that provided some insight as to judging our future investments. He was playing the good son/bad son role with grand distinction.
On top of that, he managed to secure his greatest asset, Iris Kettles, at an undisclosed location, Luca Raniero’s vacation home in Guam. She was right under Cesario’s nose, but he never looked because Sal behaved.
Nico Cristos purchased Sibyl to provide for contracts for the exhausted or guilty. If nothing else, frustrated governments paid good money for our intel and infiltration and the criminal world used Sibyl as a protective measure. They were the cleaners and the condoms.
Deacon Cruz took his position in vigilantly maintaining Juliet and Sugargrove security. He took the job as Police Chief and ran the middle-of-nowhere town in Texas like the goddamned Vatican Sal believed it to be.
And in our final measure, I agreed to part ways with my familial outfit, selling it off in its entirety to Marcello Campanelli. It was a bold move and it wouldn’t be overlooked by the underworld, but it would show a willingness to move away from the sins of our fathers and was well worth the price of admission to the tables of Lotus and Immortal.
What kind of son abandons his throne?
This one.
After two failed attempts at holding onto a marriage for longer than a year, I conceded it was not in the cards. Marriage would’ve unlocked the remaining Gennaro family trust, and I desperately needed the money to continue running the Gennaro business as it was. I was going to go broke pouring my own money into a dying outfit, so I quit.
Jaid blew the first marriage up on Sal’s command and the second to Ashley Randall exploded at ten months in. I can’t say I didn’t deserve it, but the fall out of my actions didn’t just hit me—they reverberated through The Unholy, and for that, I feel incredibly guilty.
The plan of ditching the Gennaro business was always on the agenda, only now it came with a strong dose of penance. I was going south to assist Deacon in Reckless Rebellion expansion, implementing a strategy for The Unholy survival, and getting up from the personal losses to stand in the face of a growing adversity. I didn’t need to justify anything to my brothers but myself.
“It was a hit,” I confess to Marcello. “But we didn’t order it.”
“Someone had to order it,” he alleges, lighting his cigar. “And I want you to tell me who that person is.”
“No,” I admit the defeat of an operation out of control. “The killer acted alone.”
“And who was he?”
Stroking my chin, I correct, “She…”
Laying a little track beforehand is sometimes all you need.
75
Whiskey Map
MARCUS ABEL “MAP” PARKER
Keep the mind open to new possibilities.
The snow sprinkles over the steep slopes as I look out the window of the house high up in the mountains. I rub my hand over my weeks’ worth of facial growth as the tea kettle whistles, echoing. I bought the place recently as a vacation home and haven’t had the opportunity to furnish it.
I mosey to the kitchen and pour the hot water over the raspberry tea bags. I drop a couple sugar cubes in each, hoping she’ll at least take a sip. Carrying both cups to the master bedroom, I spot her in the sitting area wrapped in a blue plaid blanket. She’s gently rocking despite the IV tube in her arm.
When they brought her back to the States, I was there at the private airport in Houston. I have no idea how they managed to find her, only that she is here now, on my wooden floor in my seven thousand square foot mountain retreat, and quiet as a mouse.
Sal Raniero left the girl, four days ago. He cited a current shortage of people she trusted. I wasn’t sure if I fit the bill, but I offered to open my home for her recovery. She’d been abducted and presumably tortured for months. I figured they’d be sending some sort of professional to deal with her trauma, but no one came.
Let’s make one thing clear—I’m not a doctor or a nurse.
But I’m a hell of a caregiver.
“I brought you some tea.” She’s vacant, almost catatonic, as she stares out the window. Every so often she blinks. “You should drink.”
I cautiously approach her and set it on the table. Four days ago, she knocked the table over with a hiss reminiscent of a girl needing an exorcism. Three days ago, she flung the plate onto the floor at my feet. (Pasta landed on my grey sweatpants. It was not pretty.) Two days ago, she left all the food and liquid I brought alone. She doesn’t move from the spot—ever.
I sleep in the bed. I shower in the en suite bathroom. I eat my meals and watch television in here with her, hoping that she will need or want something—anything, really—from me.
She sits on the cold floor and rocks. I have no idea if she gets up to go to the bathroom at night or if she is soiling herself. She doesn’t smell, but then again, I cannot get too close without fear of staining another pair of pants.
“I’m going to make dinner,” I announce, acting like we’re having an adult conversation, but knowing I’m only talking to myself. I’ve come to a bizarre place of acceptance as I encourage, “Drink your tea.”
I quickly move to the door when I hear her whisper, “Can…”
“Yes?”
She scans down to her sock covered feet like I didn’t really say anything, and then she curiously—ever so slowly—glances up to me. Her face is badly bruised with a sutured laceration beneath her left eye. It’s swollen and I fear infection in her current state of filth. I have no idea how bad th
e rest of her looks. Sal mentioned putting ice on her eye if I could bridge the gap, but I have yet to do that…until now.
“Can I have a bath?” Her delicate, feminine voice hoarsely asks. I can only imagine how much she screamed. “Please.”
“Yes,” I eagerly reply, running to start the water in the tub. When I return, she is still sitting there. “Do you need some help up?”
She reluctantly nods as I cross the plush carpet to the wooden floor of the designated sitting area—her safe space. Her eyes widen with a panic. One whiff and I know, she’s soaked and I may have to replace the floor.
I don’t give a shit about the goddamned floor.
At Juliet, I saw her six months ago—happy and smiling—but I wasn’t ready to meet anyone. Not really. It was too soon. But I couldn’t get the girl with the beautiful grin out of my mind, so I harassed my best friend, Sal Raniero, until he gave up her name.
“Priscilla… Do you want me to help you up?” I gently inquire, crouching low to her level. I’m tall and the last thing she needs is to feel intimidated. “My name is Marcus.”
“Help me,” she whispers, hastily blinking up one time, as she removes the needle from her arm. “Just a hand. And I know who you are, Map. I was there when we busted your father seven years ago.”
I snarl at the memory but don’t flinch. I’m not filled with triggers from uncontrolled post traumas. I’m fucking whole and have fought every damn day to stay this way because there must be good things on the other side of bad. And the key—the only key—is remembering that. “You were the young agent in tactical gear.”
Catching my gaze, she says, “Yes, you looked at me.”
“Because I thought you were cute.”
“… Seven years ago?”
“Yeah,” I confess. “You were my fucking hero.”
She lifts her arms to me. “I’m sorry about what happened.”
Every Minute I Love You (a Tomb of Ashen Tears Book 3) Page 62