by Sonya Jesus
Brutal & Raw
Beneventi Family, Book 1
Sonya Jesus
Copyright © 2018 by Sonya Jesus
All rights reserved.
Cover design © 2018 by Touch Creations
Editing: Dr. Plot Twist & Baren Acres Editing
Proofreaders: Dom’s Proofs & Dr. Book Nerd
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations for review.
The characters in this book are works of fictions. Any similarities to persons, alive or dead, are purely coincidental.
Contents
Prologue
1. Three twenty-seven
2. Given a Choice
3. Happy Birthday
4. False Angel
5. Yellow
6. Blood & Terror
7. Nurse My Hangover
8. Fired Up
9. Ontario
10. Heartbreak, Maybe
11. Gold Bullets
12. Boiled Eggs
13. Worse or Worst
14. Burning Water
15. Sigh of Sadness
16. The Surplus
17. Wash It Off
18. No More
19. Unspoken Story
20. Stone’s Two-Cents
21. My Monster
22. End Us
23. Go Away
24. Blood & Bone
25. Breaking Breaker
26. Blink
27. Escape
28. Beneventi Fortress
Also by Sonya Jesus
About the Author
Prologue
One Mississippi
327
I drop down to my knees and crawl toward the ditch next to the field of untamed red poppies. The small twigs and pieces of wood scrape against my bleeding knees, fragments of dried leaves sticking to the moist wounds. Small stones pierce into the exposed flesh, making the softer ground even more unbearable than the concrete of The Farm's barn.
I can't go back there, I silently proclaim and hasten my pace. Fear drowns out the pain long enough for me to reach a small entrance. Wedging my naked body between the walls of dirt, I manage to squeeze myself in a hole barely large enough for a child. My bent legs press against my bruised breasts, stretching whatever skin is left of my scraped knees. In this tiny space, there’s no easing the pain. Everything hurts. Unmalleable tree roots dig into my back, scrubbing my skin raw as I fail to become invisible.
There’s no use.
If I stay like this, he'll find me. The thought surfaces quickly, provoking my instincts. My bloody fingers scrape against the damp ground beneath my thighs, coating themselves with dirt. Damn it. It hasn't rained in weeks...or months. I can’t remember.
I scamper to gather debris from outside the ditch and hide the opening. The dangling threads of dying roots and cobwebs aren’t enough to hide my red hair. I would’ve had better luck hiding amidst the fucking poppies.
There’s nowhere else to hide though, and it’s only a matter of time before—
A loud noise erupts through the forest.
My heart stills.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three … Echo.
Shit! He’s close. I can't go back!
Panic erupts within me. Fighting through the agonizing sting of injured muscles to combat time amplifies the ingrained sound of the gunshot from moments ago, and the reflection of sound waves sync with the force of my heartbeat.
I focus on the rhythm as the blood surges through my veins. My heart pumps in increments of three, followed by a missed beat. One, two, three … One, two, three … Breaker.
He’s the missing beat.
Even cowering in a hole in a desolate forest, bleeding from more places than I can count, I still think of Breaker Beneventi.
He killed every hope I had left—murdered friends who now wait for me six feet underground—and then set his eyes on destroying me. Torture first, wicked and endless, until I begged for an end—an escape.
Mercy, or so I thought, until I realized human sentiments don’t exist in this place. Here, compassion from the soulless is simply another form of torture. He spared my life, only to slowly strip me of emotion and degrade what little of myself remained.
Which is not much.
Lyla, is just a word, a deadly keepsake of the girl who’s been reduced to a number. Three twenty-seven.
I gave Breaker Beneventi everything, my humanity included, and it’s all my fault… I chose the man who broke me.
I shut my eyes and wait… He can have my dignity too.
A warm stream of liquid dampens the ground and the soles of my feet. I dip my fingers into the urine-infused dirt and coat my hair with the cakey substance, blunting the brightness of its strands. The pungent smell of ammonia infiltrates my nostrils as I add a layer of stench and dirt to my skin. Bits of hair stick to my face and catch on the uplifted skin of my dry lips. My tongue darts out, moistening and easing the sting, but the taste of metal, piss, and desperation brings tears to my eyes.
Another loud sound whips through the wind.
My chest grips for air, but all I can think is…
One Mississippi.
The Butcher’s here.
1
Three twenty-seven
Breaker
Hours of footage with her and the other girls, and not a single clue on where she’d go. We’ve chased down every lead—every fucking lead—down to the doorman at her building. What money couldn’t buy, threats did. Bullets helped, or they supplied false leads… Who the fuck knows?
Months later, and I’m still looking over my shoulder, waiting for my one mistake to blow up in my face. I should’ve been smarter, more prepared, less impulsive, but I had no other choice. I gave her the easiest way out—death.
Maybe that’s where I went wrong. In this business, mercy is a liability and empathy the worst weakness. That’s why I brand the girls as soon as they get to The Farm. Numbering them and breaking them is part of the process—for them and their wranglers.
As much as I train my men, they aren’t like me. They grew up with the luxury of mistakes. For them, errors didn’t mean beatdowns and tears didn’t end in lectures. Not all of them are cut out to be farmers, only the worst of the worst can enter, and even then, they turn out to be weak.
The problem with our herd is they can be heard, and that makes them dangerous.
They cry and plead and wield emotions like weapons—shedding bullets with tears and daggers with tongues—sentencing farmers to their death or promoting them. Working at The Farm reveals who each of my men really are individually. It will either chip through the tough exterior and eat away at his insides until the guilt makes him weak, or it rots away the guilt with every scream, easing the weight of every strike until breaking the women gives him satisfaction.
Which one am I? I thought I knew, but it doesn’t matter.
I’m the Boss…and that’s the only classification with any weight around here.
Everyone in this town knows my life’s been the Mafia since the second I took my first breath. Instead of birthday cakes and birthday wishes, I counted my age by the steps I climbed and the people I killed along the way. It made me harder, from the inside out, but it also made me stronger.
Costa Beneventi taught me the four pillars of success before I shot his lying ass. Strategy, control, currency, loyalty—all tickets to success—but they mean nothing if I don
’t catch her.
The stupid bitch is a noose around my neck, choking me a little tighter with every day she goes unaccounted for. I don’t care if the Feds show up, they won’t find anything, but it’s not the law I answer to.
The Commission doesn’t take kindly to usurpers. A few lies and a few favors, and I got away with murdering Don Costa and taking control of the family. However, covering it up is complicated, especially when I don’t control the people who know the truth.
Like Lyla.
I pinch the bridge of my nose, trying to ease the pressure of the thought. Anger builds inside me as I glare at the fucker who should’ve killed her. He’s sitting on an office chair with his feet up on the edge of the couch, cradling a pen between his teeth and fast-forwarding to another section of the surveillance video.
“This is the last time it’s going to be watched,” I tell him as he presses play. This video is just of the footage behind the barn. Hours of nothing we fast-forwarded through, but I know why he wants it.
He slides the pen from his lips and jots something down in the notebook. “What do you want me to do with the tapes? There are over eighty of them.”
Seventy-five, actually, but I don’t tell him that. I glance at the open boxes on the leather couch. “Burn them.”
“All of them?”
In case he decides to count them, I cover my tracks. “Kelsie took some of the less incriminating ones, just make sure you burn all of those before someone gets ahold of them.”
“Sure thing. Can I keep this one?” he asks, as he watches himself cut through the woods and disappear into the forest behind The Farm.
“No,” I warn him. “You get to relive this shit in real life. No need to have it caught on camera.”
“So, we’re back in business?” He blows out a long breath and turns around to face me. “I’m really tired of being on my best behavior.”
Pff. “Psychos don’t have best behaviors.”
His lips curl into a devious smirk. “But they have periods of inactivity, and they’re getting…dull.”
“If you’re bored, why don’t you go to the bar the recruit got her from and ask to see the surveillance footage?”
“That’s been done. She was there alone.”
“Girls don’t go to bars alone, Franco.”
“327 did.”
“She must’ve been waiting for someone. Did you ask around?”
“Are we going through this again?” He pauses and drags his palms over his face. “No one remembers her.”
“I highly doubt that.” She was too hot to forget. “Who did she talk to?”
“I already told you she didn’t talk to anyone, except the recruiter.”
“Not even the bartender?”
“Well, she ordered a drink, but she didn’t drink it.”
“How long was she at the bar?”
“I didn’t count, but three or four minutes. Enough time for the guy to make a margarita…and before you ask again, no. No one talked to her.”
Why? “Was she always on surveillance?”
“No. The cameras were on a loop. She could be seen in three out of seven of them.”
“So you’re wrong. Someone might have talked to her.”
“In the three minutes it took for the footage to loop?” He thinks about his own question and answers it, “Might have, yes. She went to the bathroom.”
“What about her phone?”
“We searched through it. It was clean.”
“What was on there?”
“No messages and only a handful of numbers on her caller ID. Photos of random people, parks, and a few selfies from that night. No social media, but a bunch of e-books on her drive and some audible ones. She even had e-textbooks on there. Chemistry or science shit. Her bank app showed sixty-five dollars, and her most recent purchase was a trip here from California.”
Something doesn’t add up. “You don’t find that weird?” What girl only takes selfies from the night she’s out? And why doesn’t she have social media?
“I found that profitable.”
“Profitable? I know numbers aren’t your thing, but how many did we take out to clean up this mess?”
“I don’t know. Forty crops. Eighty heifers. Give or take.”
It had taken years to gather those numbers, and it got progressively harder to find girls with low digital imprints and loners over the years. We had to branch out over state lines to get the numbers we needed to stay in business. The losses are engraved in my mind—one harvest brings in 750k, a heifer two million—but the money isn’t the worst thing, it’s the payoffs. Rich people don’t like to wait, and some of them don’t have the luxury of waiting, so I had to reach out to the extended family. Another mistake. “Just on the herd, we lost one hundred and sixty million dollars, Franco.”
He doesn’t know, but I need that money to keep our accounting legit. If I start dipping into bank accounts to pay my men, it will arouse suspicion, and I don’t fucking know—One problem at a time, Breaker. If I started listing the problems of my new rule, I’d work myself into a fury.
“You say that like it puts a dent in your pocket.”
“I don’t fuck around with money, Franco.”
His humoristic tone changes when he realizes I’m not messing around. “We can expand and hit up fertility clinics in other areas. If the pay is right, they’ll be happy to refer our services.”
“Your mistake has cost the family billions of dollars, and that number is going to keep growing unless we find her.”
He gets up and walks over to my desk, standing in front of me and blocking my view from the TV. “It will be found—”
“Good,” I cut him off. He’s talked too much already. I point toward the bar shelf and lift two fingers in the air, testing him. “Did you get access to CCTV?”
He obeys and ambles over to grab us two glasses and a bottle of whiskey. “We’re going through the footage now.” He sets them down on the desk. “Rocks?”
I don’t answer. Only my father took his whiskey on the rocks. He pours two fingers’ worth in each glass, serving me first, before himself. “I took the men off watching the house on Jackson…”
“Did you now?” I ask. In Costa’s absence, Franco’s gotten bolder—a little too bold for my taste. “Why would you do that?”
“It’s a dead lead…and you need the men back at The Farm.”
He’s right. I don’t want anyone who doesn’t already know to be involved. “Fine, but if she comes back, and we miss her because of your incompetence, this will be on you.”
“I don’t like to be threatened.”
The fingers of my left hand curl around the armrest, squeezing it tight, before I stand and confront him. It’s time we put his defiance in check. I open my drawer and pull out my gun, placing it within reach. “Anything else you got on your mind?”
“Yeah,” he proclaims boldly, not even glancing down at the Glock. “Your obsession with finding it is interfering with business. You haven’t been by the new place, you haven’t checked what the recruits brought in, or sorted them between herd and crop, and—”
“Franco, what the fuck do I have you for? If your job isn’t to run The Farm in my absence, then what is it you do?”
“Apparently, I clean up your messes.”
We both glance at the gun.
“I really think you need to reconsider your tone.” I reach for the firearm, and swerve to the side, aiming for the glass of whiskey in his hand. When Costa was sick and my underboss role changed, I didn’t often shoot, but the dead are witnesses to the times I’ve missed. “Let’s try again?”
He tips his head quickly, submitting, and lowers his glass. That’s where he failed my test. He welcomed himself to my booze without my permission. Control, the third pillar, always requires submission and recognition of power, something Franco needs to get through his thick head.
“Sorry.”
A curt nod and the disappearance of the gun relieves the
tension in the air. “Don’t waste it.” I refer to the amber liquid in his glass. “Give me an update.”
He hesitantly takes it and says, “327 rented by the month, with no lease. When it didn’t come back—”
“Stop saying it. Heifers don’t go into hiding.”
His lip curls at the thought, but he swallows his retort and continues, “The old lady put the stuff in storage and rented the place out to someone else. If she made it, she’s long gone by now.”
“What do you mean ‘if she made it’?” My question, though I attempted to reduce the emotion, sparks his interest.
A stupid smirk plays across his lips before he arches his brows and shrugs. “She was naked, in the middle of the winter, in the woods. Half-starved and dehydrated. She’s either lying low…or decomposing in a hole somewhere.”
I shake my head, not just because I don’t believe she’s dead, but because I have no idea why the hell I gave her a ten-minute head start. I underestimated her or overestimated Franco. Every time I released one into the wild, he hunted it down and brought it back for the kill. He pretends not to like the game, but the sick fuck enjoys the sound of breaking bones and the metallic pungent smell of blood. He lives for the chase, for the power it gives him, so… “How did you let her get away?”
He clenches his teeth together and takes a sip of the whiskey. “Well, technically, you let her get away.”
“Are you trying to piss me off?” He’s been pissing me off for a while now, but ‘control’ also means controlling my emotions. The fact he’s still alive is a testament to my self-control.