Brutal & Raw: Mafia Romance & Psychological Thriller (Beneventi Family Book 1)

by Sonya Jesus

  His eyes move to the left of the picture, to his wife.

  “She’s pretty,” I comment callously. “She’s younger than you, right?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Well, she must be.” I flip the picture around to look at the woman with hazel eyes and delicate golden skin. “We could use a heifer like her, Rom.”

  The man’s eyes blink rapidly as I pass the picture to Rom, who takes a quick glance and answers, “Looks like she’s got a few breeding years still left in her.”

  “Yeah, Scar would like her. He likes exotic types.”

  Rom holds up the picture to the man’s face and threatens. “We can make this include her if you keep complicating things, Mr. Pimento.”

  “Would you like to burn together?” I ask carelessly. “We can use her as crop and then burn the chopped-up pieces in your oven. The Butcher wouldn’t mind, he’s getting restless and—”

  “We’re divorced,” the man forces out. “She divorced me two years ago and took my little girl.” The slight dip toward the end of his sentence told me his weakness. “My ex is a bitch, so do what you want.”

  Romolo shakes his head slightly. He isn’t sacrificing his ex, he’s devaluing her, so we don’t go after her. It would be admirable, if it weren’t pathetic.

  I point to the little girl with pigtails holding a fluffy white dog. “Memorize your daughter’s face, so when I stuff you into that oven, you can have something to think about.”

  “D-d-don’t…hurt her,” he punches out between labored breaths.

  I sell babies, but I don’t hurt children. They are innocent in all of this and don’t deserve to pay for their parents’ mistakes. Just like I didn’t.

  These last few days I’ve been thinking about the stuff Costa did to me, and I wondered how long he knew I wasn’t his. Maybe his ‘lessons’ were not only for me, but also for Fabrizio, trying to get him to intervene or fess up.

  No. I shake the thoughts from my head and go back to threatening. “I can make a call. I happen to know a few people in my world who don’t discriminate by age.” Magdalena was one of them. Everything and everyone outside her protected circle could be classified into one of two things: a means to power or currency. “Product is product. Some men have a thing for—”

  “Filho da puta. Cobarde!”

  Romolo tilts his head in my direction. “He’s calling you a coward, Boss.”

  My eyes widen. Did he speak Portuguese?

  “Vou te matar, cabrão.”

  “Are you threatening me?” I snort and smile at the comment. “If you get to know the deranged people who work for Cabralis, you’d call me a saint.” We sold babies and provided false adoption papers. The calves were always taken care of…the Cabralis did shit not even the Commission knew about.

  “Want me to call Mag—”

  “It was my wife!” he shouts between sobs.

  Romolo gazes up at me. “I thought you were divorced, and she was whoring herself out in the Upper East Side.”

  “We were talking about selling the house and my daughter’s dog ran away. She wouldn’t stop crying, so my wife went out looking for it while I stayed with my daughter.”

  “She found my heifer,” I expel through gritted teeth. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t even know there was a woman in the car.”

  Romolo points his knife at the corner of the man’s eye socket. “I suggest you tell my very angry boss something.”

  “Like what? I know nothing.”

  “Where is your wife?”

  The man goes silent, and I aim my kick a little higher this time. “One of the things I absolutely hate, Mr. Pimento, is repeating myself. Men with my caliber don’t often find themselves in that predicament, so you…” I bury my foot in his already broken ribs, enjoying the agonizing screams coming from his mouth. “… are really testing my patience.”

  “What are you going to do to my wife?” he spits out.

  “Depends on the information I carve out of you.” That’s three times. I give Romolo the nod to embed his knife in the soft tissue of the man’s right eye.

  “WAIT!!!” he grumbles. “I’ll tell you everything about her, just promise me you won’t hurt my daughter. Please. I know you’re going to kill me, that these are the last moments of my life, but… faz o que quiseres comigo, mas não a Leninha. Ela é inocente. Não temos familia aqui.”

  I glance at Rom for translation. “Is Leninha your daughter’s name, Mr. Pimento?”

  “Yes, Leonor Pimento. She’s only ten, and she still hates sleeping in the dark. That’s why we got her the dog.”

  “Did you ever find it?” Romolo asks for some reason.

  “No.”

  The rage dulls, and I soften my tone. I’m about to make an orphan. “I don’t hurt children, Mr. Pimento. You have my word that neither I, nor any of my men, will touch your daughter. I just want to find what belongs to me.”

  The man shakes his head, tears streaming down his face as Romolo helps him sit up against the wall. He latches onto Romolo’s arms, gripping on and holding him in place. “Will you keep her from that woman and her me… those people… please?”

  I’m not sure if he was talking to me or Rom, but a lot of people have heard about the Cabrali Bitch. She’s been causing havoc since she’s gotten here.

  I nod, which is enough for the man, and he spurts out the address. I could‘ve gotten it without his help. Maybe I am going soft.

  I take the paper with the address from Rom and the picture and turn to leave.

  “Boss?” Rom calls out, and I stop halfway.

  I don’t look back, I just give the order, “Quickly.”

  I’m standing outside his wife’s apartment, waiting for her to get home. Stone’s sitting beside me, drinking coffee and fiddling with the damn radio.

  “Would you turn that off?” I rub the migraine forming behind my eyes. Putting pressure right above my eyebrows helps the vein stop throbbing. His insistence on me being levelheaded for this and ending my binge drinking stint was clearly a bad decision. Keeping just the right amount of alcohol in my system not only dulled the emotional pain, but it staved off the intolerable pain of a hangover. Sobering up while awake might be worse.

  “We’ve been sitting here for six hours. Would you rather keep me entertained by chatting about life and Mag…da…”

  I roll my head toward him without lifting my head from the headrest, causing him to trail off. “My job isn’t to entertain you, but you can shut up now or go down the street and buy some booze.”

  “And leave you alone to kill some woman and her kid? No!”

  “I wouldn’t kill a child,” I grumble out while staring at the roof of my car. I gave my word not to hurt her, and I won’t. Sleep weighs down my eyelids, and I’m just about to shut them for a blissful second when Stone interrupts.

  “Says the guy who sells them for cash.”

  “I’m not a degenerate. Those families are vetted, and they are inseminated with a mix of their own genetic code. I don’t have The Farm workers pumping them up with their own baby juice. I’m also not an idiot.”

  “Right, I forgot, you don’t sell the kids, you sell the incubators.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, eliminating the Cabralis’ fertility centers would be a lot easier, and I would do it in a heartbeat, but it’s too much of a liability. You piss one person off and the tables can be turned. Tracing DNA back to our guys means all hell breaks loose. Plus, we make sure the couples we work with have certain criteria before accepting.”

  “Lowlifes. Scum. And people like you.”

  “People like us, Brother, except ready for a family.”

  Stone rubs at the back of his neck with his free hand. He hates being reminded that he’s a Beneventi, just like me. Or worse, he carries the Beneventi bloodline; I was just trained by one.

  “Don’t look so disappointed. The Beneventis have always been business people, and now we make families. That should b
e a positive for you.”

  The Beneventi line descends from Italian farmers who moved here in the early 1900s and bought a farm home in Jersey. My great-grandfather worked hard and supplied the town with good crops for cheap prices. He was undervalued and underappreciated, so when he died twenty years later, his son, Costa’s father, branched out and got involved with the budding criminal families of New York.

  Soon my great-grandfather’s little farm turned into Good Winds Farming, the GWF for short, and they bought all the adjacent farms, putting small farmers out of business. They supplied most of the Tri-state area with crops and cattle, and eventually, with the help of the Commission, Costa franchised the business and set up different markets on the West and East Coasts. Venturing into feed, grain mills, and organic products. Then he sold the whole corporation for 250 billion dollars, made plenty of family members even richer, and retired at the age of thirty-five to devote his life to crime.

  “Yeah, I’m sure this is exactly what our great-grandfather dreamed of for his legacy.” His voice elevates at the end, suggesting he was about to go off on one of his tangents.

  These are usually amusing. Feeling a bit less irritable, I give him my full attention because I know where this is going.

  “Gee, I really hope my great-grandchildren slaughter women like cows and grind their carcasses up to can into gourmet dog food.” His hands flail around, and he spills some of the coffee on his jeans. “Fuck,” he mumbles.

  Fighting the urge to grin from ear to ear at his ridiculous old man accent, I manage to say, “Waste not, want not.”

  The Beneventis are still infiltrated in the separate division of GWF and the mill is one that we use often. Chunks are sent over to the mill, where they get turned into feed and listed as animal by-product in expensive gourmet pet food. Costa was an evil son of a bitch, but he was fucking brilliant. Though, technically the feed and The Butcher were my idea. The important thing is evidence is destroyed in the grating process and it disappears in animal stomachs, and since we are now using a GW slaughterhouse for The Farm, they will always find blood.

  He scowls at me while using some paper towels to dab at his crotch. Before returning to his sarcastic spiel about history and disappointment, he places the paper cup in the holder between us. “I escaped poverty in my country and survived the arduous journey to Ellis Island to become part of the New World and make a new name for myself and my family, for you fuckers to run it through the mud! And because lights, technology, and the Internet aren’t enough, you have to set women free for fun and hunt them down. In my day, that was called impotence.”

  And that’s where he crosses the point to insubordination.

  “Technically, we no longer own the GWF,” I state in a monotonous voice. Not mimicking his zeal for the subject gets on his nerves like nothing else, and well, I’m sober and bored.

  Stone, Kelsie, and I hold stock in every aspect of the business and still get money from them, and are the beneficiaries to the account, but no one needs to know that just yet. Costa was very careful with his money, and he made it so his men were paid with the money from the illegal market, anything else was stored in cash in one of his safes, which I still have to find.

  “Costa invested in a different market—one that’s much easier to adapt to and doesn’t require so much legal intervention,” I point out.

  As expected, the slight dip in the word ‘legal’ flares Stone’s nostrils. “This is a legal nightmare.”

  “Oh, come on, Stone,” I bait him. “Getting our buyers to go through a surrogacy program, with some intervention on our part, is mafia evolution.”

  “Mafia evolution?” he says between gritted teeth, and then drags his palm over his face, wiping his frustration from it before propping his back against the window and glaring at me.

  “Some people actually prefer it our way, you know?”

  “You mean the wrong way?”

  “I prefer the less traditional way.” I battle this out because there’s nothing better to do on a stakeout than talk or sleep. Obviously, sleeping is out of the question, so I might as well entertain myself with annoying my baby brother. “There are no legal problems, and we don’t tell. There are doctors on call who make sure the baby is healthy, and when the bun is in, no one touches them. Like I said, we’ve evolved. No need to get rid of bodies at the Jersey docks like Costa’s earlier years.”

  “Remember when you showed up on campus asking me to come back?” He takes a drink and passes me the coffee.

  What is he getting at? My stomach can’t handle anything except liquor, so I shove it away. “Regret seems to be this year’s theme. It started off so well and then—”

  “Then you let some chick go and here we are, STILL looking for her.”

  “You’re kind of fucking annoying.”

  “Yeah, that’s what happens when you have an antisocial sociopath for a brother.” He gently swings his head back and forth as if his thoughts were metal pinballs and he was trying to rack a followup with more points.

  “I’m social,” I counter, making the pinball disappear. “You’re sitting in my car, aren’t you?”

  “I’m your brother, you have to deal with me. It doesn’t count.”

  “No, I choose to deal with you. I could just kill you.”

  He juts his chin in my direction and glares at me with wide eyes, expecting some sort of clarification.

  He gets none. It’s the truth. Determined to piss him off, I mimic his actions. I do it better, though, and because intimidation is a natural consequence of my position, he lowers his gaze and aims his eyes out the window. “There she is.”

  It takes me a moment to connect the two, but a quick glance out the window shows why Stone’s slinking downward and leaning his seat back.

  Never mind it’s pitch-dark and my car has tinted windows. He’s nowhere near ready for this life. “I’m going to go get the information.”

  “This is the Upper East Side and her daughter is probably in there. And didn’t you say something about another man?”

  My eyes roll back in my head, and for his peace of mind, I force out, “I’ll be quiet.”

  “No!” He sits up, no longer worried about getting spotted in the vacant street. While he goes on about how wrong killing someone is and how Franco isn’t here to clean up my mess, I pay attention to the amount of lights turning on. The first light on the bottom illuminates a living room through the curtain-free window. People should really use curtains.

  A few minutes later, the light turns off and another one on the second floor comes on. From this angle, I can’t see what it is, but the window is large enough to be a bedroom. Perhaps even a master bedroom. It turns off and no other light turns on in the house. “No kid in the house.”

  “What?” Stone looks out the window. “How do you know that?”

  “Most normal mothers check on their kids before going to sleep, and the father said the kid was afraid of the dark. Do you see the glare of a night light on a window, or did the mother check to see if they turned on the light?”

  “So what?”

  “The house is dark.” I point toward another brownstone on the opposite side; a soft, bluish light glows from one of the rooms. “It’s not a TV. There’s no static from images and scene switches. It’s probably a night-light. Do you see any in that house?”

  Stone seems a bit more convinced, but I grab my gun and give it to him. Time to teach him a lesson and prep him for the future. “No.” He shakes the head in case I don’t understand the two-letter word.

  “You’re going to have to learn that saying ‘no’ to me isn’t an option. If I go in there, and there’s one person, or a whole family, you know I’m going to kill them if they see me kill her.”

  “Kill her? Can’t we just bribe her?”

  At least it wasn’t a no.

  “You think she’s not going to the police after? You can’t just bribe someone and expect them to keep quiet. Either they talk to the police, or they tal
k to you asking for more money.”

  “That’s because you don’t know how to negotiate.”

  “Let me do it? In the morning?”

  “You’re just going to knock on the door and ask her for information?”

  “Yes.”

  Clearly, I had asked for the wrong person to come with me. Romolo and Franco should be done with Porky soon, so I look forward, turn the car on, and head for the mansion. “You have until eleven for an answer. I want to know exactly where she is.”

  8

  Fired Up

  Breaker

  I press play and watch the screen.

  The first few minutes is just the camera pointing to the shower of the office bathroom at the old farm location. It’s not luxurious, just decent and practical. Costa had it put in for me when I was spending time there years ago, and I still hate the black-and-white-checkered tile, but it doesn’t matter anymore. Ever since I let 327 go and ordered the cleanup, The Farm’s first location has been empty. I’ve barely stepped foot in the new place, but with Franco in charge of it, washing the shit off my skin will be a necessity.

  327’s escape has made me see things a little differently. It makes me wonder about different routes—something just as lucrative but with willing women and a lot less work. Money can buy anything, and surrogacy can still be done illegally, with less mess and less risk. I’m not squeamish with blood, and forcing women to fuck me isn’t my style. I’m smart enough to treat my toys with a certain kind of respect until I’m done playing with them. Then I don’t really care what happens.

  Or I shouldn’t care.

  Maybe that’s why 327 is driving me nuts. I wasn’t done playing.

  A noise on the TV summons me back to my movie night, and I sink into the comfortable leather couch—the one I’ve sat on many times before. I need to replace it, I think to myself before tuning in to the television.

  “Get in there!” Scar shoves her into the bathroom, and her bare feet stumble over the tile. There’s a blindfold over her eyes, her hair is up in a messy bun, and she’s wearing a long T-shirt, stained at the hem, and a pair of panties. Her hands are tied in front of her.