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

by Sonya Jesus

  “No! I’m going to meet you, so I can tell you this in person.”

  “Fine. I’m going to stop by the old farm and grab the rest of the money from the safes.”

  “Romolo is meeting you there?”

  “I texted him.”

  “I’ll meet you in your old office.”

  “You going to try to kill me before he gets there?” I joke, but my levelheaded brother would probably pull a gun out for this.

  “I haven’t decided, but you’re coming with me to get Kelsie.”

  I don’t get a chance to reply. It’s not like Stone to not want to talk through his feelings or whatever shit they taught him at his fancy university.

  For once, I wish I could talk about them—to tell Stone how he was right. Letting her go was the hardest thing, almost as hard as trusting Hayden with her life.

  I stop at the electrical switchboard to turn the power on, only to realize the light is already on. Romolo must already be here.

  I get back in the car and head toward the abandoned place, using the headlights to search for the two guards usually positioned on the premises. I don’t see them, or cars, or anything, which doesn’t surprise me. Now that they’ve been paid, some of them defected and abandoned ship when I couldn’t provide them with a paycheck. Maybe I should hunt them down and show them what loyalty means. A little blood always clears the mind.

  I grab my phone and send a text off to Hayden. I avoid the snappy comments that come to mind and ask nicely. Did you find her and drop her off?

  Almost immediately, I get a reply. Found her. With her now.

  I breathe easy as I flip on the overhead lights. They flicker as they normally do while the bulbs heat up. I head to the office, using the flashlight from my phone in the darker parts where some of the lights have burnt out. The place creaks everywhere, like the ghost of Costa Beneventi still wanders the halls, tormenting the girls who died here.

  327 was almost one of them because of me.

  For a split second, I wonder about how things could be different. Maybe eliminating the middlemen would work better, but there was also less control. The idea doesn’t sit well with me.

  Are you at the mansion? Another text comes in from Hayden.

  “For fuck’s sake!” I growl out just outside my door. Do not take her back there. No matter what she says. She needs to be as far away from this as possible.

  I tuck the phone in my back pocket and walk into my old office to find the safes completely empty.

  “It’s about time you showed up!”

  I flip around to find Franco in the doorway leading to the bathroom. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I needed somewhere private to be with Kelsie.”

  “She’s here?”

  “Yes,” he answers as he steps toward me. “Well, not technically up here.” He points to the safes. “What are you looking for?”

  “Candy,” I grumble sarcastically. “I’m looking for the money.”

  “Magdalena took it. She was here a little while ago.”

  “She what?” I get up to find Franco staring over my shoulder. Expecting Magdalena to be behind me, I turn around.

  Wood cracks against the back of my skull, followed by a needle prick on my bicep. My knees nearly give out from the pain, but I roar to life, fighting through the instant daze of whatever Franco injected me with. Scar’s blurred face comes clearly into view, the sound of heels softly clicking against the cement ground pounds against my eardrums, and I blink rapidly, resisting the urge to lower my eyelids when red filters through my sight.

  But it is no use.

  25

  Breaking Breaker

  Breaker

  True temper, hidden between layers of control—layers I’ve picked off like a scab on a wound—have shed and left an unhinged predator, wildly thrashing in the confines of the dark cement room. My wrists are tied above my head and secured by tight suspension, while the soles of my feet are flat against the ground, constrained in leather and chains. The smell of blood and industrial-grade bleach fill the air, and given my last destination, I know exactly where I am.

  The viewing room of The Farm. The one where Franco forced the girls to watch him butcher the women on the cold metal slab. I know he’s listening and watching this, so I open and close my hands, feeling the contractions in my forearm and increasing the force as I yank my legs up. “Fucking pussy!” I shout to lure him out. “Can’t beat me face-to-face, so you tie me up like some girl you take to bed?”

  Lights flood the room in front of me. Franco stands in the middle, hunched over and holding his hands behind his back. His dark eyes are on me, attempting to intimidate me as he takes long strides closer, stopping in front of the glass and tilting his head like a possessed psychopath.

  I smirk back, regaining some sense of composure, and use the opportunity to flex and try to expand the bands around my wrists while I distract him. “Afraid of being in the same room with me?” I wiggle my hands around, attempting to add flexibility to the restraints, but they don’t budge. “Need a glass partition between us?”

  The angle of his head straightens slightly.

  More. Knock him off his axis. Franco’s sort of impotence has always been a sore spot for him, so wielding it against him and learning from his reaction will help. “If you wanted a date so badly, you should have asked.”

  No response.

  “Good thing I’m dressed, or I’d think this was some sick fetish of yours. Have you been crushing on me since we first met, or do you have a thing for the Boss?”

  Nothing.

  My inner instincts rush over me, stringing together a plan. One which quickly dissolves into the air. I gave him the order not to kill her, but I think it’s safe to say he no longer follows my orders. He’s not responding to anything, and my gut is telling me one thing—he killed my sister.

  My chest spasms, and my heart jerks convulsively, lining my insides with shame. Tears I have not shed in a long time threaten to surface, but I hold them back. That’s what he wants, so I try desperately to regain my composure—a feat not easily achieved when my limbs are fastened to surfaces, and I can’t fucking move.

  Words flee my mouth before the anger within me consumes them. “Where. Is. Kelsie?” Like refugees from the war raging inside me, the words come out, one by one, through clamped teeth and semi-tight lips.

  He smiles. “Hang tight.”

  That’s not good. He didn’t flinch, which means—

  The door swings open, and Scar brings in pieces—buckets. Impulsively, my blinks seal the scene before me, but I pry the curtains of my eyes open to stare at chopped-up pieces of a body—exposed flesh visible from here. Muscle fibers stick out of the bucket, the color of the skin nearly masked by the dark red liquid meant to be in veins

  “She’s still warm,” he says, as he culls a hand, still attached to a wrist, from the top of the pile. “Wave to Breaker, Kelsie.”

  My stomach flips, ready to eject its contents. Images blur behind sheaths of salted-liquid. I tilt my head back to keep them from flowing out.

  “I thought you’d like to see her before she went to the mill.”

  Tears turn to murderous pleas as they drip from my eyes. Rolling down my cheeks, they carry messages to my lips. “You’re dead, Franco.”

  “Aww...” He carelessly throws her hand into the pile. “That’s one, Scar.”

  Scar takes out a piece of paper and jots something down.

  “We have a bet,” Franco explains, “on how many times you’re going to threaten me tonight.”

  Doesn’t matter. “I don’t make idle threats.”

  He bobs his head back and forth and shrugs before turning to Franco. “I don’t think that was number two, but there’s still time.” Scar exits the room, leaving me alone with Franco and my dead sister.

  Think like her. “She was too much for you, wasn’t she?”

  Franco finds my comment amusing. “She always was too much for any guy.�
� He grabs the bucket and ambles it to the side, sloshing the contents.

  He’s limping from his right leg. That’s why he didn’t move so much.

  I pretend not to notice and lower my head. “What’s the plan here, Franco?” Taking advantage of his distraction, I jostle my feet around. My hands are tied tightly, but my feet aren’t bound together, just apart. Squatting and pulling myself up may work, but it will hurt like hell.

  When he moves the second bucket, I try and nearly cry out in pain. My wrist pops, sending shots of pain down my arm and over my shoulder.

  “The plan will be revealed,” he says, as he brings his butcher bag to the center. All of this was for show, because if we were in the same room, I’d rip his limbs off.

  “You plan on harvesting my organs?” I scoff. “Let me save you some time. My liver’s probably not going to work. My heart’s black, and some of the parts don’t work, and I don’t have ovaries. My kidneys though, they may get you a buck or two. But with the amount of alcohol I’ve consumed these last couple weeks, they may still be filtering it out of my system.”

  “Not your organs,” he says in a creepy tone.

  Stone. Romolo. They were going to meet me here, but what if they were already here, and he ambushed them, like he ambushed me. My breath pulsates as I calmly try to get a sense of elapsed time. He showed up and must have knocked me out. I sift through the pain, trying to pinpoint if any of it is coming from the back of my head, when I realize I couldn’t have been here more than an hour. At least not tied this way. My arms aren’t tired, just hurting from the force I’ve put in.

  Scar opens the door, distracting me.

  Franco squeals and chuckles. “Here’s my next crop.”

  A woman.

  Before my mind can register her dark hair and the dark nail polish, I’m thrashing around and screaming obscenities that I can’t register. My heart thuds, searing the image of the motionless woman into my brain. The sound of bones cracking and influx of blood rushing to my head is all I hear. The pressure builds, and my lungs stop functioning; my eyes bulge with the rising temperature, and my eardrums burst, casting away any coherent thoughts.

  I zone in on the woman carrying my child.

  Nothing matters except getting out of here and killing that motherfucker.

  Springing my fury to life, I watch as Franco slides the slab closer to the glass. Without the farce of calm and composed, my skin erupts in heat. Flames of anger consume my flesh as I watch the woman I love be dragged onto a sheet of thick metal. Franco and Scar roll the table closer to me, locking it into a horizontal position.

  “You made it so easy for me.” Franco limps over to his bag and brings it closer to him. “You were supposed to kill her.”

  But I let 327 go.

  “You kept saying the mistake was mine—letting her go…” He chuckles and brings his index finger to tap on his head. “You should know by now: I don’t make mistakes.”

  What was that supposed to mean?

  “Three Twenty-Seven…” he hums, as he opens his instrument bag and plucks out a scalpel. “Do you really think I didn’t see her hiding in that hole?” He lifts a piece of her ebony hair in the air. “This color might have saved her then.” He takes the scalpel and cuts off a piece of her long locks, holding it in the air for me to see. “The red, a helicopter could’ve spotted.”

  “You let her go?” The words rumble out of my chest so harshly my throat aches from their escape.

  A wide smile curls around his lips as he points the scalpel at me. “Surprise!” The hair is tucked into his pocket, and he positions himself behind her head. “I not only let her go, but I was the one who moved her body to the side of the road.”

  “Why?” I curse myself the moment the question hits the air. This is what he wants.

  “I needed you to be distracted.” He pauses for emphasis. “And you were! This girl had you running everywhere. I didn’t really care if you found her and killed her, but I admit…this is going to be so much more fun.”

  I snap my mouth shut, grinding my back teeth over one another.

  “Hold her mouth open,” Franco orders Scar and then addresses me again, “Don’t worry. She’s still knocked out…for now.” And because he thinks I need to add more reason to disembowel him, he begins to describe his actions. “I’m going to cut around the gum of her back molar.”

  The scalpel dips into her mouth as he executes his plan.

  Scar adds fuel to the flames burning through my soul by saying, “That’s a lot of blood, Boss.”

  Boss?

  Franco winks at me. “Not nearly enough.”

  Sick asshole and his blood play. He’s getting off on this; he doesn’t even bother to clean or swab the dribbling blood.

  I have to get out of here. I rock my body back and forth, as much as the restraints allow, and then switch directions. Up and down until I stop and take a deep breath, and with all my strength, attempt to bring my elbows to my torso and yank the damn pin from the roof.

  It gives a little.

  No, that was my muscle separating from the bone. I bellow through my pain, “Touch her, and I will yank every tooth out and make you swallow them.”

  “Two!” Scar calls out and laughs.

  I make it three. “I wouldn’t laugh if I were you. You never had what it takes to lead because you don’t have a backbone. I’ll carve out your spine and put it up in my office.” I stretch out the last word as I tug again. The pain coursing through my body has all meshed into one; it throbs as a unit, and I have to stop and catch my breath.

  Franco grabs the pliers from his bag. “Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle…” He chuckles as he moves the pliers back and forth, loosening her tooth from the jawbone and ligaments. “This little sucker has a cavity.” He holds her tooth in the air. “I’m going to love whacking off to this one. Now I have two favorites.”

  Kelsie and 327. “Not if I kill you first, you sick fuck.”

  “Four!” Franco shouts out and releases her mouth. He wipes his hands on his pants and scribbles down something on a sheet of paper. “Me? Sick?” Franco finds the role reversal amusing. “This is your legacy, Beneventi, or should I say Silvano?”

  He knows. “Did Kelsie tell you that?”

  “Kelsie had a lot to say, but she never ratted on you.”

  “You killed her? When I get out of here, I’m going to—”

  He purposefully ignores me and cuts me off, “You and your fake father created the depraved shit that goes on here—well, not here anymore—but you know what I mean. This was your money pit.” He swirls around with his hand in the air. “He even hid his safes in the walls of this place.”

  “What’s your point, Franco?”

  “I took your business to a whole new level.”

  Scar wipes the blood from 327’s face with a white towel.

  If Franco squirts his load into that, I’m going to shove it in his mouth and light it on fire.

  “And how do you treat me?” Franco hands the pliers to Scar and pockets the tooth. “You keep me locked away in here. I thought we had a partnership, you and I. You had the brains, and I provided just the right amount of crazy.”

  “Crazy is right.” I shout, trying to distract him and turn his anger on me. Between him and Magdalena—Oh, shit.

  “You’re a cocky son of a bitch—full insult intended at the not-so-dearly departed Mrs. Costa Beneventi. She was a wretched person, and she took her own life because Costa gave her a choice: me or suicide. But I did get the chance to turn her into puppy chow. Bag number 2-2-6-9. Her birthday.”

  He didn’t. He purposefully didn’t say dog food.

  “Remember that bag of food your sister made me get for her?” He clucks his tongue toward Kelsie’s remains. “Such lack of respect for someone of my caliber.”

  “What do you want me to say here?” Foxy, the little bugger, was running around shitting my mother. “She was a shit person.”

  Franco smiles at me, amused by my joke. “Y
ou never did like her, did you?”

  “I don’t like anyone.”

  “Oh, now that’s a lie. We know each other better than that.”

  He’s right, we do.

  “You haven’t been the same since you shot your fake daddy. We respected you for that, and I would’ve stood by you, but you replaced me.”

  He had no way of knowing that. Not even Magdalena knew. So if Kelsie didn’t tell him, someone else did.

  “You had to bring in Stone, didn’t you? And Kelsie.”

  “Stone.”

  “Don’t look at me like that. He didn’t tell me.” Franco grabs 327’s head and positions her head, roughly twisting her neck, before bending down to her eye level to check her line of sight.

  It hits mine.

  He wants the first thing she sees when she wakes up to be me. I hope she doesn't wake up. I’ve underestimated him.

  “I’m going to break you, Breaker Beneventi.”

  “You’re going to tell me this was all your doing?” My stomach churns as my once right-hand man glares in my direction, a sick gleam lingering in his eyes as he absorbs my panic. I struggle against the restraints around my ankles and wrists, but both of my arms are stretched and tied to the ceiling for his viewing pleasure.

  “How long have you been planning this?” I thrash and kick, but to no avail. The metal keeps me locked in place when all I want is to move, to break free and lunge toward him.

  “They took my place!” he shouts and faces Scar. “Get out. I need to do this on my own.”

  “Sure thing, Boss.”

  Why is he calling him Boss? “You’re not the boss of anything, Franco,” I spit out, as I put all my weight into my lower half, gearing up for a jump. I won’t get far, but the force of gravity and my strength will help. “You’ll never take over the Beneventi Family. Is that what you think will happen here?”

  He watches me intently. Good. I’ve got his attention.

  “You think you kill me and Kelsie, and Stone is going to make you his second?” I need to know if Stone is still alive.