Capture
Cherish Series Book One
Olivia Ryann
Author’s Copyright
Copyright Olivia Ryann 2018
May not be replicated or reproduced in any manner without express and written permission from the author. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to author and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The Next Book Is Called Control
About the Author
1
Katherine Carolla
“Katherine, come see!”
I turn from the stove in the kitchen of the huge antebellum mansion house that I share with my brothers and father, willing myself not to roll my eyes.
I had the misfortune of getting the brains in my family, while the men got all the cunning and the instinct to make money. I got the chance for mental illness too, a gift from my mother who killed herself when I was young. I guess being smarter is a double-edged sword because it makes you way more sensitive to the world’s failings.
Even though I am young, I know this.
“Kat!” my brother Dave calls. “Seriously, come here!”
“I’ve got jambalaya on the stove,” I call out. “Can it wait?”
“No, you gotta see this!” calls my brother Arturo. “It’s so funny!”
I brush back a lock of my long blonde hair, sighing. Turning the jambalaya down to a simmer, I head out of our large, state-of-the-art kitchen and into the living room. There my three brothers are all standing behind my aging father, who is sitting on the couch. My dad holds an iPad, seemingly entranced by whatever is on the screen.
My brothers are carbon copies of Dad; it’s like the March of Progress diagram in my biology textbook, each of my brothers looking like one of the apes that formed the evolutionary steps to become my dad. At the moment, they are all staring at the iPad with rapt attention, their faces lit with the same dark humor.
It makes me a little queasy when my family has that look. The last time they all looked at a screen like that, I found out that they were screening one of the dogfights that they had set up. Blech.
“What is it?” I ask, skirting the couch to come around behind them all. Tony steps aside to make room for me to see what they are so enthralled by.
Looking at the iPad, and I’m instantly repulsed. The screen shows a young woman, hogtied and gagged, like a pig dressed up for roasting. She is obviously quite frightened and keeps looking at something or someone just out of screenshot.
“This is some chick that Art used to bang,” my father says, chuckling. “If you can even believe that he ever got pussy that hot. I mean, look at her!”
Looking at the dark-haired girl, with her creamy white skin marked by harsh-looking red rope, I feel dread in the pit of my stomach. There are tears streaming down her cheeks, traces of her heavy mascara still evident. She’s trembling, almost frantic, and I send up a tiny prayer that she’s just a really good actress.
Otherwise, if my family’s watching this, and it was shot against her will… that’s something entirely different.
On screen, a man clad in head to toe leather steps into the frame, brandishing a bullwhip. I wince, scowling, and turn away. Sadly, I wouldn’t put watching that kind of screwed up porn together past anyone in my family. To be a Carolla in New Orleans is to live on the edge.
Or at least that’s what the men in the room keep telling me, have been telling me for all of the eighteen years I’ve been alive. The Carolla family is old school mafia, real true gangsters, the last of a dying breed. Our family motto is, “A Carolla never quits.”
That has been drummed into me from birth.
Not that I really got to witness it or experience any of the so-called dirty business. I’m the youngest in my family, protected. But they constantly feel the need to remind me, anyway.
“I really didn’t need to stop cooking to come to see that, did I?” I say, heading back to the kitchen. There is no answer to my question, and I don’t really expect one. Instead, my dad barks an order.
“Bring me a beer, Katherine,” my father commands, absently watching the iPad.
“Beers all around,” says my oldest brother Dave, not looking up from the screen. He just expects that I will obey… and he’s not wrong. I’ve long since found that it’s just easier to do as they say. “Bring them in here like a good girl.”
I don’t say anything, I just move toward the fridge.
“I can’t believe you used to hit that,” my brother Tony says, excited. “I bet she was pretty tight, am I right?”
He’s the nerdiest one of my brothers, and sometimes I think that he just goes along with everything that Dad or Art says. I can almost forgive him for being the weakest one, but his cowardice makes him an uneasy ally. He’s my best friend, but I never know when he’s going to turn on me. He’d sell me out in one second flat if it meant that he got a kind word from my father or oldest brother.
“Hurry up with that beer,” Art calls from the living room. “I’m running dry over here.”
I roll my eyes on the way to the fridge. That’s part of the deal for my family, the not doing anything for themselves. As the only girl, I’m expected to cook and clean, to do laundry and entertain guests. To fend off my father’s drunken advances, when he has a little too much to drink. I’m their perfect little housekeeper.
In exchange, they make all the money. They run drugs and whores, take in money from the slot machines we have all around town. They do things that I could never dream of doing.
As I replace their empty beers with fresh ones, gathering cans and studiously ignoring the video they’re still watching, I take a deep breath. It’s going to be hard to tell my father and brothers that I am leaving for college. But I’m eighteen as of last week, and out of four colleges I applied to, I got into three of them.
Not bad, for someone who has never seen the inside of a classroom. My brothers and I were homeschooled, by necessity. Apparently, no one wanted the kids of one of the city’s biggest mobsters sharing snack packs with their own kids.
Or so I was told, repeatedly, by my father.
At any rate, I did my own research about colleges without ever leaving home. I’m excited about Tulane University, or maybe Loyola University. To be honest, I don’t really know the difference between the two, I just know that you have to live on campus.
After a lifetime of cleaning my brothers’ dirty laundry and listening to my dad drunkenly confess how much I remind him of my mother when she was my age, I’m ready. Ready for college. Ready to meet new people.
Ready to blossom.
I’m just not sure how I’m going to tell my family. I return to the stove and see Tony slink up behind me, leaning against the opposite counter. He doesn’t say anything for a while, and I glance over my shoulder at him a couple times.
As I look at him, I can tell he’s drunk. His cheeks are flushed, and his chocolate eyes are faintly bloodshot. He keeps his dark hair buzzed, like all the guys in my family do. He is thinner than the rest of my brothers, sinew rather than fatty muscle. He also has a habit of hunching and rubbing his hands together. It makes him look like a nervous rat, his eyes are so close together and his facial hair too patchy to be called a beard.
I’m a little uncomfortable with how Tony is looking at me
as if he’s deciding my value. He does so silently, leaning a little bit off center. If he fell on the floor, totally passed out, I wouldn’t be surprised. It wouldn’t be the first time.
I don’t say anything to Tony, though. I’ve learned not to provoke any harassment. So, I just let Tony stare as I plate up the spicy jambalaya, spooning the rice and sausage mixture into bowls.
As I am sticking spoons in each bowl, Tony finally speaks.
“You know… you know that Dad’s going to sell you off, right?” He says it slowly and carefully, and I pause. I must’ve misheard him.
“What’s that now?” I ask, my brow furrowing.
Tony continues as if I didn’t say anything. “It’s your fault, really. That’s what Dad says. It’s your fault for looking so much like Mom.” He hiccups. “All petite and curvy. Nice tits and a nicer ass.”
His eyes wander down to my breasts, and I wish my apron could keep his stare off of my body. I turn around, trying to ignore him. He’s my brother. He’s just being pervy and drunk.
This is normal, right? I try to convince myself that the butt pinches and the breast fondles I’ve been dealing with for my whole life are just part of growing up. I know they’re not; I might be isolated, but I do have the internet.
But what am I supposed to do? You’re born into the family you’re born into. So instead of making a scene, I become extra gracious.
“Tony, do you maybe want to go lie down for a little while?” I ask him.
I look back, and he’s sipping his beer. Shaking his head. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Money is tight, and you’re right here in our kitchen. You’re all too available for Dad to marry off to the highest bidder. You didn’t think that they would just let you have a life, now did you?”
I ignore his words, though they make me shake a little. Picking up and balancing the bowls of jambalaya, I offer him one.
“Here, you need to eat something,” I say gently. “I’m going to take Daddy some food now.”
I leave the kitchen, a little shaken, but I can feel Tony’s eyes on my back. As I hand out the bowls, I tell myself not to worry about what Tony said. He’s just drunk.
But later, when I’m done putting the dishes in the dishwasher, I start to worry about it. What if Tony is right? What if Dad really is running out of money, and he thinks that an arranged marriage is the way out of that?
I would totally not put it past my father. In fact, he has jokingly mentioned the idea several times over the years. Maybe I should be scared like Tony said.
I worry my lip as I head upstairs to my room.
2
Arsen Aetós
I was eleven years old the first time that I killed a man.
I remember it in clear, precise detail. I stood on a narrow back alley of Nicosia, blinking against the sun that reflected off of the sun-bleached buildings that rose high against the bright blue sky. I held a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson revolver in my shaking grip, one hand splayed out, just like I had seen gangsters in movies shoot.
The man was tall and dark, his light clothing baggy, as is normal for men to wear in Cyprus. I remember distinctly thinking that his skin was darker on the back of his neck and his arms. It made me wonder what he did for a living.
I didn’t know the man personally. I just knew that he was pointed out to me by Andreas and as I was given the gun. If I wanted into the mafia so badly, I could prove it by killing this man.
Andreas said it all brusquely as if I wouldn’t shed any blood. As if I were just a child with a wild imagination and too much energy.
I would show him. I would show all of the elders, who even now sat outside a cafe, talking and joking as if they were not the very men capable of things that chilled your blood. Things that mothers told their little boys not to worry about when they tucked them in at night.
I didn’t want to be one of those little boys. I wanted to be a man.
And so, I stood staring at the man who hurried down the alley, unaware of my presence. I was to be his life-taker, the one that shepherded him out of the world for good.
All I had to do was pull the trigger.
My trembling finger was so heavy as I pointed the gun at his back. Then I squeezed and the gun went off. It startled me. The gunshot was louder than I was prepared for.
The figure in the alley began to crumble, looking back…
I can remember all of that, but I can’t remember his face. It eludes me when I try to recall it; just a beige blank in the place of eyes, nose, and mouth.
I wish I could say that he was special in this, that my memory plays tricks on me. But in reality, I can’t remember his face in the same way that I can’t remember the hundreds of men I’ve killed since then. All of them; the grasping, the gasping, the proud and furious men…
All of them remain perfect blanks in my memory. Not that I try to recall them, exactly. After all, I was an assassin for many years before my brothers and I progressed upward through the hierarchy of the Cypriot mafia.
I stayed with them as they grew until they were big enough to send a few of their soldiers out into the world like a poisonous plant sends tendrils. From Cyprus, we went to Athens, Istanbul, Munich, Brussels, Paris, and London.
Then we attempted to take over in America, with New Orleans as our first target. That’s where I am now, handling the day to day responsibilities of our twenty-person crew.
By the time my brother Dryas and I arrive in New Orleans, we are bosses in our own right. So, I settle in, enjoying the ease with which I can infiltrate and turn the current system of drugs, gambling, and girls on its head. I start to enjoy myself, even take a whore to dote on, a skinny little Russian named Anna.
I’m comfortable, reveling in the fact that I’m taking over the underworld of New Orleans. Then I come head to head with the Carolla family… and that is where things go sideways.
Starting with Anna’s severed head being delivered to my doorstep, her face wide in a grimace of shock and fear. Blood still dripped from her neck.
A note came with the head.
Get the fuck out of my city or you’ll be next.
— Salvatore
I take a puff of my cigarette, angry that I’m even thinking of it. Angry that that stupid, fat American man thinks that he can fuck with what is clearly mine. My property.
So, I have to retaliate because obviously you’re can’t just let disrespect and murder slide. I’ve been planning my response for a couple of weeks, and now it’s about to happen.
I’m standing in a part of New Orleans that never fully recovered after a big hurricane came through, waiting in the back room of a desolate warehouse. My brother, Dryas, is with me, calmly carving his name in the wall of this shithole.
I take a moment to examine him. Like me, he wears black tactical gear. Like me, he is tall and muscular, not an ounce of fat on him. His dark hair is close-cropped, unlike mine, which I let grow out a bit more.
Dryas has always been more militant than I am, seeing things as black and white, cut and dry. I lack that same unquestioning sense of right and wrong; I exist in between somewhere, in the deepest fields of gray.
That’s what makes me a great boss, and Dryas a great soldier. I am more than willing to bark orders at anyone, and I know that I can take whatever heat might be stirred up as a response. Dryas, not so much.
His weakness is evident, to me at least. Then again, I’m sure that he sees the same things when he looks at me.
My gaze has been on him for some time. Dryas glances up at me, his green-yellow eyes questioning.
“Why are you looking at me, Arsen?” he asks in perfect English. We learned English when we were taking over London, so his accent when he speaks English is a lilting mix of British and Cypriot.
“No reason,” I answer with a shrug. “Trying to have patience, like you.”
Dryas doesn’t react or say anything. He’s not really the type to say anything just to fill up the space in the room, and I like that about him. I don�
�t like many things about either of my brothers since we were raised competing for the same very limited resources, but I’m trying to learn.
I’m trying not to act like I’m a man born in bloodshed and raised by starvation, even though that is precisely what I am. Dryas is much more patient by nature than I am.
I’m antsy, drumming my fingers, smoking cigarette after cigarette. I watch Dryas, who seems absorbed in slowly peeling curled strips of wood away from the wall. It reminds me a little of what he’s known for in Cyprus, which is peeling the flesh off of men slowly and methodically, to get them to talk.
It is very successfully, no doubt about it.
I’m not sure why Dryas bothers with marking the warehouse since we’re going to raze it within the next few hours. I guess he has that, and I have fantasizing about making the Carollas scream.
The fact that the Carolla men are currently on their way here, expecting to do a deal with a prominent Mexican patron to bring a lot of Mexican girls here for cheap… that fact almost makes the ghost of a smile grace my mouth.
Almost.
I double check my firearm, a Sig Sauer, despite the fact that I already know that it’s ready to go. I consider what I’m about to do, relishing the fact that I’m about to get the chance to kill Sal Carolla, his bodyguards, his sons…
And his lone daughter. A chill rushes down my spine as I think about some mousy little plaything, all for me. Will I just kill her right away? Or will I take my time, enjoying making her beg as I strangle her?
After all, it is how Anna died, after the Carollas raped her and beat her. My fists bunch as I think about them defiling my property.
I hear the sound of footsteps and laughter echoing in the main room of the abandoned warehouse. I look at Dryas, who is already alert, his name long forgotten. I hold up my hand, letting him know to wait a minute.
Capture: Cherish Series Book One Page 1