26
Aubriella
Aria holds her cup of coffee like it’s a lifeline. “He’s a mobster. How does a relationship like that end? I mean, what? Is he going to marry you?”
I roll my eyes. She has been like this for nearly thirty minutes, barely letting me get a word in. At first, her protectiveness was sweet, but it’s getting exhausting quickly. I know no one is going to really understand. Hell, I wouldn’t understand. I thought I wanted her to talk me out of all of this, like a few quick words of reason would snap me out of his spell. She’s only reminding me how badly I want out of this world of rules. Thinking about begging for my job back and going back to my life of counting pennies doesn’t even feel like an option anymore.
I cross my arms. I’m leaning by her kitchen table while she paces in the kitchen. “Maybe he does. I don’t know.”
“You barely know him!” she half-shouts.
I look down. “Yeah. But he feels more real than any guy I’ve ever known.”
Aria gives me a pitying look, like a mother trying to tell her teenage daughter that high school guys only want one thing. “It’s normal to feel guilty after sleeping with a guy like that. Maybe you just hope you will feel better about it if you convince yourself there’s more than just sex between you two.”
I take a deep breath, feeling my nostrils flare. “Let’s change the subject.”
“Change the subject? You go missing for over a week. I’ve been meeting with the cops almost every day, spending my time after work looking for you. Now you suddenly show up and want to talk about something else? What else is there to talk about?”
I put a palm to my forehead, desperate to change the topic of conversation. “How about you and Ronnie. Are you two still together?”
She frowns. “No, he was an asshole. So why didn’t this Vince come up with you if he’s so worried about your safety?”
I fight the urge to roll my eyes. She’s really not going to drop it. Her phone rings, saving me from answering.
Aria checks the screen and sighs. “Your dad will not stop calling me.”
I get up to take the phone from her. I need to get this over with. I pick up the phone. “Have you heard anything?” he asks.
“Dad,” I say. “It’s me.”
There’s a pause. “Aubriella?”
“Yeah.”
“They shut down my water and electric. I’m living like a fucking animal over here. Where have you been?”
I purse my lips and try to breathe my frustration out through my nose. Of course. He’s not worried about me in the slightest. He just wanted to know where his ATM machine went. “I’m fine, thanks for checking, Dad.”
“I need the money, Aubs.”
Everything between us wells up unexpectedly. I didn’t know how much it was weighing on me until his words open some floodgate deep inside me. Somehow this just feels like the culmination of all the small and not-so-small signs he has shown that he really doesn’t care about me, that the man I used to call Dad is dead and gone somewhere. All that’s left is an empty shell that will keep draining me as long as I let it. As much as it hurts, I need to cut my ties to him. I need to end it once and for all.
“Dad. I need you to listen to me real close, okay? I’m going to ask you a question, and I want your completely honest answer.”
There’s a pause. “Okay, but—”
“No. Just listen, Dad. I’m telling you right now that I’m never going to give you another penny so long as I live. I don’t care if you just need a dollar to buy a hamburger and you’re starving. I’m not giving you money anymore. You’re never going to get better unless I cut you off and let you get back on your own feet.”
He says nothing.
“So my question is, can you accept that?”
Another long pause. Finally, with a voice that chills me, as if it comes from something dead. “No.”
He hangs up the phone.
So that’s it. Aria is giving me a highly concerned look that I don’t want right now. It’s too much. I want to lock myself off from the memory of what just happened and the overwhelming guilt welling up inside of me. I don’t want to talk about it or be comforted. I’m about to wave her off when a heavy hand pounds at the door, nearly giving me a heart attack.
“Aubriella!” booms a voice from the other side. “Open the fuckin’ door!” It’s a voice I recognize. Vince.
Aria gives me an incredulous look, like she can’t believe he would have the audacity to come upstairs to her apartment. I move to let him in, pushing past Aria who tries to motion for me to ignore him. She has no idea what kind of man he is. Even if I wanted to keep him out, there’s no way something as small as a door would stop him from coming in.
I swing the door open. Vince’s hair is messed up and he’s glazed with sweat. He still looks absolutely incredible, and I catch Aria reluctantly admiring him from the corner of my eye. It takes me a second to realize he’s not alone. The man who was watching me in the Panera after I first met Vince stands beside him. He’s a relatively unremarkable guy with thin eyebrows and lips. He’s holding his ribs and wincing, like he’s in pain.
“What happened?” I ask.
“We’ve gotta move,” says Vince. “It’s not safe here anymore. You’re going to need to come, too,” he says, nodding toward Aria.
“You can’t just come into my house and order me around,” she says, but there’s a hesitance to her tone. I don’t blame her. It’s not easy to stand up to Vince, even if you don’t know what he’s capable of.
“It’s not up to you. I know you’re important to Aubriella, and if something happened to you, it would upset my girl. So you’re coming with me because it’s not safe here right now.”
Aria looks like she wants to protest, but her eyes are still taking all of him in. He’s not the kind of man you refuse. He’s too powerful. Too confident. “Let me just get my stuff,” she says in a defeated tone.
“Make it fast,” says Vince, glancing to his side and down the hallway.
We all pile into the car while Vince and Jimmy’s heads swivel to glare at every person on the street as if they might be gunmen in waiting. I hug my arms to myself, feeling vulnerable. Inside the car, no one talks for a few minutes. While we’re waiting at a red light, Aria clears her throat. “So what exactly do you plan to do with Aubriella, Vince?”
I cringe. Is she really doing this right now?
“I plan to get her somewhere safe till this blows over.”
“No. I mean after all of this. Once you get bored of her are you going to just toss her aside?”
“Aria!” I snap, catching her gaze to bulge my eyes at her in warning.
“It’s okay,” says Vince. “She’s just looking out for you.” His eyes find me in the rearview mirror and he winks. “To answer your question, if Aubriella isn't careful she’s going to end up stuck with me for a long time.”
Something in his tone makes my breath catch. He says it like a threat, but the twinkle in his eye seems to promise something as well. Does he mean…no. He can’t mean he would marry me. What would I even say? Part of me instantly responds that I would say yes. One look at our current situation--on the run from yet another danger to my life--seems to be enough of a reason to say no, but it’s one thing to know I should stay away and another thing to do it. I can only ignore my body for so long. The way I get flutters and flush just from his touch or a look from him can’t be wrong. There must be something to that.
I laugh a little too loud and see Vince grinning at me again through the rearview. Aria catches the barely hidden meaning as well and sits back, speechless for once.
We drive until we hit upstate and no one seems interested in starting conversation back up. I spend the drive staring out the window, unable to stop my mind from racing. I think of my dad, Aria, my job, the way Jerry Washington’s body looked, and of course, him. It’s exhausting. I can’t think of one topic long enough to find resolution. I’ll just begin promising mys
elf to stop second-guessing the way I talked to my dad, which leads me to think what Vince would say if he knew about my dad’s money troubles, which gets me thinking about him and the way he seems ready to bail me out of my financial trouble, which leads me to wonder if Aria would approve of me letting him, which makes me wonder if I’m against the idea because of what she might think or if it’s because of what I might think of myself if I wasn’t working an honest job. It’s a mess, and by the time we pull up to a small Colonial with red shutters, I’m more confused than when I started.
Vince opens my door and Jimmy opens Aria’s. She comes to my side, holding my arm protectively while Vince puts his strong arm over my shoulders. Even though the two of them are at odds, it feels good to let the two people I care most about show so much protectiveness toward me as we walk toward the house. If nothing else, I know I’m loved, and I don’t know that I knew that just a few weeks ago. In that moment, I realize I’m more scared to lose that feeling than my life. Even if gunmen come for me in the next hour, I’d rather die than go back to the way things were. That’s when I realize it. I don’t want to get away from Vince. I want to stay with him, to be his. Even if he’d never admit it, I want to make him mine, too. I still don’t know how I feel about everything else, but I know that.
Once he figures all of this out with the rival family, I’ll find a way to show him that I’m ready. One look at his stony features now tells me it’s not the time yet.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“This is a hideout for the wives. We haven’t had to use it for this in years, so it might be a little dusty.”
He opens the door and I raise my eyebrows. Dusty, maybe, but damn. The decorations are beautiful. A sparkling chandelier hangs over the high entryway. A second-floor balcony overlooks the foyer, flanked by two gently curved marble staircases. Straight ahead, I have a dazzling view of a pool and a well-manicured backyard. Aria gives me an approving smirk and nudges me.
“I think this will do,” she says.
I hear a din of voices coming from deeper in the house. The voices are affected and accented, punctuated by overly loud laughter and exclamations. The wives. The seemingly harmless moniker shouldn’t intimidate me so much, but these are mob wives. If Vince ever did ask me to marry him, I’d be one of them.
Vince quickly leads us to the kitchen, where seven women in lavish clothing all sit, lean, and stand around the kitchen island, picking at spreads of deli meat and cheese as they gossip. When they see Aria and I, they all turn, opening arms wide to come forward and air-kiss us on both cheeks and declare that we’re beautiful.
“Doll, Jimmy and I need to go, okay?” whispers Vince in my ear as the wives all argue over which celebrity Aria looks most like.
“...Uma Thurman. I’m seriooous,” drawls a woman with a thick New York accent. “The one from that kung fu movie.”
I give Vince a tight lipped smile and nod. I don’t like it, of course. I know he’s planning something dangerous, but I also know I can’t stop him. The best thing for me to do is support him. If he’s going into danger one way or another, there’s no reason for me to add the stress of knowing I don’t like it to his troubles. “Just be careful, okay?”
“Yeah.” He turns to leave, but I grab his arm, leaning forward to whisper in his ear.
“If you come back to me in one piece, I’ll let you do that thing you wanted to do.” My cheeks burn as I say it. I’m not much of a dirty talker, but it’s the truth. The thought scares me, but behind the fear is a tantalizing thrill. It already feels like it has been so long since I’ve had him inside me, and I want it, no matter how it happens. Just thinking about it makes my core heat.
Vince gives me a feline grin and then bites his lip before leaning in to kiss me hard on the lips. “I’ll come back.”
I nod and watch him leave.
Once Vince and Jimmy are gone, the wives descend on me as a pack for a few minutes before they finally start to disperse and let Aria and I breathe some. I spend close to an hour on the couch practically getting interviewed. How did we meet? How did I manage to keep him around for so long? Vince never sticks with one girl, what’s my secret? Am I pregnant? By the time they are done, I don’t even feel guilty abandoning Aria to their interrogations when I see my chance. I slip upstairs and find a bedroom with a computer on the desk.
A half-formed idea begins bouncing around in my head, so I sit down to the computer before I even know exactly what I’m planning. All I know for certain is that Vince can’t single-handedly gun down an entire mafia crime family. The only way he’s going to get through this alive is if I think of some way to even the odds for him. I start by googling local mafia families and digging. It doesn’t take long to find the Anastasios. They are an old family with ties directly back to Italy. A man named Andre is the head of the family, even though he’s only in his fifties. There were cases against them in 2004, 2007, 2012, and 2015 for illegal sports betting. I frown, digging through the information that was public until I have a vague understanding of what they probably did.
Most of the charges were related to baseball, but they also were involved in college football betting and some NFL bets. They ultimately escaped being convicted each time, but each case was followed by rumors of jury tampering and even bribes given to the judge. It doesn’t take long for me to start seeing the connection. All those times I tried to look deeper into the game fixing, Henry Krawbeck, SportsCast’s senior editor, was always shutting me down, steering me in another direction. Did the scandal reach that far? If a senior editor for SportsCast was involved, there was no telling how far the corruption reached.
I think of all the times Herbert Blume tried to talk me into writing for Global Sports, a competitor of SportsCast that never was able to offer me enough money to take the job. It would be a gamble, but if they ran with the story, it could be enough to immediately get Anastasios out of the picture. I also guiltily feel a bubble of excitement at the idea of breaking such a huge story. I just need to make sure I don’t imply Vince or his family’s guilt in any way when I write it. If Vince knew what I’m planning though, he’d never let me go through with it. I decide to write the story and get everything in the works and then check with him at the last minute, when he doesn’t have enough time to stop me.
I open a word document and think for a second before typing: The Mafia Fix: Corruption in Professional and Collegiate Sports.
27
Vince
“Shit!” I say as Jimmy and I jump back in the car. We doubled back and took the Mercedes from the gunmen back at the factory so it wouldn’t be traced to us. I slide my gun in my jacket pocket. The barrel is still hot, but the burning sensation keeps me alert so I don’t move it. Vivid images flash back through my mind of muzzle flashes, blood, and bodies. We just caught an Anastasio Capo and three of his soldiers as they were leaving a restaurant in broad daylight. Jimmy and I got out of the car, raised our guns, and started firing. Only one of them even had time to reach for his gun before he went down.
People are screaming now and I see at least three people on their cell phones, probably calling the cops. Jimmy and I pull down the black handkerchiefs covering our faces and I gun the gas, getting us out of there as fast as I can. I take us to the pier and put the car in neutral and pull the hand brake. We both get out and I yank the brake, letting it slowly drift towards the long fall down to the water.
We both jog to my car as the Mercedes splashes down below, releasing bubbles as it sinks.
“We need to get more of the family involved if we’re going to finish this in one piece, Vince,” says Jimmy. “They will realize by now what we’re doing, and they aren’t going to let us keep picking them off like animals.”
I grit my teeth, nodding. “If you’re right about the traitor, we’ll have to be careful. We bring the wrong guy in on this and we’ll end up getting popped while our backs are turned.”
I call in a meet-up with Pops and my brothers. I set it up at Pops’
place because the Anastasios are fuckin’ welcome to try us there when we’re all together. When we arrive, most of the family is already there. I walk inside, patting shoulders with Jack, Paulie, Pops, Mario, Angelo, the whole crew. Everyone heads to the basement and takes their normal places, lighting cigars and pulling out cards. There’s a forced calm about it as people begin hushed conversations, waiting until I signal that I’m ready to get things going.
The last few days have been like a fuckin’ whirlwind. I’ve killed people before, but I’ve probably made more bodies today than I have in my whole life. It’s a strange feeling, and it has me on edge. Seeing so many people die has me feeling less invincible, and that worries me, because I need to stay alive for Aubriella. I need to make sure I get back to her so I can finally pound that beautiful pussy until she screams my name.
I prowl the room, watching the crew as they all try to act like they’re not watching me. They know this is big. Everyone is on edge. Paulie, who normally wears a permanent smirk, has an odd mixture of a grimace and a smile. Paired with his darting eyes, it makes him look fuckin’ nuts. Angelo can’t sit still. He keeps biting his nails and absently patting his calf, where his piece must be strapped. They know this could go either way. The Anastasios are playing dirty, and it’s a new game for all of us. Word that there’s a rat in our family has spread too, which has everyone suspecting each other.
I make my way to Pops, who is in his regular spot with a thick Cuban cigar between his purple lips. “Pops. I want to call for a show of force. Do I have your blessing on this?” I ask.
“They are targeting you most of all, Vince. As far as I’m concerned, this is your call. However you want to play it.”
I take him by the back of the neck and kiss him on the forehead. “Gratsi, Pops.”
He pats me on the chest and nods.
“Have you seen Frankie?” I ask.
Pops frowns. “I haven’t. I thought he was with you, he said he was going to meet up with you at the factory.”
His: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Citrione Crime Family) Page 15