by Alexa Land
“Are you thinking about coming out of retirement and taking over again?”
Dante said, “I have to, even though Jerry won’t just step down willingly. If he’s like this with me, how’s he representing us to the other families? The last thing we need is to make new enemies or stir up old ones.”
“You’re right. So, how’s Nana doing with all of this?”
“She’s furious. Ollie’s here now and he’s been trying to help calm her down. But that’s kind of like trying to stuff a swarm of bees back in the hive. She keeps saying she never liked Jerry and that he’s a ‘bad seed’ who needs a good spanking.” Dante chuckled and added, “I’d pay to see that.”
“I would, too.”
“So tell me, how’s everything there? How’s Luca?”
“He’s doing well. His wound is healing, there are no signs of secondary infection, and he’s been able to start cutting back on the pain meds. We can probably be ready to move by the end of the week. The question is, where do we go?”
“Yeah, that’s definitely the question. What are you doing about law school?”
“I formally withdrew from this semester. Beyond that, who knows? I’m not sure if coming back to San Francisco is really going to be an option.”
“I need to get this situation under control, for all our sakes. This is your home,” Dante said. “It’s bullshit that you have to live like a fugitive from your own family. Pretty soon, I’m going to have to force Jerry’s hand. This can’t drag on forever.”
“Thank you again for all you’re doing, Dante.”
“Not a problem. I’d better go, I’m taking Nana shopping in an effort to distract her from this mess. She wants to buy sexy lingerie now that she has a new man. God help me.”
“Good luck. I’ll talk to you soon.” When we disconnected, I turned to look at Luca. He was still in his usual spot on the lounge chair, the book on his lap forgotten as he stared out over the water. He was dressed in a pair of white cotton shorts and a white tank top that set off his deep tan, and he hadn’t shaved in a few days. The short beard just made him look even sexier than usual, somehow.
But the bandages covering his injury were visible, too, and reminded me to keep my libido in check. I crossed the deck and started to reach for his empty glass on the little bamboo side table. “I’ll be right back with some more water for you,” I told him.
He caught my hand and looked up at me. “Sounds like things are still a mess back home.”
“They are, but Dante’s working on some solutions.”
“What if I went away for a while?” he asked, his green eyes searching my face. “If I’m out of the picture, do you think things would settle down with your family?”
“That’s not an option.”
“It would just be temporary. Maybe then you could go back home and try to smooth things over with Jerry.”
“No way. Never mind the fact that my cousin’s totally unreasonable and there’s really no talking to him. I’m not leaving your side, and not just because you’re still healing. Wherever you are, that’s where I belong.”
He gave me a sweet smile and said, “What did I do to deserve you?”
“Something really bad, apparently.”
Luca chuckled at that and got to his feet stiffly. “Let’s take a walk on the beach. We have almost an hour before we’re supposed to meet my brother for dinner.”
“You sure you’re up for that?”
“Oh yeah. This is more sitting than I’ve ever done in my life. I’m about to fuse to that lounge chair.”
“Well, you were just shot.”
“Not ‘just’. Two weeks ago.”
“Nine days.”
“I’m rounding up.”
It was just before sunset and the sky was beginning to turn orange as we walked hand-in-hand down the deserted beach. A warm breeze rustled the palm fronds overhead, and a gentle tide lapped at the shore. “I love it here,” I murmured.
“Maybe we should just stay here forever. We can build a Swiss Family Robinson treehouse and spend our days spearfishing and climbing the trees for coconuts.”
“Yeah, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“The very fact that you said spearfishing instead of fishing and talked about climbing fifty foot palm trees instead of going to the farmer’s market shows you’re way too Type-A for the quiet island life.”
Luca chuckled at that. “You read a lot into that sentence.”
“I know, but I’m right overall. You’re no good at being idle. I’m not, either.”
“You might have a point, though I really don’t consider myself a Type-A personality.”
“No,” I said, “but my point remains. We both belong in a big city.”
“True. Hey, how about Barcelona? Ignacio will be back there soon, so we’d be starting out with a friend.”
“Not Rome?”
Luca said, “Maybe eventually. For now, I think we need to keep flying under the radar. We don’t know how far your cousin Jerry is going to take this feud, and it’d be way too easy for him to track us down there.”
“You’re right.”
“And then there’s law school.”
“That’s the least of my concerns right now,” I told him.
A voice to our left startled us by saying, “That’s also very true.”
Luca and I both turned to see who’d spoken. A tall, dark-haired figure in a light linen suit stepped out from among the trees, and I exclaimed, “Connie?”
“God, I hate that nickname,” he said. “Would it kill you to call me Tino like everyone else?”
“What are you doing in Tahiti?”
“I’m here on business. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
I said, “Oh. Yeah, of course. Luca Caruso, this is my brother, Constantino Dombruso.” Luca’s eyes went wide and he took a step back. “What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“Tino Dombruso,” he repeated nervously.
I didn’t understand his reaction, until something Dante had said came rushing back to me. Did Andreo tell you about your brother, too? I turned to Constantino as a sick feeling started to well up in my stomach, and asked again, “What are you doing here, Connie?”
He raised his left arm, and I saw the long, black, high-caliber handgun he was holding for the first time. It was fitted with a silencer. “I told you, baby brother. I’m here on business.”
I pushed Luca behind me as my heart rate surged. “This can’t be happening,” I mumbled.
“Get out of the way, Nicky.”
“So you can gun down the man I love right in front of me? Fuck you,” I growled, anger and fear vying for the top spot in the onslaught of emotions battling inside me.
“Killing him in front of you is part of the job,” my brother said, his voice alarmingly cool and detached. “Jerry was very specific. He wants to make sure you suffer for bringing a Natori into your bed.”
“Jerry’s a fucking psycho, and so are you!”
My brother rolled his eyes. “Resorting to name calling? Really? I thought we’d evolved beyond that point.”
“So, this is what you do? You kill people? I thought you were a businessman.”
“Oh, I am. This is my business. I followed in our father’s footsteps.” He grinned a little and my blood ran cold.
“How did you find us here?” We’d begun to slowly circle each other, and I kept Luca behind me.
“This is the information age, little brother. Do you think anyone can remain hidden indefinitely? I will say it slowed me down a bit when Dante used a friend’s credit card to pay for the flight, hospital and hotel, but it was just a matter of time before I was able to pick up your trail.” That told me nothing.
“I’m not letting you do this.”
“As if you have a choice,” he said. “It’ll just take one bullet to your knee to drop you like a rock. It won’t kill you, but it will hurt like hell and leave you with a nasty limp. I’d pref
er to avoid such theatrics, but I know how stubborn you are, so if that’s what it takes, so be it.”
He’d been moving just a little closer as we circled, and I lunged forward, closing the gap between us, and grabbed the barrel of the gun. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to wrestle it away from him, so instead I pressed the muzzle of the silencer to my forehead and locked eyes with my brother. “If you want to go through me, this is what it’s going to take,” I told him.
Behind me, Luca yelled, “No!”
He started to step forward, but I held up my free hand to stop him and said, “Get out of here, Luca.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Connie sighed dramatically. “You two are quite a pair, a matched set of stubbornness. Let go of the gun, Nicky. Killing you wasn’t part of the deal, but I’m completing this job one way or the other.”
“Like hell you are.”
That came from Andreo, who’d appeared beside us. I let go of the gun barrel, and Connie immediately swung it around and pointed it at the newcomer. When I turned to look at Andreo, I was surprised to see he too was holding a big handgun and was pointing it at Constantino. He held it at arm’s length, his hand perfectly steady, and stared daggers at my brother.
“Andy!” Constantino exclaimed. “Now this is a surprise. My intel was faulty, I didn’t realize you were here playing chaperone. Well, good. Saves me the trouble of tracking you down next.”
Andreo held his gaze steadily as he said, “Nico, get Luca out of here.”
I started to do as he said, but my brother stopped me in my tracks. He’d produced a second, smaller handgun, and turned the weapon with the silencer on us as he trained the nine-millimeter on Andreo. “That’s just not going to happen,” he said. Andreo began to stride toward him, and to my surprise, Connie hesitated. It was the first time he’d shown even the slightest weakness during the entire confrontation.
Andreo stopped when they were an arm’s length apart, the guns pointed directly at each other’s foreheads, just an inch from their intended targets. Tension crackled in the air. Connie lowered the gun with the silencer, all of his attention on Andreo, who told him in a voice of quiet authority, “I’m not going to let you kill my brother, Tino. You’ll have to go through me, and I know you’re not willing to do that.” I realized suddenly that there had to be a history between them. The nickname ‘Andy’ hadn’t just been spur-of-the-moment.
“You overestimate your importance to me, Andy,” my brother said. He was trying to keep his tone light, but a bit of emotion crept in despite himself.
Andreo grinned a little and said, “I really don’t.” He pushed Connie’s handgun out of the way, stepped forward, and kissed him passionately, which startled the hell out of me. My brother grabbed him in an embrace, the weapons in his hands forgotten, and returned the kiss with equal passion, but for only a moment. He then shoved Andreo back and yelled, “You fucking asshole! Do you really think I’m going to let any personal feelings for you get in the way of doing my job?”
Andreo’s tone softened. “If I ever meant anything to you, Tino, then you have to let my brother walk away. You know what he means to me. He’s all I have.”
“Fuck you,” Connie yelled, stepping back from him. “Fuck you, Andreo! You’re totally manipulating me right now, you asshole!”
“I’m not manipulating you, I’m begging for my brother’s life.” A wicked grin curled the corner of his mouth, and Andreo added, “Though I do seem to remember you enjoy hearing me beg.”
“God, I hate you,” Connie said, crossing his arms over his chest.
“No, you don’t. You only wish you did.”
My brother stared at him for a long moment. I held my breath. Finally he said, “I’m giving you one pass, just because I owe you for that time in Belfast. I’ll tell Jerry I got here too late and that you’d already cleared out. He might check, so be gone by morning.”
“Thank you.”
“You won’t get to talk me out of finishing this a second time. I have two names on my list, yours and your brother’s, and I always get the job done. You know that. Make yourself hard to find, Andy, because the next time we’re face to face, this is going to end very differently.” He turned to me and said, “See you at Christmas, Nicky. Don’t bring your boyfriend. It would upset Nana if I had to off him over the eggnog.” With that, he holstered both guns inside his suit jacket and walked away without a second glance.
“So…my brother’s gay,” Luca murmured after a beat.
“Mine too, apparently. Oh, and a freaking assassin.”
“The gay gene is strong in your family.”
“It really is. In yours too, it would seem.”
Luca nodded. Then he said, “By the way, if you ever do that again, I’m going to yell at you for a week.”
“Do what?”
“Put a gun to your head to save me.”
“Please. You took a bullet for me.”
“Not to my skull!”
Andreo interrupted, saying, “We’d better pack and head for the airport, Tino’s prone to changing his mind. Meet me at my rental car as soon as you can.”
“Alright,” I said, “but tell me one thing. What’s the story between you and my brother?”
“It’s complicated,” he said. That I could believe. “Here, take this just in case.” He handed me his gun before turning and heading to the hotel, and I checked the clip before slipping it into the back of my waistband and pulling my shirt over it.
“Come on, we need to tell Gianni and Zan what’s happening,” I said. As we hurried to their bungalow, I added, “I can’t believe Jerry sent my own brother to kill you. Well, really, I can’t believe he sent anyone to kill you, but especially my own brother.”
“I think that was very intentional, from the sound of things,” Luca said, picking up my hand. “He told your brother to kill me in front of you. Jerry wants this to be personal, he wants to make you suffer. Including your brother was probably designed to extract the maximum amount of agony from you.”
“I grew up with Jerry. He’s the person who taught me how to throw a punch and fire a gun. I wasn’t as close to him as I am to Gianni and his brothers, not by a long shot, but he’s still family. How could he turn on me like this?” As we walked, I kept scanning the beach. The light was fading fast, and I kept expecting my brother to reappear, gun drawn. It was an incredibly uneasy feeling.
“I can’t begin to make sense of people. When I think about what my own father was capable of, it makes me want to throw up. And God, look at this idiotic feud between our families! By all accounts, Mauritzio Dombruso and Vido Natori were like brothers, but they ended up bitter rivals over something absolutely trivial. We’re still feeling the effects generations later!”
“I know. It’s so senseless.”
When we reached Gianni and Zan’s hut, we caught them up to speed and Gi exclaimed, “I can kind of believe Jerry would be capable of something like this, but not Connie! How can he be a hitman?”
“Apparently he decided to follow in our father’s footsteps,” I said.
“Holy shit! I thought your dad built bridges!”
“Not so much, as it turns out.”
“Where are you going now?” Zan asked me.
“No clue.”
Zan said, “Come to the boat with us. It’s the safest place I can think of.” We all agreed to that and hurried off to pack.
I placed the handgun on the bed when we returned to our bungalow, and Luca mused, “I wonder where my brother got the gun. He certainly didn’t fly here with it, and he didn’t bring any luggage to pack it in.”
“No idea.” He sank into a chair as he emptied a drawer into a duffle bag, and I said, “Let me do that. I can tell you’re hurting. Why don’t you lie down while I pack?”
“We don’t have that much stuff,” he said. “It’s mostly just things we’ve bought since we’ve been here. It won’t wear me out to help you.”
I took a t-shirt
from his hands and kissed his forehead. “Exactly. It’s not that much stuff. That means I’m perfectly capable of packing it on my own.” He creased his forehead but let me finish the job.
We met my cousin and his boyfriend on the beach not five minutes later, and walked up to the hotel parking lot. All of us were scanning the darkness. The gun was back in my waistband, cold and heavy as it pressed against my lower back.
Andreo was waiting for us behind the wheel of his rented SUV with the motor running. We loaded our luggage into the back, and the moment we got in, he pulled out of the parking lot. “Bad news,” he said. “I checked the outbound flights this evening, and everything’s booked. I don’t like the idea of you staying here, Luca, not with Tino Dombruso somewhere on the island.”
“We’re actually going to go with Gianni and Zan on their boat. It seems like the safest alternative,” I told him. “Do you want to come with us?”
“No thanks. I’ll just lay low tonight and catch my flight out tomorrow,” Andreo said.
He drove us to the harbor where the Mariposa was docked. The forty-two foot wooden sailboat had been built in an era when craftsmanship meant something, and it was a thing of beauty. Zan and Gianni climbed aboard and began to quickly and confidently prepare her to sail, working in perfect unison. When Luca and I turned to Andreo, he said, “Keep my gun. Do you know how to use it, Nico?”
“Given my family? Oh yeah.”
“Good. I’m counting on you to take care of my brother,” he said.
“I won’t let you down.”
Luca hugged his brother. “You need to watch your back, Andreo, both here and when you get back to Rome. He’s gunning for you, too.”
“I will. Call me every day. If I don’t hear from you, I’m sending out the Navy to rescue you.”
Luca grinned a little and asked, “Which Navy?”
“All of them. Please be safe. That goes for you too, Nico.”
“You do the same,” I called as he turned and jogged down the dock.
I helped Luca onto the boat and took him below deck, where he sank onto a built-in sofa in the living area. After a moment, the boat began to pull out of the harbor, powered by its engine. “I’m surprised Andreo left my side,” Luca said as he stretched out on his back and put his head on my lap. “I would think the sudden appearance of your hitman brother would put him in full watchdog mode. He must really trust you to take care of me.”