by Bethany-Kris
Somehow, someway she had to survive.
She had to give their child a fighting chance and Mac a little more time to find them.
The door to her prison opened and James stepped inside closing the door behind him before he came and stood over her.
“How are you feeling, Melina?”
“How do you think, cafone?”
James laughed. “I see my boy has been teaching you some Italian.”
“That’s not the only thing he taught me.”
“I’m sure it isn’t, but you know, forget about it. None of that really matters now.”
She couldn’t help but notice how cleaned up and straight James looked. It was no secret in Mac’s life that his father had been a drunk and abused drugs as well as women. But he did look clean in that moment.
“Why are you doing this? What could you possibly have to gain by causing all these problems for your son?”
Melina really could give less than two fucks as to why James had chosen to betray the son he claimed to love so much, but she had to keep him talking. It was the only way to save herself and her child.
“You’re an outsider. You will never understand how our life works.”
“What I understand, James, is that you are a world-class fuck up who made Mac’s life a lot harder than it needed to be. What I understand is that he has spent his whole life bearing the burden of being your son. Instead of you disappearing into the ether where you belong, you’re here ruining everything Mac has worked so hard for.”
James slapped her across the face.
Melina tasted blood, but she smiled at her father-in-law, concealing her hurt. “Struck a nerve, did I?”
“Everything I have done I did for him.”
“Delusional much? I’m sure Mac is going to be so grateful to you for trying to blow me up and for kidnapping me. I can just see him falling all over himself to thank you.”
James grabbed her face, squeezing her jaw. “That mouth of yours—how does he deal with it? Does he just fuck it quiet? Because that’s what I would do. There’s plenty of pussy out there that knows their place, but no, Mac had to go for you. A worthless piece of ass, but here you are, being his wife.”
“A piece of ass that you can’t keep your eyes off apparently.”
“You’re nice to look at, I’ll give you that, but you ruin it every time you open that rosebud mouth of yours.”
“Every rose has its thorns.”
Melina watched James closely. He was at war with himself, torn between his desire for her and snuffing out her existence at the same time.
“They do. The world won’t miss you, Melina. Not the one we live in. In time, my son will understand. Wives are always replaceable.”
“You’re a fool. Mac will never forgive you for this.”
James’ fingers trailed down to her neck and he squeezed tight. “What’s a woman compared to a boss’s seat?”
Power.
James wanted his son in power.
The innocent blood on his hands didn’t matter.
The collateral damage, it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that James saw this as his big chance to make up for past mistakes. Now was his chance to give Mac the one thing he’d never been able to have before … respect. Damn anything and anyone that got in his way. Fuck Cosa Nostra and all it stood for. The only code James Sr. lived by was his own.
“If you weren’t such a despicable piece of shit, this might actually be touching. The absentee father rides to the rescue. Too bad this isn’t some fairytale.”
“Get up. I’ve had enough of your fucking mouth.”
Melina was roughly jerked to her feet and she gasped as the sudden motion made her ribs ache all over again. Her eyes widened when the barrel of a gun was pressed to the side of her head.
“What? Nothing to say now?” James asked.
“Make sure you don’t miss.”
“Trust me, I won’t.”
He cocked the hammer of the gun and Melina closed her eyes.
This was it.
No more Mac.
No more sweet kisses, dirty sex and passionate nights.
No baby.
She stifled back a scream at the last thought and then gunshots rang out.
Multiple gunshots.
The gun was lowered from her head.
“What in the hell?”
Melina opened her eyes as her father-in-law wrapped his arm around her shoulders, dragging her in front of him like a human shield. The sounds of gunfire hadn’t stopped and as James dragged her closer and closer to the door, she started to struggle against him. He wasn’t about to use her to save himself.
“Be still, you bitch.”
She kept struggling and just when they were about to cross the threshold, salvation appeared in the form of a blood-splattered, gun-toting Mac. He looked like the Angel of Death come to claim his latest victims. Melina’s eyes met his, but it was as if he were staring straight past her.
There was nothing behind his gaze.
It was empty.
Melina had seen him cold and callous, but she’d never seen Mac empty.
Terror clutched her heart in a vice grip.
“Son, what are you doing here?” James asked.
“I think the question you should be asking yourself is why you were stupid enough to leave tracks. If you’re going to do something, then at least do it right.”
Melina couldn’t see James’ face but she could feel him stiffening as he held her tight to his body.
“I wanted you to find out.”
Mac raised a brow. “Did you? Now that’s a lie if I ever heard one.”
James slowly backed away from his son, pulling Melina with him. “I wanted you to know everything. Everything I did to put you in the position you deserve.”
“You did nothing! All you did was fuck things up, just like you do best. You aren’t fit to shine the shoes of the men whose blood you spilled.”
“And what makes them so much better than me, huh? I drank. Big fucking deal.”
Mac laughed, a cold chilling sound that made the hair on her arms raise.
“If you think that was all you did, then you are more delusional than I thought but at this point I couldn’t give less than a fuck. I came for my wife and I’m not leaving here without her.”
For the briefest of moments, Mac’s gaze slipped to her and she saw a hint of the man she married.
And just like that it was gone.
The man without a soul was back.
“She’s not good enough for you, son. You see the way they looked at her—how they’ve talked about her. She’s replaceable, and you’ll move on.”
“What I need is the woman you’re holding at gunpoint. Give me my wife—I’m not going to say it one more fucking time.”
“I can’t do that son. One day you’ll understand.”
James pressed the gun to Melina’s forehead and she screamed.
Gunfire exploded.
Hot, red blood splattered Melina’s face.
Her captor’s grip on her loosened and she quickly moved in the direction of her husband. Mac hadn’t even looked at her. Melina turned. James Maccari Sr. lay eagle sprawled on the ground. A bullet hole between the eyes oozed blood.
The bastard was dead.
Mac had killed his own father.
Melina faced her husband and found him looking at her.
“Mac?” she said hesitantly.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner, doll. I’m so sorry.”
He put his gun into the side of his coat and reached for her. Hands still tied, Melina melted into her husband’s embrace and finally gave into the tears she’d been holding back.
“Oh, Mac,” she sobbed.
“Shh. It’s over.”
Melina stopped crying long enough to look up at her husband.
She didn’t like what she saw.
“It’s not really over, is it? This is just the beginning.”
/> Mac swallowed hard. “Yeah. We’re just getting started.”
Mac was, once again, sitting at his wife’s side as she rested propped up in a hospital bed. He knew this time, there would be no early release for her. The broken rib and wrist was concerning, and would keep her in the bed for at least a few days.
She could use the rest, of course, but Mac wished it wasn’t because of this.
Worse, was the detectives standing at the end of his wife’s bed, slamming them with question after question. It was unrelenting, and Mac could see that his wife’s patience was slipping, though she was doing her best to deflect as much as she could.
Melina had escaped her captor.
She’d made a phone call using a payphone on the corner.
Mac found her.
No, she didn’t know who it was.
No, she couldn’t lead them back to where she had been taken, it all happened so fast.
Or, that was the story his wife was telling.
The detectives had yet to connect the burning warehouse in lower Brooklyn to the fact his wife had apparently been “picked up” just four blocks away. Mac didn’t offer the information, either.
“You’re not being very helpful to this investigation, Mrs. Maccari,” one of the detectives said.
Melina looked fucking exhausted.
She couldn’t take strong painkillers to help with the pain she was experiencing because of the pregnancy. She hadn’t been able to sleep because the questioning had been going on for hours. The detectives had a job to do, as far as that went, but so did Mac and Melina. That was only to protect one another, and secondly, Cosa Nostra.
“I think that’s about all we’ve got for you boys today,” Mac said, standing from his seat.
The beady-eyed, shorter detective turned his gaze on Mac. “We’re not finished—”
“Yes, you are.”
“No, we have—”
Mac reached over and hit the red button on the wall that would immediately call through to the hospital security. If he had his way, he’d walk the detectives out of the hospital room with a goddamn gun to their faces as he chewed their asses out for making this fucking night even worse for his wife.
He couldn’t do that.
They had too much attention on them as it was.
Melina wouldn’t like Mac going to jail.
Those were the things he repeated to himself as he patiently waited for a security guard to make his way down to the room. Once the man did finally show, one of the detectives scoffed at the sight of him.
“We have an active investigation—she’s a victim and a witness. You can’t impede that, Maccari,” he told Mac.
Mac just shrugged. “Then come back tomorrow. Give us a date and time to be at the precinct. Shit, my wife is a fucking great cook, we’ll have you over for supper once she’s back home. But you will not ask her one more thing tonight. Get out.”
It took another few minutes before the security guard was able to escort the detectives from the room. Mac wasted no time closing the door to the hospital room behind them. Then, he was back at Melina’s side and falling into the chair beside her bed.
With her gaze down, locked on her fidgeting hands, Melina seemed overwhelmed.
Mac understood that.
Silently, he found her hand with his own, holding tight and letting their fingers tangle together.
“I’m so tired,” Melina murmured.
Mac reached over to cup his wife’s bruised cheek, angry because she was hurt, guilty because he’d let it happen, and wishing he could take it all away. “I know, doll.”
“They’re not going to leave us alone.”
The police, she meant.
Mac understood what she didn’t say well enough.
“We’ll handle them when we need to. Right now, we’re going to focus on getting you better, then bringing you home, and always making you happy.”
He’d spoil her rotten, or as much as she would let him.
He’d make her happy, just to see her smile every day.
“This is just a bump in the road,” Mac told her. “We’ll get over it soon.”
Melina’s gaze drifted to the closed door. “What’s going to happen now?”
Mac didn’t know, and he had no idea how to answer her.
There were still so many things left hanging up in the air. His actions leading up to finding his wife—like his choice to go after Enzo’s son—were just some of the many things he would have to handle over the coming months. The attention of officials was yet another problem that only seemed to be closing in around la famiglia, though Mac seriously hoped that would be lessened by the fact at least one of the people that had been talking to police was now dead in a ditch.
Tyler, that was.
But how much information could the officials be getting from an unmade kid with an underboss for a father?
“Don’t worry about it,” Mac found himself saying.
He’d said it only to soothe his wife’s worries.
Certainly not because he meant it.
Melina could see right through it. “Are we going to be okay at the end of all this?”
That, Mac did have an answer for.
One he was sure was the truth because he would make it happen, no matter what.
“Yeah, doll, we’re going to be just fine.”
Mac had thought—wrongly so—that his greatest battle in Cosa Nostra would be overcoming the shame his father had left stained on their family’s name.
That wasn’t the hardest battle at all.
No, the hardest was watching the strong foundation of a Cosa Nostra family, built so firmly upon a base of loyalty, rules, and trust, begin to show its cracks. Because once the cracks began to show themselves, it wouldn’t take long for the walls to come down.
Mac watched a month go by, and then another and another. He felt his wife’s stomach grow under his palm until he could feel the gentle kicks of a baby that wouldn’t quite cooperate during ultrasounds to see the gender. He waited the seasons changing out, wanting warmer weather and less cold.
But what he didn’t see, what didn’t happen, was la famiglia coming back together.
So much distrust and anger had been woven into the strands of the Pivetti crime family. Each and every time another made man in the family was pulled in by FBI, the attention of the family was on that man, accusations flying and suspicions rising.
Why hadn’t the officials stopped yet?
Why were they still digging for things no one was offering?
No one seemed to have an answer for that.
Disgruntled Capos left crews hanging and unable to work together. Meetings called by Luca in an effort to straighten out the men usually ended in shouting matches that damn near came to blows every single time.
It was all bad.
Mac thought about the last few months as he walked into Luca’s office, a late night call that was once again, meant only for the purpose of smoothing out issues between men.
It seemed like if one problem was solved, three more popped up.
Luca was struggling with his men.
Mac and Enzo happened to be two of them, unfortunately.
The moment Mac walked into the office, he found the underboss in the corner, a glass of whiskey in his hand and hate coloring up his features.
“Good to see you finally showed up,” Enzo said.
Mac refused to rise to the man’s bait.
Because that’s all it was.
Enzo couldn’t retaliate against Mac for the killing of his teenaged son, if only because it was justified in the eyes of Cosa Nostra. Permission had been given by the boss, and Tyler had not been a made man. But that didn’t mean Enzo accepted those rules, or for that matter, the very fact that his best friend—Luca—had allowed the killing.
Apparently, Mac’s wife could be replaced.
Tyler could not be.
Mac didn’t think the two should have been seen as interchangeable souls. Both
meant something to the people who loved them, and while he wished things could have been different for Enzo’s son, it was what it was.
And Mac would put another bullet between the kid’s eyes if he had to.
But that moment was over.
“I’m not late,” Mac said, strolling past another Capo to take a seat against the far wall. It left his back protected, and his gaze on the whole room. With the amount of unhappiness in the family, Mac trusted none of these people. Except for maybe the boss. Giving Luca his attention, he said, “Evening, boss.”
Luca, sitting on the edge of his desk, nodded at Mac. “You are cutting it close.”
“Late night cravings,” Mac said to explain away his tardiness.
At the mention of his pregnant wife, Enzo’s anger turned to disgust and he looked away. Not in time to hide it, however.
More bait, Mac knew.
He wouldn’t rise to it.
Enzo only wanted a reason to come at Mac, to have his retaliation, and nothing more.
Refusing to even give Enzo more of his attention, Mac swept the large office with his gaze, taking in the men that couldn’t be bothered to talk to one another, and barely even looked at one another.
He was never more aware of how awful an effect the official’s attention and the events that led up to it were affecting the men.
Really, it was hurting the whole family.
Luca pushed off his desk, grabbing a folder and opening it up. Flipping through what looked to be photographs, he started calling out names. Mac recognized some, if only because the men’s names were members of different crews, some he had worked with when he was just a solider.
All of the names came from crews other than his.
Not one was a man of his.
Every time a new name was called for a different crew, a Capo would stand a little straighter, staring at their boss in both concern and confusion.
When Luca was finally done, he tossed the folder aside, photos of men spilling out across the large desk. “We have a problem.”
“Many problems,” Enzo added under his breath.
Luca barely passed him a glance. “The men I named—they’ve all been pulled in by officials over the last month. Figure out why and if they’re a problem we need to fix, or I will do it.”