Blood Always

by Ramsower, Jill

  “I doubt it. I’m guessing he got patched up and headed to wherever he’s got a contact who would harbor him. Every outfit in the country knows we’re looking for him, so he’d have to find someone outside the life or a family man with a death wish.” I studied the man who I regarded as one of my most trusted, loyal friends. “We’re going to find him, Diego. And when we do, you’ll have your revenge. I promise you.”

  His eyes snapped over to meet my gaze before sadness softened his features. “All right, I hear you. I’m not about to do anything rash.” Pressing his hands on his knees to help hoist him up, he rose from the chair and nodded at me. “I’m gonna stop by the office for a bit before I head back home and check on Bella.”

  “Take care of your wife. We can handle the rest,” I murmured.

  Isabella Venturi had slipped into a crippling depression after the loss of her son, making it that much harder for Diego to process his own grief. A better friend probably would have tried to help talk him through it, but that wasn’t me. I wasn’t a fucking shrink. He needed time off—not a problem—but that’s as far as my nurturing side went. He’d have to figure out his own shit just like the rest of us.

  He lifted his fingers in a resigned wave and took off.

  The second hand didn’t even make it all the way around the face of my new Bulgari watch when my brother interrupted again.

  “Nona called while you were busy. Said it was important.” He gave two raps on the doorframe with his knuckles and disappeared.

  When I glanced down at my phone, I had three missed calls from my grandmother. Some days I felt like the king of men, and others, I wondered if I wasn’t a glorified nanny, cleaning up spills and talking angry toddlers down from tantrums. From my soldiers to my brothers to discarded girlfriends and insulted business associates—there was always a fire to be put out, and as the underboss of the Gallo family, all roads led to me.

  As it so happened, Nona was one of my favorite people on the planet, but everything was always important in her eyes. At eighty-three years old, she’d seen the death of both her parents and two of her six children, including my mother. She walked to the corner market each morning to buy whatever food she planned to cook. On one of those trips, she beat a man unconscious with a 2x4 for trying to mug her at the ripe old age of sixty-one. She worked in the family deli while raising her children, one of which she birthed on her lunch break and went back to selling sausage an hour later with a newborn slung across her chest. She was the toughest, fiercest woman I’d ever known.

  Nona took the place of my mother when she died, and for that, she’d always hold a special place in my heart. However, the woman could be absolutely maddening. She saw fit to call me regularly with important news such as rain in the forecast or my Aunt Teresa’s newly developed head cold. One time, she’d called to make sure I knew lambchops were on special at the butcher near her apartment.

  To Nona Luisa, everything was important, and she wouldn’t stop calling until her message had been received.

  I selected her contact in my favorites and waited as the phone rang. We had tried to get her a cell phone on a number of occasions, but she refused to learn how to use one. Instead, she held tightly to her push-button landline phone hanging on the wall of her kitchen.

  “Hello?” Her garbled voice came across the line.

  “Nona, it’s me. Filip said you had something you wanted to tell me?”

  “Ah! Tito, just who I wanted to talk to.” She’d called me Tito since I was a baby, claiming I’d earned the ‘giant’ nickname by trying to run the family before I was out of diapers. “This morning I was looking at the cards, and when I did your spread—I don’t even want to say it.” Her voice dropped as if the winds of fate might overhear her. “It was the death card, Tito. It came up in your present, which means something’s coming. Something big.”

  Despite being born and raised in America, Nona was a big believer in the tarot cards taught to her by her grandmother. In my opinion, if you dealt the cards often enough, you’d eventually tell an accurate fortune, but it was about as reliable as rolling a set of dice, and I didn’t care to bet on either of them. However, in this particular instance, her cards happened to appear more accurate than not.

  “I bet I know what it is.”

  “You do? Tell me,” she insisted.

  “There’s a new tattoo I’m planning to get on my ribs.” The comment was meant to goad her—she hated my tattoos.

  “Gah,” she barked over the phone, doubtless flipping me an Italian hand gesture as well. “Here I am trying to prepare you—to help you—and you make a joke of it.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Nona, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound unappreciative.”

  “Yes, you did. Don’t add lying to your sins.”

  “All right, all right. Here’s the truth. There are some big changes coming, but it’s not set in stone, so I didn’t want to tell you yet.”

  “Tell me now. It could be the death card is coming for me—I’m eighty-three, you know. Maybe tomorrow I don’t wake up.”

  “God, Nona, stop it! You know I hate it when you talk like that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “No, the truth is you’ll probably outlive us all.”

  “I’ll outlive you if you don’t tell me what’s coming. I’m too old to be patient.”

  I sighed heavily. Now that Maria and I had met, I was more confident about telling my family. I hadn’t wanted to tell them if there was any chance the deal would fall through. “I’ve been seeing someone.”

  Silence.

  I worried I’d given the old broad a heart attack with my news. “Nona? You okay?”

  “Who is this woman you’re seeing?” All pretenses of elderly convalescence were dropped as the cut-throat woman who helped raise me stepped forward. Nona wasn’t just fierce—she was fiercely protective. Despite her claims that she wanted to see me settled down, no woman was ever good enough for her first-born grandson. It had always amused me in the past, but this was Maria we were talking about. She was going to be my wife, whether Nona liked it or not, and my own protective instincts bristled.

  “Why should it matter? If she’s in my life, I expect you and everyone else to treat her with the same respect you would treat me.” My voice was a wooden gavel that should have closed the discussion.

  “You know as well as I do that everyone must earn their own respect. This woman is no different. You bring her to me, and I’ll make that decision for myself.”

  Had it been any other person on this planet who had disregarded my command, I would have jumped down their throat or simply showed up on their doorstep to make my reprimand more personal. But it wasn’t any other person, so instead, I massaged my fingers across my temple and eased the stale air from my lungs. “Things are complicated right now, but I’ll bring her by when the time is right.”

  “You’re a good boy, Tito.” Her self-satisfied grin was almost audible.

  “‘Cause I let you walk all over me?”

  “You love your Nona, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

  I grunted with a smirk. “No more meddling, Nona. I’ll talk to you soon.” I hung up, shaking my head and wondering how that woman always managed to bend me to her will. I told myself it was just easier not to fight her, but deep down, I knew it was more. I liked to make her happy.

  In this instance, giving her a spoonful of information also helped me start to spread the word about my pretend relationship. I had no doubt Nona was already on the phone with my sister-in-law, gossiping about who the mystery woman could be.

  Nona had turned her nose up at every woman I’d ever dated. As I tried to envision the brash and abrasive Maria meeting my family, I had no clue what the outcome would be. In my experience, women didn’t tend to get along. Period. Even more volatile—put two dominant women in a room together and you’d have World War III on your hands. Maria and Nona had the potential to make my life hell.

  Regardless
of anyone’s opinion, Maria was going to be my wife.

  The question I kept asking myself was, why? Maria herself didn’t seem too thrilled with the arrangement. So, why had she agreed to the marriage? I didn’t get the impression Enzo had forced her into it. She certainly wasn’t a hopeless romantic smitten with the idea of a love affair. I knew my own reasons for agreeing to the marriage, but why would a feral kitten like my fiancée have voluntarily given up her freedom? There was a lot I didn’t know about her. As much as I wanted to search out the answers, it was probably best for both of us if they stayed in the dark.

  Chapter 3

  Maria

  2 Weeks Earlier

  “You know who you remind me of?” I purred next to my companion’s ear.

  “Who?” he asked greedily in his thick Italian accent.

  “A young Al Pacino. You ever see that old movie Scarface?” He looked like Al Pacino about as much as a subway rat.

  I had gone to the bar just to listen for information and keep an eye on local activity. I hadn’t meant to pick up an admirer, but the opportunity had been too good to ignore. Sometimes fate drops a shiny wrapped package right in your lap, and this one was all mine. I couldn’t honestly be expected to ignore it.

  I’d been sipping on the same martini for the last hour while I’d encouraged him to toss back one Old Fashion after another. He was so drunk, I could almost see the alcohol sloshing behind his eyes.

  “Me? You really think I look like Al Pacino?”

  “Absolutely! Do I look like the kinda girl who would lie?” I peered up at him through my heavily mascaraed lashes.

  As if looks could tell you anything about a person.

  That was one of the greatest misconceptions in our society—that we had any clue what a person was like without crawling beneath their skin and swimming alongside their darkest fantasies. Hell, some of the worst serial killers of our time were beloved members of the community. When authorities dig up bodies from beneath some psychopath’s floorboards, the neighbors are always shocked, quoted by nosey TV reporters as saying, ‘he always seemed like such a nice guy.’ You never heard any of John Wayne Gacy’s neighbors telling anyone, “I knew that guy was a worthless sack of shit. You could just tell by the way he smiled.”

  Lesson to be learned? Never be so arrogant as to assume you know anyone.

  If you must make assumptions, always assume the worst, then work backward from there. It will save a world of grief.

  Unfortunately for my companion, he hadn’t yet learned that lesson.

  His eyes grew hooded as he listed to the side. “La donna più bella … the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen,” he muttered almost to himself.

  Anyone who has watched the littlest bit of National Geographic as a kid knows that some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet are also the deadliest.

  Before I could muster a forced response, my phone buzzed. I took it out of my purse and flashed it in apology before reading the message from my father.

  I need you to come to the house first thing tomorrow.

  A fissure of fear skated down my spine. Are the girls okay? I’d never worried much about my sisters before, but lately, they’d been under attack, bringing to light just how vulnerable they were.

  Alessia and Sofia are fine, just have business to discuss. I released a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding before replying with a thumbs up. I slid the phone back in my purse and returned to the role of seductress. It was time to draw the curtain on this act.

  Gently biting my glossy bottom lip, I glanced around coyly. “You wanna get out of here?”

  His face split into a wide grin as I stood.

  Too easy.

  I took his arm in a way that looked like he was escorting me out, rather than me helping to support him, which was the reality of the situation. We eased our way out of the basement level bar onto the city sidewalk. The schmuck hadn’t even made it to nine at night before he was drunk off his ass. Fortunately, there weren’t too many people out in this part of the city—mostly commuters and locals who were too absorbed with themselves to notice us.

  “My place is just a bouple of clocks from here … I mean … a couple of blocks from here.”

  As if I’d ever step foot in his cum stain of an apartment. “That’s perfect, lead the way.”

  The thrill of the moment obliterated any lingering effects I might have been feeling from my martini. Despite a spike of adrenaline, my heartrate slowed, and my senses sharpened with acute precision.

  I waited for just the right moment.

  The timing had to be impeccable.

  Nowadays, with security cameras everywhere, there was always someone watching.

  With a touch of staggering on my part, I maneuvered us to the corner of an intersection. A beat-up delivery truck came barreling down the road. I assessed the scene in slow motion, calculating odds and risks. The setup couldn’t have been more perfect had I planned it out weeks in advance.

  Just as the truck crossed into the intersection, my new friend accidentally toppled onto the crosswalk, aided by my strategically placed elbow in the back.

  The driver never even had time to tap his brakes.

  The man’s body thumped against the metal grill—the sound hanging in otherwise vacuous silence. Then, chaos rained down as tires squealed and alarmed voices called out frantically. My hands flew to my mouth in feigned shock and horror as do-gooders rushed to the man’s aid where he’d landed in a bloody heap. They crowded around him, crying in dismay and shouting at one another to call 911.

  As for me, I stumbled backward to the entrance of a nearby alley. Only once I had disappeared into the shadows did I remove my blonde wig and allow myself a satisfied grin.

  Life is good.

  ***

  “What did you need to see me about?” I sat on my father’s office sofa the next morning and studied him for clues about why he had requested my visit. If he had something to say, a simple phone call usually sufficed. Not only that, but I was going to be at the house the next day for Mom’s mandatory Sunday family dinner. What had been important enough to call me over a day early?

  “You’re well aware that Sal’s actions have created a ripple effect, poisoning our relationships with the other families. I’m doing my best to mend those fences, but it just brings to light how much weaker all the families are from lack of unity. We should be neighborly, not act like rabid dogs the minute someone enters our yard.”

  “The other families are snakes. We don’t need them.”

  “Yes, we do.” His voice became deadly serious, turning my curiosity into trepidation.

  “Where exactly is this discussion going?”

  “The families are on the verge of another war—I can feel it. I’ve been there before, and I don’t want to see it happen again. When we are pitted against one another, people get hurt, and we draw unwanted attention to ourselves. It benefits no one. Even you have to admit that.”

  I made no comment because he was right. I hadn’t experienced a war since becoming a made woman, but I knew it wouldn’t be pretty.

  “I’ve spoken with Matteo De Luca—”

  “He’s the last person you should be talking to,” I spat, cutting him off. “If we need alliances, you should talk to the Russos or the Giordanos.”

  My father’s lips thinned.

  Our relationship was complicated. I made a concentrated effort to respect him as the family boss, but he was also my father, and the history connecting us was difficult to set aside. Fortunately, he knew how far I’d come and was lenient when my emotions got the better of me. Knowing I’d stepped out of line, I attempted to cool my temper and listen to what he had to say.

  “He’s the most important person I should be talking to precisely because it is the Gallo family we are most at odds with. If we can repair that relationship, the others will be easy.”

  The room was silent for a moment as I swallowed several scathing comments. “His family murde
red Marco—your own son. How can you stomach even hearing his name?”

  My older brother was only eleven when he was brutally gunned down. I didn’t know his death triggered a war, only that it had changed everything. For two long years, all five families waged a deadly turf war against one another. It wasn’t until attrition forced a reluctant truce and brought the bloodshed to an end. The Commission was reinstated to help the New York and Chicago outfits work together. Now, the families weren’t out for blood, but they weren’t exactly close either.

  “You can’t blame every man to ever join that family for the actions of a few. Matteo wasn’t much more than a child himself at the time.”

  “Wasn’t it the Gallos who, just weeks ago, helped kidnap Alessia?” My question was rhetorical. We both knew who was responsible, which was why it dumbfounded me how my father could even consider befriending them.

  “They had valid ground to claim blood for blood after Gino Venturi was killed. Matteo is the one we have to thank for Alessia coming home alive. They were involved, but not totally to blame.”

  “Ha!” I barked with a callous laugh. “Thank him? That’s a joke.”

  “Enough!” my father yelled, slamming his hand on his large executive desk. “The hatred ends now. That chapter in our lives has closed. It’s time for all of us to move on—am I understood?”

  I sat so still, even my heartbeats slowed.

  My father wasn’t the type to raise his voice. He didn’t have to. His presence and general demeanor were usually enough to command attention and respect in any company. He had been pushed too far, and as always, it was my fault.

  Ice cold water doused my flaming anger as he continued.

  “You may want to blame the Gallos for what happened to Alessia, but you would only be lying to yourself. There are two people who are responsible—Sal for his treachery, and me for not doing my job and seeing through his façade. If you need someone to blame, then direct your anger here, because that’s where it belongs.” With the last words, he thumped his hand over his heart. “I will not watch more of my family—blood or otherwise—fall victim because of my neglect. I have to fix this, and to do that, I need your help.”