Reno Gabrini - Mallory Monroe Page 0,2

alongside me. We have to show a united front to maintain our grip on power now that he’s gone.” Then he exhaled with bitterness in his voice. “It’s the least you can do.”

Von looked at his old man. He loved him, but that hate he had for him, too, was equally as strong. “Is that an order?” he asked him.

Mustafa’s face changed into a face of rage, and he lashed out. “Fuck you!” he yelled at his son. “How dare you ask me something like that? He’s your flesh and blood!” He said it so powerfully that it shook the room. And then he just stood there, shaking and still fuming. And then he angrily left.

Von was enraged, too, as he smashed his cigarette in the ashtray on his nightstand, and then laid back on his bed with a hard thump down. He was so tired of that shit he didn’t know what to do. He even tossed that envelope into the air as if the precise instructions inside were trash to him.

But that singular photograph of Sophia Gabrini, the girl that was now his assignment, fell away from that envelope and floated backwards across the bed until it landed, of all places, on his heart.

CHAPTER ONE

Three Days Later

The limo sped across the vacant lot and stopped behind a van. Reno Gabrini and his cousin Sal Gabrini watched from the backseat as Sal’s men got out of the van, went around back, and opened the van’s double doors. When they grabbed the man they knew as Turf Coreddi, Reno’s jaw tightened. “There’s that motherfucker,” he said.

“Think he’ll turn?” Sal asked.

“He knows my ass don’t be fucking with him. If he knows something, he’ll talk.”

One of Sal’s men opened the back passenger seat of the limo and the other one grabbed Turf Coreddi, whose hands were out in front of him and tied with zip tie, and then threw him onto the seat across from Reno and Sal.

Turf sat up complaining. “Got me tied up like I’m some common criminal,” he said. “Tell them to untie me, Reno, what are you doing?”

“You better be glad that’s all they did to your ass,” Reno said.

Sal nodded and his man closed the door of the limo and then stood outside beside the door.

“I need a cigarette,” Turf said.

“No smoking in the car,” said Sal.

“Since when you got religion, Sal Luca?” Turf asked.

“Since you got in the car. No smoking,” Sal made clear.

Turf exhaled. And looked at Reno. “What do you want?”

“Answers.”

“What’s the question?”

“Five of my midlist hotels have been shut down in the past five weeks. A hotel a week, like this shit some game.”

Turf frowned. “What that got to do with me?”

“Every one of those hotels are located in the southeast: your territory. Every one of them have been shut down by order of the various departments of professional regulations based on a bunch of bogus bullshit. I want to know who’s behind it, and why they’re doing it.”

But Turf frowned. “How would I know who’s behind some hotel shutdowns? That ain’t what I do. I don’t know shit about no hotels. Maybe you need to talk to the state officials who shut you down, Reno.”

“I’m talking to your ass because you know as well as I know those bureaucrats do whatever they’re told to do. And this shit don’t have official business nowhere near it. It has mob written all over it.”

“And since your mob is the biggest one in that region,” said Sal, “and since you’re the boss of said mob, we want answers.”

“And I mean right quick and in a hurry,” said Reno.

“Or?” Turf had the nerve to ask.

“Or,” Sal Gabrini said without hesitation, “you won’t have a mob to boss.”

Turf stared at both men. He knew who he was dealing with. They were two of the most powerful men in America right in front of him. And neither one of them talked for the sake of talking. They backed up every word they said. “I been hearing some rumblings,” Turf finally admitted.

“What kind of rumblings?” Sal asked.

“What do you mean what kind? Rumblings. Talk. Gossip. Whatever you wanna call it. I hear somebody’s trying to take you down, Reno.”

“How they figure to do that?” Reno asked.

“First, they shut down your chain of smaller hotels across the country, just to see if it can be done.”

“And then?” Reno asked.

“And then, from what I’m hearing, which may or may not be the truth, they go for the king of hotels.