call like that that I make, repeating those instructions, is as crisp and obedient as I expect it to be. I do not have to describe to them the future they will inhabit if they even so much as think about crossing me. My tone tells the story, clear as day.
When I hang up for the last time, and Dani’s brother has been effectively marooned on a drug-free island in the middle of this oasis of sin we call a city, I think about calling her.
But I don’t, of course. The feeling passes swiftly. I am not that sort of man.
In my office, I drop into my chair and idly jab at the desk with the letter opener. But I have dawdled long enough. Now, business beckons. After a call to the hospital to check on Giuseppe and his wife and child—all of whom are now doing well—I open the top drawer where I keep the notes for the club.
My blood turns cold when I see what sits on top.
It’s a rectangular business card. An Albanian phrase is written on it in blood-red letters: Po ju shikojme. A quick Google search tells me it means: We’re watching you.
I crush the note in my hand. If they can get to me here, they are saying that they can get to me anywhere.
Then I get angry, really fucking angry, and before I know it I’m stabbing the letter opener into the table so hard it hurts my hand. I’m stabbing it so hard it buries right up to the hilt, and then the wooden desktop cracks and splinters. All the times I’ve done this, that has never happened before.
So much for radio silence.
Fucking Albanians. First, they trick us and then they disrespect our territory and now this?
I call Levi, hands shaking. It takes him far too long to pick up. He’s been like that, lately. Not unreliable, exactly, but almost as though he could become that way. I tell him about the note and then order, “I want twice the security on all of our businesses. Tell the men I’ll handle the overtime pay. For the lieutenants, of course. The lower-ranking men, tell them this is their chance to show their loyalty to the Family. If any of them complain, bring them straight to me.”
“Shit.” Levi’s making sniffling noises. I can’t blame him for partying, seeing as it is almost two in the morning, but cocaine? That, too, is very unlike him. “Okay, Angelo. You got it. Anything else?”
“Just do what I said, Levi.” I hang up and pace around the office. Then I open the door and storm out.
We keep a small gym downstairs, for when work keeps me at the office late and I want to exercise to expend pent-up energy. I enter, strip off my jacket and shirt, and go to the punching babg. I don’t wrap my hands. I work it with hard jabs and vicious hooks until the plastic cracks and my bare knuckles are throbbing painfully. Sweat slides down between my forehead.
It brings me little relief.
I only stop when my cell phone rings again. I pick it up without checking the screen, expecting Levi.
“It’s done?” I bark, breathing heavily.
“Oh—shit—I shouldn’t’ve called …”
It is not Levi.
“But you did call, Dani,” I reply after a pause, dropping into my desk chair. I welcome the change of pace and mood. It’s refreshing. “And here we are. I suppose you didn’t want to leave it up to fate this time?”
“Actually, I was hoping for an apology.”
“Keep hoping.”
“Demanding,” she corrects. “I am demanding an apology. You were really rude to me last time we saw each other.”
The gulf from the letter opener splitting through the wood has widened since I left. A symbol? An omen? The Family crumbling under my stewardship?
No, I tell myself. It’s just a shitty fucking desk.
“Where are you?” I ask calmly, changing the subject.
“Why?”
So I just tell her, honestly. “Because I want to come there and fuck you until neither of us can move anymore. I want to seize your hair and slide my throbbing cock up between your legs, but I want you to keep your legs pressed together, to make me fight for it. To claim you. To take you. And when I do, I want you to moan. As loud as you possibly can.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Dani whispers, but she doesn’t mean a word of it. “Don’t even start, Angelo.”
I press my hips into the table, groaning at the thought of spreading Dani’s thighs