that shit.” The vibrations of my cell phone demanded my attention and I picked it up.
They’re at some fancy place in the city. Luis is with them.
Good. Stay on them.
I hit send, unsure whether to feel relieved or more anxious. I hadn’t even had to ask Bailey to keep an eye on Arianne, he’d offered. I didn’t want to drag him any deeper into the shit between me, Fascini, and Roberto, but something told me he wouldn’t listen anyway. And the truth was, I needed to have eyes on her, eyes I trusted with my life.
“Everything okay?” Dane asked, and I nodded. “You sure don’t look like everything’s okay. You can talk to me, you know. We’re family. One day we’re going to be running everything, together.”
I didn’t ever let myself look too far into the future, not when it was mapped out before me. But things were different now.
I was different.
“I’m trying to see a way through this, but I’m not going to lie, kid, it’s real fucking hard.”
“Hey, less of the kid. You’re like two years older than me.”
“Three.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” He waved me off. “You know your old man will fix it. Uncle Toni isn’t going to let some Suit piss all over him and the Family.”
“You know the history between the Marchetti and the Capizola?”
He gave me a half-shrug. “I know all I need to know. They went one way, we went the other, now we’re on opposite sides of the line.”
I smirked. The kid sure had a way with words. “Something like that.” I scrubbed my jaw. “The point is, we’ve got history.” And history had a funny way of repeating itself.
Dane grumbled to himself. He was still young. He didn’t understand the finesse required when handling certain situations. Roberto Capizola and Mike Fascini weren’t just your everyday guys. They had power, money... they had connections. If we were going to finally go up against them, we needed to have an airtight plan. Because when you went to war people got hurt.
People died.
“I just hate knowing that she’s there... with him. If he hurts her again...” Pure rage exploded in my veins. My body shook, my teeth grinding violently behind my lips.
I wanted to kill Scott Fascini.
I would kill him.
One day, when he was least expecting it, I would watch the life drain from his eyes and feel nothing but satisfaction.
“Shit, Nicco, you’re a better guy than me. Some dude ever touched a girl I was seeing, I’d tear his dick off his body and feed it to him.”
I smiled at that. I couldn’t help it. “Trust me when I say, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”
One way or another, Scott Fascini would pay.
Silence settled over us as we stared at the roaring fire. Boston was worlds apart from La Riva. My thoughts drifted to Enzo and Matteo and what they would be doing right now. Part of me wondered if Matt would be able to keep our hot-headed cousin out of trouble. I’d asked them both to keep an eye on Alessia. I wanted to ask them to watch over Arianne, but Enzo was still coming to terms with everything, and I knew he intimidated her. So Bailey seemed like the better option, for now. We all needed to lie low, to let the dust settle. Roberto Capizola might have double crossed me, but he’d obviously pulled some strings because I was still breathing and as far as I was aware, there had been no comeback on the Family yet.
Everything was quiet.
The calm before the unstoppable storm.
I’d beaten the crap out of Scott and put Tristan Capizola in a coma. You didn’t just walk away from that.
“What’s it like?” Dane finally broke the silence. “Being a capo? Being out there, working for the Family?”
Dane was a tall kid. He had broad shoulders and a trim waist, and it was obvious he worked out. But right there, with the glow of the fire dancing across his face, he looked like a little kid, scared and fascinated in equal measure.
“It is what it is.” I ran my thumb around the bottle neck. “Being Marchetti means family, it means putting the Family above all else. It means being prepared to fight... to hurt... to die for Dominion.”
“Your initiation...” His voice was quiet, a trace of uncertainty there. “What did you have to do?”
“You know what it entails.” All men born into the Family did.
“Yeah but hearing about it and knowing it are different things.”
I tipped my head