Tales of Darkness & Sin - Pepper Winters Page 0,25

“Win-win for the Amato family.”

“Assuming we can actually get to the girl. Paolo Vitali locks her in his fortress and barely lets her out of his sight after what happened to the sister,” Uncle Gaetano remarked.

I made a mental note to look into Carlotta Vitali. I hadn’t seen her in years, but we never ran in the same circles and I’d never bothered with petty gossip.

“Maybe you can finally put your dick to good use,” Angelo sneered, always up for an opportunity to take jabs at me and never succeeding.

He was the same age as me, but that was where the similarities ended. He was stupid and bitter for it, greedy and gluttonous, but without the wherewithal to attain what he desired.

He’d hated me since we were children.

I didn’t hate him at all.

Hating him would have implied he was worthy of my notice.

I rolled a pen between my fingers and let a smile tug one corner of my mouth. “Oh, my dick is good for plenty. If you worried about your own sex life as much as you worried about mine, little Angelo, maybe you’d get better results, hmm?”

His fleshy face screwed up, the blood rushing to the surface of his skin as if he were about to pop. “Where the fuck is your respect, Francesco?”

He thought calling me Francesco like the rest of the elders got beneath my skin. It didn’t. I went by Frankie, because Francesco was a mouthful for women to scream when I was balls deep inside them.

“You’ll get my respect when you earn it.” I didn’t bother hiding my amusement. “Just like everyone else.”

“And what have you done to garner our respect?” Don Amato’s words cut through the air with the force of a whip landing across my back. I flinched at the cold anger in that tone. “The Amato family’s reckless Casanova and homewrecker. You flagrantly ignore the rules of this family and its men of honor, Francesco. Maybe it’s about time you proved yourself worthy of the Amato name.”

They obviously didn’t understand the irony of their chastisement.

They accused me of being good for nothing but getting my dick wet, yet they were now asking me to prove myself by doing exactly that.

I didn’t point that out to them.

They were family, sure, but le mafie wasn’t about family.

It was about an inbred army. Though these were my uncles, cousins, and brothers, they only saw me as an underperforming soldier.

I’d take this as an opportunity to prove that I was so much more than that.

Than them.

The hot swell of anger in my chest cooled and hardened like lava after the flood. I tossed my pen at Angelo, stood, and addressed the room, “Consider Liliana Vitali mine.”

And she would be.

At least, her virginity would.

CHAPTER ONE

Francesco

Stalking Liliana Vitali was dull as fuck.

Usually, I got a thrill from following someone. That animal delight that comes from stalking your prey.

Not so this time.

Liliana was pure as freshly driven snow. As fucking boring, too. She bought produce at the market with her mother once a week, visited her equally vanilla, vapid teenage girlfriends, and spent long hours in her room reading on her bed.

At least she was beautiful, though not in a way I was used to. She was fresh-faced, freckles the only adornment to her glowing, golden tan. She had no curves to speak of, just long, delicate bones that made her seem deliciously breakable.

All that purity excited the darkest recesses of my brain. It conjured images of my big hand around the long column of her fragile throat. Of bruises pressed and punctured into that flawless skin, purple and red around her neck and wrists like exquisite jewelry.

I wanted to bend that little body and sink into her until I broke her mind.

My dick kicked in my jeans.

Directly across from Paolo Vitali’s house, I sat on a folding chair on Maria Louisa's roof and watched his daughter through the open doors of her bedroom balcony.

I’d just bedded the plump and deliciously curved Maria Louisa. She hadn’t uttered a word of protest when I told her I was going to the roof with a glass of grappa and an after-sex cigar.

Liliana’s long spill of black hair caught the dim yellow light of her bedside table lamp. She stood up to accept someone into her room. I watched her smile and take a package from the woman at her door.

The thin thread of her giggles reached my ears like the distant peal of church bells. I wondered what noises she