Chapter 37ANGELO

Chapter 37

ANGELO

As soon as I end the call with Perla, Miceli whistles. "Candi's right. Your mom is the one swimming in the bonkers end of the gene pool."

I had the call on speaker phone so Severu and Miceli could hear what Perla wanted. They heard Candi call me beloved too.

That's the only part of the phone call that means anything to me.

I'm not leaving my soul in Perla's clutches long enough for any harm to come to her.

" Se rat kay k ap manje kay ." Derian intones.

Severu asks, "What does that mean?"

"It's the house rat that eats the house." Derian gives me a look of commiseration. "Your mother is one foul house rat."

"She's not from my house." Not anymore.

"She's a rat though," Miceli says with disgust.

While trying to convince me that I should kill Severu and make it look like a rival faction did it, Perla kept harping on the importance of family.

Too bad for her, I don't consider her or my grandfather family. Because I'm fucking loyal to family.

"It's time to deal with Don Messino," Severu grits out.

"The final step is already in place," I assure my boss.

And if my mother wasn't the catalyst for it, she would die tonight.

Thirty minutes out from our target, we pull on our masks. I dig in the weapons go bag I brought with me. We keep one in the hidden compartment of all the work SUVs. This one is from the SUV Derian drove into Manhattan earlier today.

I pull out two extra skull masks. Every weapons go bag for my team has them.

"Here, put these on." I hand the nitrile masks to Severu and Miceli. They're imprinted with skulls like ours, but are disposable. "The skull pattern prevents facial recognition from nodal points."

"That's why your team wear skull masks?" Miceli asks.

I nod.

"Huh. I thought it was because everyone calls you Death."

Derian pulls on his mask. "Scares the hell out of targets and that's always a plus."

"I'm keeping this one," Miceli informs me.

I shake my head. "It's disposable. I'll have one made for you like ours."

"Cool."

Severu shakes his head. "If I didn't know any better, I'd believe you two were the ones that shared genes."

"That's why Angelo is our brother. He fits."

Severu grunts, but he doesn't deny it.

This is the family I am loyal to. My family by choice, the De Lucas. My team who are also my brothers in arms. My soul, Candi, and the mom and sister she brought into my life. Not the fucking Messinos.

I never fit with them and I never will.

Perla tried to tell me that killing Severu wouldn't come back on me. That my grandfather would make me a don.

But the sickly old man isn't a kingmaker anymore. And even if he was, he wouldn't be making me one. He'd sacrifice me for his plans, not put me in the center of them.

The pilot kills the lights ten klicks out. When he reaches the clearing a klick away from the house, he drops altitude and hovers.

There's no way to mask the sound of a helicopter out here, so our only option is to do the drop far enough out it won't draw too much attention. Once it flies overhead on the way to the municipal airport, with the lights back on, our helicopter will be unremarkable.

Putting on low profile night vision goggles that slide right over the skull eye sockets on our masks, eight of us prepare to rappel down two ropes hanging off the side of the helicopter. One of my men will stay onboard to pull the ropes in before the pilot takes the bird back up to altitude and turns back on the lights.

I go first, landing with a soft thud, my knees bent for impact. Seven more thumps follow, Severu, Miceli and my team landing around me in quick succession.

As one, we jog toward the target property.

I slow to a stop and put my fist up to indicate we are 100 yards out. The rest of the team takes up a wedge formation behind me. Derian drops to one knee and holds up the heat signature scanner to read the location of bodies on the property.

I take the moment to check Candi's location app. Her dot is moving, but not fast enough to be in a car.

Are they moving her from the house to a more secure location? There's a small guardhouse on the property where the security team in charge of protecting the property stay full-time. Maybe it has a basement.

Perhaps the sound of the helicopter made them wary but why not move her to the saferoom inside the house? It's a given there's a panic room there somewhere. However, Candi's not in it if she's moving.

"Two in the guardhouse," Derian says quietly. "One moving through the forest." He sucks in a breath.

"What is it?"

"There's a mass exiting the back of the house."

I don't ask for numbers. It's impossible to distinguish between heat signatures when they're close together.

"They're fanning out and running this way. I count six heat signatures."

Derian's update makes my gut clench. Candi escaped and she's being chased.

"The single runner is not a scout," I inform everyone quietly over the com units. "It's Candi."

"Roger that," is repeated back to me five times.

Severu says, "Heard."

"Got it," Miceli acknowledges.

"We reach her before they do." I lift my fist, signal go and start sprinting toward the location Candi's locator dot says she is.

The men chasing her are yelling shit at her in Italian I'm glad she can't understand. Some are shouting her name.

Do they think she's going to stop because they're yelling for her?

I hear her before I see her. Branches crackle then a heavy thump and Candi's voice. "Damn it!"

She fell.

Changing my trajectory slightly, I run toward the sound of her voice. Then I see her. She's still running, but she's limping.

Fuck.

I say her name just before I reach her. "Candi. Amate , it's me."

"Hot stuff?" She looks up and around, but the moon hasn't risen and the dark is nearly impenetrable without night vision goggles.

No wonder she tripped and fell.

When I reach her, I touch her lightly with my hand.

Gasping, she grabs my arm in a hard grip. "Angelo. I knew you'd come for me."

"If you knew I'd come for you what the fuck are you doing out here in the forest? You could've broken something running in the dark." I need to find out what's making her limp.

Behind me, Miceli laughs.

"From what Derian told us about how she responded in the alley, are you really that surprised?" Severu asks.

My men need to stop gossiping with my boss.

"Get over yourself, babe. I wasn't about to let them use me as leverage against you."

"I prefer beloved," I inform her.

She huffs a slightly hysterical laugh. "It's a little old fashioned, isn't it?"

"What do you think amate means?"

"You've been calling me beloved? I thought it was sweetheart, or something."

"No."

"Now you really can't make me believe you wouldn't have given yourself up for me."

"They don't want me," I inform her. "They want me to kill Severu."

She clutches more tightly to me. "That's stupid. Don't they realize how loyal you are? Not to mention superhero resourceful. How did they not realize you were never going to choose Option A?"

"Yeah, his birth family lost the lottery in the intelligence department," Miceli drawls. "Not to mention that whole cray-cray thing."

"You're telling me?" Candi sounds about as impressed with my mother and grandfather as I am.

"They don't know me like you do." The sound of the soldiers getting closer reminds me we have a job to do. "I need you to go with Derian."

Saying the words is harder than I expect. I don't want to leave her. But I don't want her to watch me become Death either.

"No." Her tough exterior cracks, letting the trauma she's experienced bleed through. "I don't want to be away from you."

" Amate , you cannot participate in this fight."

"No, duh. But can't I just go and be off to the side somewhere?" she asks in that pleading tone I hate to hear from her lips.

The fact that in her fear and stress, she wants to be near me does things to the heart I never thought I had before her, but I shake my head. "Too risky."

Candi takes a deep breath and lets it out. Twice.

"Okay." Releasing me, she steps back. "I know this is the way this has to go down. I'll be fine. "

I have never been in a situation where what I knew I should do is so at war with what I want to do. I want to stay with her and make her feel safe, but for her to genuinely be safe, she needs to go with Derian.

Fury at the situation my mother has caused rolls through me. I pull Candi to me, pull my mask up above my mouth and kiss her like she's my world. Because she is.

"Stay safe," she whispers and steps back. "Which one of your Death lookalikes is Derian?"

"Me." Derian puts his hand up. "I'm wounded you didn't recognize my manly stance."

"We'll talk about your dip into toxic masculinity when we're out of the way," she sasses and lets Derian lead her away.

I lift my fist. "Now, we hunt."

I'm running toward my first target as I make the sign to move.

The battle goes quickly. Too quickly to sate my fury and bloodlust. I kill two men in the forest and four of the mafia soldiers left to guard the house. Blood soaks my clothes and my knife drips with it.

"All targets down or accounted for," Derian's voice sounds over the com units.

He's back at the original recon point with Candi and monitoring with the heat signature scanner.

"Order a cleanup and disposal crew." None of these stronzos are making it back to Italy for burial.

Miceli handled the four civilians, leaving them drugged with Special-K and in their beds at the guardhouse. They'll wake up tomorrow with little or no memory of today.

All sixteen of the mafia soldiers are dead, including the one stationed outside my mother's bedroom. I left her inside, none the wiser.

"Wait ten minutes and then bring Candi to the house." By then we'll be done doing what needs to be done.