Chapter 35

"Never in all my years did I think I'd have you strapped to my table of death, Fratello." My knife thumps against my shoulder as I move it absently; it helps me clear my racing thoughts.

I've only grown more frantic in my need to get my hands on Brynne. But I can't. I miss her more than I'd miss breathing if my body expired, but I have to handle the scum before I can leave this fucking city. Because it's who I am.

You do something you're not supposed to in Ricci territory, and the reaper comes calling for you. Doesn't matter what your last name is.

"Ardesia," he manages. I don't know how; he's lost a lot of blood.

I grab a folding chair from near the door and scrape it across the ground towards the middle of the room, turning it backward and throwing my massive legs over it as I sit.

He watches me through his swollen eyes.

I wave my blade through the air. "Go on. Give me whatever excuse it is you have for what I found in the harbor. I'll fucking wait."

He closes his puffy lids, and I lean forward.

"That was a fucking command, Lucio." My voice is callous and devoid of anything resembling what it held weeks ago. When a certain wild-haired woman was keeping me even-keel.

"I was sick," he begins.

I go back to thumping my blade, this time against the back of the chair. Repetitive noises always bothered Lucio and Papa, but not me. To me, they help me stay in the present.

He eyes my blade but keeps his fucking mouth shut for once. "I was sick, and Enzo went off the rails. I found out he'd put a fortune of our money into tainted drugs. Ones I had to flush to get rid of. People were dying on our turf, Ardesia. Dying from drugs we were providing."

The news settles into my chest like a sharpened blade, and I shift. Thankfully, Enzo is already dead, or he'd be back on my fucking table. Part of me wants to dig up his rotting corpse from where I'd buried him and desecrate it for his sins.

I have the stomach, but not the time.

"Go on," I tell him when he pauses.

He swallows with great effort, and I look over his battered body with pride. He'd earned every mark.

"I needed some way to get us back on the map. We were dying. One man mentioned the flesh trade."

"Flesh trade is one thing, Lucio. What you were doing was trafficking kidnapped women. Right?"

He doesn't answer.

I stand, knocking the chair back, and it clangs through the room.

Lucio winces.

"Tell me the fucking truth!" I shout, veins popping from my neck.

He sobs. "We were stealing women, but we weren't kidnapping them."

The speed with which he's telling the story is pissing me the fuck off. I step into him, the blade's tip pressing into his neck where I can see his pulse humming for me. Almost as if it's beckoning me from below the surface. "I want the truth, and I want it now, Lucio."

Half of me knows he's stalling because he thinks one of his men is going to come for him. Ones who knew about this endeavor and were operating it for him. But I'd spent the last six weeks of my life killing every one of his little scum-bag recruits.

They're all in pieces in a mass grave, where no one will ever find them.

"Where did you get the fucking girls from, Lucio?"

Another half of me knows admitting his sins has always been hard for Lucio. Especially when he's been atop his high horse for so fucking long.

I never thought this day would come. The one where I'd have to become the reaper of his soul. I'd told him once that it could happen. That if he rose too high, without care for how he did it or whom he stepped on in his wake, I'd be there.

He thought he was safe from me.

"We stole the shipments from the Bianchis. We would intercept only some of their shipment, skim off the top, so to speak."

I close my eyes and think of Brynne wiping those men's blood on her skin in shame and honor. Even though my cock pushes against the inside of my pants at the thought of her, I growl as my eyes open again.

"How fucking long? How long were you stealing from them?" My eyes lock on his, and finally, the truth of his fear makes itself known within them. It skips across their surface like an animal on the retreat from a predator.

But there is no retreating from me. Not once I have you.

He doesn't answer.

"How fucking long?" I scream, rearing my arm back and letting my blade stab into his thigh, just missing his femoral artery. Not a fatal wound, but enough of one to send waves of agony through him.

"Four years!" he relents.

The mix of the blood spilled, and his submission has me closing my eyes in triumph.

"So, you're telling me you only lasted one year with me out of your city before you decided you were free to run this family into the ground?"

His screaming ceases, and something else sits on the surface of his face.

I click my tongue, twisting the blade I never took out of his thigh.

He cries out, begging for his measly life.

"It's why you let me go. It's why you never looked for me. You monitored me, but you didn't want me back here because I was the one thing that would shut your operation down."

His head lolls forward in defeat. "Yes," he whispers.

When I pull my blade out, blood squirts from the jagged wound.

A psychotic laugh forms and bursts from me, echoing off the walls and brushing my sensibilities most divinely.

"You were monitoring me and you were monitoring them. You knew they were coming for me as leverage, didn't you? You sat back and watched as they tried to take me."

He lifts his head, his eyes meeting mine with shame filling them.

"Who the fuck are you?" I ask. "Truly? Mama and Papa would be fucking ashamed, Lucio."

"Cancer has a way of changing a man, I guess."

I shake my head. "You're the cancer, Lucio. To think you survived the cancer, only to die by your brother's hand."

"You won't kill me," he says, and there's hope in his tone. It's the stupidest thing anyone can ever do in my presence.

"Oh, yeah? And why is that?"

I'm genuinely curious about his line of thinking.

He licks his blood-soaked lips. "Because you love me. You protect the things you love."

"If you believed that, you wouldn't have been keeping tabs on me all these years. Wouldn't have been fearing the day I stepped foot back onto New York soil."

Thinking back to the moment I saw him behind his desk, his look of surprise had a touch of fear within it, and I was so used to it I looked right past it.

He thought me dead.

"You weren't expecting her, were you?" I ask, lifting his face back to mine with the bloody tip of my blade.

Shame and blood loss have him fading quickly.

He shakes his head. "No. Because the reaper loves nothing and no one. Other than his family."

"Mmm, but you were wrong, weren't you?" A sinful smirk lifts my lips. "And not only that, but someone loved me back. Where my family feared me, someone loved me back enough to fucking kill for me. You weren't ready for the storm that was Brynne, were you?"

Something knowing flutters on his face, and it unsettles my stomach. "Doesn't matter. She's a loose end. They won't let her live."

"She's protected. Because like you said before, what the reaper loves, he protects."

He whimpers as the tip of my blade skims the underside of his face, pressing into his vulnerable throat.

"Any last words?" I ask.

He closes his eyes, awaiting the kiss of death.

My blade shoves through his throat, bones giving way and snapping, blood coating me in arterial spray, and when his eyes open instinctively, I watch the light die inside them.

All our lives, everyone thought of me as the monster. The one that hid in the daytime, only to hunt at night. But he was the monster. The one who hid in broad daylight.

He was so cocky when I first strapped him to my table, thinking me joking. Thinking himself safe.

But the reaper always gets his answers.

No matter who is on his table.

* * *

After dealingwith Lucio's body, and cleaning up my mess for once, I'm heading back to the apartment in my Audi as the phone rings.

Lorenzo's name is on the screen, and I close my eyes as I tap the answer. "Yes?"

He clears his throat. "Have you heard from the boss lately? I can't get his cell."

"You're speaking to your boss, Lorenzo. What do you need?"

"He—ahh, oh." His brain finally understands what I'm telling him, and I wait for the reason he's called me.

"Well, he had me watching for any movement, listening for any intel on the Bianchis…"

So, I left a little rat behind, did I?

"Whatever you tell me next, better be good, Lorenzo. Because your life hinges on it."

He clears his throat. "They have Brynne, Boss."

I downshift, skidding to a halt into a random open parking space in front of a hotel, ripping my parking brake up. "Say that again."

"We've got eyes on Matteo Bianchi's home in Florida, and she's been spotted outside it. She was at gunpoint and looked to be in rough shape."

Lorenzo's words have me leaning my head against the steering wheel, my breathing coming in heavy puffs that are laced with something I've never felt before.

Fear.

"We have to do this right, Boss, or it'll go badly for the family."

The moment is heavy on my shoulders because it'll be my first act as the leader of this family. It's not lost on me I'd wanted to be anything but the leader, and now I am.

But it was a necessary move to make. For this city and the men under him. He was corrupt and changed.

And he'd known all along I was a threat, and it's why he let me do as I wished.

"I know we do, Lorenzo. But I can't think, I'm…" I can't admit it. There's no way I can get the words out.

"I know, Boss. And, Sir?"

I stay silent. The only thing I can do is tell him to go on.

"I wasn't on board with his plans. I've fed him wrong information where I could, trying to slow down how quickly he was getting out of control. But I also value my life, and you know what happens when you don't listen to the head of the family."

I nod in understanding. "But you know your leader is now a different animal, right? Mind yourself beneath me, Lorenzo. Or you'll be the next body I bury."

"Yes, Sir," his answer comes. "What are our next steps?"

"Get me a meeting with Matteo Bianchi, and ready the fucking plane. We do this right, and we do this now!"

"Yes, Sir."

As I let myself calm—or try to—I think of every fucking moment I had with Brynne. And how I'd been so thankful she wasn't around the last six weeks while I dealt with this mess. Now she's a fucking part of it.

It's all my fault for dragging her from that camp. For falling for her sassy mouth and submissive tendencies.

Now, I have to give her back her freedom. Give her back her life. And it's going to be so fucking hard to be close to her again. Especially when I know I have to walk away in the end.