CHAPTER TEN

ATLAS

Finally, after months without killing, I'd satisfied my soul. I was becoming further and further unhinged, with a need to see blood coating anything that wasn't on the TV or a nature documentary. I had a hunger to get revenge, and last night proved that I hadn't lost any of my instincts.

Beating eggs, milk, and flour in a bowl, I whipped up a pancake batter. Now that one thing in my life felt like it was good, the murdering, I could focus on the next thing: taking care of my boy.

I planned on surprising him with pancakes and syrup in bed, but he came out to me in the kitchen, wearing a onesie half-undressed, the arms of it wrapped around his waist. He hugged me as I pressed a spatula against the pancakes to flip them on the hot plate.

"You remembered?" he asked in a sleepy haze.

"We've been together for years," I said, holding his hand. "You're not exactly difficult to remember. Pancakes. Cake. Slushies. Anything with sugar in really."

He clicked his tongue, burying his head into my back. "You make me sound so simple."

Chuckling. I knew he was far from that. He wasn't simple. He was complex, filled with all types of history, and inside, he had a lot going on. Outside, he might have looked like he was a pouty little princess boy who got whatever he wanted, and he absolutely was, but he wasn't always like that.

Plating the pancakes for him on the small dining table, Midas and Trojan came out of their bedroom.

"Made breakfast?" Midas asked. "I'm starving." He reached out to for a pancake from the stack. I grabbed the knife from the table, holding it inches from cutting into his wrist. "Wow. Relax."

"Like I'd ever make you breakfast," I said. "Besides, remember Osaka in ‘06?"

"Yeah," he grumbled. "We took out two triad members."

"No, no," I tutted. "I bought you breakfast from that place. That's as close to breakfast from me you'll ever get."

Jasiel stuck his tongue out. "These are all mine," he said, grabbing the bear-shaped bottle of squeezy syrup.

"Besides," I said, looking to Trojan, stood behind Midas, stretching and yawning. "You should feed your boy. We had quite the adventure last night, we'll need our strength for today."

"Oh, I fed him alright." Midas winked at me.

I knew that was regarding sex. I knew, we all knew, not that they were as loud as me and Jasiel, but because the beds in these places were extremely cheap and squeaked so loud like they were raid sirens.

Jasiel ate his pancakes, wolfing them down with animalistic speed. I had wondered what it must have been like for him inside. Unable to eat proper food, or at least, unable to eat the food he usually had.

I sat in the living room with my cup of black coffee, flicking through the TV channels to see what the news headlines were, and whether there was anything more about Jasiel there. Or the incident at the bar last night.

Midas sat beside me with a slice of toast. "Who's next?"

That was the multi-million-dollar question. Who? "I don't want to stray from our plans, but the Agosti family really tried to fuck with me by shooting at Jasiel. But we know that the Coronado family will wipe them of the map if they get that shipment."

"So, what are we going to do?"

"Find out more about the Agosti family, I didn't even think they were big-time," I admitted. "The last I remember, they peddled drugs on street corners."

Midas nodded, slowly. "I might piece together what you missed out on then," he said. "Eight months ago, Salvo Agosti was killed. His wife, Vittoria is now the head of the family. I heard rumors she poisoned him, and I'm inclined to believe them. After Salvo's death, several other people died under similar circumstances, and the one person who benefitted from that was—"

"Vittoria," I finished for him.

"They were always low-level criminals, but she had other plans. She wanted blood. She wanted status. And more than anything, she wanted money."

"Why is this the first I'm hearing of her?" I asked him, taking a sip of my coffee. "Assuming she's been operating all this time, I should've known."

Midas shrugged. "Honestly, it hasn't been on my radar either. I heard from a friend who worked for Salvo when he died. He said the wife, now a widow, she was looking to enact revenge on whoever killed her husband. It was a lot, to be honest, and we had too much on our plate."

My brows creased with curiosity. "But didn't she kill her husband."

He hummed, chewing on his toast.

"She used his death to get people to join her, and that's how she grew." I had to admit, there was a small amount of genius in that.

"They say she's ruthless."

"Ruthless," I laughed. "People who are ruthless do not poison. Ruthless people point guns to people's head and threaten their lives. They give them to the count of three but shot on two. She isn't ruthless."

Midas agreed with me. "So, we already killed one of her guys," he said. "Are we going after them too?"

"No," I said, plainly. "We don't want to waste time and resources. We only have one goal. And that's completed when Benicio's head is in a box, and anyone who fucked me over from that family is worm food."

Midas nodded. He understood. He also knew that I rarely veered from the plan. I was calm, but that was temporary. My skin had a continued itch, like small bugs were biting at my skin on the back of my head in my hair and in the corner of my eye, causing me to clench a fist and not cut a cross-section of my own skin out.

Trojan joined us as we went to talk about the shipping containers. I watched Jasiel as he went straight to the bedroom after the pancakes with a frozen slushie in hand from the freezer. I wanted to join him, but I knew we had to talk about this, and last night, we'd all come back and decided that we were too horned up from the violence to discuss plans.

"Since we know the shipment is guns, I think we only have one option," I began, looking at the two of them sitting together on a sofa.

"Well, there's no use in having them seized because the Coronado family own the police, right," Trojan said.

"Exactly."

"And if we don't do anything, we're basically giving them the ammunition to prepare for our attack," Midas added.

"Exactly, they don't know we're going to attack, since I'm still dead."

"And what about the man you killed last night?"

I looked at the TV and flicked through a few more channels. "I don't believe he's been found yet," I said. "Anyway, I think we take the guns for ourselves. The shipment arrives at port in two days."

Trojan grinned, rubbing at his chin like he'd become an evil mastermind, more so because he'd be the one in charge of getting all the information from the cargo ship's manifest. "So, what do you need me to do?" he asked, already prepared.

"The container," I said. "Have the details changed. Perhaps, give them an empty container, or something like a container full of fish, something stupid like that."

He nodded. "I can see what they have. And—and who should I put down for theirs?" He looked around, between us.

"A random name," I said. While Trojan and Midas were both aliases, their legal names were in systems that would get the container flagged. As were mine and Jasiel's names. We couldn't chance any of that. "I have a guy at a copy store who can whip up a good fake ID within a couple hours too. So, if the name isn't anything out of the ordinary, I say put that down."

"On it," Trojan said.

"Other things we'll need," I said, snapping my fingers and looking to Midas. "A van. I don't know what they've got, but it's big enough to arm them in a turf war. So, let's assume we'll need a van, truck, whatever it is, just big enough to take everything in that container."

I hated giving this to them. I was so used to taking control of every aspect of a mission, but my presumed death had put a stop to that, and I wasn't going to out myself until I was face-to-face with Benicio and the only thing his gasping shocked face would've been useful for was as a space for me to shove my gun, pushing his teeth apart and opening his jaw much wider. I almost got off on the idea of putting a bullet in the back of that man's throat.

"I think it'll be a lot," Midas said, sucking on his teeth.

"Whatever we don't use, it's yours to sell," I said. "I have my own guns, Jasiel uses knives, we'd be taking it to cut them off at their supply, but we have to assume they're still loaded with fire power at that house."

Trojan's throat let out a light gulp. "You think we can be prepared for this in two weeks?"

"If this was happening in two days, we'd be prepared," I said. "So, yes. Two weeks. We're going to be more than prepared." I was finally relaxed. I drank the rest of my black coffee, feeling the sweet syrupy sugar from the bottom of the cup coat my tongue before hitting the back of my throat.

They could've avoided all of this, but they got too greedy. They tried breaking my sweet, Jasiel, and they'd put me in a lot of pain, but I wouldn't admit that it was ever critical, at least not to them. They were, however, soon going to witness what it meant to fuck with me.