5. Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Lorenzo

Fuck.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to see her, I wasn’t supposed to let her kiss me, I wasn’t supposed to be in the damn club at all.

Shit.

“I warned you about him. I told you he was dangerous.” Victor’s voice grates on my nerves. I don’t care much for his very thinly veiled I-told-you-so.

“You want to try adjusting your tone, Tomasso ?” I raise an eyebrow, and he bows his head.

“I apologize, boss.”

I swirl the drink in my hands, the clear liquid reminding me of bright blue eyes and lips red as sin. Victor is upset with me over something serious, something that could cost us all our lives and yet I can’t stop thinking about the way her lips felt pressed against mine. The way her entire body felt pressed against mine.

I shake my head and try to focus on the matter at hand.

The Raineris have caused trouble again.

“Have we received fresh intel?”

“Not for a month now.”

“A month? What are your men doing, Victor? Because on this end, it looks a lot like nothing.” I can feel him bristle, but he doesn’t say anything to contradict me.

“I have them running stakeouts, I have them planted on the inside of the Raineri…“

“And yet, we have no new information.”

I try to take a sip of my drink, but I remember the taste of this very drink on her tongue last night and I set the glass down.

“This man, did he know anything about what we were planning? Could he have passed the information to them before he died?”

“It is possible. But there’s no way to know for certain until the Raineris make their move.”

I get up and pace the length of the study that once belonged to my father, his father, and his father before him. Their portraits line the walls of this room, of this house, their memories and the wars they fought for our family name are etched into the walls of this building.

“In essence, what you, my right hand…my supposed executioner, are suggesting, is that we wait until our enemies move. You want us to wait until we are all dead to do something about this?” I walk toward him, and he stumbles back.

I have a reputation in this world and it has served me tremendously well. People hear the name Duretti, and they shiver. They hear the word Ghost, and they pray for death to find them before he does.

I am the Ghost. I am that fearsome monster that is whispered about with bated breath. The boogeyman parents tell their little boys about in order to keep them from being naughty.

It’s just how I like it. The fear keeps this family going strong. It keeps our business thriving. It keeps the money in our pockets from ever running out. I like it, because it means that when someone is stupid enough to cross me, it means they are prepared to face my wrath.

Just like Massimo Raineri seems to be.

We first got the intel a few months ago that one of our men was working as an insider for Massimo. It didn’t take long to flush out the traitor from the rat’s nest he was hiding in, but it was just enough time for him to transmit information to Massimo. Our enemy now had information about our smuggling routes, the federal agents on our payroll and our plans.

Suffice to say, I had made an example of him.

Victor, however, was not satisfied. He had wanted me to cut out his tongue and sew it to his forehead, the way my father had done to traitors in his day. He had wanted me to leave the flesh out for the vultures to feast on.

I’m not my father. And I refuse to cater to the appetites of sick people. Even if my right hand man is the sickest among them. But he gets the job done, effectively and efficiently, and in this line of work, effectiveness and efficiency are what makes businesses boom.

Now, Massimo has started making moves. In the past few weeks, he has killed three of my men.

We have also lost twenty-five million in shipments of liquor, drugs and weapons, all because he tipped off the feds about our operation. I had to pay another ten million to get our fall guy out of prison.

It has been an inconvenience. One I grow more and more tired of by the day.

“Everyone is waiting for the Ghost to make a move.”

“Are they now?” If there’s mockery in his words, he hides it well. This time. Victor doesn’t believe that I have enough strength to lead this family. He doesn’t believe that I am viscous enough.

He doesn’t know me very well.

“And what about you Victor, are you among them?”

“I know that Ghost walks among us every day.”

“Perhaps you’re right. Something needs to be done.” I walk to my desk and stare out the window.

“Release the Kraken tonight. I want to have dinner against the backdrop of their world on fire.”

I don’t need to turn around to see his smile, I hear it in his voice. His glee is palpable. The Kraken is an operative that I only ask to help us out when a real statement needs to be made. Now is just such an occasion.

“Yes, boss.”

Maybe I am just as sick as he is, because damn it, excitedly waiting to hear the sounds of the explosions when the Kraken is released.

***

When I walk into the club, it is empty, just like it always is in the daytime, which is also when we carry out our business. My men stop what they're doing to greet me and I return their greetings with silence.

I make my way straight to one of the private back rooms, where I know that Vincent is waiting for me.

Vincent Rucci is probably the only person on earth that I would call my friend. We were raised as boys together, him being only a year older than me. He is just as level-headed as I am, thinking miles ahead of everyone, including me.

Vincent was my first choice for a right hand, but he immediately shut me down. He is the only person who would dare say no to me. But I understood all too well why he refused. He much preferred to be away from the city, or out doing field work.

Overseeing our various…projects. He works behind the scenes the best.

I called him in because I needed him. He was the one who found out that we had a traitor among us and he was the one I tasked with taking care of it. He was also who I was supposed to meet at the club yesterday, but he didn't show up.

The only reason I'm not pissed is because I know he must've had a good reason for not showing up.

I opened the heavy door and the first sound that reaches my ears is the sound of bones crunching beneath a fist. I look at the man sprawled on the floor, hanging onto life by a thread and then I look up at Vincent.

There are brass knuckles on his right hand. As I stare, blood drips from the device onto the floor.

“Another spy,” he says without looking up at me.

“I see. Have you gotten any information from him?”

“Tons. He's been a real chatterbox.”

“It doesn’t look like he can talk anymore,” I observe, taking in the condition of the man lying in the floor.

My friend glances up at me, a sideways smile on his face. “Because I am.”

I walk to a booth and settle down.

“Think it can wait ‘til after we've had our meeting?”

The man on the floor groans and tries to get up, but he slips in his own blood and falls back down. Past the swollen eyeballs and the broken nose, and the lips that are split in so many places, I recognize him. It’s Julio. He's been with us for three years now.

I feel a sharp burn of frustration well within me. One of the reasons that my family is so powerful is that we have always built bonds with our men that lasted. This is a tricky business, full of betrayal and lies, but we have always worked as a team.

Having discovered two traitors among us in a month makes me nervous. Are my men growing too comfortable with me? Have they forgotten how to fear me?

“Sure. He's not going anywhere.”

Vincent takes off the brass knuckles and throws them on the ground. The man lets out another groan, and then he wets himself.

Then the unthinkable happens. He raises his head and crawls his way to where I’m seated. Grabbing a hold of my booted feet with his two shaking hands, he looks up at me.

“Please…. B-boss. I’m sorry.” I’m not sure how he manages to speak through his ruined lips.

Vincent looks at me with what can best be described as a sneer.

“He must not know you very well if he’s begging you for mercy.”

I tilt my head to look at him, and then I lean forward.

“Do you know what happens to traitors in this family? Not just to them, but to everyone they’re affiliated with and everyone they hold dear. You have a wife don’t you?”

He moans as true fear strikes through him. My smile is cruel.

“And a daughter, hmm…Isobel? Yes. Isobel. Beautiful. How old is she now, five? Six? I know some ways I can put her to good use.”

The man starts shaking his head, tears streaming down his face to mix with the blood.

“Please, boss, please, I beg you. They’re innocent. Just kill me please.”

“You’re a dead man walking, Julio. Don’t offer me something as useless as your life.”

“Please, cut off all my fingers, sew my tongue to my forehead, pluck out all my teeth. Please just don’t hurt them.”

“Now, don’t go giving Vincent here ideas. You should’ve thought about your family before you ran your mouth to Raineri. Did they promise to protect your family?”

“Please boss, please. I beg you.”

The other men in the room watch the exchange with trepidation. I see it in the way they shift uneasily at their posts near the doors and the bar.

Of course I’m not going to do anything to his wife and child. He is going to die, but I do things differently than my father. However, it’s clear that my control is slipping. I need to change the way we do things.

I nod at Vincent and he pulls out a pistol, the silencer already twisted on and without another word, he puts a bullet through his head.

The man drops lifelessly to the floor as his grip on my feet loosens. Blood splatters on my shoes and I take out my pocket square to wipe it off.

“Put his body in plain sight. Let him rot as a warning to anyone else who is thinking about betraying us. This is the last traitor I will tolerate. This is the last time I will be kind.”

Vincent gives me a grin, then gestures to two of the men by the bar. “Do as he says,” he orders them. “Now!” he shouts when they don’t move right away.

“Now, about our meeting,” I say, turning my back on the dead body and the two men dragging it outside to place it in plain sight.

I might not be willing to stoop to my father’s level in many ways, but I will be damned if I let anyone else tell our secrets to the Raineri family.

***

Vincent and I walk to the room where Julio’s family is waiting for us. The man’s blood hasn’t even dried on my shoes yet. This is the part I hate. I just hope his wife isn’t the weeping kind, because then I might really have to kill her.

We enter and find them huddled on the ground. Maria is holding Isobel in her arms and using her entire body to shield the little girl. I look around at my men. How menacing they look in their black suits with their guns crossed over their chests.

Shit. Maybe I should’ve told them that I don’t actually plan to hurt them.

“Stand down,” I tell them, and they relax back against the walls. “You’re scaring Maria and Isobel.”

She looks up at me, and even when I can see the fear in her eyes, her glare is strong.

“You.” She spits at my feet.

“Me.” I smile and crouch beside her, turning my head to look at Isobel. The little girl’s eyes are wide with intrigue and her little finger is hanging from her open mouth. She is at that age where she hasn’t yet learned to be afraid, and something about that makes me smile.

“Hello there, little girl.”

I reach out to touch her, but Maria moves her away from me.

“Just kill me. I refuse to cater to whatever sick fantasies you have.”

“Did you know about your husband’s deceit?”

It is highly unlikely that Julio clued her in on his activities. In our world, women are expected to be seen more than heard. The men here keep their women on a tight leash most of the time and although I have made it clear that I will not tolerate any sort of violence against women or children, there’s little I can do about what they do in their own homes.

I, for one, don’t buy into that chauvinistic bullshit. I know from first hand experience how powerful women can be and what valuable assets they often are. While I don’t have any women in my army, I wouldn’t turn away a woman I knew that was qualified.

“No. Julio never told me anything. I didn’t even know there were problems within the family. The same day your men burst into our home at four a.m. and took him away was the same day I found out that he had been talking to Massimo.”

Another thing that pisses me off is how my men handled the whole situation. Not that I can blame them, I suppose. I am known to be cruel. That image protects me, so of course they would employ cruel means to complete their tasks.

“I should apologize for that.”

She looks at me like she doesn’t know what to make of my words.

“My quarrel is not with you and Isobel, Maria. It is with your husband and as you are aware by now, he has been taken off.”

I wait to see grief on her face, but it never shows up. Good, not the weeping kind.

“I may not be a kind man, but I am a fair one and so I am offering you two choices.”

Vincent comes to stand beside me and opens a briefcase. I watch Maria’s eyes go wide as she stares at the cash.

“Two hundred thousand dollars, in cash, right here, right now, and a plane ticket for you and your daughter to go wherever you want. You will be free from the Duretti name, from the family, from me. I have also set up a scholarship fund for your daughter. Whatever schools she chooses to attend someday will be covered by me.”

Her eyes fill with tears.

“The second option is to stay here. Take my name and my protection. We will make sure that your house is in your name. You will be allowed to remarry if that’s what you want. If it isn’t, you will be left alone. You will be given a job where you will be paid well and Isobel will be sent to the best schools by me. The two of you will be under my protection, and none of my people will touch you.”

I crouch in front of her again.

“If you leave, I will not be able to do anything when Raineri sends his people after you. He doesn’t take kindly to traitors and Julio was a chatterbox full of information before he…”

I glance at the girl.

“We won’t talk about that with little ears in the room. Massimo does not operate under the same principles that I do. If he finds you, you will have no help from us. Think about your decision carefully.”

Her eyes move from the cash to my face and to Vincent’s, and she swallows.

“You promise to let us go anywhere we want and leave us alone.”

“Pinky swear,” I say with a smile, and she laughs lightly.

“Isobel is the most precious thing to me. If anything happens to her, I will never forgive myself. Give us your name, give us your protection…Capo.” I exhale, Vincent closes the case, and she bows her head.

“Very well. Dino here will set you up with a job you want, and if you want to marry…”

“Never again,” she says and then curses in Italian.

I smile. “Fine. Dino will also help you with Isobel’s education fund and everything else.”

I look at the man in question, and he nods.

“Welcome to the family, Maria Duretti.”

***

“We need to tighten our security around the docks. We’ve blown the Raineri’s airstrip outside the city, so they’re not going to do anything to us for a few days.”

I nod at Dino, looking at the images that one of my men sent me earlier. They are pictures of the wreckage and mayhem that followed the Kraken’s work and despite knowing that this little stunt will cost us, my smile is wide.

The Kraken makes custom-made explosions for us and deploys them. One of his favorite bombs is a weapon of unparalleled devastation, combining the raw destructive force of high-yield explosives with the insidious, disintegrative power of chemical warfare.

Its detonation obliterates everything in its path, leaving behind a wasteland and a lingering danger from the chemical cloud that lingers long after the smoke has cleared. This makes the Kraken’s technologies not just bombs, but symbols of ultimate destruction and dread.

The Raineri family will be feeling the aftermath for months to come.

“Deploy men to guard the stashes and patrol the walls too. I want people there twenty-four-seven and I want a report by the hour of everything that goes on. Someone sneezes, I want to know, someone picks up an AK-47, I want to know. If someone breathes out of order, I want to know. A war is coming and I refuse to be unprepared for it.”

Once I'm done giving my orders, the men leave and then it’s just Vincent in the room.

“You’re distracted today.” His voice pulls me out of my thoughts and I look up at him.

“What makes you say that?”

“We grew up together, Enzo. You think I don’t know when you’re distracted?”

He knows I hate when people call me that and his smile is proof of it.

“ Bastardo ,” I mutter tossing a lint at him.

“Is it the girl? The one you met at the bar yesterday?”

I can’t even be surprised that he knows about that. It is Vincent’s job to know about things that he has no business knowing about and he is very good at it.

“Did you fuck her?”

Just thinking about it, remembering the way she looked, naked and panting on my couch, in my arms, in my bed.

“ Ay . L’hai fatto . You did.”

“You were late to our meeting.” There’s no excuse, not like I ever have to excuse my actions with him.

“She looked pretty, but she’s not your type.”

“Since when do you concern yourself with the women I take to bed?”

“You can’t tell me that you didn’t know who she was.”

Of course I know who she is. I also know that her eyes are so vividly blue, her hair is lusciously dark and silky, and her lips are criminally soft and sweet.

“I’m sure you do,” he replies for me.

He tosses another set of pictures on the table and suddenly, I'm looking down at the woman of my wet dreams.

“Daniella Roberto. Twenty-five, works at an advertising agency. Born on the third of March to Micah and Donelli. They separated when she was six, he died when she was fifteen and four years later she died.. She has twenty-thousand dollars in total to her name.”

I flip through the pictures as he talks. She really is beautiful, and Italian. Of course. She’s all the things that I cannot say no to.

“You want to know what else I found out?”

“If you’re about to tell me where she was on 9/11 or some shit…” I say sarcastically, but he cuts me off.

“She was in love. Engaged to be married to a man named Jeremy Foster.” I look up at him with a start.

“Ring a bell?”

“Fuck.”

Vincent knows that the name rings a bell. Of course it does, because less than a month ago, I had looked him in the eyes and condemned him to death.

I didn’t know that she had anything to do with Jeremy. Somehow, in the small amount of research I had done about her after she left, I had missed that.

I remember the strange look in her eyes when I woke to find her staring at me. At the time, I had thought that she was surprised that she had slept with a mob boss. Now I wonder if she wasn’t looking for me all along.

This changes everything, but I’m not even sure what it means. What I do know, is that just thinking about her while we were talking has made my cock hard.

I’m always the soul of caution, but when it comes to my little mystery woman, I might not be able to use my typical good sense.