2. Chapter One
Chapter One
Alessandrio
I remember the exact moment I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t uncommon for me to wake up next to a beautiful woman whose name I didn’t remember, a hangover making my head pound. That was all part of a normal Saturday morning for me. Never, however, had I watched my hand reach out to touch the curve of the female’s shoulder, only to not recognize my limb. I remember snatching it away to hold it in front of my face, staring dumfounded at the grotesque appendage and wondering what the fuck kind of drugs I took the night before.
My movement must have woken my bedmate, and I was still staring in wonder at the claw tipped hands covered in fur when the screaming started. I was used to making women scream. Usually it was on my dick, but this was different. It was gut churning and ripped me from my trance in time to see her scramble from my bed. She was out of the bedroom door screaming bloody murder and I still couldn’t tell you her name.
Heart racing, I rolled from my silk sheets and rushed to my ensuite. Distant screams still rang out somewhere in the penthouse. One look in the mirror, and I knew she was the least of my problems.
“What the fucking, fuck?”
The thing in the mirror spoke with my voice, the sounds dripping with disbelief, and yet I still couldn’t tell you what I was looking at. It even had my fucking eyes! I leaned in closer to get a better look, lips peeling back to reveal pointed canines in a fur covered face. I was never pretty. No. That was Emilio’s lot in life. He was the pretty boy, the clean cut immaculate boss of the Greco Mafia crime family. Me? I was his weapon. There was no need for me to be pretty. As Emilio’s capo, I needed to be scary, but the monster staring back at me was something else entirely.
It wasn’t till my brother Emilio opened his bedroom door that I realized I wasn’t the only one who went into beast mode. When we had both calmed down enough to call our uncle Lorenzo in for a meeting, Emilio finally divulged the Dolmino mistresses’ last words to him. Albenia Dolmino is a fucking cunt, and with her dying breath, she royally fucked us over.
It’s been over a year now. Emilio married Lucia, hoping to break the curse and yet we are still as we were. It was him and me after the Dolmino family murdered our father. Two brothers lost in our shared misery at what we had become. Things made for shadows and terror. Monsters made flesh. And then Emilio the idiot went and fell in love. He stopped being the monster I knew and started living for more. Living for the slip of a girl who burned her way into our family. She turned my brother into a sopping mess when she went and got herself kidnapped and tortured by Riccardo Dolmino—Albenia’s son.
That is how I find myself now in my black panel van, trailing an unremarkable hire car down toward a sleepy town just outside of Boston. In that unremarkable hire car is a dead man. Riccardo Dolmino is finally within my grasp once more. The only reason he’s still breathing after what he did to Lucia is that the Chicago Outfit offered him sanctuary. Our greatest rival city harboured one of the top fugitives of the New York Costa Nostra. But he has flown their nest. Left the veil of their security and protection, and for what? I can’t say I wasn’t curious when our tech guys flagged the movement and informed me he had booked a seat on a flight to Boston.
What’s in Massachusetts, Riccardo? What was so important that you would risk your life to leave Chicago and come back within the reaches of our clawed hands? The wait has been maddening. I have been hanging onto the threads of my control that screamed for me to cross enemy lines and set about a one man assault on the Outfits turf. But regrettably, I am not immortal . It is ironic that I resemble a walking, talking nightmare from a fairytale, the kind who would live forever feeding off the souls of the innocent, and yet I am vulnerable to death. Because I am not the only monster in this story.
I clench the steering wheel, ignoring the way the dark tips of my claws bury into the meat of my palms. Emilio has more of a claim to Riccardo’s life than me, but he’s happy now. He wants vengeance, but he stopped craving it the way I do—and I crave it like the air I breathe. I need it with a desperation that’s bordering on madness. I want the Dolmino name wiped from the fucking board once and for all.
Riccardo is the loose end. Emilio and I spent those first few weeks after Lucia was kidnapped hunting the last Dolmino heir, searching every dark corner of Chicago. He always remained just out of reach. My brother wouldn’t leave his wife and I wouldn’t ask him in the days after their reunion. Apparently, an attempt on the life of someone you love can be pretty traumatic.
The car ahead of me swerves to take an exit, drawing my full attention back to the road. I pull back, allowing some vehicles to put distance between us. The exit is for a scenic route, the kind tourists would take on their way to somewhere. A lone gas station sits at the mouth of a road swallowed by woods and with it my prey.
“Where are you going?” I wonder aloud as I pull off the exit and follow.