2. Matteo
Chapter 2
Matteo
20 YEARS AGO
‘Fuck, this wasn’t the plan…’ Matteo said, grimacing as he looked down toward his leg and saw the blood stain spreading across his cream-colored trousers.
It was close to midnight, and Matteo was aware that time was running out.
The stab wound in his thigh might have been non-fatal, but Matteo knew that the sooner he could wrap things up and find himself a backstreet doctor, the better.
With one mob boss needing to be killed, Matteo took a brief moment to compose himself as he rested up against the villa’s marble walls.
I’ve fucking got this.
I’ve taken down the henchmen.
Now it’s time to bring it home…
Matteo had been on plenty of assassination missions before. In fact, Matteo could barely remember a time when he wasn’t involved in the murder business. He might only have been in his early twenties, but Matteo Fendi had been killing gangsters since his teenage years. Death was the family business, and Matteo was determined to climb to the very top of the trade – no matter what it took.
The fact that he was far away from home in a multi-million dollar Miami residence made little difference to Matteo. He knew that a kill was a kill. It would make no difference to his bosses that he was injured either. There was only one acceptable result, and Matteo knew that he wouldn’t be able to return to the city he called home unless he was bringing good news of a completed job.
Matteo might have been a Fendi by birth, but he knew that in the ruthless world of the Fendi clan, family ties meant little if an individual wasn’t up to the job. Matteo had worked his way up the ranks quickly, and despite his youth he was already being earmarked for a prominent role in the future.
The senior powers in the Fendi crime family may technically have been related to Matteo, but to him they felt so distant. Matteo’s parents were never close to the upper echelons of the family, and while they always provided well enough for him, it was clear that as far as any hierarchies went, they were nowhere to be seen. Matteo knew that no favors would be done if he failed, and fellow family members had been killed – or ‘disappeared’ – for what had seemed like minor offences. This was just the way that it worked in the Fendi empire, and Matteo never allowed this reality to drift too far out of his thoughts either when it came to his work.
Three…
Two…
One… go time.
Matteo took a deep breath and forced the pain in this thigh to the back of his mind. With an eerie silence having descended on the villa, Matteo knew that the mob boss would be in his study, quite possibly expecting to see him.
There was no guarantee that when Matteo stepped into the study he wouldn’t be greeted by machine gun fire, shotgun bucks, or just about any kind of automatic fire imaginable. All Matteo could do was trust the intel that had been passed to him and also trust his own ability with a gun.
‘Time’s up,’ Matteo growled as he burst into the study and saw the mob boss, unarmed, and cowering behind his large, red-leather desk. ‘It’s the way it is. Nothing personal.’
‘I’ll pay you,’ the mob boss said, clearly out of his mind on illegal substances and ready to make any deal in order to get his neck out of the hangman’s noose. ‘Name your price. I’ve got millions. I can make you the richest killer on the West Coast.’
‘Quiet,’ Matteo said, aiming his gun, taking his time, ensuring that it would only take one precise shot. ‘Close your eyes. Think of something nice.’
‘Fuck you!’ the doomed boss hollered, in one last stand of defiance. ‘Fuck you, and fuck the whole Fendi clan. I’ll be avenged. Don’t you worry about tha-’
But before the boss could finish speaking, the sound of a suppressed pistol momentarily filled the room. Matteo had taken his target out with a perfectly placed shot to the head. It was over. The job had been completed.
With the deceased boss slumped in his chair and a small splatter of blood on the wall behind him, it didn’t exactly look like a massacre. Perhaps the fallen security guards downstairs were a more reflective picture of what Matteo had done during his brief visit. Either way, Matteo wasn’t getting paid by the body. Matteo’s mission had been about one man and one man only. And now the job was done.
However this was far from the time to stand around and admire his handiwork as far as Matteo was concerned. He might have been relatively young, but he had been in the game long enough to know that the villa would soon be swarming with henchmen. Matteo had taken down the guards, and the man himself. But all that meant was that soon enough there would be a whole host of people trying to find out exactly what had gone down – and when that happened, Matteo knew that he needed to be as far away from the action as he possibly could.
It was time to get the hell out of Miami and find his way back home.
Injured thigh or not, it was time for Matteo to put his foot to the floor and make the perfect assassin’s exit…
PRESENT DAY
The private members club had a great swimming pool – and while he wasn’t an Olympic standard swimmer by any means, Matteo was more than competent enough to cut through the water and get his heart going during his morning swim.
‘Yup, that’ll do it,’ Matteo said to himself as he finished off his final length of the pool and checked his sports watch.
With his heart suitably racing and the fiftieth length completed in a solid time, Matteo knew that the members club sauna was calling his name. He might have been in his early forties, but Matteo was still very much focused on keeping his body and mind as active as he could.
As he walked up the steps in the pool’s shallow end, Matteo couldn’t help but notice two boys checking him out. It was at this point that Matteo remembered that it was a rare day for him if he managed to go through a swim and sauna session without being eyed up by some of the health club’s affluent young men.
‘Morning,’ Matteo said, nodding respectfully to the young men as he walked past them.
Matteo allowed himself a subtle smile as he entered the safety of the sauna room. It was always nice to get complimentary looks from men, but Matteo was very much a single man – or to put it more precisely, a single Daddy.
Those guys were hot.
But they weren’t my kind of boy.
Pffft. Not many are…
Matteo leaned back against the sauna’s wooden walls and let out a long sigh. His heart was still pumping blood around his body at a rapid rate, but soon enough Matteo could feel normal service being resumed.
In nothing but his pair of jet-black speedos, Matteo’s tanned body glistened in the subdued lighting of the sauna room. With strong shoulders, defined pecs, and a washboard stomach that an Instagram influencer would kill for, Matteo’s body was more than a match for most men.
The reality of being an assassin in the game for over twenty years was that Matteo had to take every step he could to keep himself ahead of the competition. With numerous attempts on his life from other gangs and criminal organizations, Matteo was a man with a target on his own head. It was just the way things were. And as much as he possibly could be, Matteo was comfortable with that.
From the small circular scar on his left shoulder, down to the double bullet wound scar on his lower abs, Matteo was more than aware of a what a battle scar looked like. And this was without mentioning the long, jagged knife wound on his thigh…
‘Shit. I remember that one like it was yesterday,’ Matteo muttered. ‘The so-called Massacre in Miami…’
Matteo cast his mind back to the kill that effectively made his name in the Fendi family, and put him on the path that had brought him to living the kind of life that he did.
With a penthouse suite apartment, exclusive health club memberships, and a garage of classic cars, Matteo didn’t want for much in his life. On top of that, Matteo would dine out at the city’s finest restaurants and have VIP access to the kinds of bars that gave him the privacy to enjoy a hassle free drink with his friends without fear of thugs or rival gang members confronting him.
Life was good.
But Matteo knew that he was missing something… and that something was a Little to make his own.
Matteo had long known that he was a Daddy. Most of the higher-ups in the Fendi family knew that Matteo was a Daddy too – and it was very much considered to be his own personal lifestyle choice, not a problem as long as it didn’t interfere with his work.
But as much as his bosses didn’t care, Matteo still hadn’t been able to take the steps toward finding the right boy to make his Little. Matteo had various flings over the years, and some of them even briefly flickered into something longer. However the story always played out the same. When it came to making the final commitment, Matteo had always stepped back and retreated into his own private life.
It might have been a deep rooted fear of commitment.
It could have been the knowledge that he could die to a revenge killing on any given day.
Or it might just have been because he hadn’t actually met the right boy for him.
Whatever it was that had prevented Matteo from truly meeting his match, he had gradually come round to the idea that it simply might never happen.
Fortunately for Matteo, he had some very close fellow Daddy friends who were also in the same position as him. Michael and Faustino Fendi were cousins of Matteo and the three of them made quite the team. Three mafia Daddies with a trail of death and destruction spanning more than two decades… was it really any wonder that the three of them were still single?
The triumvirate of Fendi cousins would still party together on special occasions, and if this involved having fun and frolics at a Daddy and Little kink club, then that was all the better. While Matteo may have resigned himself somewhat to a single life, that didn’t mean that his animal instincts had been dulled. If anything, Matteo was finding that the older he got, the stronger his desires were becoming.
‘I should give the guys a call…’ Matteo mused out loud, the idea of a rare wild night out suddenly feeling very appealing indeed.
Matteo loved spending time with Michael and Faustino when their schedules allowed. And with the three of them working their way up the family hierarchy, this was becoming harder. Matteo knew that in his line of work, you had to show a total and unreserved commitment to the life – and even the hint of lacking in this area could have dire consequences.
Speaking of which, Matteo remembered that he had an appointment at the Fendi mansion later that day. And everything that Matteo knew about the senior leaders told him that this wasn’t going to be a social visit. There would be a new job presented to him. A fresh target. The city was going through an unstable period, and many of the advisors that Matteo knew were warning that a full-blown war could be on the horizon.
Who is it going to be this time?
Hell, what do I even care?
A kill is a kill… and I’m the man to do it.