1. Elio
1
ELIO
L a Seta was packed to the seams with Napoli’s most beautiful. Skin carefully revealed in titillating patches, perfumes meant to seduce, hair swinging and enticing, smiles tempting…
But not to me.
I moved through the swaying mass of desperate, clawing people like a dark arrow through a cloud of cotton candy. I wasn’t here for fun. I was here for one purpose.
To do my job.
Ahead, my target was laughing at the bar, downing shot after shot, lowering his guard even more. Some people really made this easy.
I leaned against a nearby pillar and watched him in the mirror across the way. My biggest problem somewhere like this was blending in. I didn’t sway. I didn’t smile. It kind of made me stick out in a place where everyone else was riding a chemical high of some kind, be it drugs, alcohol, or pure endorphins.
“ Ciao, bello,” a female voice purred beside me. A hand snaked down my chest. “I haven’t seen you here before.”
I had her wrist in a tight grip before she saw me move. Her hazy, half-closed eyes widened in alarm.
“And you haven’t seen me this time,” I advised her quietly.
Her smile returned; she assumed I was flirting back. She leaned into me, and the manufactured scent of her perfume was harsh on my nose. Femininity in a bottle. I wished I could unsmell it.
“Sure, I haven’t. Why don’t we get out of here and not see each other a little more?” she suggested.
I let go of her wrist. “I’m afraid that’s not in the cards. I’m not what you’re looking for.”
“You’re a man, aren’t you?”
Debatable .
“Maybe so, but I don’t have the parts you want.”
She pouted for a moment and then leaned in. A last-ditch attempt to seduce me. Her hand landed on my crotch, and she squeezed me through my dress pants.
“You feel like you have everything I need.”
This time, I didn’t bother moving her hand. I simply dropped my mildly pleasant mask and let her see the man beneath. She stilled as my eyes drilled into hers, and she saw it all. The madness, the anger, the simmering violence only just contained. The monster without his man disguise.
She dropped her hand and stepped back.
“That isn’t the part I’m missing, signorina .”
“What is it then?” she asked, muted now. “What are you missing?”
I caught sight of my target leaving the bar ahead of me and stepped forward. My missing parts were far more vital than some appendage. My missing parts made me incapable of mercy, or gentleness… It had been that way for as long as I could remember.
Since her .
“A heart,” I told her curtly and stepped past her, intent on my target.
He was a De Sanctis made man. I’d also been a De Sanctis for the greater part of my life. Service to my capo and the familigia had been my sole reason for living for the last decade. The family was rooted in Naples, though that grip was weakening gradually with the decline of Salvatore De Sanctis’ health. I lived in the second De Sanctis stronghold, New Jersey. My capo Renato, Salvatore’s nephew, was visiting Italy with his new wife, and where they went, I went. I was his shadow, his right hand, and his personal executioner.
Since I owed him my and my sister’s life, it was only fitting. One of the most satisfying parts of my job was rooting out corruption in the heart of the family. Death before disloyalty was a motto I lived by. I wasn’t a merciful man, but I conducted the bloody and violent business of being sottocapo to a brutal Mafia as professionally as possible… But a traitor in the familigia ? They got special attention.
I enjoyed delivering them the consequences of their actions, and I was so very good at it. I was a natural-born killer and could never be anything else. I’d lived in hell and brought the demons back with me. I might as well use them in service of my family.
I followed my target toward the back of the club. I had no worries about repercussions from the police. The Italian police were some of the most corrupt I’d ever met. I’d learned that lesson young. Let them chase their tails.
My mark had entered the men’s room. I stood outside and kept my face carefully angled away. I had a black baseball hat on and tinted glasses, as strange as it was to wear them in a dark club. Thankfully, enough Italians were fashion-conscious to get away with it as a normal outfit.
There wouldn’t be any cameras in the restrooms; it was against the law. There was a handy Cleaning in Progress sign just around the corner from the bathroom. I waited a few moments before entering the room. I wanted my target to be midstream and not easily distracted. There was only one other man in there, and he took one look at me and left quickly. No, not everyone was a drunken idiot. He stepped around the cleaning sign I’d placed in the doorway and took off.
My target was using a urinal. I waited until he finished and started to zip up, then slipped a garrote from my pocket. With a flash of explosive power, I had the wire around his neck before he could even realize there was someone else in the room.
The man struggled, his hands clawing at my face, but he was too drunk, and I was too strong for him. I pulled him against my body, bending backward so his entire weight hung from the wire around his neck. The crack was satisfying and clean. I dropped him to the floor and removed the garrote, washing it carefully in the sink. The whole thing had taken seconds, and there was always time to clean up your instruments. That was only one of the habits ingrained in me by my long years in the military. Precision. Clarity. Focus. I glanced in the mirror and wiped a streak of blood from my cheek. Emotionless. In that whirling storm inside, I lived in the silent eye.
Untouchable.
I left the club, careful to keep my head down. As I strode away, turning this way and that down the warren-like streets, I found myself in Scampia, a neighborhood nestled in the heart of Napoli. I could have walked the way with my eyes closed. I grew up in that very neighborhood. A few streets down on the right was the house where my mother died. A little over was the place where my sister was taken by the state, and my father was arrested in the street, facedown like a dog on a rainy day.
If I were a man who could feel, then this walk down memory lane might be depressing.
Luckily, I wasn’t.
I didn’t feel much of anything at all.
Just the way I liked it.
Spring storms rattled the thin old windows of my hotel room, howling up the skinny cobbled streets of Naples. A summer storm.
It didn’t interrupt my routine. It didn’t matter where I was. At home in New Jersey, or doing work abroad for my capo, my routine was unchanged.
Even here, in the city of my birth, dark dreams chased me from sleep in the small hours. Especially here.
A clock in the hallway beyond my room chimed the hour. Four a.m. I didn’t need the clock to tell me the time. I was well-acquainted with the particular kind of darkness that descended right before dawn broke. The deepest, most desolate kind.
I was awake, like I usually was, sitting at the table in my room, cleaning my guns. It was my nightly ritual. I had started it in the military, where the hours of night felt like days and your conscience was a boulder crushing your lungs.
I learned the measure of a man’s soul in that darkness. In the quiet between spaces where normal life should be. Every night, at four a.m., I was back there, sand beneath my feet, sweat running down my back, and the knowledge that in the morning, I’d lose a little more of my soul.
I wasn’t sure how much was left to give.
The gun in my hand shone in the low light from the dying fire in the corner, painstakingly cleaned and oiled. I enjoyed the weight of it. It was comforting. Other men turned to drink and substances to numb the terrible pain of being alive, but those did nothing for me. There was only one thing that calmed the storm inside, and that was my nightly ritual.
I laid out my collection and cleaned each piece carefully, my mind blissfully blank.
After, when there was nowhere to go but back to my bed and the nightmares that waited for me there, I loaded a single bullet, spun the chamber, and played my Russian friends’ favorite game.
Click.
Another stay of execution. Another miss.
The shutters on the window were open, so I could watch the lightning lingering over the city’s silhouette. The air was thick and damp, heavy with the coming rain. Ozone and petrichor flooded my senses. Below, a car drew up and stopped outside, blocking the narrow lane.
Men in dark suits got out, and then a stooped, shuffling figure emerged. It was late for guests, but the man outside was no guest in this city. I left my gun on the table and went to meet the Godfather of Naples himself.
They were in the parlor by the time I got downstairs. Renato, my best friend and capo, was well put together in a silk dressing gown, like he was on his way to the world’s most lethal pajama party.
Salvatore De Sanctis, his uncle, was in a three-piece suit, like he usually was. The only concession to his age was the jeweled walking stick he gripped in his gnarled hand. Time had passed here in the city of my birth. Sometimes it felt like it hadn’t. Time had stopped for me decades ago, on hot, foreign soil, baking under the sun, unsure whether there was a tomorrow. Somehow, life had paused, and it had never restarted.
But looking at Zio Sal, it was undeniable. Time was ticking, bringing me every day closer to death. It shouldn’t have been comforting, but it was.
“Elio, boy. Why does it seem like you were already up? I take it you already cleaned up Franco, the idiot who thought he could undersell me?” Zio Sal rasped at me, shooting me a warm glance when I entered the room.
My errand tonight had been for Zio Sal.
I nodded and took in his guard detail. As I scanned them up and down, Zio Sal chuckled.
“Be careful, boys. You’ll be getting a performance evaluation in a minute, so stand up straight.”
Renato inclined his head toward me. “Since we’re here, Zio, if you want Elio to do some training, I’m sure we can twist his arm.”
Zio Sal shook his head. “I lost too many men last time. I can’t afford another of Elio’s trainings.”
“Fair enough. To what do we owe this early call? I thought we were having lunch?”
Zio Sal shrugged irritably. “This is lunch. I can’t sleep for shit anymore. If it’s not the aches and pains, it’s visiting the fucking toilet. Don’t laugh, it’s not funny. It’ll happen to you, too, one day, if you’re lucky to live as long as me.”
Renato smoothed his face into a sympathetic expression. “Of course. Forgive me, I don’t want to wake Charlie so early. She needs her sleep.”
Zio Sal waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t gloat about your new wife and all the fun you’re no doubt getting up to. We will meet again later. I want to see the woman who has tamed the great Renato De Sanctis.”
I held back a smirk at his statement.
“Very funny,” Renato said, irritated.
Zio Sal pointed at me. “He got it. Anyway, this isn’t a social call. I wanted to see you boys.” He turned his head to the guards standing around the room.
They swiftly headed for the door. I moved closer, knowing I wasn’t included in the silent command to get the hell out. If there was important De Sanctis business, then I was there. After Naples, and the shit show that had unfolded, my sister and I had become De Sanctis inner circle, and they were more family to us than our own had ever been. I sat on the couch opposite Sal. There were three of us left in the room, and the door had been closed a good few minutes before Sal felt safe enough to talk.
“We have a minor problem.” Zio Sal pulled a cigar out of his pocket and lit up. “An old friend of mine, you might remember him from when you were younger. He’s finally gotten in trouble for taking bribes and who knows what else… He’s going down, and word on the street is that he could sing to cut a deal, lessen the sentence.” He gestured with the cigar, the lit end dancing circles in the air.
Tension hit my system. One thing I’d developed while scraping by and surviving in my twenties was great gut instincts. I could just tell before something devastating happened. Before the bomb went off, before the mission went to shit, before the bullet rang out. I could just tell.
Like a bullet flying through the air from a hidden sniper, Zio Sal’s next words zipped straight through my hollow chest.
He sighed heavily. “It’s Prosecutor Bellisario.”
I could practically feel the impact of the name I hadn’t heard in over a decade thud through my body. My cool, indifferent mask shuddered under the sound.
Ren glanced my way and then looked at his uncle. “Does he have anything on us?”
“On me, everything. That old volpe turned the other way for every big thing I needed done for twenty years. He could sink us with the information.”
“So, we take him out before he gets to say a word to anyone.”
“Just hold on a second… it’s complicated. Alfredo, the furbo old fox that he is, figured that would be your solution. He says he’s passed on the information… it’ll be released in the event of his untimely death.”
Renato snorted. “He’s bluffing.”
“Maybe, but you don’t know him like I do. He’s smarter than he appears. Just to complicate things, we weren’t the only people he was doing favors for. Word is that the Ravelli family also has a lot at stake if he sings. They want him eliminated… and so, he wants our protection.”
Ravelli? The name was familiar, but I couldn’t quite remember why.
Renato raised an incredulous eyebrow. “You’re shitting me. He’s threatening us into protecting him?”
“I told you, he’s smarter than he appears. Moreover, he wants protection for his daughter.”
The words washed against the bastion around my heart.
“His daughter?” Renato snorted. “Let them kill them both and we’ll deal with whatever evidence comes out. Actually, I’ll bet he sent the information to her. Two birds with one stone.”
“ Basta , Renato. I don’t want that. It’s undignified. I’m old, and soon, I’ll no longer be of this earth. I don’t want to be dragged into interview rooms, or worse, a cell, before I die. Allow me to die with dignity… at my country estate.”
Renato hid a smile of affection for his cantankerous old uncle. He’d been a hell-raiser in the past, but you’d never know it from his stooped posture and fragility now.
“Certo, zio . So, what do you want to do?”
Sal waved his hand. “That’s for you to work out. I don’t know. I’m old and I want to get back to bed. Make this go away.”
“ Ho capito . Rest up, and I’ll let you know when it’s done.”
Leaving the hotel, we stood on the steps and watched Zio Sal disappear into his town car.
“What do you think I should do with Alfredo Bellisario and his daughter?” Ren asked, staring up at the slice of early morning sky visible between the old buildings surrounding us.
I shrugged. Mask in place. “Whatever you want. It’s not my business.”
“Oh really? I’d have thought there was no one more your business than her,” Ren mused.
I held my tongue and avoided his probing gaze.
“If killing her is off the table, then the most obvious course of action is to marry the daughter off, of course, to a De Sanctis man. She’s our collateral against him spilling his guts and Salvatore’s history to the law in order to reduce his sentence. He clearly cares about her welfare… so she becomes a De Sanctis, and as long as he plays nice, she lives.”
“You’ve forgotten that she’s already married,” I reminded Renato before he could get too carried away with his ridiculous idea. Zio Sal gave me a strange look, as if a husband should be no impediment to making her one of the De Sanctis family.
“And what about the threat from the Ravelli family?” I pressed on, trying to force him to see reason.
“Protecting the father in prison is no big deal, half the guards are ours, and half the inmates. Protecting the daughter can fall to her new husband… the tax on getting a wife like Georgia Bellisario. Once Alfredo dies, he can do what he wants with her.”
Georgia Bellisario.
The name stuck like a claw in a furrow scored across my heart.
A remnant of a time when the organ I housed in my chest used to beat.
I used to be a living, breathing man.
I used to have hopes and dreams and hot blood running through my veins.
Georgia Bellisario had been the end of all of that.
The day I met her, I started my descent into hell. Now, I lived there.
“Of course, it’s Georgia Conti now, isn’t it?” Renato mused. “Now she’s the Conti widow.”
Widow. She’s the Conti widow. A widow . The word threatened to send me into a spiral.
“She’s what?” I managed.
“A widow. Her husband passed not too long ago. Some illness. Everyone is dying,” Zio Sal said, dramatic as ever. “You didn’t know?”
I shook my head tightly. No. I didn’t know. I didn’t let myself check on her. I didn’t let myself wonder. My life only worked if I continued to be a cold, emotionless machine, performing tasks and following orders without question. Looking up the woman who had ripped my heart from my chest and left me to bleed out didn’t fit. It wasn’t allowed .
“Ah, yes, she married the Conti boy, didn’t she,” Zio Sal muttered, nodding. “Those two were always inseparable.”
Right . Inseparable. The reminder that Georgia had married her childhood boyfriend after all, when my life had burned to ashes, was just the reminder I needed to reinforce my indifference to her situation now.
“Who do you suggest for the husband?” Renato asked.
I glanced at him and met my capo’s eyes. There was a question in them. Something that saw beneath the steel cage enclosing my mind.
I looked away.
“That’s not my decision. It’s none of my business. But I pity the poor bastard.”
Renato chuckled softly. “I’d bet my fortune that Georgia is still a handful. I’ve only ever heard of one man handling her.”
“Renato,” I interrupted him. I had no desire to walk down memory lane. I’d decided long ago that the woman in question was dead to me. She’d died on a warm, late summer day, lying under the shadows of an olive tree. She’d died. She was gone forever. I didn’t care about what was left over.
Renato blew out a breath, sensing my determination not to get dragged into the situation. He thought, nodding decisively. “Jimmy. Jimmy will marry her.”
“Jimmy… Jimmy who I think is skimming off the casino Jimmy?” I asked, surprised.
Jimmy De Luca was a low-level made man, one who I was pretty sure was a traitor and deserving of the same punishment I’d dispensed last night.
Renato nodded. “He’s the right age and single. Maybe it’ll make him less annoying… or Georgia will kill him. Either way, it’s a win-win. You got a problem with that?”
He cut his eyes to me.
I studiously avoided his gaze and shook my head. “No. No problem. It’s not my business.”
“Right.” Renato sighed as though I was the most trying person he’d ever met. “One part is your business, however. Georgia lives in LA. Her fiancé lives in Atlantic City. Someone needs to go and get her… and that someone is you.”
“Me?” I repeated.
Ren nodded. “You. Once all this business with Bellisario gets out, you don’t think the Ravelli family will have the exact same idea as us? Right now, it’s about who can act fastest to help old Alfredo make the right choice about who to rat out. I don’t trust anyone else to bring the daughter back in one piece but you. Cheer up. You’ll only have to put up with her for a few days, then Jimmy will do his duty and take over.”
“I can send a trusted man,” I stated flatly. Everything inside me resisted the very thought of seeing Georgia again, never mind talking to her, being around her… I wasn’t sure either of us would make it to the wedding in one piece.
“Don’t overthink it, Colonel. Just follow orders.” Renato gave me a grin.
He knew exactly how ingrained the habit of following orders was for me. When you’d dedicated your entire life to serving your country, questioning orders, or worse, refusing them, felt like an unforgivable betrayal.
“Still, I didn’t intend to see her again,” I pointed out, knowing the battle was lost. My capo’s mind was made up.
Renato’s hand landed on my shoulder. It reminded me of that day, a lifetime ago, when we’d first met, and I’d tried to steal his wallet, only to get caught immediately and hauled in front of the prosecutor.
“It seems like fate has other plans for you.”