Chapter 3
LUCA
What the actual fuck just happened?
She is sitting in the bar waiting for me, and I am actually considering going in there and having a conversation with her.
Through the steamed-up window of the late-night dive, I watch her and imagine dragging her into the nearest alleyway to fuck her.
Imagine sucking her sweet blood from her neck as I sink my fangs and cock into her.
She is the goddamn Capelli malocchio. She’s my target, my mark. My victim. Don Vincenzo ordered me halfway across the world to isolate her, and this mission had two possible outcomes—kill or kidnap.
“I don’t mind which, figlio mio,” he drawled from his ridiculous carved-stone throne while a skinny blood addict knelt naked on all fours, sucking him off as she got fucked in the ass by Vincenzo’s human servant, Carlos.
The Don is so used to the alleged pleasures of his decaying flesh that he didn’t stop talking to me when he shot his load in the addict’s mouth. There was a brief pause, a shudder of his features, so quick you’d miss it if you blinked, then back to business.
He waved his hand at Carlos, dismissing them both, and the addict yelped as she was dragged away by her greasy hair, Carlos’s dick still inside her.
Knowing him, he kept fucking her until he was good and done, then made her beg for the blood hit she expected as payment. Like most addicts, blood seekers will do anything for their next high.
“It would help, Boss, if I had more of an idea what was going on,” I said. “Is it a message job, or do I need to keep it clean?”
He stared at me while he tucked his shriveled gray penis back inside his pants, as though daring me to comment. Daring me to show any sign of the disgust that flared inside me.
Vincenzo is over six hundred years old, and it’s a point of pride for him that he doesn’t mind looking it. Me, I think the evil inside him is spilling to the outside, and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.
“It is not your position to know the why, Luca,” he said, silencing any argument I might have had with the swoop of one long, gnarled fingernail.
“Only that she is a loose piece on the game board. There are things occurring that you don’t know about, that you don’t need to know about.
Balances are changing. Allegiances shifting.
This little malocchio is in the middle of it all, and someone is using her, pulling her strings.
She matters to someone who matters to me.
So kill her, bring her here, whatever you choose, but neutralize her. You understand me?”
No, I didn’t understand him, and I still don’t. It makes no fucking sense. Why does he want her? What else is going on? He won’t tell me—he enjoys messing with me too much. For a man so powerful, he can be a petty fuck.
Petty or not, Vincenzo is still the head of the Firenze Cosca.
Still the most ancient and strongest of the Old World families.
And still the creature who dictates the rules of my whole life, no matter how high I rise within the organization.
I don’t have a choice. My life was bound to his before I was born, and his control over me means he can stop my heart with a single thought.
So yeah, I don’t have a choice. But if I did …
I’d pull his fucking head off his bony shoulders and kick it into hell, that’s what I’d do. I’d set his corpse on fire, then piss on the smoldering ashes.
He’s been off the rails for decades now, but things have gotten worse recently.
Sophia, Vincenzo’s adopted daughter and the alpha bitch in the whole administration, was sent to Toronto by Vincenzo himself, leaving him free of the one voice who ever stood up to him.
He also banished his council to New Jersey, and I’ve seen more new faces at court in the last four weeks than I have in ten years.
Much like the human Mafia, organizations like ours have survived so long and been so successful because of structure, tradition, and discipline. There’s always a boss. But he should be a boss with a brain. A boss who listens to his people.
Vincenzo stopped listening a long time ago, and these days, the whole court is full of blood addicts, hangers-on, wannabes, scumbags of various different ilk.
And us: his capos, his enforcers, his soldiers.
His alleged family—a fucking incestuous, competitive, dysfunctional family, but a family all the same.
I don’t know what’s going on or why Vincenzo is more off the rails than usual, but my job is to do as I’m told. Whatever the boss wants. I never used to question that, but here I am. Made of questions. Standing in the rain outside some shithole bar in England, dialing my second-in-command.
“Hey, Boss.” Matteo’s gravelly voice comes down the line. It’s about ten p.m. in Manhattan, and his day will be well in motion.
I hear a clatter and a thud in the background. “Did I interrupt snack time?”
“Nothing important,” he says. “More fast food takeout than a gourmet meal, if you know what I mean.”
Gourmet to Matteo means pedophiles, abusers of women, con artists who prey on the vulnerable, and anyone who would dare consider hurting a puppy.
He once kept a dog-fighting crew who tortured pit bulls chained up for a month, forcing them to fight each other over a chance at freedom that never came.
He still has one of the dogs, Moonface, to this day.
She suffered some kind of brain injury during her time in the pits, and she’s a little fucked in the head, but she would die for Matteo and vice versa.
For some of us, feeding is functional; for others, it’s tied to the pleasures of the flesh. Usually, it’s a bit of both. For Matteo, it’s a method of taking out the trash, and in New York, that well never runs dry.
“You there, Boss? In Liverpool? What’s it like? You been to Anfield stadium yet?” Matteo is a big Liverpool Football Club fan. One of the many quirks a guy picks up when he’s been ricocheting around the planet for two hundred years.
“No, I haven’t. I’m not here on vacation. Did you find anything else out for me?”
The circumstances around how I was sent here are suspicious—too sudden, too spontaneous. In order to blindly obey someone, you must trust them, and I’m no longer sure I trust the Don. It’s possible I never did, but I at least trusted he was acting in our best interests.
That’s why I asked Matteo to see if he could dig out anything more for me to work with.
He’s good with the blood addicts and the human servants.
The streak of compassion he possesses allows him to tolerate them a lot better than I can.
And to everyone but him, they’re invisible, which means they make pretty good spies.
“Yeah. But not much that makes sense—it came from Freya, you know?”
Freya has been at the Firenze court for a long time, at least in human terms. She arrived when she was a young girl, brought there by addict parents who traded her for blood.
I suppose there wasn’t ever much chance of her leaving after that.
Who the fuck could survive in the human world after being fed on by feral vampires—not to mention the other horrors she was subjected to—while they were only a teen?
Predictably enough, she’s a bit like Moonface—a little fucked in the head, but loyal to those she loves. She’s also one of the Don’s favorite playthings, which sucks for her, but it grants her high-level access.
“Yeah. I get it. I’ll run it through the Freya filter. Now go on, it’s fucking raining here.”
“Okay, keep your panties on. From what she’s overheard, there’s some dude called Kurt with a K. Doesn’t sound like he’s with one of our families ’cause nobody knows much about him. Maybe one of those ambitious newbies, you know, gonna change the world order?”
I do know. The Old World vampires, the ones who were transformed before the Bargain was sealed, are dominant in our universe.
We control all crime related to supernaturals, and a large chunk of the human stuff too.
The human Mafia knows we exist, but only those at the top levels of their organizations.
They kick up a percentage of their profits, and they’re all good earners.
In return, we let them exist and allow them to pretend they’re in charge.
There are four main Cosca families, all with traditional allegiances to cities in Italy, as well as old but smaller clans from Ireland, Scandinavia, and Russia.
It’s been this way for a long time—back to the days when those Italian cities were one-horse trading posts and fishing villages—and it works.
But every now and then, some punk thinks he can come along and take it from us.
It’s always some fresh-from-the-turn asshole who has ideas bigger than his resources and balls bigger than his brains. They always get dealt with.
“So, Freya was vague on the details, and she got all caught up on other words that started with K and went into this huge list … kittens and kingfishers and kiwi fruit …”
“I get the picture. Move it along, Matteo.”
“Right. So, she has the impression that this Kurt fuck has amassed his own little army and is targeting the malocchio. No clue why. There’ve been rumbles that he’s deliberately Calling her, using pawns to drag her out over and over again until she’s running on empty and gets sloppy.”
“Like the Lombardi girl years ago?”
“Yeah. Except back then, nobody really knew who was behind it or why they did it.”
Anna Lombardi was her family’s Seer, and it did not end well for her.
She was torn limb from limb while still alive, and her body parts were dumped on the grounds of her parents’ mansion.
Apart from her head. That was thrown through their kitchen window, eyelids cut off and lips sewn shut.
It caused a lot of trouble. The Lombardis blamed the vampires, which was totally logical, and for a while we were on the verge of all-out war.