Chapter 12Vasily #2
“He’s already here, and I think he’s going to kill this guy. If he does, he’s going to start a war with the Mafia. You need to get here, Vasily. Before it gets ugly.”
“This better be good,” I snarl at Benedetti as I storm through the warehouse at the silo, rolling up my sleeves as much in preparation for acts of violence as to hide the fact that I’m rumpled from head to toe.
I should have been in the office today. As much as I answer to no one anymore— the closest I have to a boss is a loose network of other Bratva pakhans and allies at the top of their pyramids in their respective regions— I’ve given my entire life to building this empire.
I work every single day. Even if I didn’t, it’s Tuesday.
Everyone works on Tuesday.
I threw on the first components to a work suit I laid my hands on, not even an undershirt or briefs, and then spent the drive wishing I’d hopped in the shower for the thirty seconds it would have taken to soap up. I reek of sex.
Pretty sure that’s the widening of Benedetti’s eyes once I breeze past her, but she scurries after me as I head into the storage closet.
And then through the secret door in the storage closet.
The work room behind it is cliché as fuck, all exposed ducts and concrete walls and a single lightbulb bright enough to blind the sun hanging down in the center of the room, the shell around it narrow enough to make a spotlight of it, casting all but the chair directly beneath it in shadows.
On that chair sits a man I’ve never seen before, but he reeks as strongly of Mafia as I do sweat and Ana’s pussy. And despite having been here the half hour it took me to get here plus however long Kostya and Benedetti were here with him before that, he’s in better shape than I am.
“Who the fuck is this asshole?”
“Angelo Fiorini,” Benedetti says before he can answer for himself. “My second cousin.”
I wheel around on her. I hadn’t really looked at her before, it wasn’t something I was thinking about, but now I notice that as much as I’m rough around the edges, the bigger shocker here is the fact that she’s in civvies.
Comfy leggings, a plain tee-shirt, a thin knit cardigan covering her arms. She’s in hiking shoes, and they’re actually scuffed and dingy like they’ve touched real dirt and not just gym and sidewalk.
Her hair is in a clip atop her head, big lazy curls flopping out of it. Huh. She always has her hair straight or pulled back in a face-lift bun. She’s not as tall as I’d imagined she’d be in flats either, and she has freckles, thin lips, and no eyebrows to speak of.
Huh.
But plainclothes Benedetti doesn’t excuse this.
“Did you call me here to save your goddamn cousin?”
“Fuck no! Guy’s a mook. Pain in my fucking ass. You kill him after this, you’ll be doing me a favor.”
“You get me killed and Uncle Franco will have your legs chopped off,” Angelo warns her.
“Uncle Franco is too busy figuring out where Granny Margie hid the marshmallow salad at Easter, and Granny Margie has been dead for a decade!” Benedetti shrieks at him.
Kostya and the other shadows circling the room all attempt to tamp down their laughs.
Family’s family. I genuinely don’t know if I’m going to kill Angelo Fiorini— it does take a lot for me to kill someone, and I don’t know this guy or any wrongs he’s done to me, so I’m thinking not— and I do believe Benedetti that this wasn’t a ploy to keep me from killing him, but I do think she’d be devastated if I did.
I don’t know the family tree very well, but she and Ana are related, as well, so Angelo might be Ana’s cousin, too.
But every death that’s come at my hands has devastated someone else.
Every soul that’s perished because of me was the most important person in someone else’s life.
I’ve made it a priority to ignore that, whether the person devastated is a stranger or someone I know intimately.
Benedetti might leave the silo with tears down her cheeks and a body bag in her back seat, but that will be her cousin’s fault.
“Sounds like you’ve been wasting a lot of my boys’ time today,” I say to Angelo, walking into the halo of bald light illuminating him while casting long shadows down his body. “And my boys’ time is my money.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you need new boys. ”
The way his dark eyes meet mine tells me that even though I don’t know who he is, he’s not some young punk and he’s not an underling.
The power structure of the Mafia is a lot different from the power structure of the Bratva, at least in my experience with them here in the Southwest. It’s not a mountain so much as a mountain range, hundreds of tiny mountains that lead to low tops instead of a pinnacle everyone seeks to climb although hardly anyone makes it to the summit.
I am the summit.
Angelo has his own little plateau, that’s my guess, and he’ll never be anything higher, doesn’t even have a path to that, but he’s the king of his kingdom, however small it might be.
His words are wisdom, although I’ll likely reject that wisdom because I do have a much larger kingdom. Still, I say, “Oh? What did my boys do to deserve, ah, what is it your men like so much? Cement slipper?”
“Oh, right,” Angelo sneers. “Your people prefer a genocide.”
Not my people. Me. And not a genocide. That’s just what the night in Flagstaff when my brother was gunned down came to be known as. Simply because I was a bit too casual in my words.
But seriously, everyone knew that when I ordered the execution of every Irish man, woman, and child, I meant the IRA goons and their affiliates.
Not even family members who were connected solely by blood.
Deirdre Corcoran was still in her classroom teaching eighth grade history the next day and Rory O’Sullivan was still there in the first row. I don’t actually support genocide.
For the sake of scare tactics, I nod. “Yeah, and I’m about ready to take out every Italian in sight if you don’t start talking.
” And because I like a bit of the dramatic, I pull out two guns and aim them on Angelo and Benedetti.
If I had a third hand— I have a third gun but no hand for it— I’d be aiming it at Delaney on the opposite side of Angelo, too, just to prove the point.
He’s one of my guys, but he’s a mutt. Yeah, there’s some Russian in him, but Italian, too, and fuck if I know what Delaney is. Irish, probably.
But he’s one of my guys. See, I’m not pro-genocide. I’m just making a point.
Angelo leans back and crosses his arms over his chest, rumpling his dress shirt further.
The way he has his hands allows me to see the twitch in his pinky, though.
Nerves are starting to get to him. Or fatigue.
He’s in a shitty folding chair, and he’s a big guy.
I know how much those chairs bite into the ass after sitting in them long enough.
“I told them the minute they hauled me here that my message was for you only. In fact, I told them that when I was in the lobby of your place, so you can also thank them for wasting your time. This could have been resolved in ten minutes if these pencil dicks hadn’t gotten all womanly hysterical on me. ”
Benedetti, who still has my gun trained on her, pulls out her own gun.
Points it at Angelo.
Angelo points a finger at Benedetti. “See? Womanly hysterics.”
I want to say Artyom and I never squabbled like this in public, but I know we did.
Constantly. And Kseniya is my only remaining bully to this day.
She jokes that it’s the real reason I don’t go to Flagstaff, and honestly, as much as I miss her, it is nice not having her embarrass me in public now that I’m the pakhan .
So I tuck my guns away, although I cast a glare at Benedetti.
“Why did you not get me when he showed up? He’s your cousin. ”
“I didn’t know he was coming! I wasn’t even in town.
They called me in when he namedropped me— which, holy shit, Angie, what a pussy fucking move that was, calling for your cousin because you walked your own stupid ass into enemy territory and just expected a goddamn red carpet.
I should have let you drown that time you fell in Nona Gia’s pool. ”
She calls him Angie. Yeah, these two are thick as thieves, although clearly, she had no idea he was going to show up at my place and is more pissed at him than anyone else here is.
“As soon as I got here, I called you,” she tells me. “And no, before you ask, I don’t know why he’s here. He won’t tell me shit.”
“Because like I told you and everyone else, what I have to tell Vasily is for Vasily’s ears alone. I come as a friend.”
“You are no friend of mine,” I bristle.
“No, but the man who sent me is. And the message I have can go only to you.”
He stares me down intensely. I see the truth there. I don’t know that his message is truly a friendly one. He might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Who’s dressing as a wolf. He’s Mafia. Base level, he is the villain in my story. If this is the mole Benedetti warned me of, fucking fail. But Benedetti is Mafia and ATF, so I recognize that villain is more than just how one identifies.
And the message that can only go to me, the way he says that, could be what I’ve been suspecting is more likely than a mole.
A traitor.
Dima. I haven’t confirmed it, but the absence of evidence is no more the evidence of absence than the evidence of absence is the absence of evidence.
And traitors are like cockroaches. Sometimes, one just randomly walks in through the front door and makes its way to the kitchen to have a couple snacks and die, but it’s far more likely there are thousands behind the wall.
“Everybody out!” I yell .
“Vasily—” Kostya starts, but I shoo him away.
“You pulled all his weapons, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“He scratched that itch right behind my left nut, too!” Angelo pipes up.
I pull my gun on him again.
He puts his hands up. “Hey, man. You can ask your boy. I had a gun and a knife on me, and I handed them over when they asked. They didn’t find nothing else on me.”
“Found a cigar snip,” Kostya argues.
“Oh come on, that’s not a weapon.”
“You people cut off fingers with that shit!”
“Yeah, I’ll cut your little pencil dick off with it—”
“Out!” I bellow, wishing I could kick Angelo out, too.
But we’re finally alone, and when I tell him to sing, he grins and relaxes back in his chair. “Gino has your boy.”
It takes me a couple seconds to even recognize the name, but Angelo is right.
Gino is not my enemy. He’s Mafia, but that time Ana nearly died in my apartment?
The friend she was talking to was Gino’s wife, and Gino actually called me a dozen times to save her.
And when everyone thought I was livestreaming myself raping her— which was her idea and she loved every second of— he managed to smuggle a phone in to her to find out if she needed an extraction team.
He’s the only man from her side of the world who truly cared about her during all of that, even if it was all to make his wife happy, and I respect the hell out of that.
Then it clicks what Angelo is saying.
“Alex? Gino has Alex?”
Angelo shrugs. “I don’t know his name. I just know Gino has him. ”
“How? Why?” I want to ask how a second time— and then why a second time, just for good measure— but I hold back so I don’t sound like a complete idiot.
A shake of the head this time, but he says, “If I get the gist of what happened, Tony had him, and Gino talked Tony into handing him over. He was with Gino when I was there, and they didn’t want to freak him out or anything, so we couldn’t talk too much about it.”
Alex is a bit soft, always has been sensitive, but he’s a grown man and has the brand to prove he’s a full-fledged Bratva member.
It’s ridiculous that they thought they couldn’t talk frankly about him when, if anything, what they had to say should have made him feel better about getting kidnapped, but I shrug it off.
Mafia. No point seeking logic where there is none.
I thought more highly of Gino, though.
“Why you?”
Angelo nods to the door everyone just exited through. “Everyone knows you’re banging my cousin.”
“Of course they do,” I sigh dryly.
“So yeah, we all figured if I caught her, she’d be able to hook the two of us up so we could have this talk because, bro, I shouldn’t be the one telling you this, but your organization is leaking like a sieve and it’s all raining right into the Mafia’s pocket.”
“I fucking know,” I grumble. “I’m working on it, and I’m going to kill the traitors, so you can zip your pockets back up.”
“Hey man, I hate Tony the Bitch. I was the one who gave him that nickname, you know.”
No less than seven Mafia men have claimed that over the years, but I nod like I believe him .
“So if this shit I’m passing off to you helps close up your leaks and fucks Tony up to boot, I’m all for it. But... there’s something else you need to know that we know.”
They don’t know that we know that they know we know suddenly rattles off in my brain. No idea what that was, but I feel like Kseniya is the source of it. Some dumbass American TV show she made me watch. New Girl or The Office or Gilmore Girls or some shit.
I shake it away to get myself back on track. “Well shit, don’t stop now.”
Angelo leans closer, as though he thinks that even this room is bugged. Fuck, it might be. “Word is you’ve got Tony’s sister.”
Shit.
Shit.
And now that I’m worried that there might be a bug in the fucking room and it’s going to get leaked to even more people, I say nothing. I just stare at Angelo, and my silence is enough of a confirmation to him.
“Should that be the case,” he says softly, “Gino requests a trade.”
I shake my head. Absolutely not. I’m not giving them Ana in exchange for Alex, and they better be prepared for the fact that I will send in a squad to rescue Alex, now that I know where he is. This is on them. All of it. Including the fact Ana’s with me.
Angelo holds a hand up. “Mrs. Romano requests an afternoon with Mrs. Baranov, that is all.”
Mrs. Baranov. So that means they know I’m passing her off as my wife, too .
“They’ll bring your boy, you bring your wife. It will be a great comfort to Mrs. Romano to know Mrs. Baranov is safe and taken care of and happy where she is.”
“We can do that over the phone.” Fuck, why didn’t she just smuggle a phone in like last time?
“There are concerns about Mrs. Baranov’s mental state. The phone isn’t good enough this time. Mrs. Romano wants to see her. Mind you, they are putting their necks out returning your boy like this.”
I scrub the back of my own neck and groan in irritation. “Fine. When and where?”
“Tomorrow. They’ll come to you. I presume there’s a helicopter pad on your roof? I’ve heard that’s your thing.”