29. ~Nico~
29
~Nico~
There was an undeniable honesty in violence.
When somebody was in that more primal state of mind conducive to delivering such a thing, it stripped away all the rest.
The pretense, the dishonesty, all of that was banished when that was in play.
Because of the life I led, the only time I experienced any sort of sense of freedom was when I was immersed in a bloodied, gory bout of violence.
But right now, that wasn’t the case.
Like everything else today, it was mired in lies and pretense.
I didn’t want to spare these assholes I was supposed to be fighting alongside.
I wanted them all fucking buried.
I wanted them to fucking kill each other.
Well, there were a couple of exceptions.
Milo, of course.
None of our soldiers had been invited to the wedding, just Capos and up, along with the wealth of business partners that the Marchetti-Leone alliance had, including the new ones it had acquired. So I didn’t need to worry about my charges. They were out of the line of fire.
I also wasn’t ready for my father to pay for his sins in death. But he’d been evacuated, so that wasn’t an issue either right now. Unfortunately, I’d seen Gio orchestrating that, his attempt to gain more favor with my father, seeing as though Gio was the worst earner out of us three Capos, so he was worried about his standing—possibly even his life if he didn’t shape up soon.
Santino had also been evacuated, the twisted shit now long gone into the night.
The true Underboss of the Leone Family that Caterina was still fond of, Dante Rivera, also hadn’t attended out of protest, something he’d unfortunately have to pay for at Santino’s hands in the coming days. The Consigliere, Matteo Ricca, had apparently been told to stay away with Santino concerned that he would cause issues with some of their new business partners, the guy not on board with a certain few of them.
With them out of the way, that still left Cassio and my uncle.
While the latter, I wouldn’t shed a tear if he fell. It was a pity that the fool was being heavily covered by Marchetti security still on the premises, those that hadn’t been on my father and ensuring the Boss got to safety.
But Cassio deserved better.
And he had no such cover. That was reserved for the undeserving shit of Leo, who was over by the bay windows working alongside Angelo and the other Leone Capo, Elia Volpe, to cut down several bikers trying to breach the front entrance. Meanwhile, several dozen had already breached the rest of the house, fanning out and coming at it from different angles.
I spun from breaking the neck of one hostile over a patio table to see Cassio still unable to make headway, and pinned down behind an oak tree in a firefight with two more bikers.
Approaching fifty, he still held his own with the younger of us extremely well. This current situation notwithstanding, he’d been battling non-stop with barely any time to take a breath, let alone a beat.
His floppy chestnut-brown hair that fell down to his collar and was usually styled impeccably was all over the place, in his eyes, his deep-blue suit torn and dirtied in places from battle too.
It got a whole lot worse when I caught sight of somebody coming up behind him and lining up a shot.
Cassio looked over his shoulder, having heard the footsteps crunching behind him, and when he turned back, I saw hopelessness flit across his features. Resignation that he was done.
Not happening.
I was tapped out ammo-wise and I’d given my backup gun to Caterina, so I used the next best thing, pulling a knife from my ankle holster and lobbing it through the air.
It sailed across the distance with rapid speed and tore into the throat of the guy about to take a shot.
He jolted and gurgled as blood sprayed, and he dropped his gun in the process before sinking to his knees.
Cassio swung his head toward him, then caught sight of me, eyes wide.
Unfortunately, him connecting with me drew the attention of the other two firing at him, and one of them turned toward me, taking aim.
He never got to fire, as a bullet ripped into this skull, blowing it to hell, a moment before a rush of movement blurred across my vision and then I watched Milo tackling the second guy to the ground.
They landed hard, but Milo recovered first, yanked the guy’s gun from his grasp, then used it to fire a bullet straight through the guy’s heart.
He pushed off him, then handed me the dead man’s gun as I met him.
“Appreciated,” Cassio said, coming out from behind the tree finally, and giving my shoulder a squeeze. “Both of you,” he added, giving Milo a chin lift. “I only had one fucking bullet left. I wasn’t expecting to need extra ammo at a wedding. Then again, with this new alliance in effect, I guess nothing is off the table now. And Marco hasn’t even struck back against those Benzino attacks yet, so we’ve got that shit coming. Everything’s gonna go to hell soon. This home invasion will look like nothing in the coming weeks, I bet.”
He was right on the money there.
Milo and I exchanged a look.
Before anything more could be said, three Harleys came tearing through the tree line and headed straight for the patio. Angelo had sent a portion of Leone security over to that area. The dumbasses should have had it covered.
At least with these three hostiles breaching it, it meant those Leone fuckers were dead. More thinning the herd had gone down.
Milo handed Cassio a gun from the other fallen biker he’d taken out, and then all three of us were firing at the incomers.
Cassio was an ace shot, and he fell into it with us easily, only taking us two shots each to hit our wildly moving targets and make them dead men riding. Two were killed instantly with headshots, toppling from their bikes like rag dolls as the machines slammed into a tree each, totaling the rides. The third took a bullet through the chest from Milo and wiped out in the next second, his bike skidding across the grass into a retaining wall, taking a chunk out of it in the process.
His body twitched. He was still breathing.
I stalked over to him, just as he was tapping an earpiece and communicating muffled words that I couldn’t hear.
Before I could do another thing, a bullet whizzed past me, nearly fucking winging me and tore through his skull, killing him instantly.
I jerked back and spun to see Leo standing there, gun still in firing position.
“What the fuck was that?”
“Couldn’t risk you showing mercy or pulling your diplomatic bullshit. All these invading shits are marked for death.”
“I heard the order just fine,” I bit back.
His phone buzzed, and he was pulling it from his pants in the next second and taking a call. “Angelo? Yeah. What? You’re sure? All right, got it. Move to clean up then.” He hung up, then told me, “The Gunners have just started to retreat.”
That was what the guy he’d just almost shot me to kill had been communicating then—that the battle was lost. At least for now.
He eyed Milo and Cassio as they came over, telling us all, “Time to assess the damage of this shitshow.”
Cassio and Milo, especially, were glaring at him fiercely for nearly fucking shooting me just to take out a hostile who was already down.
His need to deliver punishment and his own personal reckoning upon any of our enemies often had him doing reckless fucking shit, just like this.
He acknowledged their reaction, but instead of speaking to it, or giving a shit, he barked instead, “Inside now.”
I ground my jaw, but managed to focus on the bigger picture of it all, rather than the slight, as we made our way back into the main house.
That bigger picture being the carnage all around us.
The many bodies littering the patio and more inside the house itself.
The massive security issue it posed to both the Leone Family and the Marchetti-Leone alliance as a whole.
The distraction that going after what was left of the Lone Gunners MC would prove to be, something the four of us would take full advantage of.
And the mammoth hit to both morale and the confidence that everyone involved would be suffering right about now when it came to this new alliance.
Not to mention, the despicable plans Santino and Angelo had had in mind for my wedding night with Caterina were now off the table with the mansion in a state of near-ruin.
One manipulated attack had achieved so much.
And this was just the beginning.