Wolfe
I sat across from Francesca at the small table outside the gelato place. It was a sunny day, and there were tourists everywhere. Once September arrived, it would calm down quite a bit, and I would get my town back.
She ordered a large size with multiple flavors and happily enjoyed her cold gelato on a warm day. It wasn’t that I didn’t like sweets. I just didn’t allow myself to ever eat them, so I lived vicariously through her as I watched her eat.
I was content to be out and about with her, to have some of our previous relationship back.
She was still shrouded in grief and misery, but through the cracks came flowers and blossoms that managed to survive.
I had been too young to understand grief when I’d lost my parents, so I didn’t know how to handle her sadness.
I let her take the lead. Let her ask to go out for lunch, let her initiate sex, let her take the reins until she was ready to give them back to me.
It was hard because I didn’t let anyone call the shots in my life.
“You don’t want to try it?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“You should be a monk with that kind of willpower.”
“I’ll never have the willpower to be celibate.”
She smirked. “You’ve got me there.”
My phone started to vibrate in my pocket, and I pulled it out to glance at the screen. It was Don Russo, so I answered it right away. “What do you need?” I fell right back into my old ways, acting like the lieutenant I’d always been.
“Ciro says Icarus is on the way,” he said calmly. “If we don’t take this stand with him, they’ll be gone. And that’s one less ally.”
“I didn’t know Ciro was an ally.” Last time I checked, he was a competitor.
“All the gangs have forged an alliance ever since Icarus started his campaign. We leave in fifteen minutes.”
“They know for a fact that Icarus will be there?”
Francesca raised her eyes from her gelato and looked at me.
“Nothing is fact, but it’s a strong possibility. He butchers his own meat.”
Francesca put down her half-eaten cup as if she could hear Don Russo over the line and the crowd around us.
“I’m headed over.” I hung up.
Despite the beautiful Mediterranean tan she sported, she looked pale as snow.
“We’ve got to go.” I rose to my feet, grabbed her cup, and threw it away without asking if she was finished.
She came to my side and walked with me as we headed back to the villa. “I can make it the rest of the way on my own. I have a key. You can take a taxi to headquarters.”
I stopped to face her on the sidewalk. “You’re sure?”
She nodded. “I’ll be fine.”
Time wasn’t on my side and I had a job to do, and I appreciated that Francesca understood that.
She looked at me like she had more to say, but she decided to keep it to herself.
“I’ll be okay, baby.”
She nodded. “I love you.” She moved into my chest and hugged me tight.
I squeezed her back and rested my chin on her head. “I love you too.” It was still surreal to hear her say those words to me, to understand that I went from being a terminal bachelor to a practically married man who worshipped my woman like I was in a fucking cult.
“You tell me the second you’re on your way back,” she said as she pulled away and looked me in the eye with a stark expression of sadness.
“I will.”
She reluctantly let me go, releasing a sigh of defeat when she did.
I turned away immediately and waved down a taxi, unable to stand that sadness for a moment longer. I hated hurting her and putting her in this situation, but this was how it would always be.
I arrived at headquarters and strapped on a vest underneath my shirt. Sometimes if they saw your vest on the outside of your clothes, they would purposely take headshots. If they didn’t see it, they would just take the easiest shot they could find. The less your enemy knew about you, the better.
I grabbed all the guns I wanted from the armory, and the guys loaded everything into the SUVs parked in the roundabout.
To my surprise, Don Russo was joining us.
He was decades older than me, in decent shape, and he had a great shot, but regardless, he was still in his fifties. The reason he had lieutenants and captains like me was to do the dirty work on his behalf.
“Don, it’s probably best if you stay out of this one.”
He slipped a pistol in the back of his jeans and wore a slight smile. “All hands on deck.”
I lowered my voice so the other guys couldn’t hear. “I don’t know about this, boss.”
“If Icarus is really there, I want to make sure we put him in the ground. Show him that Sicily belongs to Cosa Nostra and not some Florentine asshole. We’ve been running this island for generations, and he doesn’t get to come in here and take a piece of that, let alone the whole fucking thing, without asking. ”
This was the Cosa Nostra I remembered—proud as hell. Sicilians became part of Italy in the late 1800s, but for centuries, we were our own country. We were still our own country as far as we were concerned.
“Let’s bury this asshole alive and see how he fucking likes it.”
I smirked. “I like your spirit, Don Russo.”
We left in a line of cars to Trapani, the same place where Warren had had his clandestine meeting where I’d intercepted Leo.
That felt like too much of a coincidence that Warren had just been there and now Icarus had crossed the entire island to come for Ciro.
Seemed an odd place to start. There was definitely a connection between Warren and Icarus, but I wasn’t sure what it was, considering they had opposite interests.
When I’d gotten that phone call, it had been six in the evening, so by the time we arrived outside of Trapani, it was almost sunset.
Trapani was another coastal city, but Ciro’s operation was farther inland.
He got his deliveries from the dock, smaller quantities since he avoided customs, and then handled his operations on his own acreage.
The gangs didn’t deal their drugs only to Sicilians.
Some exported them south through Morocco, while others went through Istanbul in the Middle East. In a lot of ways, Sicily was just a hub for distribution from South America.
Off the radar from the rest of Italy but with a noteworthy population of five million people, it was small but unique, easily overlooked and underestimated.
I sat in the back seat with Don Russo as we traversed the winding roads.
Nothing was said on the ride. Don Russo was his normal calm and collected self.
I was like a pressure grenade about to go off at the slightest bump. The adrenaline surged in my blood and gave me razor-sharp focus. Gave me a maniacal edge sharper than a butcher’s knife. It was a high I’d spent my life chasing, but now, it didn’t hit the same way it had before.
Everything was different when I had someone waiting at home for me.
My life was somehow mortally intertwined with another. If I died, she died, and if she died, so did I. Our relationship had a distinct purpose, and that purpose was a heavy responsibility. My life suddenly had value when I’d never cared before whether I lived or died.
Don Russo turned to me. “I like your woman.”
I snapped out of my thoughts and looked at him.
“I can tell she’s tough, which is exactly what you need.”
“You could tell that just by talking to her for five minutes?” I asked incredulously.
“Along with everything you’ve shared about her, there’s the fact that Don Mancini wanted her to run the business instead of his son and the fact that you’re obsessed with her.
Beautiful women are like fish in a barrel.
They’re easy to catch. She’s obviously more than a pretty face to you. She has substance.”
Substance and depth and complexity and a spitfire attitude.
“She would be a good wife to have in Cosa Nostra.”
“We’re five minutes away, and you’re really going to try to poach me?”
He smirked. “I might get a bullet in the head like Don Mancini in five minutes. Should say my piece while I still can.”
“We’re coming up,” Santino said from the passenger seat.
Nicolo radioed in from the front. “We’re too late. They’re already here.”
“Or we’re here just in time,” Don Russo said.
A minute later, bullets sprayed our SUVs, which didn’t matter because the windows and the cars were bulletproof. It’d been a while since I’d heard the sound of cracking glass, and it didn’t fill me with excitement like it used to.
Instead of enjoying the thrill, all I could think about was survival.
I had to get home to Francesca.
We drove right into the scene, a private piece of property with a villa, a warehouse, and all the other cars from workers.
I could see through my cracked window. “Looks like they’re holed up in the warehouse because most of the men have converged over there.”
“Then we draw fire this way,” Don Russo said. “Give them a fighting chance.”
The SUVs moved into a secure position behind the house, and we all jumped out and ran for cover before Icarus’s men could catch up to us. All the windows in the house were already shattered from gunfire, so they’d cleared this place out before they’d moved on.
Santino clicked the button that connected to the back of the SUV. “Take cover.”
We all made our way into the house, and the back revealed an automatic machine gun that would shoot anything with an infrared signature, including us if we were in the wrong place when it was activated.
The second the other men converged on the house, the machine gun did its job, going through a hundred rounds of ammunition in just four seconds. Bodies dropped, and the others scattered behind stone walls and rocks until the gun was empty.
We silently moved through the other side of the house, communicating through experience and hand gestures like marines until we reached the far side and tossed our grenades toward the men who had tried to hit us from the opposite direction.
Santino hit the button and turned off the automatic gun. “It’s off.”
The grenades detonated and cleared our way toward the warehouse.