2. Elio
CHAPTER 2
ELIO
I woke from what felt like the remnants of a drugging, except that the only potential perpetrator was asleep beneath me and as far as I could tell I hadn’t been robbed blind or had one of my kidneys stolen. I shifted carefully, lifting my head from where it was resting on her stomach, her leg draped over my chest.
Sitting up with a groan, I looked around for my phone and found it along with the rest of my clothes scattered across the floor. My skin itched from the moment I lost contact with her, but I needed to check the time and figure out what the fuck had happened.
Fucking Christ. If I didn’t get her to the airport in the next half hour, they weren’t even going to let her try to get through security. I pulled on my clothing, cursing at whatever the fuck was making me feel so unsteady. Every instinct screamed at me to climb straight back into the bed and wrap myself around the sleeping omega who looked like a well-used princess draped across the blankets.
I’d already been gone too long.
Once I was dressed, I shook her awake. Her eyes opened with a snap, the brown irises nearly eclipsed by her pupils. Lemon tarts filled the air. The perfect combination of sweet, tart, smooth, and buttery. I hadn’t even begun to eat my fill of her. If we’d had more time, I could’ve made a go of it, but time wasn’t on either of our sides and I’d have to sate myself with the appetizer instead of the entrée. Her reaction to me had been…surprising. It had been a while since a lover by chance had been that desirous of me. Usually it was a meeting of necessity, or demand, in the case of my boss. Fucking for the pure pleasure of it, the luxury of it, was an experience too infrequent for my liking.
Fucking timelines.
“Get dressed,” I barked.
She stared at me like she was even more out of it than I was. I couldn’t remember eating or drinking anything that might’ve been spiked, but who the hell knew what could’ve caused this reaction. She moved too slowly, so to speed things along I helped her into her pants, and it took every fucking ounce of willpower to not spread her out and feast on her cunt while I did so.
Stepping away from her was an exercise in control. The hotel had complimentary bottles of de-scenting spray so I grabbed one and spritzed her down, both to give myself a chance to think and so that they wouldn’t turn her away from the airport for smelling like she had just been through a tumbler of alpha pheromones.
She didn’t protest as I hoisted up her bag and dragged her along after me. She shivered the whole ride to the airport, hard enough that I felt it over and above the rumble of the bike beneath me. Maybe she had caught something and it had just chosen this afternoon to present itself. I couldn’t afford to get sick, but it was too late now.
“If you don’t go now, you’ll miss your flight,” I said when we stopped at the drop-off zone and she didn’t make a single move to get off.
That knowledge at least prompted her into motion. I stared after the pretty omega for longer than necessary. Her scent clung to me, infused into my skin.
I should go. The omega had already disappeared into the building, but my instincts were demanding I drag her right back out again and take her for myself. Unfortunately, I had taken enough of a detour. It was one thing to play with her, but another thing entirely to think it could go on for more than that. Besides, I had shit to do.
I flexed my hands, trying to shake off the need to follow her. I had no choice but to be patient, but luckily I had a lot of experience with that.
The three-hour ride back to Naples gave me plenty of time to think. I was still here for another three weeks or more to deal with my grandmother’s estate, but soon enough I would be back stateside, and that hot little omega had no idea we lived in the same city. I imagined us reuniting a thousand times over the drive. Thinking about the taste of her was a million times more enjoyable than the reality I was entrenched in.
I wanted everything she could give me: the sass, the softness, and that burning desperation I hadn’t expected. Realistically I probably should’ve asked a few more questions about her situation. She had mentioned kidnapping and extortion, and that didn’t happen often with tourists over here without it making international news. That likely meant the Neapolitan mob was involved and they were not for the faint of heart. Not quite as renowned as the Sicilians for their brutality, but not someone I would want to fuck with. Too bad I couldn’t avoid them since they were either family or enemies trying to run said family out of town.
I dreaded going back to Naples. Nonna was on her fucking deathbed and I simply couldn’t bear to be in the house anymore. She might have been a vicious bitch all her life, but the family both loved and despised her in equal measure. Now that she was going to be gone, the few of us who were left had to deal with the fallout.
Nonna was a legend among the locals, an epicenter of the mafia here. Daughter and granddaughter, wife and sister, mother and grandmother to the people who had both built and razed this town throughout history. Unfortunately, few were left to mourn her. Territorial disputes had spilled over, a huge portion of my cousins and uncles dying in the process. The only men left standing in this family didn’t fucking live here.
I was more a guard dog in this situation than anything else. My cousins could all wield a gun and hadn’t shown an ounce of fear their entire lives, but they were mourning, and that meant they wouldn’t be as on guard as they needed to be to survive. Rival groups had been paring down the family for decades, and now that our matriarch was leaving us, they were more than ready to swoop in and claim what we had for themselves.
My cousins had been discussing what to do—whether they should stay and honor Nonna’s memory and the place of her birth, or get the hell out of Dodge with the family members who were still alive. I couldn’t encourage them to cross the ocean and stay with me when a territorial dispute was coming soon that might leave us in a similar state. Skipping town while the Rossis were gathering strength to move against the Gallos wasn’t the smartest move. The do?a I served under, Bianca Gallo, hadn’t wanted me to go, but grandmothers were her one soft spot. She leaned harder into matriarchal respect than sentimentality, but if she were actually capable of being sentimental, I suspected it would be about the grandmother who had raised her and left this world too soon. Biance had allowed me to go on the condition that I return immediately if she contacted me.
We’d been keeping tabs on the situation before I left, but it was never entirely possible to know when one side would make a move. The Rossis wanted Bianca dead, not that I particularly blamed them, and she wanted to burn them to the ground. Over the last decade their little empires had expanded, consuming each half of the city we shared until only the river divided the territories. The only way to get more was to take what someone else already had.
My cousin Anita was leaning on the stone wall outside the door when I arrived. She wrinkled her nose when I stepped off the bike and pulled her into a hug. “You smell like a whorehouse.”
“Classy as always, Anita.”
She shrugged and took a drag from her cigarette. “Why should I have to be classy if you’re not going to be either? Where were you?”
“I had business to attend to.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m sure. You missed dinner.”
“Did you save anything?”
“Of course I did. Nonna would rise up from her deathbed and beat me with a wooden spoon if we let anyone go hungry in her house.”
She followed me back inside and we passed the living room, where Nonna was set up in a hospital bed, a handful of my cousins holding silent vigil.
I ate my fill of the fresh bread and the minestrone Napoletano still simmering on the stove. If I said I missed American food—particularly canned tomato soup and grilled cheese—Nonna would probably find the strength to bury me in the garden. My cousins were all excellent cooks, but I was nostalgic for the taste of home.
Anita continued to stare at me the entire time I ate until I finally got fed up and dropped my spoon. “What?”
“Where were you?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“If you’re not going to actually be here, you might as well go home.”
“It was an unplanned detour; don’t be a bitch about it. I’ll be at your beck and call the rest of the trip.”
Anita pursed her lips but didn’t argue, slipping away to take her place in the vigil.
I stayed up well into the late hours, and at least one of my cousins was always sitting at Nonna’s bedside. In the brief time I managed to fall asleep, she went, and I woke to sobbing, my cousins waking and joining us one by one.
Grief saturated the air until I was suffocated by it. I stepped outside into the light of dawn, blocking out the crying until I felt like my chest wasn’t going to cave in. The town was mostly still asleep, a sprinkling of residents meandering down the streets. If I were at home, I would go and get everyone coffee, maybe a box of donuts so the deep-fried sweetness could take the edge off, but nothing was open in this town and I wouldn’t have been able to get coffee to go even if there was.
When my guilt got the better of me, I finally went back inside and then straight into the kitchen to start pulling espresso for cappuccinos. It wasn’t one of my top skills, but I knew how to work the machine Anita had bought for Nonna when she had moved in two years ago. Anita joined me, purple shadows beneath her eyes and tears streaking her cheeks.
“How long will you stay?”
“As long as I can.”
She nodded silently and combined the espresso, hot milk, and foam, setting the two cups on the table for whoever wandered in before returning to assist me with more.
The oppressive quiet that day was only broken by crying. I did what I could to make sure everyone stayed fed and hydrated, but I hated every fucking second of being there. We’d been going through all the properties since I arrived, sorting out what to sell, and what specific cousins wanted to hang onto. Most of them had been bathed in blood at some point or another, so they wouldn’t be missed when we put them on the market. And undoubtedly the same people who had filled those homes with blood would be the ones to buy them. Over dinner, most of my cousins had made up their mind to leave and settle elsewhere after Nonna’s funeral.
I wasn’t nearly so sentimental about the legacy here. I hadn’t grown up in Italy, so most of the time it was more story than reality. Coming back was a chore, but I knew how much everything meant to my cousins and I tried not to be a massive dick about everything. I’d had plenty of practice biting my tongue while working under Bianca.
A bullet sliced through the silence and embedded itself in the wood of Nonna’s china cabinet.
About fucking time. This I knew how to deal with. This was where I fucking shone.
To their credit, none of my cousins screamed. Violence wasn’t anything new to them, but they did look pissed off that the cabinet had been damaged. I double-checked my Glock, calculated the angle and trajectory as best I could, and fired in the opposite direction. The heavy grunt let me know I’d guessed correctly, and gave me the second of delay I needed to sweep outside and make eye contact with the asshole targeting my grieving cousins. The next bullet went exactly where I needed it, and the light faded out of those eyes. Another bullet cracked into the stone near my head, far too close for comfort. The mob here was losing its fucking touch. I’d have made that shot.
I slipped into the headspace of combat: focusing my breathing, everything moving almost in slow motion as I picked out the threats and eliminated them. Only two. This time, anyway. When those two didn’t report back, they would send someone else. There was no need to scare my cousins into leaving when they had already decided to do so, but if they were dead, money would be saved from having to purchase the properties.
Pain lanced through my arm like lightning. “Son of a bitch!”
I didn’t give myself a second to check on the wound, raising my gun and firing in the direction I’d been shot from. I emptied the magazine, pissed that I hadn’t noticed another assailant after finishing off the first two. Far more bullets than were necessary peppered the third body. Stupid of me. If another was lurking, I’d be unprepared, but the fucker had shot me. I could put up with a lot of shit, but not that.
I kicked the two corpses that were near enough to do so. The third hung out of a window and I’d have to do something about that. Fuck me. My arm burned, but I’d have to get the shovel and get them out of sight before someone called the Polizia.
The tip of the metal shovel slammed into the ground next to me and I turned to see Anita standing there, a look of disgust on her face. “Get inside and clean the wound. We’ll take out the trash.” She prodded the bullet graze and I checked the urge to clock her for it. “Looks like you’re good for something after all.”