Chapter 15 Rosalia
ROSALIA
PLAYLIST: FINISH LINE – SATV MUSIC
“Itold you she’ll make it,” says Kat.
“What a shame,” I say.
“Rose,” says Kat and rolls her eyes. “She does what we wanted her to do. She is currently leading an empire that would otherwise blow up everything. She handled the shipment situation. I bet she gained some of their trust; it will all work out.”
“You couldn’t crack her phone?”
“No, Zeus couldn’t infiltrate it. They must have run the same protection on it like on Giuseppe’s phone.”
“It was probably his, just a new number, otherwise she wouldn’t have had my number.”
Silence passes. I am occupied in my mind. I was so sure she’d be dead by now. That girl—that woman. I can’t even call her girl anymore. She is no girl. She is a woman. A woman who stepped up into a world she pretended to know nothing about and excelled. It does not sit right with me.
“She’s meeting with the commission in an hour,” says Kat.
“Are you two chatting now?” I ask.
“We are exchanging information,” says Kat.
“She will be dead afterwards. The men in the room are a minimum of twice her age, she will be ripped apart and end up as a used doll buried somewhere no one will find her,” I say harshly.
Kat narrows her eyes at me.
“Rose, are you envious of her?” she asks, and I explode.
“Envious?” I shout. “Of that thing? She is a stone in my shoe that pokes me every day a bit more!”
“Then, what is it that enrages you so much?” she asks. “I mean, look at you. If you aren’t envious, might it be that you are intrigued by her?”
“I am not intrigued!” I curse.
Anger rises in me. That thing. Intrigued?
If I am one thing, I am repulsed. And an image flashes through my mind.
Accompanied by a feeling. A feeling of consuming superiority and a pull.
A pull I felt for this one second, where she looked me in the eyes with a flicker in hers, pressed against the wall, blood on her face, her chest heaving up and down, and I called her a filthy whore—and she liked it.
It was the moment I knew she had a degradation kink, and the reason she didn’t break from what we did to her.
It is what intrigued me for this one single moment.
Because I see it as a personal challenge to break the one who has to pay the debt.
The debt I now might never collect, because I cannot kill her.
Because she is a human to me now. And she also knows where my son’s body is.
I have to wait until I know, and then someone else can kill her.
“Not intrigued, huh?” Kat chuckles.
“Do you know where they’re meeting?” I ask to navigate the topic away.
“She didn’t say, somewhere remote.”
“The contacts I have don’t either.”
“I mean, I could pull cell phone log data from towers, there must be what, two dozen people meeting?”
“They won’t be foolish enough to allow cell phone use,” I say. “There won’t be guns or anything else allowed in the room.”
The afternoon goes by, and we hear nothing.
“I’m telling you, she is dead already.”
“She isn’t, if she were, I would know,” says Kat.
“And why is that?”
“Because she implemented a security measure so we can react.”
I sit up straight.
“Why am I only hearing this now?”
I don’t like it. I don’t like them close. I don’t like them talking about things I am not involved in. It takes control from me, and I am always in control.
“Because you have been an arrogant pain in the ass,” Kat says.
I roll my eyes and get up and walk to the kitchen. Turn, and pace up and down. There is so much at stake, and I hate that most of it relies on an insubordinate twenty-four-year-old who is too happy, bubbly and naive for this harsh world.
“Have you heard anything from Adria?” asks Kat.
“Nothing. She will have heard. And if not the other capo mandamentos, Adria will most certainly come for her. Adria wanted to kill Giuseppe more than I did. You saw how much emotion was behind it.”
At that moment, Kat’s phone rings.
“Yes,” she says as she answers the call.
A big smile appears on her face.
“Wait, I’m putting you on speaker.”
“I don’t have much time; succession was sanctioned under the premise that I hit the set quarterly targets.”
My lips part because I cannot believe my ears.
“How did you do it?” I asks.
“Well,” she says, “By bringing my background in use, reading the room, catching and killing a traitor and Kat’s resourcefulness in saving the day with the vessel.”
Kat grins.
“Who was there?” I ask.
“I can’t tell you right now. Sunday, 11 p.m. Chiesa di San Francesco di Paola, use the right side entrance,” she says and hangs up.
Kat and I stare at each other in a moment of silence, and she draws up her eyebrows while grinning.
“I have to say, I underestimated her,” I say. A sentence that does not come easily over my lips. But Sophie—Antonella—has earned my respect for what she has done. Convincing the commission was what I thought was impossible, and I was wrong; I have to acknowledge that.
It also means I cannot touch her, and I won’t, as long as she keeps up her end of the bargain, and that is working with us.
Sunday comes, and night falls over the city of Palermo. We decided to arrive earlier as a precaution, assuming her men would be watching all entrances. When the church bell chimes eleven times, we wait in the church, guns ready, behind an arch, one of us on each side.
The main door opens and closes.
Someone enters in heels, a single person. The sound of heels reverberates through the church's arches as the confident footsteps come closer.
I step out from behind my arch, gun pointing at her.
There is only dim light in the church, just enough to recognise her.
Sophie—Antonella, the girl who is no girl at all anymore.
Her hair is pulled back in a straight, high ponytail, and her intense eyes are framed by dark lashes with mascara…
she radiates confidence over me. Her lips are slightly parted.
She wears high-rise soft-fabric trousers with stiletto heels.
A loose, black blouse, tucked into the trousers.
Belt. Golden bracelets and earrings. Gun.
“Hello to you, too,” she says. “You can put that down.”
“You don’t order me around,” I say.
“Well, you came. Apparently, I do,” she says smugly. Kat snorts as she walks up to us.
“Sophie,” Kat says.
“It is Antonella,” she says in a rather cold tone, and I see where the change in optics came from. She had to become someone else to survive. Just like I had when I was sixteen, after I promised myself to kill everyone after giving birth.
Only she has done something I was never given the chance to. She has taken over. And if I were completely honest, I would acknowledge that one small part of me is envious of the girl, the woman, who managed to accomplish all of it. It is a part I detest. And therefore have to detest her.
Have to, a voice in me tells me, while my body has other plans. I look at her, watch her, see who she has become, and I cannot help but feel a sensation stirring in me. One of desire. Those slightly parted, red lips.
“I have a list for you,” she says very efficiently.
“It is what I could gather so far. I will have to keep up the money flow; therefore, drug routes and money must be untouched. Now, the human trafficking. We need to find a way to get people to a safe place. I got all the shipments for this month,” she says and hands me manifestos for several vessels.
I take them, and our hands touch for the smallest moment. I have to catch my breath from the sensation it causes in me, and my eyes snap into hers. She stares at me for the briefest of seconds before she twitches her head and turns to Kat.
“Kat, can you use your system to—” Antonella begins, but I don’t listen.
I am simply standing there, staring at her back.
Staring at the woman I hate from the bottom of my heart, as something in my core tingles—a desire.
A desire to grab her, choke her until she kneels half unconscious, and then suffocate her with my pussy.
My lips part.
My chest heaves up and down.
This should not be happening.
Not with her.
Of all the women there are, why her?
Why!?
And I look up in the sky as I question my Lord for the first time.
Why? Why do you let me desire her?
“Hello, anybody home?” I hear her ask, and my eyes wander down. She is standing right in front of me. Staring at me intently. Her eyes slightly narrowed.
My eyes wander to her lips again.
Full. Red. Slightly parted.
She tilts her head as my eyes wander back up.
She knows.
She grabs my hand.
Brings it up to her mouth.
Opens her mouth slightly more.
Trails underneath my pointer finger with her tongue.
And then sucks it, without breaking the gaze into my eyes.
Her red lips close around my finger, and I breathe in sharply. Never, ever in my life have I seen anything more erotic than this.
It's lustful, so consuming, and I know she is the apple. The forbidden apple.
A shiver runs over my back.
I pull back my hand, forcefully, and take a step back, gun drawn, pressing into her chest.
She smirks.
Biting her bottom lip.
“Shooting me won’t change anything,” she says and smirks dangerously. “Because I am Capo Antonella Amato.”
She turns and walks away.
With an energy that is worth her title.
Leaving me with a longing desire.