25. — you’re mine, homicide. #3
Salvatore hated Giorgio’s office. The whole third-floor wing where it belonged. An entire section made up of wood paneling that soaked in years and years of bad energy, untold sins, and cigar smoke.
“Where’s Nico?” Giorgio demanded, standing behind his desk.
Salvatore stayed near the door, ignoring a smirking Marco. “Escorting Frankie to the car; he’ll get here when he gets here.”
“I said everyone!”
“My daughter is not your responsibility, Giorgio.”
The man pointed a beefy finger his way. “You...you have seriously overstepped your bounds, old friend.”
Salvatore sneered blatantly. “We are not friends, Giorgio. I am a tool at your disposal, as you made very clear to me each time I had to pick up a phone call from you; every fucking check I wrote; all the orders you gave. Friends? Please.”
“Matty,” Giorgio demanded.
The enforcer, never far from his boss’s side, even if he blended in well with a crowd, appeared at the door. “Yes, boss?”
“Find Francesca. Bring her here, now.”
“He won’t find her. She left in a different car than she arrived.
Said vehicle will change within three miles of this house, then change again, and within the hour, she won’t even be in this fucking state,” Salvatore informed, his tone the same as it would be had he been ordering breakfast from his favorite diner.
“You see, I know the games you like to play, Giorgio, and so when I tell you that my daughter will not be a piece you think you can move on the board, I mean it.”
Giorgio’s stare burned with his growing hatred. “I see you and I are going to need to revisit all the ways you can learn, Sal.”
“I learned quite well the first time around.”
Matty still stood in the doorway. “Am I finding her, or...?”
“Watch the halls,” Giorgio barked. “I’ll see the girl on another day, I’ll make sure of it.”
“You got it, boss.”
Matty passed Salvatore a look as he turned to leave. Salvatore simply brushed the underside of his jaw with two fingers and put his attention back on the problem at hand. That being Giorgio.
“You tried to get a pregnancy past me?” Giorgio gritted out.
“The pregnancy is a secondary detail that you would’ve eventually learned. I wanted to ease you into it. Trust me, it pissed me off, too.”
“Goes to show what you had to say about him earlier isn’t entirely true, is it?”
Is that what he thought? “No, I didn’t speak a single lie about Nico. Nor Marco.”
At his name, Marco sneered. “What’d you have to say about me, Sal?”
“To you, young man, you will address me using my proper name, or you won’t address me at all.”
“I—”
“I would suggest you go with the nothing at all choice, Marco,” Salvatore warned, “lest I finally give you what I’ve been promising for months.”
“Don’t threaten my son,” Giorgio uttered.
A grin tugged at Salvatore’s lips, but he just shook his head.
Sucking his tongue against his top front teeth, he folded his arms and waited out Nico’s eventual arrival.
It took a few more minutes, and they each passed painfully slow.
The longer it took, the angrier Giorgio became until the man was practically apoplectic.
By the time Nico strolled into the office, Giorgio’s face had turned entirely red. He wasted no time before exploding.
Just like the crystal bowl on the desk that he threw at Nico the moment he saw his face. Nico ducked in time, thankfully. The bowl shattered against the doorframe.
“You little shit!” Giorgio roared.
Nico glanced at Salvatore, but otherwise, stayed steady. “It’s a boy, Dad, and we’re naming him Damiano. We picked that today. I love her. I love her more than air. More than myself. I love her.”
“Aw, so cute,” Marco teased from the corner. “Less fuckable now that she’s pregnant, but...”
Nico didn’t even glance his way, still staring at his father. “I know I fucked up, but I don’t see it like that, anymore. It happened, and I’m doing what I should do; what I want to do.”
“Fucked up?” Giorgio snarled, reaching for the next thing on his desk to throw.
A paperweight, by the looks of it. “I understand marrying the bitch because you knocked her up—but hiding it? That smells like something bad to me, and I want to find out where the smell is coming from before it spreads.”
That paperweight lifted in his hand.
Salvatore took three steps sideways, stopping in front of Nico. “You’re not going to throw something at him again. You’re not going to hit him. You’re not going to call him names, or yell, or anything else, Giorgio. You talk to him like the man he is, with respect, or this ends now.”
The boss’s expression lit with disbelief. “Who do you think you’re talking to? I made you, Sal! I tell you what to do, not the other way around! You’re this close to never leaving this office, you fucking moron!”
“I know exactly who I’m talking to,” Salvatore replied.
Marco decided to taunt his brother yet again, dragging the older men away from their conversation entirely. “So, you couldn’t get her to abort it, or what?”
Nico remained still and quiet. Unbothered.
Marco’s gaze tracked his brother like prey. “You know, she’s not going to look like that after she shits out a few of your brats, bro.”
“Marco, shut up,” Giorgio snapped at him.
He didn’t. “Shit, maybe I can still hit it before you get another one up in there, huh? She won’t be entirely ruined, anyhow.”
“Get out!” Giorgio bellowed.
All eyes turned on the man behind the desk.
“Get out,” he repeated to Marco through clenched teeth, “and take your brother with you so I can have a fucking conversation without you running your mouth like you always do, Marco.”
Marco just smirked, chuckling slightly. “Whatever you say, Dad. Come on, Little Nicky,” he added, pushing off the wall to nod at the door.
Nico barely passed him a glance, but he did meet Salvatore’s gaze over his shoulder.
“Seems you have interesting things to share. Rate her out of ten—for a lay, I mean.”
Salvatore had to breathe deeply once, then twice, at that comment. It took a lot. He had years of practice keeping his cool, but Marco tested the man with every word that came out of his mouth.
Nico did not have such practice and patience. Yet, somehow, he turned to follow his brother, silent still.
Then, Marco stopped in the doorway, looking back at Nico. “You know, I just had a thought.”
Giorgio, distracted momentarily with picking up the phone on the desk to make a call, didn’t notice the exchange.
Marco didn’t wait for Nico to ask what thought he could possibly have before moving right along to share it with the rest of the class. “Maybe I won’t need to put much work in to fuck her after all. Depending on how this goes for you, I might be her last option left.”
Nico’s chin tipped up at that comment, jaw tightening. “The fuck did you just say?”
“Nico,” Salvatore warned.
He didn’t hear it.
Marco grinned murderously. “What? I could play daddy to your baby, couldn’t I? It’s not like we haven’t done it before, repeatedly, in this family. And you know, the first things to go when I married her would be that fucking cat and dog. You know I hate pets.”
Giorgio growled something into the phone, making Salvatore turn back to the man as he slammed it back onto the receiver. “Are you two still standing there? Get the fuck out!”
Salvatore glanced back to see Marco leave laughing. Nico followed, but the view of his side profile as he turned just outside the door to follow his brother down the hallway made Salvatore pause.
He didn’t look the same.
Blank stare. Tense jaw. Robotic movements.
For a moment, Salvatore felt like he had a glimpse into the past. As if he were that twenty-four-year-old leaving Giorgio’s office, a different one back then, with a bleeding hand, money to pay for his wife’s hospital care, and an eventual death sentence hanging over his head.
That haunted stare. It looked just the same.
“Nico,” he said again who didn’t look back.
He did grab something, though. A metal statue of a naked woman sitting on a decorative table directly across from the opened office doors.
Salvatore heard the first crack of the statue hit Marco. Then, the second. So did Giorgio.
By the time Salvatore turned around to face the boss, he already had the gun pulled from the holster hidden by his tux jacket.
Locked and loaded, ready to blow. They hadn’t even checked him at the door like they did everyone else because for all those years, he’d never carried one.
Dead men didn’t need weapons. They were just waiting for their time.
Giorgio got too comfortable with that.
“Matty!”
“He’s not coming,” Salvatore assured, as calm as ever.
How, when the sounds of a beating continued just outside the office, wet and broken and horrifying with every hit, he would never know.
He’d ask himself in the years to come how he just stood there and listened to Nico beat his brother to death, and made Giorgio listen, too, but he knew exactly why. It’s what they all deserved.
“MATTY!”
Matty didn’t come. Those two fingers from earlier made it so.
“You bas—”
Salvatore pulled the trigger. He wasn’t the best shot; lack of practice, honestly. The bullet still hit its mark, tearing through Giorgio’s cheek and sending him flying back into the large leather chair that rocked from the force and weight. Then, his head slammed forward. Straight into the desk.
Giorgio stayed like that, bleeding. Salvatore’s hand started shaking, gun still high, while the beating outside continued.