Chapter 35
Enrico stormed into his house, slamming the front door so hard the frame rattled. Fury simmered through him with every heavy step toward his office. The week had been a disaster—one humiliation after another.
He’d lost money. A disgusting amount of it.
Half a million gone, evaporated with the vanished arms shipment.
He’d lost men too, good ones, and the emptiness of their absence gnawed at him.
Not because he cared—they were pawns—but because he had fewer bodies to order around now.
Fewer fists to swing, fewer guns to point.
His protection racket was crumbling, his bribes thinning.
Hell, even the strippers probably laughed behind his back when he left the room.
And then there was his daughter. His pathetic little bitch of a daughter.
Catarina had betrayed him, publicly. He’d seen the pictures splashed across the papers and online—her wedding pictures plastered all over the news, that bitch of a daughter smiling like she’d never lived under his roof.
They weren’t even professional pictures.
The images seemed as if they’d been taken by a damn cell phone!
He hated the smiles. Smiles were weakness. He preferred women broken, terrified. That was what gave him a hard-on.
Unfortunately, that was the same moment when Matteo strutted into his office, smug and oblivious, another lavender shirt stretched tight across his chest.
“How’d it go, boss?” Matteo asked carelessly, leaning against Enrico’s desk.
Enrico didn’t hesitate. His hand dipped into the left-hand drawer, closed over the cold steel, and he pulled the pistol free. One smooth motion. One squeeze of the trigger.
The shot echoed like a thunderclap. Matteo’s head snapped back, his eyes wide, a spray of blood splattering across the oriental rug. Then he collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut.
Two soldiers rushed in, weapons half-raised. Their eyes darted from the body to the smoking gun to their boss’s expressionless face.
Enrico dropped the pistol onto the corpse with a casual flick of his wrist. “Roll him up and get rid of him.”
When they didn’t move fast enough, his temper flared hotter. “Now!”
Startled, the men obeyed, their steps jerky as they bent over Matteo’s body. They bundled him in the ruined carpet, his blood soaking deeper into the fibers, then hauled the weight between them toward the waiting car. Neither of them bothered to clean the gun of fingerprints.
“Toss everything into the river,” Enrico snapped, adjusting his waistband over his bulging gut.
They left without a word.
Fifteen minutes later, on a dark, quiet road outside town, the car rumbled to a stop near the familiar stretch of riverbank. Everyone in the organization knew where bodies were dumped. But tonight, neither man moved from where they sat, the silence inside the vehicle heavy.
“This is bullshit,” one of them muttered, staring out at the dark water.
“Yeah,” the other said. His voice was low, grim. “Bianchi’s out of control. Did you hear what happened to DiAngelo a year ago? Bianchi pulled the poor bastard in front of him like a shield. The poor bastard took five bullets meant for Enrico.”
The first man’s jaw tightened. “So what do we do now? We dump Matteo and pretend our boss didn’t just shoot Caruso for no apparent reason?”
The other man glanced back at the trunk. His voice was cold. “Why bother with the bridge? Gun’s still in the rug with the carpet. He didn’t wear gloves.”
A long pause followed those words. Then the first man grinned. “Fingerprints all over it.”
They got out together, opened the trunk, and dumped Matteo’s carpet-wrapped body on the gravel. One of them murmured, almost respectfully, “Never liked the guy. But dumping him in the river ain’t right.”
The other just grunted. “Agreed.”
They drove away, but minutes later, the car pulled into a gas station. One man bought a burner phone, snapping it together in the lot. The service to the phone was good for five minutes. He needed thirty seconds.
“911, what is your emergency?”
“There’s a body wrapped in a rug about four miles outside town,” he said flatly. He rattled off the location, then added, “He was shot by Enrico Bianchi. Gun’s right there with his fingerprints on it.”
He snapped the phone shut, wiped it clean, and tossed it into a trash can.
By the time their car merged back onto the highway, both men were silent, staring ahead. Whatever happened next wasn’t their problem.
Back in his office, Enrico puffed on a cigar, blissfully unaware that he’d just pulled the trigger on the beginning of his own end.