The Camorra's Fallen Rook

Chapter One Enzo

Chapter One

Enzo

“Hey, killer, lookin’ good in those slutty sweatpants!” A drunk guy in a fishnet top stumbled past me on the street. “Buy you a drink?”

I buried my fists deeper into my hoodie’s pockets and tipped my chin down, ignoring him. My ears were hot, even though the temperature was deep into the negative.

I tried to push down the familiar feeling of claustrophobia, like I was trapped inside myself, itching to tear my skin clean from my body.

I had been trapped for a very long time.

Tonight, I was finally breaking free.

What do you do on the night you buried your abusive father? This is a multiple-choice question, and one that requires some attention:

A. Mourn said father with your family and friends. I mean, he still sired you. That’s gotta count for something, right?

B. Seek urgent help in the form of intense therapy to deal with all the shit he put you through.

C. Go and get your dick sucked by a dude, because up until now, you never dared to try from fear he’d catch and kill both of you.

If you answered A or B, congratulations, you’re a normal, sane person.

If it’s C—ding, ding, ding! Welcome to the sexually oppressed, religiously traumatized club. We have cookies (but zero appetite).

I knew I was making a mistake as I trudged my way to a low-profile gay club in Hell’s Kitchen. It was too dangerous for me to show my face at a place like this, considering my profession and family pedigree.

Which was why I concealed myself to the max to protect my anonymity.

I wore a white Yankees baseball cap and a faded black hoodie.

Gray sweatpants and a pair of green Adidas tennis shoes.

It was the kind of getup I wouldn’t normally be caught dead in.

I usually dressed nice, in designer Chelsea boots and tailored chinos and shirts that cost more than the average Manhattan rent.

And my hair was always tousled to messy perfection.

A few standout traits made me recognizable no matter what camouflage I donned. I was uncommonly tall, standing at six four. And I had a sick physique even a baggy hoodie couldn’t hide. I’m talking broad-as-fuck shoulders and defined abs you could grate cheese on.

People noticed me everywhere I went, for better or worse.

While I was already regretting my dumbass decision, I still couldn’t back down from it.

It was time I figured out what was going on with my dick.

A dick that’d been increasingly reluctant to go on playdates with my usual hookups.

My cock had always been a bit of a snob—preferring my hand to anything else, really—but I’d been going on three-month stretches of dry spells lately.

Which was frankly blasphemous, considering my age and looks.

I didn’t even know if I was gay. All I knew was that I couldn’t be fully straight, because if I were, sex wouldn’t be so…taxing.

I liked it more than leg day, but less than cheat day. Food wasn’t supposed to be better than sex, right? Every red-blooded man I knew would eat pussy over steak. Not me, though.

I’d had a longtime girlfriend before, high school through early twenties. Her name was Adriana. We’d had sex, but I found it just okay. I’d get hard, and even orgasm, but once it was done, I was glad I’d bought myself a few more days of not having to do that again.

The first clue to the fact I probably wasn’t straight was when she and I were doing a marathon of Outer Banks, and she gushed about how cute Chase Stokes was, a notion I wholeheartedly agreed with.

Both Adriana and I had glanced at each other at my confession, then looked away quickly; a blush had blossomed across my face. It was obvious that I, like her, found him attractive.

The relationship ended on a pretty bad note when my older brother, Achilles, screwed her to break us up so I would come out of the closet. His fucked-up version of being supportive, I guess.

Shockingly, his plan to try to drag me out of what he deemed my sexual confusion kicking and screaming by obliterating my already shaky trust in humans didn’t work. If anything, it just convinced me that my family was as unprepared as I was to confront whatever was going on with my sexuality.

For a while, I thought I might be asexual, but that didn’t track well with the fact I found plenty of people attractive.

I had also been jacking off like the entire state of Texas was in desperate need of a sperm donation since I was a teenager.

I loved masturbating. And I loved porn. Especially threesome porn.

And, well, maybe the girl wasn’t always necessary.

But it still felt safe that one was present in every video.

Because then I could tell myself that I wasn’t watching gay porn.

Because I wasn’t gay, you see. Not even a little bit.

Anyway…so back to getting my dick sucked by an anonymous man tonight.

In all my twenty-six years, I’d never seriously considered it before.

I couldn’t muster the courage to go through with it. After my breakup with Adriana, when the whole discourse about me showing zero interest in girls started in our conservative Catholic family, my father had been uncharacteristically quiet about it.

Then, one day, about three years ago, we were wrapping up a Camorra meeting with my brothers, and my dad asked me to hang back after they left.

He motioned for me with his hand to get closer to him.

I leaned forward, angling my ear close to his mouth.

He grabbed my earlobe and twisted so hard that my spine contorted to keep my ear from snapping.

He dropped his voice and whispered, “I don’t give a damn if you’re gay, Vincenzo. If I catch you as much as smiling at another man the wrong way, both of you will be dead before sunrise. You will touch another man over my dead body, you hear?”

I heard him, loud and clear. And even though I killed for a living (though, let’s be honest, all the dudes I offed deserved to die—they were criminals, murderers, pedophiles, scum of the lowest order), no part of me wished to die. Let alone make some poor, innocent guy my father’s next victim.

Instead, I shoved my wants and needs deep into the back seat of my existence and stayed the hell away from anyone or anything I deemed temptation.

So, yeah, I was relieved when my father finally kicked the bucket.

Actually, relieved was putting it mildly. I was…elated.

I never forgot what being called “a gay” in a negative way did to me. It lit an inferno inside me and scorched my soul to ash in a way I found so humiliating, I carried that quiet rage with me wherever I fucking went.

Yesterday, I finally killed him.

It wasn’t very hard, nor traceable through postmortem examination. I knew my shit around medication and took premed courses before Don Vello, a.k.a. Daddy Dearest, forced me to obtain a law degree. I’d even graduated youngest in my class, after skipping a grade in high school.

Skewing his medicine dosage to make it look like an accidental overdose was a piece of cake.

It helped that my father had been in a vegetative state for eight weeks prior to my delivering him to Hell’s doorstep.

His immune system was already in the shitter, because I’d been poisoning him for a while.

The mysterious illness he’d been suffering from for the past two years? Completely fabricated.

By me.

He was a rotten man who had been cruel to my mother and abusive to all of his children.

Odd, but I couldn’t muster any guilt over killing him, or anyone else I’d ever murdered.

Maybe I was a psychopath like my older brothers, but I didn’t think so.

I was capable of empathy. Capable of love. I loved my siblings and my mother and my friends.

And I would never, ever hurt someone who didn’t deserve it.

As I navigated my way down the narrow, cobblestoned alleyway toward the red neon sign of the club, I burrowed my chin deeper into my hoodie, aware of the curious gazes thrown my way.

I was what Mama referred to as a big boy.

In all the places that mattered.

My Queerdr date was about to get a front-row seat to the exquisiteness that was Enzo Ferrante.

Fuck, my dad better not be haunting me as a ghost, because shit was about to get seriously X-rated.

But there was no way, right? For that to happen, his soul needed to leave his body, and he obviously hadn’t possessed one.

I stopped in front of the neon sign. A cluster of young men loitered underneath it, laughing and smoking. Their carefree air burrowed beneath my skin. My breath caught, and I realized what I was feeling was longing.

I longed to belong to this group of strangers, who looked a little younger than me in age, but a million years younger than me in spirit.

They looked…happy. Calm. Confident in their own skin.

I pulled my phone out and frowned at my last few messages.

Ca$h: I’m at the bar

Ca$h: The place is packed, wanna go somewhere more private?

Ca$h: I can’t stop looking at the picture of your .

My lips quirked into a smirk.

It was a good picture.

Not that my dick had any bad angles.

And the good news was, he was always gracious when he met fans, no matter how disinterested he was.

Italianstud2000: coming inside.

Here’s hoping.

Reaching the red velvet rope, I wordlessly flashed my fake ID at the beefy bouncer, shouldering past him into the hot, dark space. The suffocating ambiance of too many people, overflowing alcohol, and BO wrapped itself around me, tightening its grip the deeper I ambled inside.

Dozens of bodies crowded the dance floor, moving, writhing, throwing their arms in the air to “Russian Roulette” by Rihanna. The low bass and adrenaline made my bones throb.

Jaw clenched tight, I pushed my way to the bar, keeping my head low.

I needed to get outta here, fast. I’d take him to my place, or maybe a motel that accepted cash.

Honestly, I was too panicked to be horny.

The only reason I didn’t double back was because that’d embarrass me to a degree where my fucking soul would divorce my body or some shit.

Unacceptable. I was a grown-ass man. I was seeing it through.