The Enforcer (Mafia Rivals #2)

Chapter 1

RAFAELLE

An extremely proficient killing machine.

That was what was written in the ‘Points of Interest’ section of my military file. The file I broke into my commanding officer’s desk to peek at one night when I was bored out of my skull.

I never told another living soul, but I was damn proud of those handful of words. Enough to keep me grinning and killing for months and years.

Hell, I’m grinning now as I settle onto my belly on yet another cold concrete floor. And wait.

It doesn’t take more than a handful of seconds for the grin to slide off my face though.

For fury to erode mirth like battery acid eats through flesh.

For memory to tear chunks out of my temporary levity.

It always does. Hovering in the wings like some fucking demon vampire, ready to suck the joy out of every moment.

These days, it feels like a competition, this push and pull.

I fight to find puddles of bliss in an abysmal landscape, only for the demons to swing by and take a crap in it.

And lately… fuck, it hurts to admit, but lately I seem to be losing.

Ever since my older brother, Cesare Salvatore, former Formula One racer, underboss of the Salvatore Organisation and heir apparent to our multi-billion-dollar empire, opened his arms out wide and invited the enemy into his bed.

Into our lives.

That enemy is now his wife. My sister-in-law.

As much as I want to hate her, Maddelena Mancinelli, now Maddie Salvatore, is good people.

She deserves props for holding her own in a family that wouldn’t have hesitated to rip her throat out and feed it to the specially built pond of piranhas my nonno commissioned as a Christmas present for himself three years ago.

The one he salivates about dropping some traitorous schmuck into James Bond style the first chance he gets.

Doesn’t matter that we’ve tried to tell him that’s not how piranhas operate. That they don’t chomp on human flesh just for shits and giggles.

When it comes to getting what he wants, Don Orazio Salvatore, Cosa Nostra down to his very marrow, lets very little stand in his way.

And for reasons I’m still stumped by, he decided giving Cesare and Maddie’s Romeo-and-Juliet-style hookup his blessing was the right thing to do. For the sake of family, and because being on Nonno’s shit list was a hard ‘no thanks’, I had to fall in line.

But as my commanding officer would attest, there’s falling in line for regular assholes, and there’s the way I, Rafaelle Fucking Salvatore, the enforcer of the Salvatore Organisation, choose to fall in line.

Do I admit the other reason why in my quiet, secret moments?

Sure I do. The thing is, Cesare was born first, the heir who knew his place and his destiny.

I have zero problem with that. But being born within months of each other meant we could’ve been twins made us close. So close I became his shadow.

But that’s the problem with shadows.

People tend to forget they’re there until they move.

Or act.

So when the opportunity presented itself to act, to use that shadow for more than standing in my brother’s limelight and destiny, I took it. To protect my family against our enemies, against the uglier parts of the world no one liked to talk about.

I became proficient at it.

Hence my presence on this roof.

Because I sure as fuck am not lying down and taking all that loved up kumbaya crap. Not when the person who took my mama – the most important person in my life – still walks this earth, breathing free air.

And irony of motherfucking ironies, that person too happens to bear the surname of my family’s worst enemies.

Giada Mancinelli.

I would’ve preferred the original eye for an eye but the mother to the Mancinelli brats is of very little consequence. On her best days, Vittoria Mancinelli moves like a shadow of whatever the fuck she used to be. On her worst days she’s like a character from The Walking Dead.

Whatever Bonafacio, the head of the Mancinelli family, or El Topo as he’s derisively nicknamed, and his son have done to the woman over the years, I sense she’ll be very briefly mourned – if at all – then promptly forgotten about should anything happen to her, like a sniper round to the head from my rifle.

And, hell no, that won’t do.

I need this to hurt.

To sear and torture and torment.

I want it indelibly marked on their souls as Mama’s loss is marked on mine. I need them to never take another breath without knowing the person they love is no longer breathing the same air.

And with Giada Mancinelli having vanished off the face of the earth, and Vittoria not worth the effort, here I am, playing eenie-meenie-miney-fucking-mo.

The most obvious choice is Matteo Mancinelli.

El Topo’s first born son, underboss and heir.

I have a feeling I’d be doing everyone a favour by taking him out. Because he too is an oppressor and abuser of women. He stood by while his own father signed off on his daughter’s attempted assassination at her wedding. And the weasel has shown zero signs of remorse since then.

Hell, he’s boldly stepped into his father’s shoes once El Topo realised his plans had failed spectacularly when we handed them their asses at our compound in Fallbrook, Upstate New York on that wedding night a year ago.

With the FBI officially on El Topo’s tail, ditto the Russians he foolishly got into bed with thinking he could best us, and us Salvatores hunting him down on the qt, he’d made like the rat he is and scurried underground.

No matter. I have Matteo. His various siblings.

Or El Topo’s other grandchildren.

Jacinta, his third granddaughter. The lawyer who bends over backwards to get all the Mancinelli shitheads routinely out of the jail cells they seem to land themselves in on a regular basis.

Or Narciso, Matteo’s last born and El Topo’s only grandson.

Baby of the family and the piece of shit who tried to take out not just Cesare but my younger brother Renzo during the Las Vegas Formula One Grand Prix last year.

And it isn’t like that was his only attempt.

At every turn, the Mancinellis have brazenly and consistently attempted to do my family harm, in the name of the family feud that’s either murky or heavily embellished depending on who was doing the narrating.

And last but not least – and I absolutely refuse to acknowledge the fireworks popping beneath my skin when I think of her – Sofiya Mancinelli.

The second Mancinelli granddaughter.

The one Orazio asked me to keep an eye on, not having a clue she’s been on my radar for the better part of five years now. The woman my grandfather calls ‘strange’ because she doesn’t quite fit the mould of an obedient Sicilian progeny of a family steeped to the eyeballs in Cosa Nostra.

The woman I’m loath to admit has become a subject of rabid interest which has gained near obsession status in the last year.

Moving her to the top of my revenge kill list will solve a host of problems.

First, I’ll feel a damn sight better than the hellish nightmare I’ve endured since finding out that the circumstances of Mama’s death weren’t as clearcut as I’d thought. Shit, I might even be able to finally sleep more than a forty-five-minute stretch.

Second, it would be doing my family a favour and depriving the Mancinellis of a key threat in their admittedly shoddy protection, leaving them even more vulnerable and ready for the death blow that should’ve taken them out decades ago.

Who cares that she fascinates me beyond reason?

That the whispers I heard two years ago, the little traps I left on the dark web that she walked straight into, and the final confirmation in the last few months of just what Sofiya Mancinelli is would’ve had me salivating under different circumstances?

If she didn’t have the fucking surname she wears so proudly.

And all of this even before that gut-punch of a fuck-hot body she loves to display with jumpsuits and catsuits, as if daring any red-blooded man not to stop and stare at the juiciest ass without losing their fucking minds.

None of that matters, stronzu!

As the enforcer of my family’s continued security and wellbeing, none of that should matter. I already dropped the ball once, allowing my mother to fall prey to our enemies.

This is my chance to set things right.

I breathe out.

Adjust the scope of my sniper rifle with the ease of long practice, my finger brushing over the trigger like a lover’s caress.

The lens sharpens, and there they are. Narciso Mancinelli stepping out of his Ferrari F80 – a little obvious in the boys’-toys-zero-class department if you ask me. Beside him, Matteo.

Both oblivious to the monster watching from the rooftop a quarter of a mile away. They walk around the car, lost in their love of fast, showy cars, giving me ample time to weigh their fate.

At the thought of avenging every single soldier we lost last year at Cesare and Maddie’s wedding when these assholes unleashed their cowardly carnage, my lips curve into another slow grin, snatching this piece of joy straight out of my demon’s mouth.

‘Eenie.’ I tilt the barrel towards Narciso, brash and mouthy, immature but with the potential to be a wildcard and a pain in my ass down the road.

‘Meenie.’ I shift to Matteo, older, slower, soft-spined yes-man.

‘Miney…’ I flick back to Narciso, who’s laughing about something, cocky as hell in his loud designer gear. ‘Moe.’

My pulse doesn’t even tick up.

A strange kind of stillness lives inside me – cold and precise, dark as the shadow I was born into. This is what I made myself into, after all. The useful tool to deliver consequences. To balance the famigghia’s bloody ledgers.

My brother may be the golden boy who wins in the light. I do my winning in the dark with little applause. Just the comforting silence of a job done right.

I’m the perfect yang to his yin.

Does it grate sometimes, being painted that black? Sure, but knowing I’m keeping him and everyone I love safe? There’s no greater honour.