21. Nico
NICO
I called Father again.
Then Mamma. She tells me she refuses to get in between Father and me, like what’s going on is only a little spat, and asks after Valeria.
In front of her private airplane, Alessia tells me I’m an idiot for giving Valeria ten times the cash I took from her.
“If she runs, she dies,” Alessia said, carving into the edge of her lipstick with one caramel nail and adjusting her oversized sunglasses. “The Russians will get her. Gio’s said as much. If you love her, you’ll make Papà happy and keep her in your apartment until you get her pregnant with an heir.”
Valeria won’t let me get close enough to even consider trying.
She’s testing me. She thinks all I care about is fucking her—and while I love fucking Valeria and my balls are bursting at the seams—I’m glad she’s doing it.
I’m going to prove her wrong, and that’ll be one more crack in her armor.
Every night this week, I’ve crawled into bed, pulled her against me so her ass nestles into my lap, and when she sleepily murmurs no, I hold her close and tell her about what I plan to cook for her the next day.
The next afternoon, I drag myself out of bed, we walk to the grocery store together, and she makes collages in the kitchen while I cook dinner.
Stewed lamb with mint—she doesn’t like lamb.
Sushi—she doesn’t like raw fish.
Eggplant caponata—she hates the hard-boiled eggs my mamma’s version includes.
Anelletti with tomato sauce and ricotta—ding, ding—I saw her resolve to keep me at arm’s length crumble with every bite.
I’ll make her a BLT tomorrow.
Cars spray through shallow puddles of rainwater on the road, their headlights glowing on the wet road. A man with headphones and a backpack stares oddly at the bouquet of tulips in my hand as we cross paths under a streetlamp.
It’s a pitiful assortment, but they were the best flowers the convenience store offered this late at night, and I liked catching Valeria secretly admiring the last bouquet I brought her.
Salvatore is still determined to haze me, not that I blame him or care, really. I could be shoveling shit all night, and so long as I can see Valeria’s red GPS dot at the apartment, I’ll do whatever my don asks of me.
As I turn toward our apartment building with my armful of magazines and tulips, an SUV pulls alongside. The driver’s window rolls down.
I keep walking.
“Get in,” Giovanni says.
I wring the tulip stems, imagining they’re his thick neck. “What about a pretty please?”
The car creeps forward to match my pace, his gaze fixed on me, until I come to a stop.
I hold up my things. “And what about these?”
“I will have somebody come and collect them.”
I set them on top of a barren planter. I better get this over with.
I get into the car, and Giovanni drives off. I imagine I catch a glimpse of Valeria in our dark apartment window before we drive around the street corner.
“We haven’t spoken in sometime,” he says. The car cabin is ice cold.
“I’ve missed you, too. My hearing is almost back to normal after the shooting.”
Giovanni doesn’t need to know that I suspect him of anything, but I can’t fucking help myself.
He put my entire family at risk by coordinating that drive-by, and for what?
A fucking threat? To make Valeria and me scared of the big, bad Russians?
We’re already doing what Salvatore and my father asked of us and getting married. What more motivation do we need?
His hands tighten over the steering wheel in a little show of emotion. “We will kill those bastards,” he says in Italian.
I roll my eyes. If all of this is culminating in Father pushing me to kill the pakhan, he can answer my calls and tell me to do it himself.
I text Valeria, letting her know I won’t be home for a while longer, and I have a delivery on its way for her. It’s the middle of the night, so I don’t expect a response, but I watch the screen for a little longer anyway, just in case.
“Things are going well with Valeria?”
I stuff my phone into my pocket. “Peachy.”
“Is she pregnant?”
“Thinking of what to get for the baby shower?”
“I am asking on your father’s behalf.”
“Let Father know she’s trying her best, but I keep begging to have her take my ass instead.”
“You need to figure this out soon. Your father isn’t going to let a wedding happen unless he knows she can give you an heir.”
Is that really what all this is about? Making sure he has a grandchild in the short time he has left? “Why does he care? He planning on kicking the bucket before then?”
Giovanni glances over at me. “So you know.”
I move the seat back and kick my feet up on the dashboard, grinding my boots into the leather. “Yeah, apparently everyone wants me in charge.” I shift to a casually light tone, inspecting my nails. “What do you think is gonna happen to you when they make me the boss?”
“I am not worried about myself. And your father is getting the best treatment possible. He still has plenty of time.”
“I wouldn’t know. He’s not answering my calls.”
We drive for an hour until we’re on the outskirts of the city. My phone buzzes with two notifications—Valeria has left the apartment, and Salvatore said Giovanni is acting with his permission.
These coincidences make me nervous.
I call her, and it immediately goes to voicemail.
My nerves ratchet up, adrenaline flooding my veins.
“Just so you know,” I say, staring at her location as it moves, fast like she’s in a car, “if she doesn’t make it out of all this mess perfectly intact, neither will you.”
Giovanni steers off the road, parks next to the woods, and gives me a deliberate look. “I told you, I am not worried about myself.”
“Matassa’s Bitch always comes out on top.”
“Come.” Giovanni steps out of the car, a black flashlight in hand.
My boots crunch into the frozen grass on the edge of the highway. Giovanni walks straight into the forest, guided by a pale beam of light.
I have my gun and my knife, but it’s Giovanni’s unwavering loyalty to my father that I place my trust in.
He won’t kill me. He’ll just take me to the middle of the woods for some undoubtedly horrifying reason, and then I’ll go back to the city to figure out where he sent Valeria in the middle of the night.
And if anyone touched a single hair on her head, they’ll find out how much of my father’s son I can be.
With one last glance at her location, I switch on my phone’s flashlight and stride into the undergrowth, sticking to Giovanni like a shadow as we pick our way through the dense, pitch-black woods.
There’s no real path to follow, so I track the moon’s position in case I might need to find my way back.
Just as I consider the possibility that he could be planning to finally shoot me in the middle of the forest, a sliver of light slices through the trees. Up ahead, someone’s whistling.
Giovanni turns off his flashlight. I follow suit.
We break into a small clearing lit by a single electric lamp placed on the forest floor. Outside the ring of light, trees press in with thick, clawing shadows.
Dom the Butcher, Salvatore’s right-hand man, whistles cheerfully as he launches a dart at a bloody man strapped to a tree trunk.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” Dom says and fires another dart. It lands straight into the man’s thigh, and he jerks with a muted scream through the cloth binding his mouth. “That’s thirty points.”
“Nico,” Giovanni says, “you remember your father-in-law?”
Fuck me.
Phil Aceto is almost unrecognizable. From the smug, confident man who tried to overthrow Salvatore, to the mutilated outcast, and now—he looks like an animal with wide-open, crazed eyes and blood smeared across his face.
“He tried to make a run for it,” Giovanni says in Italian. “Don Salvatore and Don Ottavio are in agreement. They want him dead.”
Giovanni reaches into his coat pocket and holds a knife out to me.
Aceto gives a muted scream as Dom lands another dart—into his chest. It sags heavily from the tip, embedded in the skin above his heart.
“Fuck, I’m out of darts,” Dom mutters.
I shove my hands in my pockets, my heart pounding. “I’m not doing that.”
Giovanni sighs. He retrieves his phone, taps a few buttons, and holds it out to me. Even Aceto falls silent as the phone rings.
“Nico.” The sound of my father’s voice crashes against me like a bucket of ice water.
I let out a harsh laugh. “And here I was thinking you’d forgotten me.”
“I’ve stepped back,” Father says through the phone speakers. “I needed to see how you’d respond to my absence.”
I close my eyes, willing myself to stay calm.
Games, always games with him. Always another puppeteer behind the first, always another layer of shit to uncover.
“You’ve done well, Nico,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”
I suck in a breath.
It’s Valeria’s face I see behind my eyelids, smirking at me with a single raised eyebrow like I’ve told a bad joke.
“You’re stepping up, Nico. You’re helping the Family and becoming a man. You won’t have your papà forever. It’s good you learn how to take care of yourself now.”
I choke back a strained laugh, my eyes flying open.
“And Valeria?” I ask. “She doesn’t get her papà?”
“She loves you, doesn’t she?” Father asks, adding an emphasis to loves like it’s a dirty word. “She will understand what you had to do. If she doesn’t, she will learn. You are the only man she needs now.”
Giovanni thrusts the knife flat against my chest. I take it, stumbling back and baring my teeth.
“She’ll hate me for this.” The same, the same. He’ll never change. “For what you’re making me do.”
“Do you believe that if you let Aceto live after he tried to kill his own don that he wouldn’t try again with his son-in-law? If you’re going to be a leader, you need to be clever enough to discover the rot and strong enough to cut it out.”
“What rot?” I throw my hand toward Aceto, even though Father can’t see him on the other side of the phone. “He’s a dying old man. He’s not a threat to anybody.”
“He isn’t the only rot in your home,” Father says ominously. “And even dying old men can be a threat.”
He hangs up.
“If you don’t do this,” Giovanni says, leaning down to murmur in my ear, “Stefano has his orders.”
He holds his phone screen out. Two dots at Valeria’s old home, her parents’ house.
I jerk my phone out of my pocket—she’s there.
“Give that to me,” Giovanni says, sticking out his hand. “You don’t need to be contacting her in this moment.”
Dom has a wild grin on his face as he leans back against a tree trunk.
“You got nothing to say?” I ask him.
He shrugs. “I don’t get mixed up in family affairs.”
I pass my phone over. Giovanni slides my phone into his pocket like a teacher who’s caught his student texting.
I clench the knife. “Tell me what’s stopping me from stabbing you in the throat?”
He’s unruffled. “Your interest in your wife’s well-being.”
Your wife, your wife.
Father’s gamble worked. All he needed to do was let me pick out a woman, and now he’s got his hooks in me.
All for a wife who says she hates me. Who I was wearing down—who showed me love with her eyes even if she was too scared to say it out loud.
Who will never trust me again.
I squeeze the handle of the knife and walk up to Aceto.
He watches me with unblinking eyes, his body going tense as he senses his last moments.
I don’t know if she loves her dad.
But I know she would never forgive me.
I raise my hand.
I slice.
I work quickly, sawing through Aceto’s bindings, not knowing if Giovanni or Dom will stop me or simply allow this to happen and report it to my father later.
I yank the darts from his thigh and chest as he tears at the cloth in his mouth.
“Thank you,” he sobs past his missing tongue.
“Run,” I hiss.
Aceto drops from the tree and bursts into a sprint—
BANG.
The forest is silent, all the little creatures in the darkness waiting and watching.
After a moment, I stand.
I don’t look at my father-in-law’s body.
“This is disappointing,” Giovanni intones. He tucks his gun back into his jacket.
“Then shoot me too,” I say, blood pounding in my ears as I turn toward him.
I let the knife drop from my hand and spit on the dirt near his boots.
“You want to talk about disappointing? How about the disappointment your mamma and papà must feel at knowing a man of your status, of your potential, has been reduced to a glorified fucking babysitter.”
I hold my arms out wide. “But we’re in the middle of the woods, Giovanni.
You could get away with it. Shoot Dom too.
The Russians would welcome you, wouldn’t they?
You’d be okay, and things wouldn’t be so different, would they?
You’d be doing what you do best—kneeling at the feet of your master.
And if you don’t, I’ll be your new master, and I’m going to great fucking pleasure in making sure you know nothing but pain and suffering for the rest of your short, miserable life. ”
He waits until I’m finished with my pathetic little speech before turning and melting into the darkness.
“Bootlicker!” I roar after him.
Dom winks at me, takes the lantern, and walks off.
I don’t waste any time. I go to check Aceto’s pulse, rubbing my fingerprints all over his neck in the process, but there’s nothing.
He’s dead.
Unsurprisingly, Giovanni’s car is gone when I finally burst onto the road. The barest hint of sun filters the sky to a dark grey as I walk along the guardrail with my thumb sticking out into the air. No one pulls over for me.
Valeria was right. She’s nothing but an expendable pawn. She doesn’t have the backing of a strong family to protect her. She only has my love, and that’s not enough.
After an hour of walking in the bitter cold, an old man in a Honda pulls along my side.
“Where you going, son?”
I give him my most charming smile. “Got in a fight with my girlfriend, can you believe it? I’m just trying to make it back home.”
He shakes his head, the few grey strands on top of his head waving with the movement. “That’s women for you. Hop in, I’ll get you where you need to go.”
I give him the address to Valeria’s parents’ house and half-listen as the man spends the next hour regaling me with tales of his three crazy ex-wives.
If anyone touched her…
Sickness settles into my bones, siphoning out all the marrow and stuffing the cavities with poison. This is what I have to look forward to. A lifetime of dread, of rage, all for a few stolen moments of sweetness.
The worst part is—for me, it’s worth it. She’s worth it. But if I had to guess? If I had to take a real, honest look at what I mean to her?
I’m not enough.
She won’t want me if it means her life is constantly at risk.
My companion shuts up when I tell him I’m in a real fucking hurry and would he please drive a little faster, until we turn the corner to the street outside Valeria’s house.
“Damn, I feel bad for the poor bastard who lives there.”
For one horrific, infinite moment, I’m frozen in place, sucked into a pit of black tar while my heart pounds and my mind screams at my useless muscles—I have to be dreaming, I need to wake up.
Her house is on fire.