Chapter 6
Demario didn’t sleep, instead he sat on the edge of the bed long after Keisha’s breathing evened out into exhausted, tear-stained silence.
His dick was still half-hard, slick with everything he had forced back into her.
The gun lay on the nightstand, barrel still faintly warm.
Two fresh holes stared from the headboard like accusations.
He stared at the wall and let the past crawl up his spine. was twelve the first time he watched a man die for disrespecting his mother.
It happened in the kitchen of a two-bedroom apartment that always smelled like grease and cigarette smoke.
His father had been gone three years by then, either dead or smart enough to stay gone, and the man at the table that night was just the latest one who thought paying the light bill bought him the right to put hands on her.
Demario’s mother had a soft voice and a hard spine.
She told the man to leave. He backhanded her instead.
Demario picked up the cast-iron skillet from the stove and swung it like he had been waiting his whole short life for the chance.
The sound of bone meeting metal still lived in his ears some nights.
The man dropped. His mother did not scream.
She only looked at her son, blood on her lip, and said, “Clean it up before your brother wakes up.”
Rome had been six. Asleep in the next room with a comic book still open on his chest. Demario dragged the body to the alley himself, heart slamming, hands shaking, and learned two things before the sun came up: blood washed off easier than people claimed, and the only person he would ever fully trust was the little boy who still believed in superheroes.
Demario made a quiet promise the night the streets would never touch Rome.
He would eat the dirt so his brother could stay clean, and it was eating him up inside that he had to break it.
That night shaped everything that came after. Demario stopped being a child. He started collecting debts for the older boys on the block by fourteen, running packages by fifteen, and by seventeen he had already put two men in the ground for less than what that first one did to his mother.
Demario built the empire fast after that.
Product, corners, protection, the kind of fear that made grown men look away.
Johnny Russo’s people noticed. They offered a sit-down under a white flag when Demario started cutting into their uptown routes.
Johnny’s oldest son, Michael, sat at the head of the table that night, twenty-eight years old, arrogant, a glass of expensive wine in his hand.
Demario smiled, shook hands, then put two rounds in Michael’s face before the kid could swallow.
Demario snapped out of the flashback and stood, pulled on a shirt, and walked to the window.
The woods beyond the glass were black and quiet.
Somewhere out there Malik was waiting for an answer.
Somewhere else Sofia Russo was deciding whether the dick she had taken from Rome was worth betraying her father.
And somewhere in a federal visiting room Johnny Russo was still counting the days until he could make Demario watch everything he loved burn.
He looked back at Keisha’s sleeping form, the marks from his belt already darkening on her ass, the dried mess of two men’s cum on her thighs.
He loved her. That was the problem. Love had always been the one thing that made him stupid enough to leave witnesses.
Downstairs, Rome sat at the kitchen table with a laptop open and a cold cup of coffee.
He had already found the second set of wire transfers.
The ones that proved the early release had not been luck.
Someone inside the Russo organization had paid a federal judge.
The same someone who was now feeding Malik information and waiting for the right moment to collect.
Rome closed the laptop and stared at the dark hallway that led upstairs.
He had spent his whole life staying clean so Demario could stay dirty. Now the dirt was climbing up his arms and he could feel it under his skin.