“Don’t get yourself killed in the next thirty seconds, okay?” I said, just before I left the room.
There was no one outside the door, but I heard a low, intense whispering from around the corner. I walked down to listen in.
“—because they’ll know it was me,” someone was hissing, and then there was a long pause. “Are yousure…no, sir, I’m not questioning—no, I don’t mean—” Another long pause, and then, “Yeah, okay, I’ll do it. I’lldoit. It’sdone; Sandro’s dead. You can count on me.”
I will swear to this day that the voice I heard was Renny Caruso’s.
I got back into the suite fast and jerked my head at Sandro. “We need to vamoose,” I told him. “Your boy’s been turned. He’s plotting mischief out there.”
I was all ready to go. I planned to take out Renny as soon as he came back in, as soon as Sandro gave the nod, and I expected he would. He’d act first, worry later. He always did.
Except this time, he didn’t.
This time, he shook his head. “Not Renato,” he said. “He’s loyal.”
“He’s loyal to someone, alright,” I snapped, “but not you.”
“Calmati, Jack. You’re mistaken. Put your fucking gun away. The Bernardis come in and see you waving your dick around, wewillall die.”
“Listen, Iheardhis plans out there—”
“Do I need to remind you that Renato’s father, may he rest in peace, wasmyfather’sconsigliere?” Sandro snapped. “The Carusos areloyal, Jack.”
I stood there with my gun in my hand, trying to find the words to persuade him, and I waited a moment too long.
“Do what I say, Jacopo, or I’ll take that gun off you myself,” he snarled. It wasn’t only my accusations he objected to by then—I was disrespecting him.
I was sliding my gun back into its holster when a twitchy-as-fuck Renny Caruso came back in. “Sorry I took so long,” he said, rubbing his nose. “Found an exit at the end of the hallway...” He looked between us. “What’s going on?”
“Jack here seems to think you’re going to kill me,” Sandro scoffed. And then he turned his head at the courtesy signal knock on the internal door. The Bernardis had arrived and were about to come in.
Sandro wasn’t looking at Renny, but I was.
And Renny was looking at me.
I saw him go for his gun, but there was no one in the Castellani Family—no one in Los Angeles—who could out-draw me. He fell dead to the floor just as the door opened. And then everything…
Well, everything went to shit.
Not unreasonably, the Bernardis thought I was shooting atthem. The only thing that saved Sandro and me was the fact that there was a bottleneck at the doorway. I did what I could to protect Sandro, took out a few Bernardis before I ran out of bullets, but none of us were heavily armed, in deference to what was supposed to be a neutral meeting.
The first thing Sandro did when the bullets stopped flying was to shove me off and scramble over to Renny Caruso where he was lying dead on the floor. And then he pulled that corpse into an embrace and gave a scream like I’d never heard in my life.
* * *
“That’s when I understood,” I said. Miller had been quiet as a mouse through the whole story. “Sandro and Renny, they’d been…you know.”
“Oh,shit,” Miller breathed.
“Yeah, that was pretty much my thought at the time. And then my second thought was, why the fuck hadn’t Sandrotoldme about it? We weren’t as close as I’d thought, apparently. And when Sandro looked at me—he didn’t even seem to register that the Bernardis were about to fucking rush us—I could see that he hated me for what I’d done. Hehatedme. That friendship we’d built up, gone in a second. He was going to kill me the first chance he got.”
“But why didn’t you tell him Renny had been pulling his gun?” Miller asked.
“I did. I mean, I tried, and I’ve tried since, but he won’t hear it. Won’t believe it. And hell, over the years, I’ve gotten less sure about it myself. His father smoothed things over by saying I’d just made a mistake, but sometimes I think Sandro believes I did it on purpose. That I was jealous or…I don’t know.”
“He thoughtyouhad a thing for him, so you killed his boyfriend? That’sinsane.”
To any normal person, it’d probably look that way. If Miller couldn’t understand it, that was for the best. But the truth was, disagreements, debts, love—they were all settled with blood when you were in the Family.
