Coldblooded.
Ruthless.
Utterly wild and untamed.
It was my curse that I was attracted tothoseparts of him more than any other man I’d ever met.
The one good thing about Cesare was that he could be… if notcontrolled,exactly, thenguided.
He was a tornado: destruction incarnate, wreaking havoc on anything that got in his way.
And if I could just nudge the tornado in the right direction…
Push it a few degrees this way or that…
ThenIcould deploy all that power for my own ends.
That was what had happened tonight with Amato.
I might have planned the entire operation and guided it to fruition over four long years – but I needed someone who could execute it fearlessly.
And Cesare had delivered in spades.
It’s just that now, after he killed Amato…
Everything else fucking fell apart.
Once we’d dealt with all theCosa Nostrafoot soldiers on the property, everything devolved into a wild bacchanalia.
Cesare raided the deadmafioso’swine cellar and liquor cabinet and passed out 5000-euro bottles of scotch to his men like they were soft drinks.
Somebody found an entertainment system and started playing godawful Italian gangster rap.
Women started showing up. Some of them were our foot soldiers’ girlfriends; a lot more were just party girls and whores who hung around Cesare’s crew.
There were people fucking in every available room in the house.
Even though I begged and pleaded and bitched and nagged, Cesare ignored me and started doing shots with Tiratore, Ciro, Cicciobello, and Toro.
Not Romeo, though. He was in the doghouse.
First, he hadn’t found Amato’s daughter. It didn’t matter that the littleCosa Nostrabitch had probably snuck out earlier to party, and there was no possible way Romeo could find her.
Second, he’d dared to speak up when Cesare ordered Cicciobello to kill Luciano’s family.
I didn’t particularly like the fact that we’d had to kill children, but we couldn’t leave any loose threads. They had to die.
Poor Romeo. Sometimes he was a little too soft for the job.
Anyways, Cesare was irrationally furious, like always. He told Romeo if he so much as took a sip of booze, he’d get a bullet in the head.
So Romeo basically got assigned clean-up duty.
ThankGod.
Occasional weakness aside, Romeo was the only one of Cesare’s lieutenants I trusted to do a good job. Everyone else was just a mini-me version of Cesare with all his worst qualities and none of his charisma.
At least Romeo had a level head and couldlead.
