“Call Tony. He won’t have a problem cleaning this up.” I walked over and patted his shoulder. “I’ll leave the truck. I have somewhere to be.”
I took a deep breath when I walked out of the warehouse and headed to our meet-up spot. I’d have to bag everything I wore and drop it off here so it could be taken to the crematorium. I was fucking pissed about my boots. I stripped just inside the door of The Place to not dirty it. We hated when there was blood in here. Once I was done bagging it, I grabbed my black suit and headed to the shower. Normally, I would have skipped Giuseppe’s party, but I looked forward to seeing the Principessa again.
6
ROCCO
Lenora De Lucawas a fucking vision. I was glad this was where I saw her again after so many years, because if she’d walked into my new bar, I would have charmed her and had her back against the brick wall in under ten minutes. She kept looking at me like I was her next treat, so I knew she’d let me. I pushed all those thoughts away and focused on Dean and Lorenzo's conversation. Every time her throaty laugh filtered through the room, my cock stirred. I’d thought it last night when I saw her in that fucking see-through dress, but tonight she was even sexier. Tonight, she was wearing a satin dress in deep green. It was looser than last night’s, but it had the same effect on me. I knew every man in this room, except for her family members, was picturing her naked.
Who could blame them?
I noticed that she didn’t smile at them, not really anyway. She gave them a polite smile before she turned away. Our eyes caught, and I waited for her to look away, but she didn’t. She didn’t smile either. She looked a little nervous — and turned on — which turnedmeway the fuck on. I could easily school my face to look nonchalant and unaffected, but no one would fault me if I checked her out. Soon, she’d be married and whisked away to Italy, and I’d probably never see her again unless there was a funeral. I took a sip of my drink to rid myself of the sour taste left in my mouth.
She was promised to Adriano Salvati. Thirty-six years old. Duke Adriano to those who properly addressed him, which would not be me. He walked around with an air of importance as if his title wasn’t just there out of courtesy. There was no legality to his title. He couldn’t do anything with it besides try to impress American women because, let’s be honest, women here flocked to those kinds of men. I doubted the women in Italy would, considering they knew it was all a facade — a stupid one, at that. Adriano Salvati held no power in any arena. If you believed the rumors, which I never fucking did, he was so well connected in the world of organized crime that he could make anyone bend to his will. I didn’t buy it. To me, he was as phony as the title he hid behind. A little boy trying to play a part, which I guess was what most of us were doing.
“I thought you were on a killing ban for a year,” Loren said, looking at my knuckles.
“It was a one-off.” I smiled.
“You broke your own rule then.” Dean raised an eyebrow.
“I was training Mattia,” I said. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Let him kill whoever it was,” Loren said as if it were obvious.
“Matti’s still learning. He needed a demonstration. It went well, considering he threw up his lunch.”
Loren’s face pulled. “I don’t even want to know what the fuck you did.”
I shrugged. “Your loss.”
“My favorite thing about you is that you can stand here, all happy-go-lucky and shit, after your torture sessions,” Dean said, eyes smiling.
“Lessons.” I raised an eyebrow.
“Fuck off.” He laughed.
“Can we get back to the topic of our shipment? Just because it hasn’t arrived doesn’t mean it was stolen,” Loren argued, snapping me back to their petty argument. “It just means the captain is slow as fuck.”
“It was stolen,” Dean said.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I have someone on that ship.”
“Who?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dean smirked.
I took a sip of my drink and looked away because I knew if I didn’t, I’d start laughing my ass off and ruin his little ruse. Russo and I were a lot alike. Admittedly, I had a better sense of humor. Not saying he wasn’t funny as fuck, but his humor was sarcastic while mine was. . .well, I wasn’t sure what mine was. I just liked to laugh. Laughing was the only thing that kept me sane most days. Otherwise, I’d probably go on a murder spree. That was how it was with me. You get Funny Rocco or Killer Rocco, so I tried to find amusement in everything. Lately, I’d been trying harder to eliminate Killer Rocco altogether. I blamed my brother for that. His latest Ted Talk about life, where he told me I was headed down the same path as our miserable father fucked me up. Therefore, I put myself on a “no-killing ban” to prove I could do it. I wasn’t sure if Mikey really gave a shit. He probably wanted a year-long break where he wouldn’t have to call me every night when the NYPD found a body. He wouldn’t find this body, but I wasn’t happy that I’d only made it six months before breaking the ban.
Nevertheless, Russo and I were a lot alike. Many of our military contacts overlapped, making it easy to share intel. I would never know how he'd managed to get the contacts he had because I'd never ask. Sometimes questions were better left unanswered. When you ask someone a question, you’re allowing them to ask one back, and I would rather not talk about my time working for the CIA’s dirty secret company. I didn’t get into specifics about that job–NDA and all– and wouldn’t want to talk about it with these guys, anyway. They understood street war and going after men who were doing worse shit than they were. Not to say they hadn’t seen some awful shit. Of course, they had. But they’d only killed within reason, following some fucked up moral code our ancestors created. The man I killed last month should’ve been on death row, as far as I was concerned. I felt no mercy in taking him out. The shit I’d done for the government was horrifying. Shit I’d take to my grave, regardless of how ironclad the NDA I’d signed was, because thinking about it made me feel shame. The experience was helpful to me now, so I shouldn’t complain. In the past, Russo made most of his money finding people. These days, he made it by making people disappear. The man on the ship was one of his. . .clients, so to speak, which was how he knew exactly what was happening. It was also how I knew he was fucking with Lorenzo.
“Russo.” I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Loren was so fucking anal about things, which made him an easy target for shit like this. He never bought into any of it, but lately, shipments were being stolen, so Dean’s little joke was plausible. “Was the shipment purposely stolen?”
It seemed counterintuitive to steal our shit, but it wasn’t. If the rest of the crew thought they were on the same side, they’d slip up and make their intentions known, giving us the names we needed. That was one of the many reasons a couple of “our” guys always traveled with our shit. Dean didn’t answer my question, but his eyes lit up. It didn’t even take Lorenzo a full minute before understanding dawned on him.
He shot Dean a glare. “You asshole. Why didn’t you tell me? I was about to call Enrique.”
