Total pages in book: 157
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154525 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 773(@200wpm)___ 618(@250wpm)___ 515(@300wpm)
He knew who was down there. It didn’t bother him.
“Get a move on, then,” he ordered Matty. “Clean it out, and then we burn it down.”
“Burn—”
Salvatore cocked an eyebrow, quieting the man. “This whole level is a fucking tinderbox. The rest will go, too.”
“There’s staff, Sal.”
“They’ll leave fast. Do you need me to say it again?”
“No, boss. I, uh, I got it.”
Matty turned back to the door and opened it.
Salvatore threw an arm around Nico once the man left and pulled him into a hug. He held him like that, close to him like a father should, like Nico needed, and let him cry as much as he wanted.
Mere minutes later, a figure darkened the end of the hallway. The same spot where Matty watched earlier but left the door open as he left.
Salvatore went to raise his gun, but the familiar curves of a woman hugging a silk robe stopped him. Vanna.
In bare feet, she surveyed the damage, silently.
Salvatore broke the silence first. “It would be wise of you to pack a bag and take Carmen with you.”
“This changes nothing,” Vanna replied, “Carmen is still mine.”
“We know.”
“And I love her, still,” the woman added in a whisper. “Everyday.”
She didn’t mean Carmen that time, but they all knew how much Vanna loved that little girl, too. Enough that she fucked a monster to sleep every night and then crawled into her daughter’s bed to stay until daylight, so she always knew where both were, every hour of each day.
Those deals with the devil? They never stopped paying.
“She knows,” Salvatore returned eventually.
Vanna swallowed thickly, eyeing the body on the floor and then the macabre painting Nico had made throughout the hallway. “And my husband...?”
“Don’t go in there, okay?”
She nodded once.
“You should pack a bag,” Salvatore repeated. “Now.”
“Where should I go?” she asked.
“Wherever you want.”
Once the woman left, Matty returned shortly after. He stood in the doorway long enough for Salvatore to listen to him explain that the house had cleared of guests, the remaining staff from the party had started cleaning up and would also leave soon, and no one seemed to be any wiser to the situation upstairs.
His original plan would have worked.
This was fine, too.
Salvatore lifted the gun again, pointing it at Matty.
The enforcer blinked, hand twitching like it might reach for the piece at his side. Only then did Nico seem to realize something else had started happening around him.
“Sal, don’t,” Nico mumbled. “He helped—”
“If he’ll do it to his boss, he would do it to me.”
He pulled the trigger for a third time.
Nico promptly vomited.
Salvatore peeled open Nico’s hand to find a deep scratch heavily bleeding. Probably from the struggle. “I should cut your palm, and make you swear on a saint like your father did to me. That’s how you make a man who deserves it.”
“Life made me,” Nico whispered brokenly.
“Maybe life played a part,” Salvatore agreed, but then he told Nico the same thing Giorgio did him all those years ago. “But I own you now, kid. You’re mine.”
26. — birds fly...
Staten Island, New York
Frankie, Private Airport
Frankie worked on chewing the edges of her sharpened red fingernails as Larkin maneuvered the four-door Ram pick-up truck down a desolate stretch of road she didn’t recognize in the darkness. Larkin wasn’t like everybody else. He wouldn’t tell her to stop, and if he even noticed her anxiety playing out in the rear passenger bench seat, he didn’t make her aware.
“You could at least tell me where I’m going,” she said.
Larkin eyeballed her reflection in the rearview mirror. “Francesca—”
“It’s Frankie, for fuck’s sake!”
Always the consummate professional, Larkin never crossed a line with her or anyone else his job for her father deemed him responsible toward. To him, that seemed to include keeping the people who meant most to her father at arm’s length, in a kind and respectful way. Which meant he never used Frankie’s nickname, and she thought it ridiculous.
They were way past that.
“Just so you’re aware,” her father’s head of security said, “I don’t typically allow people to swear at me, and that isn’t very lady-like.”
Now she understood his attraction to Sissy. Two peas in an annoying fucking pod.
“Yeah, well—”
One hand lifted from the wheel, pointing a finger up. “I will give you a pass from my usual lecture about how kids your age are seriously causing the irreparable degradation of the English language with all this swearing and slang nonsense, because I know it’s been an intense night for you. I will not give you a second pass, however. Keep it in mind.”
“What are you, my dad?”
Larkin chuckled. “Oh, no. If you were my kid, I’d have locked you in a tower where boys and sex didn’t exist. From the jump.”
So much for not using slang, she thought. It all made her laugh a little.
Frankie desperately needed the relief, and the glint in Larkin’s eye in the mirror said he knew it, too.