Chapter 3
1858words
As soon as the rebel sees that his shot hit me, he scrambles away. There are still a couple of sentries by the windows, but the battle is already over. The fucker knows there's no way he's making it out alive; he just wanted to take me out.
'Zade!" Damon shouts. He must have seen me get hit.
I duck, raising my arm, then making a tight fist and flexing my wrist quickly in a bid to check that my left hand still works. Thank fuck!
I swallow back a slew of curses and turn to him. 'I'm good," I yell over the din. 'Cover our backs."
His nod is swift, and for a moment, our eyes lock. There is an intensity, a shared understanding and then we round the van and advance toward the warehouse.
Almost all the sentries are dead now. More of my men come through the warehouse door, heading straight for the stairs across the room that lead up to the second floor.
Leo and I finish off a few more men on the second floor. In a few moments the echoes of gunfire fade and the warehouse stands silent.
Romario's men lay sprawled across the floor, their bodies bloodied and their weapons discarded, their lifeless eyes staring into nothing.
We return to the main floor and meet my men, still tense and bristling with energy. A grim smile pulls at my lips. They were spectacular tonight, despite it being an unplanned battle.
It's a fucking shame I'm going to have to put a bullet in someone's brain. The rat who tipped off Romario.
I catch Damon's meaningful gaze and I know he's thinking the same thing. He says nothing, only giving a slight shake of his head before his mouth curves in his signature smirk. He won't say anything. For all his insolence, Damon knows that questioning me in front of my men is the quickest way to get us both killed.
'Nine up there, Signore. All dead," Salvatore reports, unfazed by the bleeding wound on the top of his right ear—a bullet likely clipped him. At twenty-four, he's the youngest of the Vitalo ranks present tonight but also one of the deadliest, a lethal mix of tech wizardry and espionage.
'Grazie, Salvatore," I nod. Get the doctor to look at that ear tonight; otherwise, you'll end up with one like a cauliflower," I warn. He nods and continues the body count as Leo approaches.
'That was some damn fine shooting out there, amico mio," I tell Leo.
He nods with a tight smile, but his brown eyes hold a shadow, a tension in the air thicker than the fading smoke. 'Just doing my job."
Indeed he has done his job training these men, and he's done it well.
'Let's check it and load it up, guys," Pietro, a stocky, hard-faced Capo, nods to the crates stacked against the far wall of the warehouse, and the rest follow him.
We stand side by side, watching on as Salvatore, Pietro, and the rest of the men carry the crates outside and into the waiting truck.
'How did they know about the ambush?" I ponder aloud, grappling for an explanation that doesn't paint one of our own men as a traitor. 'This was supposed to be a surprise attack." I flex my left shoulder, feeling the muscle twitch and throb.
A bullet wound wasn't what I was expecting when I decided to join my men tonight, but it sure as hell beats being dead right now.
I wave the truck off, giving the signal to leave with the consignment, and then shove my hands in my pockets. 'One of these men leaked our itinerary, Leo. You know I can't have a mole in my house."
Leo looks around at our remaining men fanned around a circle around us, still vigilant for any lingering threats. His gaze lands on one man and then the next before coming to meet mine, his eyes unwavering. 'I trust every one of them, Zade. The leak didn't come from any of them."
I nod, though a cloud of suspicion lingers. 'Keep an eye on the perimeter. We're not out of the woods yet," I warn in a low voice.
Leo nods and moves away, blending into the shadows outside and I can't shake the feeling that something is wrong. Leo is like me, usually loose-limbed and exuding a confident, almost lazy calm in the heat of action. This nervous energy unsettles me.
Something is wrong with him. I wonder if Mariana and the kid are okay.
Two hours later, we're miles away from Romario's now-burning warehouse and unwinding at Urban Elixir, one of my bars. Most of the men have been relieved for the night, leaving my top five. My Capos make it a point never to go straight home after a racket.
Leo sits beside me, nursing a whisky. Pietro, Enzo, and Salvatore are arguing over a poker game while my brother sits far away from the others. His tongue is halfway down the throat of the skinny redhead on his lap, his hand between her legs. It's his way of decompressing, I suppose. Although that seems to be a universal Damon response to a great many situations.
I lean forward and knit my hands together on the window bar table, my eyes on the quiet street before us. 'Something on your mind, Leo?" I don't need to look at him to know he's as tense as a bowstring. He's practically vibrating.
'I'm just tired, Zade," he replies, the words weighted.
'Aren't we all, amico mio?" I say lightly, but there's more to it. I can feel it in the knot that has twisted up inside my gut, a little more with every passing moment since we left the warehouse.
Leo throws back the rest of his third whiskey, then slams the tumbler down. 'It wasn't a lie when I told you the leak didn't come from them," he cocks his head toward the men on the other side of the room, then shakes his head slowly, chuckling. The sound is dry and humorless.
I sit up straighter as the prickling sensation across the back of my neck becomes a full-on burn. 'What do you mean?"
He sighs, reaching for his whiskey glass. When he finds it empty, he sets it back down again and stares at it like it might magically refill itself. I'm about to hand him my own drink, but his following words make me freeze.
'That shipment?" he finally meets my gaze. 'It's on me. I made a deal with Romario. That was how they got their hands on it. It's not the first time I've let them intercept our shipment, either." And it's because of me he knew you were coming for it tonight."
His words land like blows to my chest. Leo isn't just my righthand man; we've been friends since fucking elementary school. And he walked not just me, but my men, hell, my brother, right into a goddamned trap.
Why?
'I see." Hot, betrayal-fueled rage pounds through my veins, making my fingers curl so hard I can feel the glass in my hand begin to give beneath the pressure before I set it down on the table. I look away from Leo as the implications of his actions settle on me.
'It was meant to be just the firearms, Zade. Romario wanted ammunition, and since he rebelled against the Outfit, he's been iced out. So we struck a deal to let him have some—Just enough guns to arm his soldiers and protect his family and businesses. But then he started wanting…other things."
Leo continues as if he were speaking from a rehearsed script. 'My plan was to go alone tonight, tell him that I'm done working for him, and probably have him execute me like a dog. You weren't supposed to be there."
Leo looks around with half-crazed eyes. 'None of these good men were supposed to be there. When you insisted on coming along, I had to warn Romario to give the consignment back in order to avoid a war. I didn't expect a confrontation."
I remember Leo walking in while Salvatore briefed me about Romario's most recent theft. As soon as Leo heard what Salvatore was telling me, he offered—no, insisted, on going to retrieve the shipment alone.
Of course, I'd refused, instructing everyone to go instead, to seize everything in that warehouse and burn it down. A clear message to Romario and other would-be rebels for daring to double-cross me. Then I decided to tag along for the ride for good measure.
Something in my stomach turns, the roiling sensation usurping the rage for just a moment.
Leo has just signed himself a death warrant. Romario will come for Leo, and he'll be coming for blood.
I can protect Leo. All it would take would be to call a meeting with Romario and his rebellious factions. But that would seem weak. And weakness is suicide, especially in a house that is already caving under the pressure of rebellion.
Not that Romario will get the chance to kill Leo now. With what Leo just said to me, I'm going to need to kill him. Right here, right now, and in front of my most trusted men. Men that love and look up to Leo.
As if this night wasn't fucked up enough.
I throw back my whisky, relishing the burn and wondering what hell would feel like.
As if he could read my mind, Leo mutters, 'I know I'm a dead man, Zade. I'm living on borrowed time."
'You're absolutely right," I mutter coldly. 'Why did you do it?" Not that it matters. The reason won't change what will happen in the next few minutes, but it would be good to know.
If my most trusted soldier and friend could do this, I look around the room at some of my most trusted Capo regimes, then I might be well and truly fucked.
'I told you, Zade. I'm tired. This life… it sucks the peace right out of you."
'Then you take a goddamn vacation," I snap. 'Or you bury yourself in enough pussy that you forget all about your fucking troubles. You don't—" Ultimately, it doesn't matter what he should have done. It only matters what he did.
'I wanted something different for Mariana, for Victoria. Something you could never give me, Zade."
'And Romario can?" I scoff.
'He's got ties to rural Cuba, a small place with Italians protected from extradition laws. The deal was solid: get him a decent stock of ammunition while making it look like De Luca was robbing you.
Orlando De Luca is the highest ranking and most powerful Capo, and one whose daughter I plan to marry in a bid to keep him loyal to the Outfit.
'Fucking hell, Leo!" My fist crashes onto the table. 'You agreed to drop a grenade right in the middle of your family for a new life in Baracoa?"
Leo's eyebrows rise in surprise.
