He gives a quick side-eyed glance, and I know he did. Ashley isn’t just a royal cunt, but a full-fledged addict. I know, so am I—but I’m not sure everyone isn’t craving something.
But the difference is this—self-discipline.
I can go months without touching a thing, plus I don’t routinely beat the fuck out of my loved one. So, there is a difference, and I’m saying it here and now. Not all addicts are created from the same cookie cutter form.
Kaci was an addict, but she had cancer. She taught me. Does that absolve my self-medicating? Not necessarily but there is a point when it is the only way to shut down the machine. In a way, it was a gift from Kaci.
Do this. Be moderate. Don’t go too far. Be considerate to the temple.
Should Ashley suffer our wrath because of it? No.
Should she suffer because of the hell she has put Dom through? Yes.
My guess is Ashley is on a constant hound for her next fix. With an uncaring demeanor, Dom finally sounds off, “She was an addict as a teenager, and I helped her get clean. She just recently started using again.”
One glance at the numbers on the phone and I know, she is dying today. She not only called Wendy Cruz but Vinny Veramonte and Marcello Campanelli. I throw her phone to the ground, smashing it into bits, as my chest undulates over a rapid pulse.
“You fucking cunt,” I seethe, angrier than I have ever been. “How fucking dare you!”
“I did what I needed to do for my son!”
“You signed his goddamned death certificate!” I bang my palms hard into the table. It hurts. But I don’t care because I need a hit of pain to contain the ravaging flames. “What did you tell them?”
“Why should I tell you?” Her eyes impart an uncaring craze as she knows her time is limited. “You’re all the fucking same! Running the show the way you think it should be ran, but it doesn’t excuse your behavior! You think it validates it, but that is where you vigilantes fail!”
Did you just call me a vigilante?
With a vindictive gleam in my eye, I lean down closer and hiss, “Do I look like I need a fucking excuse?” My blood burns hot in my veins. “Your stunts are going to kill my fucking daughter!” And with one out of control move, I back hand the bitch.
There is a first time for everything.
“Just kill me!” she laughs, coming back for more. “Just kill me and get on with your warped lives. I’ll see your ass and your fucked up spawn in hell soon enough.”
Losing my composure, I lunge across the table and pummel her to the floor as my hands wrap around her neck. The table crashes to the ground as my shoes get caught on the edge. I cut off her air flow. She can call me every fucking name in the book, but she isn’t allowed to say shit about Raine. I’ll strangle her before she gets that chance again.
“Boss…” Deacon mutters, crouching low and drawing my attention away from the grayish blue woman beneath my clenched fingers. “Don’t.”
I let go and she gasps for air.
With the table on its side, I can’t see Dom or Nico when the main door swings open. A single shot randomly erupts in the metal building as a clanking sound claims my attention. I peek up to see Dom falling to the ground and Jack holding the gun as Deacon yanks me back. The gun fires again and the echo blares through my eardrums as I gaze with terror at Deacon and stay down.
We didn’t plan on this.
This was not on The Unholy menu.
“Drop it!” a woman’s voice roars. “Stop right fucking there!”
Hearing the gun crash to the cement, I peer over the table to see Amber holding a gun to Jack Kerris’ head. Dom lays in a fetal position, on the floor, with a pool of blood around him. He dropped his cane. “If you move, I will blow your fucking cock all over this god forsaken place.”
She glances at me and I stand. “Amber…”
“Sal…”
With a tilt of her head, she questions, “You want me to do the deed or do you want him?”
“I want him.” We are slowly captured in the moment—eye to eye and wound tight in our history—as I jump over the table, trusting she won’t kill me. “Deacon help Nico get Kerris to the storage closet. Amber…” I order, hurrying towards Dom. “What the fuck…”
I flip his lifeless body over and press my hands to the gunshot wound in his chest. His eyes slit open as he mutters, “Kid… I’m not going to make it.”
“Don’t you be talking like that,” I warn, trying not to lose it. “Amber… Switch with me!”
Her hands cover the crimson geyser as I strip off my shirt. “Switch!” I hold it to the trauma. “We need to get him to the hospital! Now!”
“I won’t make it,” he whispers. “You can’t stop it…”
“Bullshit,” I argue, not giving up my fight, as Deacon and I lift his body and work our way to the car. “You aren’t dying on my ass today, fucker. Nico, stay here.”
“Yes, Sir,” he says, tossing the keys to Amber. “Take my car.”
We carefully place his limp body in the back seat with his head on Amber’s lap. I’m stretched over his torso, crushing my sanguine soaked shirt to the gushing wound. There is so much blood. So, so, so much blood. Amber glances with worry as if preparing me for the inevitable loss.
“I tried to get here as soon as I found out.”
“Deacon drive,” I yell, crying. “Hurry! Call and tell them we’re coming!”
“I’ll never forget when I held your flower for the first time,” he barely whispers. I want to tell him to hush and save his strength, but I can’t. “She was a little princess. I knew who she was and as much as I wanted to keep her, I knew I couldn’t—she was too fragile for me. You’re so much gentler than me. Nico brought you to her, and you need to get out of this wedding, Boston. Because it isn’t right… It never was…”
His eyes shudder close as I scream, “No! No! Dominic! God! No! Wake up!”
“He’s still got a pulse,” Amber calmly claims through her tears as Deacon calls the hospital. “Do not give up hope, Raniero. Deacon, drive faster!”
“We’re almost there.”
The next five minutes blur into a haze of white coats and blue scrubs and tubing and gauze pads. The medical team rushes about and carts the only true father I have ever known away.
Bathed in crimson, I sit in a stupor in the backseat.
“He means the world to me,” I babble, rubbing the sticky blood off of my hands onto my gray sweats. “He can’t die. This is all just a nightmare. I’m going to wake up,” I cry and curl into Amber’s chest as she pets over my head. Her teardrops fall in my hair. “I’m going to wake up,” I uncontrollably sob with an endless stream of tears dripping into the red. Always the red and the blue, the fire and the water. “Please don’t let him die.”
“The Sugargrove PD will not be investigating this,” Deacon informs from the driver seat as Amber and I find a comfort in one another. The surge of adrenaline in witnessing one of our own being shot is hypnotically turbulent, but the silent aftermath deafens my mind to a paralysis...a void...an absence…a vacancy…a missing piece of my heart.
“I need a shower,” I mutter.
“I can take you home.”
“I can’t leave.”
“Yes,” Amber whispers, holding my hand. “You can leave and come back. You cannot do anything for Dom but pray. Staying like this isn’t going to help anyone.”
“Deacon, drive.”
“Where to Sir?”
After a long pause, I request, “Take me to the farm. I can bathe at my shit hole of a house.”
Amber squeezes my hand. “Is it that bad?”
“Ya,” I reply. “It is that bad. Perfect for a massacre.”
She nods. “It will be okay.”
“Do either of you have a cigarette?”
I chose to come to the vandalized house for several reasons. One—I don’t want Amber to know where Deacon’s new house is. Two—I cannot go to Juliet looking like this. Three—I need the suit
I wore for my wedding, so I can burn it after tonight.
Standing under the hot water, I watch as the blood splatters from my skin to the white porcelain tub and slopes to the drain. I wash it all away. Every ounce of heartache and bad memory of the last nine years will disappear.
Thrust into a baptism of blood, I will resurrect in the holy water of one.
There are no other options for me.
I open the shower door to find Deacon holding a towel. “It’s not fresh.”
“Fresher than I have ever been,” I reply, drying off. “Where is she?”
“Guest bath.”
“There are a million reasons we should kill her,” I remark, staring in the broken mirror. “And one reason not to.”
“You aren’t ready to,” he simply says with a smile.
I snicker. “You know me too well. That said, I want to make a play and see if we can use her.”
“We can try. The worst that happens is it backfires, but considering where we’ve been today, it can’t get much worse.”
“I want her fucking boss…”
He backs up and whispers, “You want to go after Muerte?”
“I want to go after whoever is controlling the Amber killing machine.”
Licking his lips, he props against the cabinet. “Alright, we’ll talk to her for a few minutes, but then we need to get back to the hospital.”
“Fair enough,” I reply, going into the closet. “Lock the door.”
Without question, he side steps to push the latch.
I toss the bottle of old lube over my shoulder and get on the floor. “Fuck me. And don’t spare me.”
“Then I shouldn’t use the lube.”
“Cruz,” I hastily warn. “Don’t debate this.”
“You realize we’re going bareback?”
“It won’t be the first nor the last time.”
The drop of his jacket and his zipper coming down spur on the ignition of my processor coming back online. “Is there a reason we are doing this, Sir?”
“I need to forget how much I hurt and remember how much I hate.”
“And the path to hell is through your exit?”
“No, the path doesn’t exist because I’m already suffering in eternal damnation.”
He sighs deeply as I wonder if he has it in him to do this. He may not be able to with me, but only a foolish man would doubt a sinning Saint, and I certainly will not be the first. I feel the pump of his fist bump into my flesh.
“You want my big, hard cock in your ass, Pretty Boy?”
“Rape me.”
I am trained for this.
But fuck if it ain’t hard some days.
67
In The Sweatshop, I Get No Sleep
We spend the afternoon pacing the floors of the hospital. There was talk of moving Dom to Austin or Houston, but the doctors feared he wouldn’t make it. The news was a devastating blow. Currently, I feel nothing but rage blistering in my muscles and aching in my heart.
“What are we doing?”
“Waiting on my world to end.”
Deacon’s nerves are making mine flare. “I’m going to the chapel.”
“Are you praying?”
“Ya, but not for forgiveness,” I say as we run into Father Quinn on our way there. “Q…”
“I heard,” he mutters with concern. “We need to talk, Salvatore—privately.”
With a solemn gaze, I mumble, “Anything I can hear…”
He lifts his wrinkled hand to my lips. “Not this, son.”
“You go on,” Deacon replies, laying his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll go fetch a cup of coffee.”
Hope Chapel, not named after my dearly departed, is older, like the rest of the hospital. The original name was The Sugargrove Sanatorium and it was built in 1943.
A few renovations have occurred over the years, but the feel remains the same. In some areas, old mint tiles still grace the walls. The embellished crown moldings and wood work are a thing of the past, rarely seen in modern hospitals.
The staff is a decent size for the outlying communities, and though not all of the doctors possess a certain talent, many of them do. It is an affluent area and the recent acquisition of a trauma and cancer center, albeit small, represent that.
With the old forest green carpet underfoot, I walk down the aisle with Q by my side. It won’t be long—34 days—until Emily is walking down the aisle to me. Dom was supposed to escort the bride because her relationship with her adopted parents is strained by my father’s reign.
I genuflect and make the sign of the cross in my too tight jeans and shrunken hoodie. The clothes are for a twenty-year-old me because they’re circa 2010.
Kaci and I moved many of our things to the house in boxes with lofty ideas of having enough time to move in. They were all I had today. So, here I sit, in skin tight jeans and a hoodie stuck to my muscles like plastic wrap. It is suffocating, and I am miserable.
We didn’t have enough time.
Maybe no one ever does.
“In light of recent events, I think you need to be aware of what you’re looking at.”
I furrow my brow. “What do you mean?”
“Do you know who Jack is working for?”
“No,” I mumble, flustered. I bend forward with my head in my hands. The jeans bite my balls like a fucking vicious cock ring. He rubs my back, the same back he has lashed and beaten and trained. Q was a client. Just like Mierne, my Miemie. They paid and I provided because that was what we did. Delarte Cristos, Jack Kerris, and me—we were the golden boys of Juliet.
“If I tell you, it should play no bearing in your decisions.”
This from a man of the cloth. “Is it that bad?” He stares at me as I venture a guess. “My father.”
A gentle smile lights his cheeks. “If you are still stuck on the same song and dance routine that everything is your father’s sole doing, you are not ready for this conversation, Lucas.”
“… Mama?”
His hearty chuckle fills the air. “Have you met your mother?”
With all the supercharged pink turbo moves of late, I wouldn’t put it past my mother or any of the sisters. “Tell me.”
“Let’s have a story first, shall we?”
I shrug and lean against the pew. I put my foot up on the back of the one in front of me because I’m a thug. Deacon missed a classification—cut, suit, and thug. The thought drives the madness in my mind to accept thugs can be both cuts and suits.
Thugs are adaptable, move without warning, and look good in a wife beater (get over it already) or a fine silk suit (don’t drool on it, unless you need to cry…then slobber all over the fucking thing because I really don’t give two shits.)
I am a bizarre hybrid of the two.
“I ain’t got nothin’ better to do, Padre.”
“Many years ago, there was a woman named Paloma Silvestri, who married a man named Pietro Veramonte.”
“My Nonna…my maternal grandparents.”
“Yes,” he sternly says. “Now don’t interrupt again.”
“He had a much younger sister named Luna Veramonte.”
I whisper, “Moon…”
“Son, if you do not stop, I’m going to rip those damn fangled sheath pants from your ever loving body and spank you barehanded while you recite Hail Mary’s.”
“Promises…promises.” I snarl.
He sighs. “Luna Veramonte married Leonardo Ravenna and together they made…”
“Ravenna? …as in Nereza?”
“The one and only.”
“So, she is like my great aunt or some shit?”
He lays his hand on my thigh. “And she runs the Veramonte business outside of Rome.”
“This is fascinating,” I sarcastically mutter, dipping my head back. The harsh slap to my leg comes sudden. “What the hell!”
“God’s House,” he warns.
“This is a fucking hospital cathedral.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he
scolds. “Behave. You may be buckling under the stress, but we raised you better than that.” I itch my cheek with my middle finger. “You are such a pill when you’re in a bad mood.”
“Wait…that means her son is like a relative…”
“Yeah,” he says, waving me off. “But you don’t want to hear my boring tale of your family lineage, so piss off.”
“I’m sorry,” I grumble, knowing I’m being a dick. Dom may die and no amount of turning off the emotion with brutal butt sex is going to change that. “Please, continue.”
“Nereza Ravenna is the eldest heir to the Veramonte outfit in Italy.”
Locking my fingers to stretch them, I correct, “There is Uncle Vinny…”
“He was removed years ago by his father, Pietro.”
“If the Veramonte’s have their own established business, why is Vinny working for my father?”
“There is a reason for that,” he elaborates as I crack my knuckles. “After Pietro disowned him, Vinny had nowhere to go, so he went to Cesario, who brought him on.”
Feeling a bit petulant, I ask, “What does all this have to do with me?”
“Jack Kerris knew about the family secrets and took them to Vinny. He considered killing him, but Vinny decided to use him.”
“To make my life a living hell,” I specify.
“And eventually Jack joined forces with…”
The light shines through the stained glass and I get lost in the pattern of the big picture. We are all disjointed fragments to a larger whole. We make no sense alone, but with time, patience, and glue, everything comes together.
“La Morte.” I fathom the guess as he nods. “That still doesn’t tell me who is running La Morte.”
“Vinny Veramonte is,” he answers, slipping the piece of the puzzle to me. “But the important part of the story is that Luca Raniero was not just only a well respected member of The Commission.”
I sit up as the reality hits and I gasp, “So was Pietro Veramonte, which is why he disowned his only son.”
“There will be no shame amongst the famiglia.”
The door swings open as Deacon yells, “Nero…you need to come…now!”
Every Minute I Love You (a Tomb of Ashen Tears Book 3) Page 57
