Code of Silence

by Tessier, Shantel

  He turns to face me. “Yes. You are.”

  I shake my head. “I refuse …”

  “Will you stop?” he snaps, making me flinch at the sharpness of his tone. He’s never spoken to me like this in the past. What did he do in Italy that changed him so much? “Stop acting like this scared little kitten, Haven.” He storms back over to me. “This is not a death sentence. This is our home now.”

  I snort, finding that fire as well. “You think I’m gonna lie down and sleep with you in a bed you’ve fucked your whores in?” I ask tightly.

  I hate the fact that I haven’t been with a single man since he left me. Now I wish I would have fucked anyone who looked my way. I know he has.

  He leans in, his lips softly grazing my ear. His scent that I used to want to cover myself in now smells sour. “It’s never stopped you before.”

  I fist my hands and shove him away from me. He doesn’t budge. Instead, his hands grip my head, and he tilts it back. His lips devour mine a second later. His kiss is like pain—it demands to be felt. So fucking much that it makes me weak in the knees.

  He tastes like everything I hate and love all at once. His tongue enters my mouth, and I try to pull away, but he nips at my lip, and I whimper. I kiss him back. Aggressively. I take all my hate and pour it into this kiss. Hoping he chokes on it.

  I bite his lip hard, and his hands slides into my hair, fisting it. My scalp feels like a thousand pinpricks. He bites down on my lip this time, and I taste blood.

  He pulls back, and I suck in a breath, trying to clear my thoughts. My mind. This is his plan. This is how he will cage me in a luxurious mansion and make me never want to leave. And I’m not sure I’ll be able to fight it.

  His dark eyes roam my face. He lifts his hand, and I flinch. His face grows hard as stone. “Have I ever hit you?” he questions with a growl.

  “No,” I answer softly.

  “I’m not going to beat you, Haven.” He releases a sigh and leans his head forward, resting his forehead on mine.

  I hold my breath.

  “But I need you to understand that when I tell you that you will be my wife.” He pulls back and hard eyes stare down at me. “I will be your husband. And we will share this bed.”

  Then he steps back and exits the room, closing the door behind him.

  LUCA

  I sit in my Bugatti La Voiture Noire in the middle of the night. The lights are off and so is the radio. Thankfully, the row of bushes I’m hiding behind is low enough to the ground to cover us while still giving me a clear view of the wedding chapel across the street. Twenty years ago, it was a funeral home, but then Alberto Rossi turned it into a wedding chapel. Guess he felt the living would bring him more money than the dead. And he just needed a cover.

  My brother sits in the passenger seat, driving me nuts by blowing bubbles with his gum. “If you pop one more bubble, I’m gonna stab you in the neck with my knife.” I finally speak to him.

  He snorts. “Someone isn’t getting enough pussy. What’s wrong? The soon-to-be Mrs. Bianchi not spreading her legs for you?”

  I ignore him. My sex life is none of his business. No matter how right he may be.

  I left Haven standing in our room earlier today and haven’t seen her since. I had work to do. Honestly, I’m pretty pissed at her. I thought she’d be happy. She’s always wanted marriage, a home, and children, and I’m going to give her that. I think she was more upset that she had been sold than the fact she had to marry me. I wasn’t going to tell her that I bought her. I had planned to keep that a secret, but my brother fucking ruined it. Just like he does everything.

  “Just a tip, I wouldn’t eat whatever she cooks you. Poison isn’t that hard to come by.”

  Headlights shine ahead of us, and a limo pulls up in the roundabout. A guy dressed in a pair of holey jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt climbs out of the back. He helps a very drunk looking redhead out behind him. They enter the chapel hand in hand.

  “I’m not sure what you expected,” he continues. “You left her. She’ll always hate you for that.”

  “I had no choice.”

  He snorts. “She may believe your bullshit, but we both know you had a choice.” He looks over at me. “You chose the wrong girl.”

  My hands fist the steering wheel. “What’s done is done.” I made a decision, and I’ve lived with it for almost two years now. She’ll either get over it, or she won’t. At this point, it doesn’t really matter. The world will know she’s my wife.

  He nods at that. “Dad is—”

  “I don’t care to talk about Dad and what he is,” I interrupt him. He doesn’t want me with Haven. He had other plans for me, but I won’t allow him to dictate my life. He has three other sons he can do that to.

  I cross my arms over my chest, and the couple comes rushing out the glass door. She carries a black bouquet in her right hand. He picks her up, throwing her over his shoulder, and he slaps her ass before he places her back in the limo, and it takes off.

  My brother sighs. “We’ve been here for over two hours. Maybe you got it wrong.”

  “I didn’t,” I growl.

  “What exactly did Titan tell you?”

  I lean my head back against the headrest. I’ve told him this a hundred times now. “The Queen said she heard the client on his phone. He said there would be a drop tonight. No time. But she was positive Rossi was mentioned.”

  “Sure, she was.” He snorts. Silence falls over the car once again, but it only lasts a few seconds before he speaks. “What do you think Rossi is up to? Why hasn’t he come after us?”

  I’ve asked myself this very question every day for the past four years. Nite and I took six of his men on the mountain that day. Why not make his move? The mob isn’t known for their patience. If they want you dead, they will pull up to your house, your kids’ school, or even your church and shoot you right between your eyes and then drive away.

  “What if this is a setup?” He goes on. “They could have paid the hooker a hefty amount in return for her to make up this fake drop. We run in. They kill us. Boom. All a lie.”

  I run a hand down my face. “Guess we’ll just have to wait and see.” I see headlights coming toward us, and a white utility van follows shortly behind it. “We won’t have to wait long.” I reach over and hit him in the shoulder.

  He sits up straighter, picks up the gun in his lap, and loads the magazine into his .380. All jokes aside for now.

  I do the same and look over at him. “Stay with me.”

  He nods.

  “I mean it,” I growl. Last time we did a job, he skipped out on me and ended up getting shot in the arm. You would have thought the fucker was dying. I even had to carry him.

  “I know—”

  “No, you don’t,” I interrupt him. “Stay the fuck with me, or I’ll shoot you myself.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” He shoves open the passenger door and jumps out.

  I exit as well, and he follows me across the dark street over to the chapel. Running, I come to the side and push my back up against the brick building. I hold the gun in front of me and aim, ready to shoot at any given second.

  “Is this all of it?” a man asks. I recognize the voice. It’s Rossi’s right-hand man, Donatello. He replaced Bernard, the guy I left for dead on the side of the mountain four years ago.

  Rossi and my father once were friends, and they worked together until they went their separate ways. Nobody knows what happened except for them. Honestly, I’m surprised they’re both still alive. For the most part, we stay on our side of Vegas, and he stays on his. Then he came after my family, and all bets were off.

  But once again, tonight, we’re going to him. We’re going to take from him again. Because I don’t care what I have to do once I enter those back doors, but every one of his men that I see tonight will be dying. I’m going to tip the scales in the Bianchi favor. And my marriage to my college sweetheart is going to push my family to the front of that war. It doesn’t matter if she’s
always loved me, or if she now hates me. It’s business. My life has always been that way, and I’m not about to change now. Not when my family needs me, plus it gets me what I want. Her.

  “No. There’s one more bag in the truck,” an unfamiliar voice answers him.

  “Go and get it,” Donatello demands. “It’s late, and I wanna get the fuck home.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I walk down the side of the brick building until I come to the back. I peek my head around the corner to see a man dressed in dark jeans and a black T-shirt walk over to the white van. The double doors in the back are open. He leans over and grabs a trash bag.

  I shove my gun in the waistband of my jeans, remove my knife from my black boot, and rush over to him. I come up from behind, slap my hand over his mouth, and yank his head back. Then I slash his neck from ear to ear, making sure to dig the knife in deep enough to get the job done.

  Blood sprays across the bag and on the back of the van. His body goes limp, and I remove my hand from his mouth. He falls to his knees, then forward, his head hitting the back bumper before he slumps to the ground and bleeds out.

  I step back and run the side of the blade across my black jeans before placing it back in my boot. Grabbing the bag, I throw it at my younger brother. “Take this back to the car.”

  He arches a brow. “What about …?”

  “Now, Matteo,” I snap, knowing I told him earlier to stay next to me at all times. I’m not in the mood to listen to his shit right now. I have blue balls and need to get this over with.

  He lets out a sigh but turns and runs back to my car to put the bag away.

  One down.

  Picking up the dead body, I throw his fat ass into the back of the van and shut the doors. Not much I can do about the blood on the ground, but the cleanup crew will take care of that once I make the call.

  Pulling my gun back out, I open the back door of the building and creep inside the chapel. It’s quiet, letting me know that whatever is happening is upstairs. Rossi never transformed it like the first floor.

  I make my way up the stairs quietly, my gun steady in my hands. Once I hit the landing, I look both left and right. It’s cold. Doesn’t matter how long the funeral home has been out of use, the smell of dead bodies lingers. It’s in the walls. No amount of bleach or paint could ever cover it up. That’s why I’m so surprised anyone would want to get married below it.

  I make my way down the long hallway, and a single light buzzes above my head. The old flowered wallpaper ripped off in spots. The brown carpet stained and chunks missing. I come up to a door on my left and crack it open. It’s empty other than the large two side-by-side metal plated crematories.

  Hmm, we can make use of that.

  Closing the door, I continue, opening the next one. The concrete floor is covered in dried blood, and the back wall has three metal doors. This is where they store the bodies. There are two metal slabs with sinks at the end where they wash them off before placing them inside the refrigeration system.

  Entering the room, I shut the door behind me softly. Walking over to the doors, I open one up, but it’s empty. I close it and open the next one. To my surprise, it has a body. I thought it was out of commission. But we’ve always suspected the chapel to be a front. A tag on his toe tells me his name was Jacob Miller. Thirty years old and was an organ donor.

  I bet he was.

  This is what they did in the past. They’d steal bodies from the hospital, remove all the organs, and then pack their bodies full of drugs and or money. Then they ship them. Hard for search dogs to recognize the smell of drugs when you have a rotting corpse in front of them.

  “He’s in here,” a voice calls out.

  Shit!

  Closing the door, I open the one that I know was empty and crawl in. I lie down and look up into total darkness. This would frighten any person, except for me. For my family. I saw my first dead body at ten years old when my father killed my uncle. At the time, I was scared of what he was capable of, but it didn’t take me long to understand. A month after my uncle’s murder, my aunt Ava was gunned down in her own home. My father didn’t make me witness that one.

  The Mafia takes their code of silence very seriously. You don’t fucking talk. To anyone, about anything.

  “When are they shipping out?” a familiar voice asks, and my jaw clenches. Davis Ricardo is Rossi’s most loyal follower, but he wants to be number one. He wants to be the one on top and in charge, and in order to achieve that, he’ll have to fuck him over. It’s just a matter of time. He’ll get tired of waiting. Eventually.

  “Tomorrow. Don’t want them sitting still for too long. We’ll put them on the plane and fly them out. They’ll reach their destination by Friday.”

  No, they won’t.

  “Okay, put the woman in this one.” I hear him slap the door to the one I’m in.

  Shit!

  I hit the side of my Apple watch to light up what small amount of space I can see. Thankfully, it’s open. Normally, these would have individual slots for each body, but these bastards can be cheap, and they chose to purchase the kind where each level is open, so it costs less to cool.

  Thank God for that.

  I quickly crawl over, trying to be quiet, and hold my gun so I don’t drop it on the metal tables. The space is cramped and cold. Once I get to the next one that is available, I lie back down and close my eyes, turning off my light.

  Where in the fuck is my brother?

  “How long will it take?” Donatello asks.

  “Shouldn’t take me longer than thirty minutes to pack the body.”

  “Get it done,” he orders.

  I smile to myself, ready to get this show started. I can take them all on at once, but I prefer one at a time.

  I hear the door open to the room. “Sir? Gabe is dead.”

  Fuck!

  “What?” Donatello snaps.

  “I found him in the back of the van,” a man rushes out. “Throat slashed.”

  “Find whoever did this,” he barks. “I want the place surrounded. Now!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then the room grows silent. I hold my breath to listen for any kind of noise but hear nothing. I open the door and peek out, looking for my brother. Nothing.

  “I want everything shipped tonight,” Donatello orders from down the hall, but I can’t see him. “Someone, somewhere has fucking opened their mouth.”

  “But sir, the pickup van won’t be here until tomorrow.”

  “Then make a fucking phone call and assure me that it will depart tonight,” he barks. “If you don’t make this happen, I will stuff your body with these fucking drugs myself.”

  Walking down the hall with my back pressed into a wall, I hold my gun up and turn the corner. I see Donatello standing at the end of another hall with two guys flanking each side. His bodyguards. He wears a black suit with a red button-up, and a black and white tie, cutting into his double chin. His once dark hair is now shaved close to his head. He holds a cigar in one hand and a gun in the other.

  “I think we should evacuate, sir,” one of them suggests.

  He snorts. “Rossi will kill each one of us if we don’t get this shit moved.”

  Ricardo comes into view. “I’ll stay behind and take care of it. You need to leave. I’ll call Rossi and inform him of what is happening,” he says, running a hand down his stubble. He’s nervous. Good.

  Rossi will question his loyalty. Not because he’ll think he talked, but because he’ll think he got careless and somehow tipped someone off and was followed.

  I raise my gun and aim it right at Donatello, waiting for Ricardo to move out of my way to give me a clear shot.

  “Fine,” he growls. “I’m going.” Ricardo takes a step forward, giving me a clear shot, and I take it. But at the last minute, he moves again, and the bullet whizzes right past him. Ricardo leaps on top of him, shoving him to the tile floor. With gun raised, they aim them in my direction, and I jump out of the way, fall
ing to my side and sliding across the floor as gunfire erupts in the small space. I pull the trigger, over and over until there’s nothing left. Pieces of the wall and ceiling fall down around me. Jumping up, I run into an adjoining room, shutting the door behind me. I drop the now empty magazine and replace it with another one I pull out of my pocket before aiming at the door. It opens, and I go to shoot but see that it’s my brother.

  I lower my gun. “Where the fuck have you been?” I whisper harshly.

  He turns to face the door as well. His shirt is covered in blood along with his hands. He’s wiping them on his pants. “Was on my way back from the car and saw two men walking out the front.”

  “And?” I snap at his vagueness.

  “Killed Isaac. The other got away,” he explains with a growl. My brother hates to lose.

  We were raised to be competitive. He once played baseball for our high school. He was removed from the team after he slammed his fist into the coach’s face when he was made to run a lap after striking out in practice. That was his one and only week as a Tiger.

  “What about you? Killed any more?”

  I shake my head and walk over to the door. “Nope. But we need to wrap this up.”

  He nods once.

  I take a deep breath and kick open the door, a gun in both hands. Holding them out, I’m ready to shoot at anything, but we’re met with silence. As I look around, my eyes narrow. What are they doing? Where did they go?

  Tires squeal, and I run to the back door, flinging it open. The taillights of the van are fading in the distance. I aim and fire off more rounds, but none of them make contact. “Fuck!”

  My brother chuckles from behind me. “Man, has she fucked with your mind? It hasn’t even been a full twenty-four hours yet. Since when do you miss?”

  I spin around, pointing the gun at his head. “I bet I won’t miss from here.” I arch a brow.

  He just smiles at me. “You’re out of bullets.”

  “Am I?” I question. Lowering the gun, I pull the trigger, sending a bullet into the floor. Right between his feet.

  He jumps back. “Fuck, man. What the fuck?”

  “Don’t fuck with me, Matteo. I’m not in the mood,” I warn.