Breathless & Bloodstained (The Chicago War #4)

by Bethany-Kris

  “Why not?”

  “Because he was good for a little fun, but not much else. Two dimensional men are boring.”

  Tommas cocked a brow. “What would it take, Ella?”

  Was he asking?

  Because almost everything she learned about Tommas tonight was a great start. She wasn’t an angel. She hadn’t been one of those for years. She wasn’t going to act like one now.

  “The right kind of guy.”

  Tommas laughed. “And who is that?”

  “The one who can give me what I want.”

  His gaze caught hers, holding strong. “Care to let me in on the secret?”

  “I just want to be free, Tommy.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  What good was family if they didn’t storm in your home without knocking while barely saying a word to you as they went directly to where the food was?

  “Cousin,” Tommas greeted.

  Damian strolled past Tommas’ spot at the small kitchen table. His cousin hit up the fridge, his broad shoulders blocking Tommas’ view of Damian as he dug to find food.

  “You need to go shopping, Tommy.”

  “I’m aware, D.”

  “There’s fuck all in here.”

  Well, there was, but Damian didn’t like healthy food. He preferred junk food, and then he worked it all off with his crazy morning regime. Tommas had lived more than enough years with his cousin to know what the man liked.

  “Eat an apple for once,” Tommas said. “It’s better for you. An apple a day and all that crap.”

  Damian popped up from the fridge, closing the door and biting into a red apple at the same time. “Not my first choice.”

  Tommas cringed. “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

  “You sound like my wife.”

  “She has better manners than you do.”

  Damian chuckled, swallowing his bite of apple. “She is my better half for a reason, I guess.”

  “Truth.”

  Tommas shut the laptop he’d been working on and pushed it away. Damian joined his cousin at the kitchen table, twisting the chair around so he could rest his arms over the back as he regarded Tommas.

  “I went to your house first,” Damian said.

  “I haven’t been there a lot lately.”

  His apartment was easier and safer. Joel Trentini wasn’t aware of Tommas’ second, much smaller place in the heart of the Trentini territory. Tommas had only picked up the apartment a couple of years back, because he wanted a safe place for Abriella to come to if she needed.

  Looking around the two bedroom, one bath apartment was a bad idea for Tommas. There wasn’t a single part of the apartment that was unmarked by Abriella in some way. Her little touches were all over it from the colorful artwork on the walls, to the black appliances in the kitchen. Tommas knew the things she liked and had picked accordingly to decorate. Abriella had added a lot over the years like the silver throw pillows on the sectional and the white chaise by the bay window.

  “There you go again,” Damian said. “Off into another world.”

  Tommas slammed back down to reality in a blink. “Hmm, what?”

  “You’re dazed, Tommy. You’re out of it.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t deny it.”

  Tommas sighed. “All right, so I’m out of it. I’ve got a lot on my mind. What did you want coming here, anyway?”

  Damian passed a look at the blankets on the couch. They were messy, like someone had been sleeping in them and hadn’t bothered to fold them up. “Still sleeping on the couch, huh?”

  It was easier than the bedroom.

  She was all over that, too.

  “What do you want, D?”

  “To talk,” Damian said.

  “About what?”

  “Whatever you’re planning. I’d like to know this time around instead of getting surprised by whatever in the hell you’re going to do like the last time.”

  Tommas ignored the heat of his cousin’s tone. Trusting that Riley would do what he needed to do and kill Joel, Tommas had inadvertently put Theo DeLuca in the crossfire. The man nearly lost his life more than once, but shit happens sometimes, and people became casualties. Once Tommas had known about Theo’s involvement with Evelina Conti, he’d changed plans and tried to correct what was already in motion because of Riley. Tommas was hoping Theo would see it the same way and move on.

  Unfortunately, the war was far from being over.

  “I apologized for Theo.”

  “Not to him,” Damian replied.

  “All right, that’s true enough.”

  “When are you going to do that?”

  Tommas shrugged. “Soon. What more do you want, man?”

  “A guarantee it won’t happen again.”

  “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  Damian’s shoulders stiffened. “Don’t go stupid over someone you don’t even have, Tommy.”

  “It has nothing to do with not having someone, Damian. It’s getting what is mine. That’s all.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” Tommas murmured.

  “I think you should make your way over to Theo’s hospital room before he gets out,” Damian said. “Make face, and give the man the respect he’s owed for the shit he’s had to go through the last few months.”

  Tommas nodded. “I will. I told you soon, okay?”

  “He’s getting out today, Tommas.”

  Oh. Well, then …

  “And I think he might want to step out of this,” Damian added quieter.

  That caught Tommas’ attention. “The war?”

  “Yeah. He’s never had much to do with it except to be used by people for their own gain. Theo is at a different place right now. This mess is the last thing on his mind. So yeah, he wants out.”

  Theo DeLuca was smart as hell for doing it, too. Tommas didn’t blame the man.

  “Does that mean he isn’t taking any sides?” Tommas asked.

  “I don’t know, Tommy. You’ll have to ask when you make your way over there.”

  Tommas scowled. “Mmm.”

  “Someone else to consider is Adriano Conti,” Damian said. “What about him? Where does he stand in the mess right now between you and Joel? It would be good to know where he is in all of this.”

  Adriano Conti was a young Capo that Tommas had learned to respect over the last few months. For a long time, Tommas simply took Adriano’s age and compliance to Riley as a weakness. Tommas was ten shades of wrong on both fronts. Adriano had more than proved he was capable of handling his own business without his father at his side. With Riley dead, Adriano hadn’t even skipped a beat with his crew or life.

  The kid was moving forward.

  That was the important thing.

  Tommas shrugged. “His wife’s sister is stuck firmly on Joel’s side of things, man. Think about it.”

  Damian scowled as he took another bite of his apple. Tommas waited his cousin out while Damian chewed and swallowed. The men sat in silence until Damian put his apple aside.

  “Adriano won’t do anything that risks Alessa, her family, or her happiness.”

  “Exactly,” Tommas said quietly.

  “But that doesn’t mean he’ll jump into Joel’s side of things, either.”

  “Probably not. There’s a lot of love lost there.”

  Damian leaned forward, letting his arms hang down over the back of the chair. “You’re on your own against Joel Trentini.”

  Tommas chuckled dryly. “Not entirely. I’ve got you, D.”

  “True,” Damian agreed, flashing a wicked smile. “But I still don’t have the first clue what you’re doing or where you’re going, cousin. Joel, like he usually does, has made a lot of threats and sent out a bunch of warnings, but he’s yet to put any of those words into actions. That makes me nervous. We don’t know what he’s doing or when he’s planning on doing it. You need to make a choice where you’re going, Tommy, before Joel decides something for you.”

>   “Up.”

  “Up?”

  Tommas passed the decorative glass bowl on the table a look. A handful of silver bangles had been tossed haphazardly in the bowl months ago by Abriella when she woke up early one morning to cook breakfast. She hadn’t wanted to get her jewelry messy while she cooked. Tommas had driven her back to her apartment so she could make it to church with her sister.

  No one suspected a thing.

  No one ever had.

  To get mornings like those back, the very best mornings he could ever remember, Tommas only had one option. He needed to take the empty boss’s seat. He would have to clear Abriella’s house of Outfit men, so that she was free to make her own choices.

  Guilt still chewed at Tommas.

  “A lot of people have died,” Tommas told his cousin.

  “I know.”

  “They shouldn’t keep dying, D. They didn’t cause this feud. The people have done nothing but be born or married to certain families.”

  “I never knew you to be the kind of man who worried about other people,” Damian noted.

  “I’m not.”

  “But Abriella is, right?”

  “She is,” Tommas said under his breath. “And I know she wouldn’t want this to keep going. I can give it up, D. I can say fuck the seat, leave it alone, and let Joel take it.”

  Damian didn’t give a thing away as he said, “And her, too, yeah?”

  Yes.

  “I could do it,” Tommas said, meeting his cousin’s gaze. “I could let her go if I thought she would be happy, or that she would find someone who could make her happy. I wouldn’t mind. I could do it, D.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “I know I could.”

  Because Abriella’s happiness was all Tommas had ever cared about at the end of it all.

  “But,” Tommas added, “I know Joel. And he won’t let her be happy. All the blood in that family is so sour that it stinks. They’re poisoned against one another. Joel doesn’t care about his sisters or his parents, he never has. He won’t do a damn thing for her. If I let it all go thinking that he might give her the chance to be happy, I’ll be sorely disappointed in the end.”

  “You’re choosing to go up, then?” Damian asked.

  “Up,” Tommas echoed.

  Damian blew out a quiet breath. “Then that’s where we’ll get you, man.”

  Tommas wondered if being up as high as he needed to go would be a lonely place. It certainly would be if he was alone once he made it there. What if he took the seat as the Outfit’s next boss, and Abriella still pushed him away?

  As if Damian could read his mind, he said, “It’s a risk, Tommas.”

  “Nothing worth having comes easy, right?”

  “Right,” his cousin said. “Besides, the Outfit needs a change. A good change, Tommy. You could be that. Don’t make this about only your selfishness, make it bigger than all that nonsense. We haven’t been a famiglia for a long time. Do what needs to be done, man. Get us back to that place. You’re capable.”

  Damian was right.

  “Doing what needs to be done could be messy as hell.”

  Hadn’t enough blood spilled?

  “So let’s play dirty.” Damian laughed. “We can do that.”

  Tommas caught sight of the bangles again.

  “I saw Abriella yesterday,” Tommas admitted. “She was having dinner with her mother.”

  “Oh?”

  “She didn’t see me.”

  Damian chewed on his inner cheek. “What about it?”

  “Love and business never mixes well, but I don’t know how to make it about anything else right now. That’s dangerous, D.”

  “Dangerous men are the best ones.”

  The problem with that was Tommas wasn’t the only dangerous one. Joel was lethal, too. Erratic at times, demanding like a spoiled child, and unpredictable in his moves at best. That didn’t make for a good situation when Tommas needed to carefully plan ahead to take the seat and the Outfit from Joel without spilling more blood than what was necessary.

  “You could play it like Riley did,” Damian suggested. “Best Joel in the areas he’s most weak and cut him off at the knees when he thinks you’re down and out. You’ve got to give Riley the credit where it’s due, even if he did get killed in the end. He played one hell of a good game.”

  “I’m not Riley,” Tommas replied.

  Damian chuckled. “No, you’re right. You’re far too bloody for that.”

  Tommas didn’t bother denying it. He had a taste for spilled blood when it was needed, and sometimes, even when it wasn’t. Spilling blood always made a damn good point.

  “Yeah, Bloody Tommas, right?” Damian asked.

  “Right,” Tommas agreed.

  He hadn’t earned that nickname for doing nothing.

  “Just make sure to give me a heads up this time before you do something crazy again, all right?” Damian asked.

  “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Good. And you know, be careful, Tommy. I want my boy to have some kind of family to grow up around. Something better than what we had, which was practically fucking nothing. Certainly nothing worth having. Next to Theo, you’re going to be the only other family I really have for my son. It takes a village and all that.”

  Tommas froze in his seat, taking in his cousin’s words. “A boy?”

  “Shit. I said that, didn’t I?”

  “You did.”

  Damian smirked. “I wasn’t supposed to tell. Lily wanted to do some kind of reveal thing.”

  “I won’t say anything,” Tommas promised.

  “Thanks.”

  The shitty bubble Tommas had been floating in for the last few weeks suddenly burst without warning. All it took was his cousin reminding him that there was more to life than the Outfit and selfish desires.

  Love wasn’t always selfish.

  Neither was family.

  Tommas was thrilled his cousin and Lily’s first child would be a boy. Damian was too high-strung for a girl, as far as Tommas was concerned. Damian would likely spend his life in a panic as his daughter got older, so a boy was a relief. But at the same time, it wasn’t. Boys followed their fathers. Just like Tommas and Damian had growing up.

  “This needs to be better,” Damian said quietly. “The Outfit can’t be like it is right now for my boy in the future, Tommy. Is that how you want your kids growing up? Is that what you want to hand off to them? This legacy?”

  “No,” Tommas said.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “It’s not that simple, D.”

  Damian frowned. “It rarely is. Are you doubting yourself?”

  Tommas scoffed. “Hardly.”

  Being a boss hadn’t been in his long-term goals, but Tommas didn’t mind the added task.

  “Her again?” Damian asked.

  Tommas simply nodded, but said nothing. It was always about Abriella even when it wasn’t.

  “I could always try to scare Joel into compliance,” Tommas said, more to himself than his cousin.

  “That’s an interesting idea.”

  “I’m sure we’ll figure it all out.”

  Damian sighed. “I know what you’re doing, man.”

  “What?”

  “You do realize that with the boss gone, there’s only a few people who could really fill the other seats for the front boss and underboss, right?” Damian asked.

  “Obviously.”

  “And if Joel doesn’t hand the boss’s seat over, you’ll end him.”

  “I might end him even if he does,” Tommas said honestly. “I still want what is mine, D. He’s got what belongs to me in a gilded cage. It’s the one thing holding me back from slaughtering him when it’s all I really want to do. I don’t want to hurt Abriella, or worse, get her hurt in the process of making my moves.”

  “That’s not my point, Tommy.”

  “Then what is?” Tommas asked.

  “Don’t make me your right-hand in this. I
never wanted something like that.”

  Tommas didn’t even blink at the statement. “But you’re good at it. You’ve always been my right-hand, even when we were kids. This shouldn’t be a surprise to you. Don’t act like it is.”

  “That’s not important.”

  “It is to me, Damian. And right now, that is all that matters.”

  Damian didn’t even try to hide his displeasure. “You’re putting me in a spotlight. You know I don’t like that kind of bullshit.”

  “Comfort zones are only useful for weak men who are afraid of the unknown. Time to step out of yours, D.”

  “Point taken,” Damian muttered. “So, what are you doing today?”

  Tommas pushed out of the chair and stood. “Well, I have to check on my mother and make sure she hasn’t gulped back enough alcohol to kill herself over the last few days.”

  “And?” Damian pressed.

  Goddammit.

  “And I’ll head over to Theo’s hospital room.”

  “I knew you would. Good men apologize when they do wrong, Tommy.”

  Tommas didn’t reply.

  Why should he?

  He hadn’t been good for a long time.

  Tommas cringed the moment he pushed open the door to his mother’s home. The pungent stench of rotting food, piss, vomit, cigarette smoke, and old liquor burned his nose when he inhaled. Tommas held back the automatic gag reflex that always seemed to act up whenever that smell invaded his senses. It wasn’t the first time he got a whiff of that concoction, but it still felt like a punch to his gut.

  Since his father’s unfortunate death—or murder, depending on how someone wanted to look at it—his mother had only slid downhill with every passing day. Truthfully, Tommas was just waiting for the woman to drown herself in alcohol.

  As harsh as it sounded, it would be easier for everyone, Serena included. Alcoholism was a disease that affected everyone and anyone it could touch. It wasn’t just the alcoholic that felt the disease’s dirty touch, but the people around the addict, too.

  Tommas had felt more than enough over his thirty years.

  Sure, he was more than capable of handling the issue of his mother if he wanted to go that route. He’d killed his father, after all. When Laurent nearly got Abriella killed in the crossfire of his attack on Riley Conti months back, Tommas lost all control.