by Naomi West
“It’s just Dante,” Fabi says, jamming a magazine into a gun and testing its weight.
“What?” I ask, starting to get annoyed again.
Fabi shrugs. “I called him. He’s Alessia’s brother, too.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose as I feel my tension rise. I watch Dante descend the staircase into the cellar. His head is held high like he’s a king. This fucking family. Everybody is just so damn regal.
“I thought you were off somewhere protecting Alessia,” Dante says, he’s back in the shadows and I can barely make out his face. “Fabi calls and tells me that you’re in Chicago, gunning for Greco.”
“Alessia’s safe,” I load a clip into my gun, “and she’s about to be a lot safer.”
“Where is she?” Dante asks, taking a step toward me.
“I told you, she’s safe. And if you think I’m going to tell you her location right now, you’ve lost your damn mind.”
Apparently, that was the answer that Dante was looking for because he doesn’t argue with me. He’s always been a cold fish. Hard to read. He walks forward until he’s standing before me, his eyes like coal and his face drawn and serious. For the first time, it hits me how strong the family resemblance between him and Alessia actually is. If not for the age difference they could have been twins.
“So you're coming too, huh?” I ask, letting the tension of the moment come into my voice.
“Yes,” he says, finally moving past me and trailing his hand over a line of handguns, studying them. He comes into the light and I can see that he has a black eye and a ripe bruise over his forehead. I remember Alessia telling me that he’d been badly concussed only a few days before. I look back and forth between the two brothers.
Fabi is young, loose, always ready for a joke or a laugh or a woman. He doesn’t let the seriousness of any situation reflect in his behavior. I’ve seen him flop down on a couch during a gun standoff. The man has almost zero sense of self preservation.
Dante is only a few years younger than I am but in a lot of ways I feel like I watched him grow up. When I started with Patrizzio as his bodyguard, I was fresh out of the service. Dante was still just a little gangbanger. Still following all of his father's directions to a T and dreaming about inheriting the Patrizzio empire. He’d never been reckless, always calculating his next move and from what I can tell now, all that has changed are his motives. The empire doesn’t interest him anymore. Only the safety of the ones he loves.
I’d watched that boy transform into a man who wanted nothing to do with his family’s mob connection. He'd gotten Fabi out of jam after jam, protected Alessia over and over from whatever scum lowlife thought he might be able to crawl around and get a taste. Dante had stood up to his father three years ago and gotten shot in the leg for his troubles. He wants out of the life of a mobster, that’s for sure. He wants his siblings out, too. He’s willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
Now he stands before me and I see a man who made a mistake. His plan got Greco arrested and now Greco is coming for Alessia. There’s nothing he won’t do to end this.
“Kind of a Catch-22, isn’t it Dante?” I ask him as he selects a gun, weighs it in his hand and lays it back down.
“What is?” he asks in a disinterested tone.
“That you have to be a gangster in order to stop being a gangster?”
He shrugs, like he’s already made his peace with it. “I can live with my own sins. I just refuse to pay for my father’s.” He slides a handgun into a holster at his hip and selects a bullet proof vest from the wall. “And I damn sure am not going to let Alessia pay for the crime of being born into this worthless family.”
I lean against the wall and watch the brothers standing hip to hip, straightening their weapons in the mirror. “So what’s your play here? I know what my plan is, and nothing is going to get in the way of that.”
Dante turns around and faces me. He’s studying me in the exact way that Patrizzio has always studied me. I don’t mention it. I don’t think he would particularly care for the comparison.
“I’m going to make sure that Greco isn’t a threat to my sister, to my brother, or to my woman. And then I’m going to get them the fuck out of Chicago.”
I nod, but Fabi cuts in. “What the hell, Dante? You want us to leave Chicago? Leave everything behind? What about the restaurants? Our businesses? Our life here? You want us to run away like we’re scared?”
“It’s not running, Fabi. It’s leaving it. It’s starting over. If we don’t, we’re going to be fighting Dad’s war for the rest of our lives.”
Fabi opens his mouth to fight more but I’ve heard what I needed to hear. If they were going to Greco for any reason besides ending this, I wouldn’t let them come with me. I wasn’t trying to start another war. I was trying to ensure that Alessia was safe. Forever.
“He’s right, Fabi. Trust me. I’ve seen the way the game is played. I’ve been by your father’s side in almost every deal he made for the last ten years. I’ve seen the way it sucked him back in every time. If you stay here, you’re going to have to live in your father’s world.”
“But it wouldn’t have to be the way it was for Dad,” Fabi says, yanking a hand through his hair. “We don’t have to mobsters to run our businesses and live in our home.”
“Fabi,” I say and he turns to me, frustration lining his face. “There is no living on the edge of this life. It sucks you in every time. No matter how hard you try to get stay above it. It happened to Patrizzio over and over. Do you think your father never tried to get out?”
“What?” he asks, his face blanching. “Dad never tried to get out. He loved this life. He loved being a mobster.”
“Maybe at the beginning,” I admit, “but once everything happened with Dante he changed.”
Both Fabi and Dante go perfectly still and I know my words are painful for them to hear, but they have to hear them.
“Yeah, well, shooting your son in the leg will change your life view, I suppose,” Dante says coldly. “Even if you’re a monster.”
“He regrets that,” I say.
“You don’t know how he feels,” Dante snaps and turns away from me. “Nobody does.”
“You’re right. I can’t know how he feels exactly, but I know the things he did.”
“What things?” Fabi asks and for a second he looks so young. I realize that even after everything that’s happened, he still loves his father, somewhere deep inside. I don’t envy him or Dante or Alessia. It would be a curse to love Fabrici Patrizzio. It would be a heavy love that would always be laced with the guilty knowledge of the pain he’s caused the world.
“He was preparing to get out. He was figuring out how to hand over the docks to Greco.”
Dante freezes and glares at me. “I don’t believe you.”
I shrug. “No skin off my back if you don’t. All I know is what I saw. He was piecing off his connections little by little. He wanted to pass off his position as an importer without losing his status as a dangerous man. He wanted to be out of the game but still have the position to protect you three.”
“And then we got him sent to jail,” Fabi says hollowly.
“Well, as someone who doesn’t love him and has seen him do terrible things, I can tell you that he deserves jail,” I say and watch Dante’s eyes flicker to mine. He appreciates the sentiment. “I can also say that the three of you deserve a fresh start away from Chicago. Someplace you won’t have to be looking over your shoulders for the rest of your lives.”
“You’re gonna help us,” Dante says, a bit of surprise coloring his tone. “You’re not acting on my father’s orders, then?”
I shake my head. “I have no loyalty to your father anymore.”
Dante raises an eyebrow as something flickers across his face. “A true mercenary, then.”
Fabi shakes his head and a mischievous smile plays at the corners of his mouth. “It’s not because Dad is in jail and can’t pay him anymore, Dante. It’s be
cause Dare’s loyalty lies with Alessia now.”
Dante freezes as instant comprehension washes over him and I have only a second’s warning before I’m at the business end of a nine millimeter.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Fabi yells, throwing his hands in the air and instantly moving in between Dante’s gun and my chest.
“You were supposed to be protecting her, Guinne,” Dante snarls at me.
“He was!” Fabi insists, moving to block me when Dante starts to prowl around, trying to get a better shot at me. “He was just also, you know, fucking her at the same time.”
“You’re not helping, Fabi,” I growl and push him aside. “Dante, I’m not fucking Alessia. She’s the love of my life. The most important thing to me. And I’m here right now, strapping firearms to myself to go destroy a man who is threatening her. I’m not going to live in a world where Alessia is in danger.”
Dante’s eyes search mine, he’s trying to figure out if I’m telling the truth.
“And from what I know about you, you don’t want to live in a world like that either, do you? So, put aside how you feel about this for a day, let’s fucking skin Greco alive, and then you can ask Alessia if I treat her right. After she’s not in danger of being kidnapped and tortured by one of the most despicable men alive, alright? If she says I wasn’t good to her, you can shoot me then.”
Dante considers me for another second before he lowers the gun and flicks the safety back on. “Fine.”
I can see that he’s still very agitated but he’s not going to shoot me. “Look,” I say, needing to clear the air a little bit if we’re going to be going into battle alongside one another. “I don’t enjoy having a gun pointed at me, but it’s nice to know Alessia’s got people who will go to bat for her.”
Dante gives a curt nod. “I’d probably feel the same way about Clara.”
“Alright, girls,” Fabi says. “Are we done dancing? Because we have a mobster to kill and we aren’t getting any younger.”
He’s right. It’s time.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Dare
Artuz drives and Dante, Fabi, and I sit in the back of the van. There’s energy rolling around between us. It’s soldier energy. It’s the brink of battle. It’s what your body makes you do to get ready.
I watch Dante and Fabi from the corner of my eye. Dante sits completely still and Fabi bounces one foot on the ground but neither look nervous. These men don’t have the same amount of wartime experience as I have, but this won’t be their first firefight.
For a second, a memory flashes across my mind. It’s of my dad shaking me awake one night to go for a walk with him on the beach. I was maybe ten years old. He’d shown me the Northern Lights that night.
I look at the way Dante and Fabi hold their guns across their chest. Neither of them were trained soldiers. I compare Patrizzio to my father, what it must have been like to grow up under the tutelage of a mobster. In that second I think I hate Patrizzio as much as his sons do.
The feeling passes and I feel the van slow and pull to the side of the road. We’re here, in Greco’s neighborhood. This is where the games begin and I can’t afford to be distracted.
“Alright, Fabi,” I say as Artuz comes around and slides open the van door for us. “Remember. I’m leading us through the grounds. I think I’ll be able to disable a fair amount of the security features he has, considering he tried to imitate my own system. But once we’re in the house, you have to lead us. We’ll be blind in there. And we’ll have to move fast, because I have no idea what kind of alarms or locks he has in the house.”
Fabi nods and a look of complete concentration comes over his face. He looks strikingly like Dante for a moment.
We’ve parked the van about a mile out from Greco’s property. We take a moment to completely wipe down every surface. It’s unmarked, unregistered, untraceable. We’ll be coming back to it once all this is finished but if anything goes wrong we don’t want it getting back to any of us.
Unlike Patrizzio’s style of doing business, we will not be leaving a calling card. The whole thing is moot if Greco’s people can prove that we did it and want us to pay. I lead the men through the woods and I notice with approval that both Dante and Fabi move with quiet grace through the shadows, just like Artuz and I do. It doesn’t take long before we’re up against the fence that lines Greco’s property.
I open my phone and log into the app I created to run the security features at Patrizzio’s mansion. I’m praying that the algorithm that Greco had tried to poach me for is the same one he used to protect his own property. I’m instantly rewarded when my phone picks up the presence of six motion detectors, three cameras, and a series of alarms along the way. I look closer. Plus, one motion activated tear gas bomb? Loud, unconventional, but something to consider when I’m putting in my next security system.
I turn to the men behind me. “I should be able to deactivate and reactivate as we go. But anyone who is paying close attention will be able to figure out that there are intruders taking a direct path toward the house. We have to move fast and pray that Greco’s security is taking a coffee break.”
“More like a porn break,” Fabi says and the rest of us turn to him.
“I’m serious, have you ever met the head of Greco’s security? That guy’s a perv.’
I have to agree with Fabi but I don’t say anything. Dante on the other cuffs his brother on the back of the head. “Concentrate, dumb ass.”
“I’m focused, D,” Fabi says. If it were me, I’d be irritated at Dante’s condescending tone, but Fabi doesn’t seem bothered by it. “It’s gonna be alright.”
“Alright boys,” I say and disable the first round of motion sensors. I motion to Artuz and he’s swinging himself up and over the fence like a cat. He lands silently. Fabi next, then Dante, then me.
I reactivate the alarm behind us to allay suspicion on Greco’s end and follow the group. We slink across Greco’s property like a band of burglars, Artuz leading at certain points and me leading at others. We only get one chance to get this right and all of us are performing at top caliber. We know that if we mess this up, Greco is going to go into serious hiding. We’ll never find him them.
We skirt the house without incident but at this point my blood pressure goes up. We’ve reached the end of the elements that I can control. At this point, we have to trust Fabi. He leans back and shades his eyes from the bright wash of the security lights.
He mutters to himself for a minute before whispering in my ear. “That window up there? That’s the window she used to sneak me out of. It’s on the second floor and it’s a hallway that pretty much never gets used. We used to get busy in one of the far guest bedrooms away from Greco’s chambers.”
“Spare me the details, Fabi,” I mutter.
“If we go in there, we’re not likely to run in to anybody. But we’re also far from where he probably is. He’s got a little mini apartment in the belly of the house. It’s his personal chambers and he rarely comes out of there. He’ll have a guard posted at each entrance.”
I run through the configuration in my mind, picturing the sketch that Fabi made from memory a few hours ago.
I motion to Artuz. It’s better if we go around the house to a closer entrance. Even though it’ll take longer and there might be a guard we have to disable, we’ll be closer to Greco as soon as we enter the house. Artuz nods at me and falls into a crouch. Slinking to the edge of the house, he peers around the corner, motioning for us to go on ahead. The second Dante clears the corner, I hear a low hissing sound, followed by a cry from Dante and a beeping in my pocket.
“Fuck,” I growl and grab Dante by the back of his shirt, hauling him back. “Hold your breath everyone, that’s a tear gas bomb.’
We just set off the fucking system. I race back to the window that Fabi pointed out and hoist myself up, easily breaking the window and sliding myself through. There’s no going back at this point. We set off the system, they know we’re here. If w
e stay outside we’re going to go blind with the tear gas. I can already feel it stinging my eyes. I reach down and tug Dante through the window as Artuz pushes him up from below.
Dante’s eyes are streaming and his nose is running. He’s holding one hand over his mouth, trying not to cough into the silent hall. I don’t envy his position. I’ve gotten a face full of tear gas before.
As soon as Fabi is in the window behind us he’s tugging Dante to his side. I’m not sure what he’s doing at first, but then I realized Fabi is tilting his brother’s head back. He’s reaching into Dante’s eyes and pulling out his contacts. Good move. That could have caused his eyes serious damage otherwise.
“Gonna have to fly blind, bro,” Fabi whispers to his brother and Dante nods, looking extremely grateful for Fabi’s quick thinking. I wonder how blind Dante is without his contacts but we don’t have time to figure all that out.
