by Bethany-Kris
Caesar started listing names in his head.
Names of men in the family.
Names of their wives.
There was maybe three men whose wives Caesar hadn’t gotten to in his special way—it was likely he was going to sit at the table with men who knew very well that he’d at one point or another, got a taste of what was between their women’s thighs.
He enjoyed that.
Compromising them all in that way.
It was his only control.
He needed it.
“Dinner sounds nice; I could eat.”
Angelo cocked a brow, obviously hearing the slyness in Caesar’s tone. “Don’t pull any shit, figlio. You step out of line one more time, and so help me God, I will put you in the grave I should have given you years ago.”
“Promises, promises,” Caesar called over his shoulder as he left his father behind. “You’re always making those, and yet never keeping them.”
Death would be a gift.
His father would never give it to him.
Dinner was a fucking bore.
Caesar could barely open his mouth without his father glaring in his direction—a silent order for him to sit still, and shut the fuck up. His father hadn’t lied, though. Only a handful of men were there to eat and discuss the latest business in the organization, but Caesar was out of the loop in that regard.
Shitty by-product of being gone for so long.
Not that he wanted to talk business.
Caesar was downing his second glass of wine when the high-pitch, nasally voice of his step-mother resounded from the entryway behind him.
“Is the wife not invited to this party of yours, Angelo?” Her laughter felt like nails raking down Caesar’s back—a bloody trail of pain and hate he couldn’t escape. “I’m offended, mio bello.”
At the head of the table, Caesar’s father hid his displeasure at Martina interrupting his dinner with the men. She should have known her place after two decades of marriage to the man, yet she still kept pushing her boundaries.
Angelo let her.
That was part of the problem.
Well, that and the fact she was almost always drunk. And when she wasn’t entirely plastered, then she was pretty fucking close to it. Angelo did a good job of hiding his wife’s alcoholism, but not from his son. Caesar had gotten a taste of this woman’s vile vindictiveness one too many goddamn times.
Martina’s hand brushed Caesar’s shoulder as she passed him by at the table—her silent hello. She never offered very much more when others were around, and he liked it just fine that way. He did absolutely everything he could not to have a conversation alone with the woman, or get stuck in private with her.
She was the woman who replaced his mother.
She was shrill, and horrible.
He hated her.
Always had.
He only learned how to hate her more and in different ways over the years, but no one cared to hear about those details.
No one wanted to know.
“Ma,” Daniele greeted when Martina bent over his shoulder to kiss her son’s cheek.
“My boy.”
A pat to his cheek.
Soft, and sweet.
Then, she moved onto her husband, ready to put herself in his path, and in the spotlight for everyone else in the room. So was her way. Typical, and predictable.
Nothing fucking new.
Caesar was still trying to forget the way her hand felt on his shoulder, and how it left a heavy weight behind. He hated when she touched him.
It left dirtiness behind.
Caesar was up out of his seat before anyone even knew what was happening, and had tossed his napkin down to the table. He didn’t bother to turn and see his step-mother drop in his father’s lap, but her giggles were more than enough to send him the hell out of that dining room.
Those feelings her touch invoked still thrummed deep even as he half-jogged down the hallway, and came to the grand entry. They should have left him the moment he was out of the mansion, and calling for a cab. It always went away then, except for this time.
This time, it felt stronger.
It ate at him.
The dirty, awful feelings still lingered long after he reentered the city limits.
Only two things could fix it.
Pain.
Or sex.
He chose the latter when he told the cab driver, “Lucifer’s Den—the club downtown. Take me there.”
TWO
LIFE AND HAPPINESS were fleeting.
Those were the two details that had taught Aria De Rose the most about being alive in her twenty-six years. Fleeting because anything could happen that took away one’s simple happiness, and when a person’s joy was gone, their life was effectively over.
Her life had been over for a year.
“De Rose!”
Aria glanced up to find the guard behind the Plexiglas window was gesturing at her. All of the prison guards knew her well enough by face alone to pull the file on her visits to this godforsaken place. A few of them even felt like they knew her well enough to use her first name in greeting as though she cared to greet them back.
Although, she did greet them.
Politely, of course.
She had to for no other reason than the man behind bars here—her behavior to those that kept him safe while he was in this hellish place might make all the difference for him. She certainly couldn’t afford for him to think something she had done or said to one of the guards made a target on his back.
Standing from her seat, Aria fixed her dress with one hand, and kept a firm grasp on her diamond studded clutch in the other. She might have been visiting a prison, but she sure as hell didn’t need to look like it, too.
Her father—a long-standing Camorra boss—wouldn’t appreciate seeing her in anything less than her finest, anyway. So was the life of a Camorra woman, and Aria was proudly one of those.
Constantly sheltered.
Revered.
Harshly judged.
More dangerous than a man.
One didn’t choose this life—they were either born to it, or it chose them. There was no in between, she had found. And one could either make due with what they were given from the life, or they could struggle and drown trying to get out.
Because there was no out.
Aria made small chat with the guard as she went through the visitation process at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility. The security checks and paperwork were nothing new now that she had been doing it for a little over a year. Her once, and sometimes twice, weekly visits making her well-known to the guards shortened the time for her whereas it might take someone else far longer to get through the process.
“Enjoy your visit, Aria,” the guard said with a smile.
She sat down in the hard, plastic chair he directed her to and nodded back at the man. “Grazie.”
The guard went back to his post at the entrance door. She was grateful that, yet again, he had opted to seat her at the very far end of the block. A good fifteen chairs with their own private window made of Plexiglas and a telephone separated her, and the guard.
It gave her the illusion of privacy.
A camera was still at her back, though.
That couldn’t be helped.
Soon, the man she had come to check in with—as she did every week—came into view as he was shuffled through the metal doors on the other side of the visitation block. Jac De Rose could pull off any look including drab prison gray. His wide smile, and bright green eyes greeted her as he sat down opposite to her on the other side of the Plexiglas window.
Gesturing with his still-cuffed hands to the phone on the wall, Aria picked it up so she could speak to her father. “Papy.”
Daddy.
Jac’s smile softened. “How’s my girl?”
Aria tucked the strands of her copper-brown curls behind her ears, and said, �
�Pretty good, all things considered.”
“Things like what?”
Merda.
She still wasn’t very good at this whole visiting thing. She was constantly told by those around her to make sure she did everything she could not to upset her father during her visits. Any business talk—mafia, always—needed to be good, or great things. Certainly not something that would warrant him making a call or two so that he could rage at someone else.
No one wanted the boss upset.
Everyone answered to him.
“Nothing,” Aria said with a smile she hoped was enough to distract her father.
Beauty had always served her well even when it came to the man who gave her life. Jac appreciated a pretty face, and the reprieve it could provide in hard times. Aria had learned her beauty was enough to get her just about anything she wanted should she use it the right way. Or … most of the time.
Her father often told her that with her large, expressive green eyes, heart-shaped face, and delicate lips set atop the rest of her dainty features, she looked a great deal like her long-dead mother. That the only thing she had taken from him was her brown hair with the copper tint, and those unruly curls that she had to hope and pray every single time she tried to do anything with them.
Aria had seen enough pictures of Carina De Rose to know that was true, but not actual memories given her mother had died when she was a baby after an unfortunate run-in with a rival Camorra clan. Jac killed every single one of them for what they had taken from him—he never remarried after that, either.
“Nothing at all?” her father pressed.
He was reaching for something, and clearly, giving her the opportunity to come out and tell him whatever it was before he was willing to admit he already knew. This wasn’t an unusual game her father liked to play, and to be fair, she was pretty damned good at it, too.
After all, she was his daughter.
Manipulation was her forte.
She racked her brain to come up with whatever it was Jac wanted to know—she kept drawing a blank, though. A lot was going on in different areas for their clan. Business was good, but that wasn’t anything new.
Her father’s amused chuckle echoed in her ear through the phone before his voice said, “I heard you’re having some problems on the streets—you know he fills me in when he can, although he didn’t have much to tell me this time being he’s away. The Accardo family, or so I hear. They have quite a large organization, and not one that tends to intrude on smaller families.”
Oh, that.
Jac had posed the question as though it was their clan having the trouble. Like they had found themselves in a pot of stirred shit by-proxy. She assumed, just from that alone, her father didn’t know it was actually her who had started this street war with a rival family.
She had her reasons.
None she was willing to share.
“It’s nothing I can’t handle,” Aria replied. “And I am—handling it, I mean.”
Jac nodded, but he didn’t look entirely convinced. So was the way of a standing-boss, but even more so when she had a pussy between her thighs instead of a cock. It was fine and dandy for her to relay her father’s messages, or make an order because he gave it to her to pass along. But anything else, and a Camorra woman had to work ten times as hard as any man to gain the respect, and acknowledgement of those around her.
That was fine.
She didn’t mind the work.
“I’ll be out soon,” her father said. “Six months left, mia cara. In the meantime, work on peacefully settling whatever problema the Accardo Cosa Nostra has with us. Do not entice or incite them more. I don’t want to come out of this place to total chaos.”
“Whatever you want, Papy.”
Jac smiled. “Good. Now, how is Raffe?”
And just like that—with all of one question—she wished she could leave.
Except she couldn’t.
The thing about Camorra was that there was no real structure to their organization. There was, of course, what Aria’s father liked to refer to as the cielo coperto, and the cielo scoperto. The covered sky, and the clear sky.
Within their clan, the covered sky was anyone with a direct connection to the top, or a proper position that they were required to handle. Her father, obviously, being the boss even behind bars, and her, acting as the boss while he was away could be put in the cielo coperto. She, and her father, were il Vangelo of the Camorra—the gospel.
When they spoke, they were heard.
Any man who dealt directly with them—only a handful—were also under the designation of being protected by the covered sky.
The cielo scoperto encompassed the larger breadth of their clan, and held less loyalty to the Camorra succeeding as a whole. They were more prone to violence, and at times, were liable to attempt to break off and begin an entirely separate clan of their own.
It was exactly why clans often found themselves in the bloodiest of battles. No clan answered to another, and there was no hierarchy beyond an us and them situation.
Aria had always thought that given how long her father had managed to control and sustain his Camorra, Jac had been given every opportunity to clean up the ranks. To manage it better, or even, take their horizontal structure into a more pyramid style situation so that fewer problems came up with rival clans.
It meant cleaner streets.
Less spilled blood.
Fewer deaths.
But it was also not the way of Camorra, and the men who only knew the life that they had been taught for decades upon decades were not quite ready to give up the stronghold they had on old traditions.
Shame, really.
Camorra could be so much more.
Aria knew it.
She felt it.
Tasted it on her tongue.
It was all right there.
And she could do it.
If only …
For now, business was waiting.
“And what did the boss have to say about this fucking Accardo problem?” Simone asked.
Aria, from the head of the table, barely even turned her head to peer down the way at the man. A favorite of her father’s, Simone Bruno, was sometimes like a stand-in son for the boy Jac never had. She figured that was part of the reason why the man was so goddamn mouthy a lot of the time, and tried to use more pull than he actually had.
“He’s not willing to bend to the Accardo organization,” Aria said, flicking a hand as if to dismiss any other notion that might come up about the topic. “He wants more streets—more territory to control. It’s about time we expanded. I see his point.”
Simone’s jaw tensed, and his wife—Giovanna—reached over to pet him like he was an angry puppy that needed stroked to be calm. It was almost amusing, if it wasn’t so fucking sickening, really.
“Did you explain to him that I lost four men in a month?” Simone asked.
“You, or him?” Aria countered, leaning forward a bit as she tipped her head to the side. “There is only one boss of this clan, Simone. You have nothing—it is all his. That’s how this works.”
The three other men at the table quieted in their conversation as Aria spoke. She didn’t need to raise her voice to cut someone down—she’d learned how to be as sharp as a knife without making a scene of herself.
It was a good talent to have.
An emotional woman, a man could handle.
A calm one?
She was frightening.
Simone’s jaw continued doing that thing it always did whenever he was pissed, and trying to hold it back. Aria wondered how long he would last before he exploded on her. It didn’t matter that he knew the rules of Camorra, and that her place above him was rightly done considering their current circumstances.
None of that factored to him.
She was a woman.
A daughter.
She had her place.
To him, this wa
s not it.
“Fine,” Simone snapped, “then did you explain to him about the men that have been killed?”
She chose to ignore the way he phrased the question this time. Poking at that raw nerve of his wouldn’t get her anywhere good—at least not tonight.
He was probably going to have to go, though.
Eventually.
“I did,” Aria said.
“And?”
“Anyone in cielo scoperto are easily replaceable, Simone. They are our batterie. No one we can’t afford to lose, and frankly, we might find less trouble in the future considering how many from that side of our clan seem to step out to form their own organizations. Perhaps work on making those men loyal to you, and less loyal to the cash they’re making for you, and that might not be such an issue anymore.”
“That’s not even what the issue is!”
Red-faced, and with fists clenched, Simone raised from his seat at the table. Her table, actually, which just irked Aria even more. Disrespect was one thing, but disrespect in her territory was something else altogether.
Oh, yes.
He was certainly going to have to go in due time.
Aria raised a brow, and nothing more, in the face of Simone’s sudden rage. He was not the first man to get angry, or to try something with her. He could raise his fist, and she would probably smile at him and dare him to try it.
She didn’t frighten that easily.
“I want to speak with Jac,” Simone demanded.
Growled, was more like it.
Aria smirked a bit, and shook her head once. “No, that won’t be possible for a while. You know how this goes while he’s in lockup—the less visitation, the better. He doesn’t want names and records kept of our coming and going besides his immediate family. Me, I mean. If you have something to say, Simone, you are looking at the one woman you get to say it to. Otherwise, sit yourself back down in that chair. I’m starting to think my father has severely neglected some things when it comes to you.”
