Mafia Ties: An Italian Cartel Sequel

by Shandi Boyes

  Please don’t take that the wrong way. Our children will never be subjected to the repulsive, disgusting things my father forced me to endure when I was a child, but I will never hide the fact I love their father from them. He is my world, and until they find their own partners willing to go to the end of the earth for them, he is theirs as well.

  “Play to play,” I breathe against Dimitri’s kiss-swollen lips. “Kill to kill.”

  “And take down any fucker stupid enough to get in my way,” he finalizes, smiling. “Rest, Mama Bear, because when I get back, I’m going to pretend you’re not already knocked up with my kid.”

  Acting as if his murmured comment didn’t ignite a firecracker low in my stomach, Dimitri bites my lips, runs his tongue across the sting, pivots on his heels, then hotfoots it to his ride. He climbs into the driver’s seat, but his ignition remains unfired until I’m bundled into the backseat of a fleet of SUV’s and driven away.

  He never leaves before us because he doesn’t want our last thoughts of him to be of him walking away from us. You never know when you may see someone for the last time, so forget the arguments, the bitterness, and the hate, and cherish the good times.

  Don’t dwell on the person you could have become.

  Be Dimitri.

  Forgive yourself for accepting less than you deserve, but never give up until you have everything you deserve.

  He fought the odds. He beat his demons, and now he will help his brother do the same. I have no fear about this because the good takes time, but the bad can make things occur at the speed of light.

  My husband is a murderer, a liar, and a thief, but I love him, and at the end of the day, that’s all he needs to bring him back to us.

  7

  Dimitri

  “Jammers are blocking most signals. Even old school isn’t cutting it. Hunter is working on a back channel, but I may lose you once you reach Rico’s building.”

  As Smith’s fingers hammer his silicone keyboard, I take the street a block out from Rico’s building like a bat out of hell. I’m stunned he’s living in Ravenshoe, but it makes sense when you realize the ties he has here. Not only was his wife born and raised in this area of Ravenshoe, his sister resides here too. He has ties to the community, and it’s greatly benefiting me. Usually, Hunter would hang up the instant Smith reached out to him. Tonight, he granted him access to Ravenshoe’s security system without an exchange of favors.

  “The security guard on the door has no record,” Smith advises just as I reach the west entrance of Rico’s building.

  “That isn’t necessarily a good thing,” interrupts a rough, gruff voice I’m going to assume is Hunter. “Isaac does security checks on all his staff—”

  “Except his wife,” Smith butts-in, laughing.

  Hunter acts as if he never spoke, “So he’d have some type of online record. If he doesn’t…” A smirk raises my lips when he finalizes his sentence by making a throat cutting noise.

  I throw open my door before moving to the trunk of my car. It is loaded to the hilt with my weapons of choice. “How many men are they facing?”

  “An army,” Smith answers before adding numbers into the mix. “Around thirty or forty are storming in via the front entrance.”

  My jaw almost cracks with annoyance. Nikolai has more than enough men to push back with force, but they’re not at his disposal right now. Not even I would turn up with four dozen men in tow for a family dinner. “How far out are Nikolai’s men?”

  Smith breathes heavily down the line. “Five, ten minutes.”

  “They don’t have five minutes.” If the noises pumping out of Rico’s apartment are anything to go by, they may not even have two. Silencers are a great way to reduce the number of 911 callers contacting the closest precinct, but it has nothing on the wounded cries of fallen men, and the putrid scent of death.

  “How many men are there between Nikolai and me?”

  I grow impatient when nothing but the frantic taps of keyboards being overworked sound through my earpiece for the next several seconds. Mercifully, Hunter’s grizzly timbre soon gobbles it up. “You’ve got two in the foyer and six in the stairwell. I’m still scanning the faces of the men in the buildings surrounding your location.”

  Bang, bang. I lessen his count by two by taking out two men hiding in the shadows of the back entrance. They could have been civilians, but even rich businessmen who like to pretend they’re alpha males scream like banshees when they trip over deceased bodies while exiting a building. You don’t step over them like they’re dog shit unless you’re in this industry.

  Once I have a customized M6 strapped to my back and several guns stuffed down my pants, I close the boot of my car and hotfoot it toward Rico’s building. Adrenaline is surging through my veins, just not all of it is compliments to the rush of a raid. I hated handing my family’s protection to Rocco. The only reason I did was because I didn’t want to disappoint Roxanne. She’s so convinced the sun shines out of my ass, even if I were to return with the blood of a hundred men on my shirt tonight, she’ll still take my dick between her lips with a ghost-like grin on her gorgeous face.

  I don’t want to lose that for anything.

  Not for money.

  Not for reverence.

  Not even for my brother.

  I am here solely for my wife.

  “Left or right, Smith?” I ask after breaking through the paned glass door of Rico’s building.

  I’m pissed I need to get orders from him, he’s usually on the ball, but I guess his delay is understandable. We’ve never played in this playground before. It’s all new.

  “Left. Three doors down. Security pad code is 3281.”

  The eerie silence that usually encroaches every takeover bid overtakes Smith’s breaths battering my ears when I creep down a hallway lined with bodies. I don’t need to check if the first three victims are breathing. It’s clear they died a quick, painless death. The fourth man isn’t so lucky. He’s gripping his shirt like his hands can fix the bullet wounds in his chest.

  I try to walk past him. I try to ignore the plea in his eyes, but something stops me. I want to say it’s because I’m a good man, but we both know that is a lie. There’s something more at play here. I just have no fucking clue what it is.

  “Redirect first responders to the back entrance.”

  While Smith mimics the voice of an officer in need of emergency assistance, I fist the man’s collar and drag him toward the exit I just snuck through seconds ago. I prop him up against the back door so he can’t be missed by the medics when they arrive before returning to the door locked by an electronic pad.

  Just as I lower the handle, Hunter says, “Guard isn’t on payroll…” I stop his reply by popping a bullet between the eyes of the man manning the desk before jackknifing to an African American man seated in the chair next to him. I lower my gun from the man’s head to his chest when it dawns on me that he’s taped to the chair. I also recognize him. He is Nikolai’s advisor—the same man who mocked me when I assured him my claims of a takeover weren’t fraudulent.

  “Go,” Roman begs when I ripped the duct tape from his mouth. “I’ll take care of everything down here.”

  I thrust a gun into his chest with more force than needed before snarling, “Your men are still minutes out.”

  He absorbs the disappointment in my tone without the slightest bit of disdain crossing his features. He knows he fucked up, so he isn’t going to argue about it.

  Not having the time nor the care to ensure he knows the full extent of my annoyance, I move through the building in the direction opposite several residents are fleeing from. Roman pulled the fire alarm, not only giving me the perfect cover to climb a flight of stairs unnoticed, but it will also stop the pesky FBI from getting my face on camera.

  Pop, pop. Another two men of the unnamed crew feel the burn of my bullets.

  When one of the man’s brain explodes onto a door hanging by its hinges, a weird noise sounds out of the
earpiece lodged in my ear. It seems as if Hunter is swishing his tongue around his mouth, unaccustomed to the gore that comes from this life.

  I’m not surprised. Isaac plays the role of a mob boss well, but he’s far from being one. He just stood up to the plate at the right time. It amassed him a favor only someone as smart as him could turn into a multiple billion-dollar empire.

  It’s rare for me to admit I admire someone. I don’t face the same issues with Isaac. Just like the digits in my bank account, he is responsible for every one of them in his. There’s just one noticeable difference. His businesses are legitimate. Mine are not.

  I get my head back into game mode when Smith’s voice crackles out of my earpiece. “Thirty p…erps… o… roof…”

  “Smith?” I count to three before calling his name again. “Smith.”

  When nothing but deadly silence sounds from my earpiece for the next several seconds, I curse under my breath, armor up, then race onto the battlefield as if my pregnant wife’s only shield of defense is a dining room table upended on its side.

  After charging into the cozy, yet understated apartment, I take a few moments to survey the scene. Considering they’re outnumbered twenty to one, Nikolai and Rico have remarkably maintained control. That might have something to do with the machine gun Rico is yielding like a real-life motherfucking gangster. He slices the swell of insurgents in half in one fell swoop and will be set to deplete the rest if the assailant sneaking up on him doesn’t end his campaign.

  Since I have the means to ensure that doesn’t occur, I put actions into play. The man creeping his way falls back with a thud when I take him down with a direct kill shot between the brows.

  The light in his eyes has only just been snuffed when Smith’s frantic voice breaks through the shrill of my pulse in my ears. “Get. Out. Now!”

  I lock my eyes with Nikolai. The sheer warning in them should tell him everything he needs to know, but in case it doesn’t, I add words into the mix. “They’re swarming you from all angles. You need to get into the open before they kill you all.”

  A grunt leaves my lips when my conversation with Nikolai is interrupted by a perp with a machete. He charges at me with his hands held high in the air, leaving his chest exposed to the brutality I was raised by.

  I jab my knife into his chest before dragging it down, smiling when shock darts through his eyes a mere second before he falls to his knees. He’s stunned I didn’t shoot him. I don’t have the heart to tell him his life wasn’t worth the cost of a bullet.

  When a second man comes at me, I swoop down low, slice the tendons on the back of his knees, then pop back up before he knows what hit him.

  I’m just as astounded as him when Nikolai shouts, “Take them,” a mere second before he thrusts Justine to my side of the room. Just like me, he’d rather side with his enemy than see his woman get hurt.

  “Go with Dimitri,” he says to Justine after taking down a man to the left of me. “He’ll keep you safe.”

  Justine is shaking like a leaf, but no amount of jitters can hide the bob of her head. She’s awarding me a trust I’ve only ever been given from one woman, and it has my thoughts so far away from the carnage prevailing in front of me, I don’t feel the halo of bullets racing my way until one of them shreds through my shoulder.

  As images of my wife and children filter through my head, I fall to the ground. My stumble doesn’t come without additional carnage. I take down three perps during my collapse before my gallantry is thwarted by a second bullet ripping through my stomach.

  While wheezing through the blood creeping up my windpipe, I roll onto my side so the frantic cries of my wife sounding out of my earpiece aren’t gobbled up by the chaos I was born to rule but sometimes wish I didn’t know. I should have known she’d be listening. She’s too stubborn for her own good, and too fucking caring to ever let me believe I’m walking alone.

  “H…elp is coming, Dimi. Sm...ith… dispatch… C… Clover… S…s…stay…”

  As Roxanne’s chopped up confirmation that help is on its way trickles into my ears, I allow the peace floating above me to settle around me. Not enough I’ll walk toward the gates of hell anytime soon, but enough I can recall the peaceful expression on Roxanne’s face earlier tonight when she was nuzzled in my chest.

  I was born craving chaos. I sought it as often as I did a woman to warm my sheets each night, and created it at every available opportunity—except tonight. I relished that twenty minutes Roxanne was cradled in my chest so much it was the sole reason I initiated evacuation orders when Smith caught wind of a takeover bid. To ensure my family’s safety, I was willing to be seen as a coward. I would have taken it up the ass for as long as my enemies demanded if it guaranteed they wouldn’t be harmed.

  Now I realize that was wrong of me to do.

  Roxanne’s past pains are what made her the woman she is today. She loves our children so fiercely because she fought for them with everything she had. Taking away her ability to fight for what she believes in will change her. It will make her bitter like my father, vindictive like my mother, and as evil as the man I once emulated to be.

  By hiding her away, I kept her safe as promised, but I also stripped her of who she is.

  That’s almost as bad as succumbing to the blackness engulfing me, although it’s nowhere near as headstrong as my final command. “Hand Roxanne the reigns. This is now her monarch.”

  For years, women in this industry were seen as worthless. They were disposable, unforgettable, and easily replaceable, then Roxanne was thrust into my life.

  She could have destroyed me.

  I could have destroyed her.

  But together, we created a bedlam not even God himself can control.

  She made me stronger, she gave my life purpose, and if she’s half the woman I saw in her eyes when she stood across from me with mascara-stained cheeks and goth-loving attire, she’ll bring the fury of hell to earth to make sure the last image I have of my kids isn’t of them in bulletproof jackets.

  8

  Roxanne

  My breaths come out with a quiver when the expression on Dimitri’s face goes from pained to peaceful. He hasn’t spoken a word since he ordered for me to become the monarch of his realm, but I know he’s still with me. I can feel it in my bones, sense it in the prickling of the hairs on my arms. If the man I loved were dead, I would know it… wouldn’t I?

  My watering eyes lift from the tablet I’m never without when Dimitri is on the ‘job’ to Rocco when he says, “Grant me permission to go on field.” His eyes are as wet as mine, his lip just as gnawed. “Let me get him out of there, Rox. Come on, they’re going to fucking slaughter him if you don’t order someone there now.”

  “It’s too late,” I reply, shocked I can talk through the despair clutching my throat. We’re not just halfway to the safehouse Dimitri bought when I was laid up in a hospital bed fighting for my life, we’re over sixty miles from Ravenshoe. “Not even a helicopter could get us there before they storm in.”

  I twist the screen of the tablet to face Rocco. It reveals there are armed agents stretched down two blocks. They’re about to storm Rico’s apartment building even more perversely than the final three dozen men who swarmed in via the rooftop garden. Smith had every floor covered. He hadn’t considered them entering from above.

  “We’ve at least got to try.” As Rocco’s eyes bounce between mine, he adds a plea to the many I see in his eyes. “Do you truly think the feds give a fuck if he dies or not? They don’t give a fuck about him. They don’t give a fuck about anyone. They’ll let him bleed out in the ER just so they can claim they took down Dimitri Petretti.”

  “Someone in the bureau cares about him.”

  As confusion crosses Rocco’s features, I call Smith’s name.

  Forever on alert, he replies remarkably fast. “I’ve called Ellie a dozen times. She isn’t answering.”

  I appreciate his blur of the lines, but we need to go well past a favor to get Di
mitri out of this alive and without handcuffs circling his wrists. “Call Isabelle Holt.”

  Smith exhales a deep breath. “What?” He only spoke one word, but it relays how stupid he thinks I am. “They’re not related.”

  “No, Dimitri and Izzy aren’t related. I don’t even know if they know one another, but Rico is her brother, and Dimitri was shot protecting him and her sister-in-law.”

  “That’s a stretch, Roxie,” Rocco breathes out, jumping back into the conversation. “But it could work.”

  While Rocco coaches Smith on what to say to Isabelle—if he can get past her husband—I lean over the privacy partition so I can redirect the driver to a secondary location.

  “Are you sure this is what Dimitri would want?” asks Preacher, uneased I’m guiding a fleet of pricy vehicles to an area well-known for its love of hotwiring.

  “I’m sure,” I reply, hopeful I’m not making a mistake.

  It’s rare for people to get the chance to redeem themselves, so I can only hope my mother doesn’t squander the opportunity. If she hurts my babies while I endeavor to safe their father, I’ll let Dimitri kill her as he wanted to years ago, and I won’t shed a tear while he does it.

  The unease twisting in my stomach gets a moment of reprieve when I glance back down at the tablet. Dimitri’s reflection is still in the middle of the frame. He isn’t alone. A blonde-haired female agent is pushing swatches of material onto his stomach while screaming for a medic.

  Seeing Ellie in her element pops a brilliant idea into my head. It will ensure we will never be friends, but if it gets the father of my children out of the carnage alive, I’ll accept it.

  “Mama loves you, baby boy.” Matteo’s dark hair tickles my lips when I press them to his temple. He’s passed out cold, the hour drive in the car too much for his little body at this late hour.

  I wouldn’t be here unless I truly believed this is the last place Dimitri’s enemies would look for the heir to the Petretti monarch. Dimitri said we were being evacuated from our family home because the crew endeavoring to topple Nikolai’s reign knew too much for him to believe we were safe there. If that ‘too much’ involves our children, I have to take drastic measures to keep them out of harm’s way.