Both men knew what that meant. Were they willing to defy their father, even for Gloria? Were they willing to go toe-to-toe with the most vicious human being they’d ever known? Not even Teddy was that bold. They both sat back down.
Teddy knew what Mick was capable of, and that was why, unlike his siblings, he never tried him like that.
Joey’s journey on the road to getting to know their father was a different journey. Joey remembered when he fucked up and Mick handled his business on him. He still had the scars to remind him.
Now it was Gloria’s turn. Now she was experiencing the wrath of Mick the Tick, the man who was a stone-cold gangster. And their father. Even Princess Gloria was not immune. Joey never thought he’d see the day.
CHAPTER EIGHT
If Gloria thought her father’s punishment would be all she had to endure, she still didn’t know her father very well. She came out of that study in pure agony, with her butt so sore she could barely walk. All she wanted to do was go home and curl up in bed. She betrayed Will to tell her father, but felt as if she received no appreciation from him whatsoever. Just a beat down like she was his property rather than his grown daughter. But instead of leaving her alone to stew in her misery, he was walking her to his limousine to go God knows where with him.
What struck her most was how he looked. He had changed clothes, for one thing, into a pair of black trousers, a black turtleneck sweater, and an ankle-length white coat that flared out as he walked. His hair was swept back, and his big, green eyes blazed with an unrecognizable look. Even his sleepy eye looked wide awake. What, Gloria wondered, was going on? And why did he look so confrontational?
She sat on one end of the backseat of the limo, and Mick sat quietly on the other end. But Gloria was sitting sideways, as she was unable to sit on her ass just yet without feeling the pain of Mick’s lashes. She remembered when Joey got into serious trouble and their father beat him down so badly that he ended up in the hospital. But Joey participated in the kidnapping of Sal Gabrini’s son, Lucky Luciano Gabrini. A kidnapping that almost caused a war within the family. He deserved to have his ass hospitalized. But Gloria didn’t see where she deserved what she got.
Mick knew she felt that way, too. She was, in many ways, a wonderful woman and a spoiled brat, too. She was spoiled by her mother when she was a kid because Mick was not a part of her upbringing, except to give them money. Her mother, a gorgeous fashion designer, overcompensated by giving her whatever she wanted. Then she was spoiled by Mick himself when he did become a part of her life. He brought her into his corporation and allowed her to skip many lines on her way to middle management. It was his way of overcompensating for his failures in her life, too. A re-correction was in order for her own survival. But he knew she didn’t understand that.
“You turned on Will,” Mick said to her.
Gloria looked at him. It was the first words he’d said to her since he sliced into her hide.
“You feel that I do not appreciate that fact,” Mick added and crossed his legs, looking even more, Gloria felt, like the authoritarian that she now knew, and had the scars to prove, he was.
“That’s exactly how I feel,” Gloria said. “I may have lied about a few things.” Then she corrected herself. “I lied about a few things,” she said, “but I could have gone along with his scheme. I could have never told you what was going on, and just let it all collapse around you.”
Mick looked at her, his anger unleashed. “Collapse around me? Are you out of your fucking mind? Do you think I’m going to let one of my sorry-ass workers and my inexperienced young daughter destroy my company? A company I built from the ground up? You are not the daughter of a businessman, so stop deluding yourself. You’re my daughter! There are no limits to what I’m capable of doing to you. Don’t you ever forget that.”
Gloria saw that cold look in her father’s hard eyes, and her heart began to pound again. She knew he was a mob boss. When she had that boyfriend trouble with Marco, he showed her just how boss he was. But somehow, she never felt that side of him would ever come for her. She used to feel as if she, above any of his other children, had an exemption. But she was wrong. And it was a painful reality. She had thought, wrongly, she now realized, that she was special in his eyes.
Mick saw the pain in her beautiful eyes, and felt the earth shifting around what she thought she knew to be true. “It’s my fault,” he said.
Gloria stared at him. The idea of her father taking blame for anything was major.
“Your mother spoon-fed you, and then I came along and spoon-fed you, too,” Mick said. “I created a false sense of security. So false that you mistakenly thought there would be no consequences when you conspired with your boyfriend against me.”
“But I didn’t,” Gloria started. And then corrected herself. “I came clean, Dad. I told you what Will was up to. I told you all of it. But that didn’t help me at all. I betrayed Will, and I lost your love, too.”
Mick’s heart sank. The idea that she thought he didn’t love her anymore cut him to his core. He loved her, like he loved all of his children, with every breath in his body. He looked away from her. “You haven’t lost anything,” was all he could bring himself to say about it.
But for Gloria, she knew how hard it was for him to say even that. And it did give her some relief. She was in his doghouse, and it was a cold, miserable place to be, but at least there was now hope that she could one day get out.
But when they arrived at the condominium Will Flannigan owned and often spent nights in, apart from his wife, and Mick told Gloria to come with him, that sinking feeling deep within Gloria returned. She was upset with Will for putting her in the position she now found herself in; but she knew, in the end, it wasn’t his fault. It was her fault. She should never have even entertained what he was up to. But even with all of that said, she still cared about Will and didn’t want any bodily harm to come to him.
Mick had every intention of inflicting great bodily harm on him, and he needed Gloria to see that, too. Nobody was going to scheme to take over his company, and steal his money the way Will had been doing, and there be no retribution. He learned that creed early on when he was a thug in the streets. If they even thought about attempting to harm you and you didn’t harm them back a hundredfold worse, you would become a sitting duck for every fucker with a notion to take a shot. It would be open season on your ass.
Not Mick’s ass.
He and Gloria went around the backside of the huge condominium building to the outside elevator reserved for wealthier tenants on the highest floors. Mick put in Will’s private code, a code that would take them directly into Will’s condo. The doors of the elevator opened, and father and daughter stepped on.
Gloria had no idea how Mick got Will’s private code. She didn’t even have his private code. But she was beginning to realize that her father had ways so far beyond her scope of knowing that it would be futile to even try to guess. So she didn’t try. She just rode the elevator up to the fortieth floor with him.
They stepped off of the elevator onto the corridor just outside of Will’s condo. Will, who earned a great salary as COO at S.I., had a floor all to himself.
But to Gloria’s additional shock, her father didn’t knock on the door or bother to ring the doorbell. He used a keycard, swiped, and just walked on in. As if he was making a point. As if he was saying that Will tried to screw him over, now it was Will’s time to get screwed.
What Gloria didn’t understand was why her father would bring her along for this. She didn’t want to see this! She cared about Will. She once considered spending her life with that joker! But he made her choose between loyalty to him, or loyalty to her father. She chose her father.
Will Flannigan was half asleep on his sofa, watching the Golf Channel, when Mick and Gloria walked in. He jumped up, startled, but then relaxed when he saw who it was. Big mistake, Gloria thought. He, as she had done, was underestimating what her father was capable of.
�
��Mick?” Will asked, attempting to smile through his worry. “What are you doing here?” He kept glancing at Gloria, too.
Mick began walking toward him so slowly that it seemed menacing. Gloria opted to stay where she was.
“What’s going on?” Will asked again as Mick walked, that nervous smile still plastered on his face. “Is something wrong?”
“You tried to screw me,” Mick said.
Will’s heart plummeted. Gloria had told! He knew he couldn’t trust that bitch! “Excuse me?”
Mick was in his face, completely in his personal space, as he stood before him. “It’s over, Will. You tried to manipulate my daughter into finagling with my company. You screwed her in the process. Now your stupid ass has been trying to screw me.”
But Will was shaking his head and backing up. “No, sir. You’ve got it all wrong. Gloria, tell him he’s got it all wrong! It was her idea, sir.”
Gloria was stunned. “Mine? Are you insane? What are you saying, Will?”
But it was each man for himself time, as far as Will was concerned. He would hang his own mother to save his life. “I tried to tell her not to do it, sir,” he said to Mick. “I tried with all I had to tell her to stop trying to sabotage her own father! But she insisted. Now she’s trying to put it on me. She wants my job. That’s what this is about, sir. She wants my job! It’s Gloria. Gloria is behind all of this. She’s the one--”
But Mick had heard enough of his bullshit. Just as Will had backed up so far that he was about to fall over the sofa, Mick grabbed him, and punched him so hard that he flipped over the sofa. And then it was a rout.
Gloria thought she would be petrified to see her father beat down her former lover. She thought she would have tears in her eyes in sympathy for Will. But after he threw her under the bus; after he tried to put doubt in her father’s mind about her loyalty to him, she wasn’t thinking about Will. Beat his ass, was how she felt. Any man who would turn on her the way he did, deserved every lick he received.
And he received an abundance. Mick threw him against the wall, breaking bones if Gloria had to guess, and then knocked aside a table to get to him. She’d never seen her father so enraged.
But seeing it made her understand it. Will had conspired to undermine everything Mick stood for. He even mentioned stealing money? Gloria always suspected that his eventual plan was not to put her at the helm of S.I., but to place himself there. As her husband. Not because he loved her or even cared about her. But because she was the ticket he needed to stamp.
But her father was doing the stamping right now. He was stomping the shit out of Will. “I worked my life to build that company,” he was telling Will as he stomped, “and you thought it not robbery to rob me of it? You thought it not robbery to use my daughter in your theft?” Then he stomped him one last time. “You thought wrong, motherfucker!” he said, and then he stopped all action. Will made this too easy.
Gloria stared at Mick as he stared down at Will. A part of her father, she knew, was deeply saddened by the betrayal. He and Will had once been friends. And to think that his friend, and his daughter, would try what they tried had to really hurt him on a very deep level.
But Mick wasn’t showing hurt. He was showing rage. And although his violence had stopped, his rage was still apparent.
Then suddenly he spoke. “Wait for me in the car,” he ordered Gloria.
Gloria didn’t expect to hear that order. Wasn’t he done with Will? Why couldn’t they leave together?
But when Mick turned back and looked at her, as if he was expecting her to have already heeded his order without hesitation, she didn’t hesitate. “Yes, sir,” she said, and hurried out of the condo.
She made her way down a few flights of stairs, and then took the public elevator, as her father did not bother to share Will’s code with her. But even her walk to Mick’s limousine felt surreal. In all of her days, she’d never made such a foolish move. And falling for Will was a bad move all around. Every man she’d ever had ended up in the bad/I shouldn’t have done it/what was I thinking category. And they were all older men, supposedly settled men, supposedly marriage-material men. But Gloria was beginning to wonder if the material that wasn’t marriage-worthy wasn’t the men, but her.
Once outside, her father’s chauffeur/bodyguard opened the backdoor of the limo for her, and she got in. She closed the door and waited for her father’s return. But she was unable to stop thinking about how crazy she had to have been to think that she and Will could outsmart Mick Sinatra. Even her own mother once told her to never cross her father. “It will not end well if you do,” she once felt a need to tell Gloria. But Gloria didn’t listen to her. She fell for Will and listened to him. Like some damn fool. That was how bad she felt.
But her feelings went to a different level within minutes after she sat down in that limo. She was looking out of the window, at the huge condominium building in front of her, when suddenly something began falling from one of the top floors. At first she wondered if somebody had dropped something out of a window. Then she realized, as the figure dropped faster and faster toward the concrete below, that it wasn’t something, but somebody.
Then she realized it wasn’t just somebody, but Will! Her father had, in all likelihood, thrown Will out of the window. He had thrown Will down forty stories! Her heart rammed against her chest. She was about to get out of the car for a better look, but Mick’s bodyguard, who remained standing at the door, slammed it back shut. He knew his boss. He knew his boss’s handiwork, too, and that downed body was Mick’s style through and through. Gloria wasn’t going anywhere.
When the body hit the concrete, it splattered. Gloria turned away in horror and pain. Nobody, she felt, deserved to die like that. He tried to take over her father’s company. He betrayed and tried to undercut him. But was it a crime worth dying over? To Gloria, it was not. To Mick the Tick, Gloria could now easily see, it was.
As people ran to the aid of Will Flannigan, even though they all had to know it was a hopeless mission, Mick’s driver got back behind the wheel and drove the limousine to the side of the building. Within seconds, Mick walked off of the private elevator, got into the limousine, and the driver drove them away.
Mick sat there, leaned back, and remained silent. He never wanted conversation after he did what he had to do.
Gloria stared at her father. And watched him agonize in the decision he felt he had to make. A decision that would not have been necessary if she had been the woman he wanted her to be. The woman she knew she could be. But it was done now. Will came to her with that bullshit, not the other way around. He started it. Her father finished it. It was done.
Gloria slid across the seat until she was sitting next to Mick. And she laid her head on his shoulder.
Mick’s heartbeat quicken when she made her move. And when she said, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” so heartfelt, he thought he was going to lose it. But he didn’t. He took the little he had left within him, placed his arm around her, and gathered her to himself.
Gloria couldn’t stop the tears as they made their way back home.
CHAPTER NINE
“He’s arriving now, ma’am,” the voice from the front gate said over the house intercom, and Roz thanked him and pressed off. She wasn’t leaving until he arrived. She laid her sleeping daughter in the crib, next to her sleeping son, kissed them both, and then wished the nannies a good day.
When she made her way into the foyer of her home, she grabbed her briefcase and keys and headed for the exit. She was frustrated. It seemed every time she felt they had turned a corner, they seemed to have to back up and start over again. It was getting annoying and downright disrespectful to her.
When she made it outside, Mick’s limo was just turning into the curve of the long, horseshoe driveway. Roz’s Bentley had already been called up by the valet staff, and was waiting at the steps. To her surprise, Mick’s Lamborghini had also been called up and was parked and waiting, too.
Mick’s driver opened
the backdoor of the limo and Mick stepped out just as Roz made it down the steps. He was no longer dressed in his black attire and white coat, the clothing he wore when he left home last night, but was now in a form-fitting Armani suit. Looking sexy as hell, Roz thought, which didn’t help.
She was peeved with him, it was obvious to all of the household staff attending to their needs, and even the yard workers further away. He didn’t give a fuck. That was also obvious to the workers.
“Really, Mick?” Roz asked when he stepped out of the limo. “Not even a phone call?”
“Get in my car,” Mick said without any explanation. “I’m taking you to work.”
What nerve, Roz thought. “No, thank you,” she said and began heading for her own car. “I prefer to drive myself.”
But Mick grabbed her by the arm, stopping her progression. She looked into his tired green eyes. He looked into her determined brown eyes. “Get in my car,” he said again. He said it in such a way, and looked at her in such a way, that both of them knew it wasn’t a request, but an order.
Roz hated being ordered around. She felt she earned the right, in Mick’s life, not to be treated that way. But she knew Mick. He was no insecure man seeking to dominate his woman to make himself feel better. He was a busy man, with major league problems, who never did anything for the hell of it. She jerked away from his grasp, but made her way to his car.
Mick followed behind her as they walked to the Lamborghini. She wore her hair long and down her back in a layered cut, and a form-fitting pencil skirt suit that came well above her knee, revealing those shapely legs he loved. She looked like the epitome of class and sophistication to him, a gorgeous brown bombshell, with her briefcase swinging at her side.
Mick Sinatra: Love and Shadows Page 5
