It’s a tough moment when you realize that the ultimate player has outplayed you.
It’s like that airplane coming in for a landing, where everything suspends for a few seconds, and then life is slamming into you again.
Without asking for permission, I flick the lid of the wooden box up. There, lying on a plush crimson cushion, is a black metal key that matches the design of everything else around here.
“We’ve been expecting you, Aiden. For a long time now.”
“Fourteen years,” I mutter.
“Indeed.” He flashes his white teeth at me. He must brush them at least five times a day to remove the bloodstains.
“I became a member of Villefort thirty years ago,” he purrs, drumming his fingers lightly on the table.
“From three months to thirty years… That’s quite a leap.”
“We are more than just a protection service,” he continues tersely. “The earth spins on a clap of our command. Every country is our playground. Every government is under our auspices. If we want power, we take it. If we desire money, we kill for it. We are the people behind the headlines and the whispers in dark corners. There is nothing we can’t steal, no mountain we can’t conquer. We take societal justice and we make it our own. Put simply, we are the world, Aiden.”
“You’re making me feel like a bad date,” I tell him, forcing myself to inhale and exhale and hold my shit together. “If you were a member all this time, why string me along under a hoax of my parents’ justice?”
“The fourteen-year membership application period is real. But it was never for me, Aiden… The application period was for you.”
“Me?” I start laughing, but it’s a little forced and a lot resentment.
“You need this Aiden. It’s in your blood.”
“My blood is mostly sponsored by Glenfiddich these days.” And the only thing I need is black and gold and trembling. “Thanks for the offer but I decline. Ergo, you have my permission to take my membership application, make a paper airplane out of it and fly yourself back to Sicily. I’m done.” At this, I make to stand. “After I have my name, of course.”
“By the end of this evening you will gorge on the answers to every secret,” he snaps, his smokescreen slipping. “I suggest you take your seat again and stop holding up the proceedings.”
His patience is fading.
I’m losing control of this situation.
There’s a plan… I came here with a plan.
Casting my gaze around the room again, I slowly list each name in turn as I lower myself back into the chair. It’s all the heavy hitters and the pro players, the drug lords and the arms dealers—all except for one.
“Do you wish to know why the application process is a period of fourteen years, Aiden?”
“No, but I have a feeling it’s going to be rammed down my throat anyway.” I turn to seek out Issa’s reassurance again, and discover a mask of shock. If Frankie’s face gets any whiter, they’ll be performing an autopsy on him.
“We give people a taste of our power and a sip of our wealth. If you offer a dog the tastiest morsel of meat, it learns to crave it above anything. We turn our applicants into slavering beasts.” He concludes this with a cold smile. “We socially isolate, we taper their emotions until all they feel is avarice, revenge and gratitude. Everything else is an unwanted distraction. We alter their psychological maquillage by offering them something that becomes their obsession.”
My parents. He’s talking about my parents.
“And then we make them pass the test.”
My head jerks up from eye-fucking the box in front of me. “What test?”
“We rip it all away from them,” he says, his dark eyes gleaming. “We sink them like a ship. If they swim, we offer them a choice—full membership of La Società Villefort—or nothing. A life of destitution. No money. No friends. No family. You will be cast from this château with nothing but the clothes you are wearing.”
“Tomorrow, there will be a choice for you.”
I laser beam in on Dubov again, but he’s staring straight at the table.
“And what did you sacrifice, Zaccaria?”
There’s a pause. “I gave up my firstborn son. I gave him to a man in London, a distant associate who promised to care for him until I gained sufficient leverage to ascend the ranks of La Società Villefort and rescind my sacrifice in exchange for his inclusion.”
This time when Issa gasps, it’s the real deal.
I always hated surprises.
The room is spinning.
“Surely you’re not suggesting—?”
“It is an agony of no comparison,” he snarls suddenly. “To have your flesh and blood raised in squalor by another man. Your son. Your heir. To never watch him make the vows of Omertà. To have a Zaccaria denied his made man status.”
“To be a Father is a gift, not a right,” I snarl back. “Joseph Knight will always hold that title for me. The best thing you ever did was give me away to that family. Their deaths will still be avenged as if they had a biological claim to me. I’m disowning you, Zaccaria, at the same time you’re supposedly fucking claiming me.”
“You have no choice in the matter… Pietro.”
Issa is strong armed up to the table with a gun to her back. After a shout and a scuffle, a gun to his head subdues Frankie.
“Let her go, Zaccaria!”
“So now it begins.” He slowly rises to his feet. “This is the initiation process where we systematically destroy your life for the ultimate gain. Are you there, Stefano?”
A loud voice comes booming into the room via a sound system.
“Yes, Signor Zaccaria.”
“Is it done?”
“The fortune divided into various bank accounts has been frozen, all fourteen properties in his portfolio have been signed over to you: nineteen bars, clubs, hotels and other legitimate establishments are now in the possession of La Famiglia, and all other assets have been seized, including The Cristo.”
They better not take—
“One black Maserati has been seized, as well.”
Motherfuckers.
Zaccaria tilts his thin lips at lips at me, the grooves in his face swallowing me whole, like a sea creature. “And the casino?”
“Is now in the name of your second son, Luca Zaccaria. I believe he is there as we speak, making the necessary changes and arrangements.”
I catch Issa’s eye for a third time. It’s only money, sweetheart. I grew up poor. I can make it again. Fuck it, I’ll sell my suit, make a grand and rent an apartment in the arse-end of Marseille if needs be. I don’t care, as long as I have her.
She smiles at me, and I feel a rush of emotion that no Mafioso could take away from me.
“Excellent word, Stefano,” he says expansively.
“My pleasure, Signor Zaccaria.”
But not mine.
I watch his gaze slither over to Issa and my stomach sinks like a stone. “Leave her out of this!” But I’m cruising an avalanche and the only way to stop now is to hit the bottom.
“Play the tape,” he orders.
More voices filter into the room, ones that I recognize from twenty-four hours ago in my casino office. What used to be my casino office...
Mine.
Her father’s.
“I am not in love with your daughter, Dubov, but neither do I think of her as damaged goods. I fuck her out of duty. I fuck her to keep my end of the bargain.”
“Wait!” I roar, slamming my fists down on the table. “There’s a goddamn context here.” I swing round, but all that greets me is pain.
“I am not in love with your daughter, Dubov.”
“I am not in love with your daughter, Dubov.”
“I am not in love with your daughter, Dubov.”
Some sick fuck has put my words on a loop, drilling my lie into every person here, including the one who I’m lying directly to.
“Issa.” I stand to go to her, and I find a gun jabbed
against the side of me head, instead. “This was all before...” Before we laid our souls bare. Before our two halves of a heart became a whole.
When she doesn’t respond, I feel like I’m drowning.
“What about Eloise Dubois?” growls Dubov suddenly.
My attention snaps back to him. “What about her?”
“Why don’t you tell my daughter how you threatened her life last night.”
“Bullshit!”
“You played me a tape of me and Eloise. It was footage that you stole illegally from her store security cameras. We both know that it was a direct threat to her life. If I didn’t leave Eloise alone for Ielena’s sake, the consequences would be dire.”
“You had footage of them?” cries Issa. “You promised me no more lies, Aiden.”
“Again, context!” I feel like I’ve taken bad coke. I’m talking, but I’m acting too shit-faced to hold anyone’s attention. “I know what she meant to you. I wouldn’t jeopardize us like that.” But she’s already backing away from the table and Pietro’s letting her leave with a big fat smile on his face.
The sound of her heels departing the room is like the upper cut I need to bring me around from this nightmare. The slam of the door plunges my world into darkness. I try to follow and get pushed down roughly into my seat again.
“I never expected her to be such a thrilling part of this evening,” crows Zaccaria, delighted by the turn of events as he lowers himself back to his seat, as well. “She was supposed to be a pawn in this game, not a queen.”
“Then why the hell was she?” I demand. “You said it yourself. There is no Riviera deal. There was never any need for an arranged marriage—”
“She isn’t just your sacrifice, Knight,” says Dubov slowly. “She is mine as well. Sixteen year ago, I gave up the chance of a relationship with my daughters. A female sacrifice is valued less in La Società Villefort. I was required to lose all three.”
“Regret that much, do you? I didn’t kill Eloise Dubois.”
“No, we did,” interjects Zaccaria. “La Società Villefort has a strict code we abide by.” I watch him pin Dubov with an icy glare, and then give the man sitting next to him the same—a man who looks unnervingly like his oldest son before he was gunned down in front of me a couple of days ago. “Occasionally certain members need to be reminded of rules.”
“Are you done?” I say idly. “Can I get that drink now?”
“On the contrary,” smiles Zaccaria. “Pietro!”
I’m starting to associate that man’s name with a gong chiming at the gates of hell.
The ground tips again when I see Frankie being pushed toward the table.
“You let very few into your world, Aiden. I take full credit for that. I taught you well. But we needed leverage for when the time came, so leverage was created.”
I open my mouth to refute it, and then I see Frankie’s face.
Broken.
Guilty.
“Why don’t you tell me the real location for Karina Dubova, Frankie,” he croons, slam-dunking me in a vat of betrayal.
“Cambridge, Addensbrooke’s Hospital,” I hear him grit out, and I know it’s hurting him as much to say it as it is me to hear it.
“Good, Frankie. Very good. But let’s not stop there. Why don’t you give my son the name he’s been so avidly seeking?”
His head drops, and the avalanche hits the ground doing one-ninety. The impact steals my breath away and rocks me forward in my chair.
No.
He won’t look at me.
“For fuck’s sake, Frankie, tell me it isn’t true!”
I never thought of myself as a desperate man. I’ve never pleaded for anything. I was planning to take and take until I ran out of wanting.
Until now.
What a turnaround. I’d do anything to hear him refute Zaccaria’s claim, and I’m prepared to get down on my knees and beg for it.
“Of course, at fifteen, he needed assistance in decapitating Jacob’s head.” Zaccaria chuckles darkly. “Lorenzo Gambino was more than happy to lend a hand.”
“Then I’m happy I repaid the gesture.”
My body feels weighted with misery; my elbows are driving crevasse into the mahogany table. My head hangs low between my shoulders.
“Raven,” hisses Frankie. “Raven, look at me.”
“Fuck you! You’re dead to me, too.”
I hold up my hand to permanently silence him. My parents took him in and he betrayed them worse than Judas. I don’t even flinch as the security guards set upon him like a pack of wolves, smashing his bones into silence as the rest of the room watches, unmoved. I feel his pain, though. I feel it like he is still my brother. When they’re done, they drag his limp body into the corner and throw him down like dead meat.
“You ordered the hit didn't you, Zaccaria?” I say slowly.
It’s rhetorical. I already know the answer.
He nods. “The time was right to cut the old ties and begin the application process and your education.”
That’s one hell of a confirmation.
They didn’t deserve it.
Dad’s laugh—as carefree as the one I’ve always aspired to.
Mum’s kindness—as true as the one my wife throws to me in a perfect game of catch and release.
“I’m going to kill you for this, Zaccaria,” I say calmly.
“No, you won’t,” he says with a laugh. “You’ll make the right decision when I ask it of you, because you are my son.”
Never.
“Why did you break in and leave the business card next to Gambino’s head in Siena?”
“We always leave a tribute to those who have served us loyally.”
“And Eloise Dubois? How did she serve you?”
His face darkens. “That was no tribute. She was a warning. Dubov made the grave mistake of requesting to leave the La Società. As a result, another female sacrifice was required from his family. Once you enter the brotherhood of La Società Villefort, you can never leave. Eloise was Dubov’s sister. Mattia Rossi here required the same…incentive, and so his son was terminated.”
“Do you even give a shit about Karina Dubova?”
“She was another punishment tool,” he says with a sigh. “Luca was planning to show her the color of our displeasure. But I’ve since learned that she’s dying anyway.”
There’s a croak of pain from Dubov’s direction. Maybe he gives a shit about his daughters, after all.
“The time has come,” booms Zaccaria’s voice. There’s movement from around the room as backs straighten and he rises stiffly from his chair once again, his expression fervent like a priest’s who’s about to issue me my last rights.
“Aiden Knight,” he rumbles, clearing his throat. “Born Alessandro Tommaso Zaccaria. You are a man with nothing. We, the men of La Società Villefort offer you everything. We offer you the opportunity to rule as you were born to. Do you accept, or do you choose a life of poverty, opacity and solitude? Of dying like a dog, like the man who raised you?”
“Well, when you put it like that…” I glare at Pietro, who’s standing right behind me again with his gun. “Can I get some fucking room here, please?” I say, rising to my feet as well. “This is going to be epic.”
All eyes are on me as I slide my hand into my jacket pocket and wrap my fingers around my father’s old lighter. “I’m not going to lie… If you’d asked me this six days ago, I would have accepted. No question. But you fucked up, old man. You sent sunshine into my Black Skies Riviera. You sent hope to a broken raven, and she took its pain and unclipped its wings.” Pulling out the lighter, I flick the hopeless flint wheel, and for the first time in years it produces a flame that’s bright and solid. “You may have twisted me into your image for fourteen years,” I continue, “but I had sixteen with the man who really made me.” At this, I reach into my other pocket and pull out the small, black MI6 listening device that I had planted on me all along, sliding it across the table to land rig
ht in front of his fucking nose. “In conclusion, Zaccaria, I won’t be joining you and your band of unmerry men. In the plainest way possible, I’m telling you to go fuck yourself, along with the twenty or so British Intelligence Agents listening in to this conversation in their bat mobiles outside… I also find it pretty poor form that everyone else in this fucking room has a drink except me.” Picking up my neighbor’s full whiskey glass, I chuck the entire contents across the table. A split second later, my father’s lighter follows suit and the whole thing erupts into red and amber hellfire.
“Burn with it, you bastards,” I roar as pandemonium breaks out in shouts and cries, and bullets start whizzing past my ear. Dropping to the floor, I hear the sound of more gunfire outside, and then the doors are flying in on themselves.
Armed agents are pouring into the room to add their own brand of gasoline, but the thick smoke has turned visibility to a poor zero. Somehow I reach Frankie’s body, and roll him over.
“Get up,” I croak. “We need to move.”
“Why?” he wheezes. “For years you’ve lived and breathed this moment. If I had a loaded gun I’d hand it to you.”
“Because my wife has a thing about forgiveness, and I need to get back in her good books.”
“Don’t deserve it.” His words dissolve into an ugly coughing fit.
“The way I see it, we were both fucked over.”
“I’m not going with you, Aiden. My leg is broken.”
“Then hobble. Hop. Do the one-legged conga. I’m not leaving here without you.”
He grabs my shirt, and I see the determination in his eyes. It's the kind that not even God himself could talk down. “Go.”
There’s a pause. “Why did you do it?”
“I had a sister. They threatened to kill her if I didn’t. I wish—”
“There’s a hell of a lot of regret going on in this room.”
“Go,” he repeats, his voice growing weaker. “The British won’t let me die. I’m too good a witness for them.”
“I’ll get you out, brother. Wherever you end up.”
“Did you hear what I said? GO!”
I can’t see my hand in front of my face anymore so I keep low where the air is cleanest, fumbling along walls for a side door.
I hear Zaccaria scream a name through the smoke and the chaos, but I answer to Aiden not Alessandro.
Black Skies Riviera: An Enemies To Lovers Mafia Romance Page 26
