Drago
Made Men, #6
Sarah Brianne
Young Ink Press Publication
YoungInkPress.com
Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Brianne
Edited by Hot Tree Editing
and Diamond in the Rough Editing
Cover Art by Young Ink Press
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This work of fiction is intended for mature audiences only. All sexually active characters portrayed in this ebook are eighteen years of age or older. Please do not buy if sexual situations, violence, child abuse, and explicit language offends you.
Connect with Sarah,
[email protected]
www.facebook.com/AuthorSarahBrianne
@AuthorSarahBri
Contents
1. A Man by the Name of…
2. Setting His Fate in Stone
3. I Beg of You
4. …
5. Love a Luciano
6. I’ll Be Damned
7. He’s an Idiot
8. Drago’s Girlfriend
9. Like father, Like Daughter
10. Lucifer’s World
11. The Princess is out of Her Castle
12. The Right One
13. A Mission to Get Every Man in Kansas City Murdered
14. RSVP
15. We Knew This Day Would Come
16. Until Death Do Us Part
17. A Twenty-First-Century Arranged Marriage…
18. The End to a Beautiful Beginning
19. Making Their Marriage the Shortest One in History
20. The Man Who Had Met His Untimely End
21. Bullet Holes from My Father
22. Lucifer’s Mark
23. I Hate You For This
24. Amo De Santis
25. Kitty Kat
26. What’s Mine Is Yours
27. I’ve Learned You Can Never Be Overprepared When It Comes to the Time of the Month
28. Kat in Wonderland
29. The Fucking Rabbit Hole
30. It’s Getting Really Weird Down Here
31. The OG
32. The Monster That Lay Just Beneath the Surface
33. The Fucking Point of Having a Husband
34. Face-to-Face
35. One Day
36. Do You Believe in Heaven and Hell, Lucca?
37. Why Can’t You Just Fuck M-?
38. Back Out the Rabbit Hole
39. The Sins of My Father
40. The Day Katarina Was Chosen
41. The Truth Shall Always Set You Free
42. This Tub Is Big Enough For Two
43. So Long As You Both Shall Live
You
One
A Man by the Name of…
For the last three months, blackness was all the man had known. Now, he was sure he had finally been delivered to Hell. He’d had it coming, and this was his purgatory.
For almost thirty years, he walked the earth as a merciless man. Now, as he walked this dark plane of nothingness, his soul only grew darker.
Repenting for his sins hadn’t worked for him when he had been alive, and it definitely wasn’t going to work for a man who was already in the pits of Hell.
“Delivery for Lucca Caruso…”
Something started to trickle into the darkness for the first time.
POP.
Grabbing his chest, he felt the explosive pain that had ceased his months of endless walking.
POP.
A strong sense of déjà vu told him this had happened to him before, back when he was alive.
POP.
He was reliving his death.
POP.
Even though his body had grown very weak here, his will refused to let him go down until…
POP.
Everything he had known, had grown used to over those lonely black days that turned into months, just disappeared. It was as if he entered a new plane, one that came with sounds and smells… and light. A plane that was beginning to seem all too familiar.
Dark lashes attached to heavy lids laid upon his sunken blue skin finally lifted, revealing his eyes. His pupils that were severely dilated slowly began to adjust to the light, turning his eyes from large black orbs to smaller pupils surrounded by brownish irises… Until the devilish red he had carried in them since birth appeared. The red that had given him his name. However, now that red flamed brighter, burning like a red ring of fire.
Eyes like that fit a dead man who had walked the bowels of Hell. Eyes that fit a dead man who had been spit out of Hell and brought back to life. Eyes that belonged to a man by the name of… Drago.
Some men just refused to fucking die.
Hell was a special place on earth, a place many people thought started six feet below the earth, but it didn’t. Hell was exactly two thousand five hundred and fifty-six square feet, and she lived right in the fucking middle of it. It was a house that sat on the shitty side of Kansas City, Missouri, that she lived in practically her whole life. Almost eighteen long years she had been imprisoned here, and there was no knight in shining armor, let alone a god to save her. Those luxuries didn’t exist for a girl like her.
Most people experienced their Heaven on earth only to greet Hell in death for the sins they’d committed. However, there were what she called the unlucky ones; the ones who weren’t born like everyone else, pure and free of sin, but born into Hell itself. She was one of those unlucky ones.
All she knew was evil, fear, and hate. All four-letter words that had summed up her world since birth. Words and a world that she could never escape, except through death.
And it was all because of the blood that ran through her veins. A blood so wicked and disturbed it was like she could feel the coldness of it as it flowed through her body, so much so that it scared her shitless to think about what she could have become… or what she still could become.
When she looked up at herself in the mirror, it was as if she could see the monster that lay right under the surface, but it just hadn’t been woken up yet. Staring into her eyes that her father had given her told her it was there… The big black orbs of abyss promised her there was evil inside of her too, no matter how much she told herself she was nothing like him.
You just weren’t born the daughter of Lucifer without being fucking crazy.
Two
Setting His Fate in Stone
Do you know what it’s like to look in the mirror and not know who it is looking back at you? Staring at his reflection for the first time in months, he didn’t recognize the man before him. He had always been big. In high school he didn’t even pass as a student because he looked bigger than grown-ass men. Drago was called “the tank” because that’s what he was: a fucking tank for the Caruso crime family. He practically had been born and bred to take and carry out any hit for the Family. Almost all the De Santis men were, but something about Drago De Santis had been special, making him the best bodyguard the Carusos ever had. Until now… His muscle mass… gone. Along with the man he once knew. His strength and size were what made him Drago, and without it, it was like he no longer deserved the name. Drago De Santis had been replaced by a weak stick of a man who wouldn’t be capable of taking one bullet to the chest and live
to tell the tale.
Lifting a tired hand to his gaunt face, he touched the beard that now graced his skin, then pushed back the long, shaggy black hair out of his eyes. It all made him look even more unrecognizable; he’d always had a clean-shaven face and kempt hair along with most of the men in the Caruso family.
Unable to hold the mirror the nurse had given him any longer, he slammed it down without much force. It was like his body had betrayed him, too weak to even hold a one-pound mirror, let alone get out of bed to take a piss. His body had fallen apart, and even after spending months at the gates of Hell, this was what was going to break him, ’cause at least there his body hadn’t betrayed him.
“My father wasn’t sure if you were going to make it.” A voice sounded from the dim doorway to his hospital room.
His eyes trailed over to see the shadowy figure he knew all too well. “What do you want, Lucca?”
Walking into the room, the underboss took a seat in the chair that sat by the bed. “I know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work.”
Drago knew what he was referring to; he had told the nurses and the staff not to let anyone see him. Not wanting anyone seeing him pissing through a bag, but it was too late for that, and dumb of him to think Lucca wouldn’t come see him after what happened. Swallowing hard, he finally looked his underboss in the eyes. “How is she?”
“We both know I wouldn’t be here if she weren’t okay,” Lucca said coldly with a matter-of-fact edge.
Knowing he’d either be locked up behind bars or six feet under by now getting his retribution, Drago nodded his head with a sense of relief before saying the last words he needed to say, “I’m sorry I failed you.”
“That’s the last thing you did,” he admitted before standing up to slip out the way he had come in.
“If your father saw me right now, he’d know I didn’t make it,” Drago confessed through a whisper before he could leave.
“No, you didn’t.” Fierce blue-green eyes turned back to stare him down for several seconds before he spoke again. “But the new Drago did.”
It was in that moment he felt the fire begin somewhere deep inside of him. He looked down at his weak body; it was strange to see the outside not match the inside. “What if I can’t come back from this?”
“You will for one reason.” Lucca gave a slow smile of pure sin. “Revenge.”
At that one final word, the flames grew brighter.
Revenge was a weird thing. You could seek revenge on one person your whole life, and when it finally struck, was all over, and didn’t fix anything, you realized quickly it didn’t solve the problem.
That six-letter word was the only thing she wanted her father to finally meet, and now the devil was dead and gone. She hadn’t personally taken her revenge out on him, but the Carusos had, and she and her brothers all reveled in it. She didn’t think that if she swung the sword and had been the one to personally do it, she would feel differently about revenge. But she supposed the only one who knew that was the man who had swung it.
Was she glad he’d swung it even if revenge wasn’t really that sweet?...
…Hearing the front doorknob jingle, her ten-year-old lanky body jumped up from the couch she was sitting on beside her twin brothers. Knowing it was all too late, she stood frozen as she looked at the big brown door, waiting for death to walk through. When hands covered the door, blocking it from opening, her eyes met her older brother’s brave ones.
Dominic mouthed the word “Go” as he strongly kept the door held.
She quickly made a run for it with one final look at her brother, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time.
“What the fuck!” The yelling started on the other side. “Open this damn door! I’m going to fucking kill....”
The farther she ran, the less she could hear, until she flung the door to the basement open and shut it behind her. She was sliding her back down the door, the tears slipping down her cheeks as she held her hand over her mouth, trying to cry as quietly as possible.
It wouldn’t matter how loud she cried. The beating she could hear on the other side of the door was loud enough to drown her out. It was just a habit…
…Yes, she fucking was.
“Come in, Drago.”
Walking through the office door to see Lucca sitting with Dante and Vinny took him by surprise, as he wasn’t expecting the boss and the consigliere. It had taken one fucking long month to even be able to walk to take a seat in front of them, let alone the bit of muscle he was beginning to build back again. He wasn’t close to a hundred percent yet and definitely wasn’t as big as he used to be, but every day he got closer and closer. His recovery was a hard road, and it wasn’t over yet, but just like his underboss had predicted, the thought of getting revenge against the family who’d almost sent him to his grave was what gave him his miraculous speedy recovery since awakening.
Expecting Dante or Lucca to tell him why he was called in, he was surprised again it was actually Vinny who spoke. “While you were in a coma, I made a suggestion in order to bring long-term peace between the two families, and both Dante and Dominic agreed.”
The hairs stood up on Drago’s back. By now he’d been told everything that went down about the meeting between them and the Luciano brothers while he was out, but he was beginning to figure out that they left out an important part of the deal.
Lucca reached for a cigarette, then flicked his Zippo open quickly to light the end as he took a long, deep hit.
Fuck, they did.
“It was agreed that we would pick a woman from the Luciano family to wed a Caruso. So blood could mix and trust could be earned once again.”
The feeling of dread washed over him.
Their consigliere continued setting his fate in stone. “And we all agreed on you.”
“What?!” Was he hearing them fucking right? “You can’t be serious.”
Three silent men met his eyes, showing just how serious they were.
His mouth went dry. “Absolutely not. I am not marrying a fucking Luciano!”
Again, no one sympathized.
Frustrated, he stood up. Keeping his voice calm, he spoke each word clearly. “They almost fucking killed me, and you expect me to marry one?”
The cigarette he had just lit hit the ashtray as Lucca smashed it deep into the glass, suffocating the fire. A small trail of smoke floated into the air, it all just showing exactly how fucking serious he was. “I do.”
“Is this an order?” he asked, the words coming out slowly. Looking back at the man he had gotten closer to, he would almost call that psychopath his friend. It was him he looked at for the answer, his underboss, even with his boss in this very same room.
It was Dante who answered angrily from the disrespect. “It’s a Goddamn order.”
Flexing his jaw, he waited for Lucca to save him from his fate in some way, but he never did. Knowing him, it was probably his sick idea. He took calming breaths for several minutes, coming to the conclusion there was nothing he could do as clearly their minds were made up. No Caruso, let alone a De Santis, denied an order from the boss unless they wanted to lose a finger. He figured they had picked him because he was a De Santis, one of the most loyal members in the family since the mob had been formed. Not to mention his personal status within the family being the boss’s personal bodyguard. His age of twenty-nine with no woman in sight of possibly marrying one day probably sealed the deal. No matter how much he didn’t want this, he did understand it in a fucked-up way, and if the roles were reversed, he would have made the same decision.
So, nodding his head, he bit the bullet, giving the approval they didn’t even need. The mafia hadn’t had an arranged marriage in a long time, and he believed he was going to be the first one in the twenty-first century.
“Glad you could see it our way.” Vinny smiled.
Like I had a fucking choice. Quickly, he began to realize something else... “Who did you pick for me to marry?”
&nb
sp; Dante’s ice-blue eyes glowed. “We realize this is a lot for us to ask of you, so we are giving you the choice.”
“Hmm.” Leaning back in his seat, he was almost tickled. Drago should have known it would be his boss to take care of him. He supposed he could deal with that. He would pick the hottest one with the least amount of ties to that fucking family, fuck her every now and then, and continue on with his life and make his bosses happy. It didn’t matter much, anyway; he’d never wanted to get married, so it wasn’t like he was losing out on finding the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. That shit didn’t exist for him. “When do I get to choose?”
“They are ready for us to come today,” Lucca answered with a thin air of smoke escaping from the new cigarette he’d just lit.
He clapped his hands together, ready. “Line ’em up.”
There was something Drago missed, however, what he completely overlooked. The slight smile… that held Lucca’s lips.
Three
I Beg of You
Drago (Made Men Book 6) Page 1
