Heart of a Monster: A New Reign Mafia Romance: Chapter 3

Igot her letter way too late. The date was postmarked months back, and the edges of the envelope were bent and covered with mud.

Still, I recited the address as I pounded it into my phone and drove straight there, hoping to find her, hoping to find the man who must have been taking advantage of her.

I banged on the door with the chain I took with me at times wrapped around my knuckles.

A tall skinny man with dark circles around his eyes answered. “Damn, calm down. What you want?”

“I’m looking for Katie.”

“I didn’t tell her she could have anyone over,” he drawled.

It was all the confirmation I needed. Taking a step forward, I swung at him, and the chain links shattered his jaw. He flailed back, screaming in surprise. Clattering came from a hallway behind him.

Katie stood there, a ripped black shirt hanging from her shoulder and jeans that showed too much of her waistline hugged her hips. She’d filled out and lost weight too. Her high cheekbones were hollowed out, just like the gaze she now shot at me.

“You need to leave.” Her voice was raspier than I remembered and completely devoid of emotion.

“You need to go back to your room until I’m finished with him.” I pointed behind her, directing her back to safety.

Her foster parent finally recovered, and he ran toward me at full speed. My wrapped fist met his momentum head-on, and he screeched in pain while scrambling away from me into his kitchen. The man wasn’t skilled in fighting, and when he pulled a knife from a drawer with a snarl on his face, I winced. Leaving a bloody mess to clean up wasn’t ideal, and as I glanced at Katie, I knew I didn’t really want her to see any of that.

Advancing quickly, I yanked his wrist forward fast enough to trap the weapon and twisted hard. The metal clattered on the floor as he wiggled in my grip and punched wildly through the air, hoping to land a blow.

I calculated each punch and made sure to hit him in the temple, hard in the gut, and at weak points that I knew would break bones. The chain, my training, and the fact that I’d done it all before gave me an astronomical advantage.

It didn’t take him long to realize I wasn’t stopping. That flight response kicked in, his body panicking and starting to flail every which way. He freed himself long enough to throw a bowl at me and yell out that his wife would be home soon.

“I’m not worried about who finds you dead.” I smiled at his ridiculous warning, and my hand pulled a gun from where it was tucked into my waistband behind me.

His eyes widened despite the increasing swelling, and his hands shot up to the sky. “Is this about her? I’ve never touched her. She’s a liar, I swear. She came messed in the head. Doesn’t cry, doesn’t talk, doesn’t do anything.”

I glanced at her. Katie was leaning against the doorframe of the hallway, watching with her arms crossed over her chest. Even though her curves had filled out, she looked tiny in that black sweater, like she was still the same kid I met who was trying to save her father.

“That true, Katie. You a liar?”

“My father was too proud to raise a girl who lied, Rome.” She said the words barely above a whisper and looked down as she tucked herself deeper into that sweater. Without another word, she pushed off the wall to go back to her room.

Something twisted in my gut, snarled in anger, and unleashed in my soul.

When I looked back at the man, he was crying and stuttering over his words. “Please, man. She’s beautiful and . . . I have a problem . . . we needed the money, okay?”

Bile rose fast in my throat, bitter and acrid. I shook my head once, trying to wrangle the angry beast that clawed at me to get out. The man had sold her. I knew it already, but still I whispered the question, “How did you get the money?”

A bead of perspiration formed as his eyes darted everywhere, like he’d been caught. “Look, there’s only been a few guys who paid to be with her. She’s asleep when they come, I swear. I got a lot of–”

I raised the gun so it pointed right at his head. “You’re going to die in the next minute. Don’t waste your breath, because you can’t change my mind.”

Changing tactics, he tried to turn the tables on me. “You’re a fucking monster,” he cried with his hands in the air.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” I motioned for him to come toward me, curling my hand up and down over the rusted metal. I carried it sometimes, when I knew I wanted to inflict real pain. My father had me use that chain to strangle the life out of my first kill. At the age of twelve, most would have cowered at the request.

I’d embraced it.

The man ran toward me with a loud yell, hoping to catch me off guard. I stepped to the side, raising my gun above my head so that he didn’t grab for it. Muscle memory had me using his own force to yank his jaw as I moved. The loud crack signaled that his spinal cord had separated from his brain.

The sound quieted the rage in my veins, soothed the monster that wanted a life to eat. We got what we came for.

I pocketed my weapon and enjoyed the silence.

I knew how to deliver kills. I was comfortable with it, almost took pleasure in it. A man fought for his life like a fish out of water, flapping about and trying his best to flounder back to safety. He’d been no different. Normally, I called Sergio and he brought a cleanup crew right after. I was used to leaving the scene, used to washing my hands of the situation, and used to moving right on.

That day, I couldn’t.

My real problem, the one that caused me extreme discomfort, was the girl in the next room.

My boots clomped on the wood floor as I peered inside two rooms that stunk of old cigarette smoke before I reached hers. She sat on a pink bedspread in the third room, legs crossed as she leaned against the wall. “Is he dead?”

“It doesn’t matter.” I didn’t go near her but took in her dyed hair, pink tips on her dark strands. She let them fall over her face and down her shoulders like she wanted to hide behind them. “Let’s pack you a bag and get you to a friend’s house. Do you have a contact at CPS?”

She laughed, but her smile didn’t meet her eyes. She stared out of the window, and I wondered how many times she’d contemplated running away. “I’m not calling them. They knew what Marvin was.”

“Katie,” I sighed. “Not all of CPS is bad. The world dealt you a fucked-up hand.”

Her eyes cut to me, glistening silver like a sharpened blade. “He paid someone at CPS. They aren’t all bad, sure. But that guy was. They’re all getting a cut. The girl that was here before, she told me . . .”

She choked back a sob and brought her arm up to cover her cry. She straightened then and wiped away the tears so roughly they left red marks on her cheeks. “They get thousands for having men visit us. Over and over and over again, Rome. Before that, her own family before was selling her for years. The world is fucked up. I’m not calling CPS, not calling anyone I don’t trust now. I’ve got friends. They’ll come get me.”

“If your friends are Jared and—”

“Rome, do you want to take me in?” She glared at me, cutting me with just a look, like it was a challenge, like she knew I’d say no.

I recoiled at her question like she’d drawn blood. She couldn’t live with me. I’d just murdered someone with my bare hands in the house she lived in. I was what the mafia made me: a monster and nothing more.

“I’m no good for you, Cleo. I’d ruin you.”

“Then let me go where I need to go. I’m safer wherever I land than I ever was with the dead man out there.”

Maybe I was too young to make a different call, but I still wonder if I should have.

She didn’t write to me again.

I couldn’t write to her either since I didn’t have her location, only snippets of information from some of the calls Mario and the guys made. I was running my bar, trying not to be a part of the meetings. When Mario needed me, he called me.

I delivered kill after kill. Tonight, I did one quick. After a couple of missed punches, he’d run at me, hoping to outmaneuver me with force.

I needed efficiency this time, even though the frustration and need to torture was there. We’d found out he’d been trafficking women through the business we helped him keep afloat. He deserved a beatdown, but I took his life fast instead.

Mario Armanelli, the boss of the family, wanted a late family meeting. My plans for torture and suffering would have to be inflicted on those that aided the trafficker.

I stepped over the obese, balding man as I pressed and held the number three on my phone. “Job is done. Take care of the mess. I made it easy for you, no red anywhere.”

Sergio sighed into the phone. “Thank you, Rome.”

I hung up and drove my truck through the cool night air with my window rolled down. I took the side alleys and got lost in the sea of buildings. One road led to another until the old factory our family owned came into view. The massive garage hid most of our cars, and one of the guys opened it immediately when he saw me approach.

It’d been a while since I’d taken my place at the right hand of Mario Armanelli. I was a young underboss, but I’d earned my seat. I protected his life and solved the problems he needed me to.

I nodded to a few familiar faces as I walked into the open space that must have been where they used to house the large crates. Now, we had an expensive circle of luxurious chairs on the cement slabs, and they all faced the middle one. The rusted metal of that folding chair had seen better days, and so had the people who would sit in it. One of the younger members dragged it to the center of the room, letting it scrape loudly against the ground, drawing the attention of everyone there.

These impromptu meetings always had everyone jumpy and on their toes. No one knew who the boss was going to call to the middle: the hot seat, the electric chair of the mob, the one you never wanted to be in.

Mario patted my shoulder as I sat down next to him. “My boy. Thanks for the easy cleanup. Sergio’s getting old. Frankie’s out of town, but we need to bring him in more to help Sergio.”

I shrugged. “It’s fine. Wanted to be on time. Not every day we have a meeting sprung on us. Who’s in trouble?”

Mario grunted and rolled a thick gold ring on his finger. His olive skin wrinkled around it, worn from age and years of strain. Running the mob and keeping his businessmen in line kept the man busy.

And me too. I did the dirty work. The dirtiest of all. I killed the men Mario didn’t need anymore, that disobeyed us, that stepped out of line.

Just a year ago, one man stepped so far out of line that Mario would have been dead had I not jumped in to save him at the exact right moment. No one saw it coming. Except his right-hand man, my father.

Mario and I cried that night. He cried like he’d lost a brother, and I cried like I’d lost my father.

Because we had.

Life within our family was a dangerous business. Irish, Russian, and Albanian families watched for a weak spot. They found one with my father but didn’t expect that I’d bridge the gap. Mario Armanelli lived on as the Chicago Boss, but he’d changed after that night.

He wanted new ways for the mob, and he tightened up his team, kept me close, and started to pull the Italian families back together.

Mario squeezed my shoulder and then gave it a little shake. “It’s not you.” He chuckled. “Never you, son.”

I rolled my eyes at him even mentioning it could be me.

No one came between us. I’d lived in the family under my father from a very young age. My mother left me to my father early on, or he took me from her—I wasn’t sure which. But I wouldn’t have been surprised at either.

I never asked, because he never would have told me. He didn’t care about the niceties of parenting. He was ruthless, cold, and vicious. It made him good at what he did. And it taught me the same skills.

He never shielded me from his work. I’d seen a man murdered by the age of four and knew how to handle a gun by the age of six. By twelve, I’d taken a life and knew how to drown out their pleas as they begged for it.

It made me the perfect person to step into the job, to step into the lifestyle.

Except I wasn’t my father. I’d made ties. I’d conquered my emotions, crushed them into nothing when I needed to for the family. And I put my trust there.

In the family.

In my father.

I believed in the mob. I indulged in my lifestyle because it was a good one. I saw enough death within the family to know it may not be a life that would last long. So I indulged in the luxuries.

If my life would be short, I intended to make the most of it.

Until we lost my father.

Questions started for me then. The little voice in my head that said I could have been wrong about everything festered and grew.

Love for the life disintegrated. The soul within me withered. I turned from a child with trust to a man with only one purpose: to fill the shoes of the underboss for the family and never be left open to deceit again.

I took life after life and felt less and less pain.

Bastian and Cade, Mario’s only children, nodded at me as they strolled in. When I saved their father’s life, I’d saved their family. I became one of them, another son of the mob boss. Still, they only met my eyes for a moment. Maybe because they didn’t care, or maybe there was nothing there to look at.

“Today, the only person in trouble is Jimmy.” Mario confirmed what I’d suspected.

I cracked my knuckles. Jimmy had been sliding through the cracks for years now, getting away with shit he shouldn’t. The Armanelli family had cleaned up a massive mess for him more than once. We couldn’t afford slipups, not with RICO laws as restrictive as they were now. Tonight, Mario would decide if Jimmy was worth the risk.

He walked in, black suit pressed and a swagger in his step. He wore the gold family ring, along with about nine others, and flaunted extra diamonds where he could. A Rolex weighed down his wrist; the gold chain on his neck was overkill. He wanted to make a statement, but the one he really made walked in behind him.

I sucked in a quick breath.

Katie.

She had always been a little thing, probably only five-five and skinny enough to pick up without any struggle. She had curves, but they were young ones. She was green. So was I. I realized my twenty-one years seemed unripe to most, but I’d seen the world.

On Jimmy’s arm, what had she really seen?

She wore a pink sweater, her black hair pulled back in a tight bun and tipped with red now. She walked close to him like he would protect her.

Her almond eyes and smooth skin screamed innocence. It was beautiful and frightening at the same time. These men were nothing like the ones she should be around. Some of them smiled, Bastian actually catcalled, and Mario hushed him.

I leaned toward Mario. “Why is she here? Did he inform you?”

“I knew about it,” was all Mario said. “Jimmy?” Mario announced, and everyone gave our boss the attention he deserved. “You brought the little Katalina finally.”

She smiled and walked up to Mario. She held out her hand, no fear in her eyes as she shook his hand and he brought her in for a kiss on each cheek.

“Thank you for having me,” her voice rasped out to Mario, a hair above a whisper, and it rubbed every man’s dick just the right way. Her lips glistened with gloss, and the eyeliner she wore was thicker than I’d ever seen on her.

Fuck, she was a pretty little thing. She always had been. Her frosted gray eyes held your soul when she stared you down, like she could suck you in and never let you out. And tonight she’d dressed in soft pinks though she’d painted on the face of a woman.

She still wore the gold necklace. I saw it tucked under the neckline of her sweater. Didn’t she know this wasn’t the place to wear something like that? She had to if she was with a man like Jimmy.

What a piece of shit she’d picked to be with, too. I held back a growl just thinking about how dirty this man got. He’d trafficked buses of women. He’d tied them down, shot them up with drugs, then sold them off.

It was the old way, not something we’d ever focused on much, except that we knew it wasn’t the way Mario wanted to leave the mob, and he would leave it to his son one day soon enough.

Traditions were sometimes buried so deep into the ground that it was hard to determine if the roots were toxic. And poisonous roots needed to be ripped out.

My eyes skittered up Katie’s arms, but her sleeves hid any track marks I may have found. Had she fallen a victim to the temptations of the world, to what she’d been forced into so long ago in that foster home?

A jolt of realization shot through me—there were so many others like Katie, but I shoved those thoughts away.

I wondered how I’d protect those I loved, how I’d protect my own little thing now. My ex-fiancée, Sasha, had come to me just a few nights back. We’d fought again. Life of the mafia, I guess.

She didn’t see this side of things. She didn’t know about the drugs, the trafficking, the body counts.

Even when I’d told her, she’d held strong that she deserved more of my time. She didn’t understand—family was family. Or maybe that was the real problem: I didn’t see her as a part of that family.

That night she repeated it over and over, and then dropped a bomb.

She was pregnant.

My baby was in her belly.

And a baby changed everything. A baby made me reconsider what I was doing.

“You ask and you shall receive, Mario,” Jimmy sneered. He grabbed the girl’s elbow, and she went with him to sit down where he normally did.

Mario tsked at him. “You know you don’t sit there tonight, Jimmy. You sit in the hot seat.”

“I didn’t do anything outside of the family,” he countered.

“You didn’t traffic two hundred women in just this past week by sending your crew out to lure new foster kids? They may be your crew, Jimmy, but you work for me. Those are my men, my soldiers, and my name they work under. That’s mi famiglia, no?” He emphasized that word. It meant something to us all, and it sliced through the room. The attitude toward Jimmy shifted. I could feel the ones that had been on his side turn their backs.

Jimmy stuttered, and two of Mario’s guys grabbed him to shove him into the chair. His feet dragged across the floor as he wriggled in their grip.

The metal clanked as they held him down in the chair like a jail cell closing. Jimmy sat alone in that cold, ominous chair. The blubbering erupted from deep in his gut immediately, an act for sympathy and a last-ditch effort that wouldn’t sway our jury.

His show was of no entertainment to me. Instead, I watched Katalina. No fear was in her eyes. No shudder ran through her body. She picked at a piece of lint on her jeans and crossed her legs, as if ready for the night’s events.

In her room the first night I met her, there had been so much more emotion in her. Marvin stole it away, and Jimmy hadn’t seemed to jog even a memory of an emotion either. She’d been emptied of feelings a long time ago.

Were her eyes as dead as mine when she stared through the room?

What have you been through, Cleo?

“Admit something, Jimmy,” Mario said with a sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Let me at least know you’re honest. Did you bring them in or not?”

“I swear I didn’t.” He wiped a meaty hand over his nose and sniffled.

Mario dragged a finger back and forth over one eye as if to clear away dust irritating it. The guy on the right punched Jimmy until blood splattered. “That’s enough. Admit something, Jimmy. Don’t you know I’m trying to set an example for my boys?” He motioned toward Cade, Bastian, and me, as if I were his boy too.

“Katie will tell you.” His pleading eyes shot to her. “I didn’t do it. I’ve been with her all week. I only left a few times.”

Mario turned to Katie, and my body tensed. Something in me instinctively wanted to tell her to run. The hot seat was dangerous, and sparks could fly from it to others very quickly.

I didn’t. It wasn’t my job to save her, at least not this time.

Those smoky eyes of hers scanned the room and fell on me like I could give her the answers. Maybe I should have tried.

Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up where we were if I had.

“Katalina, Douglass was a good man,” Mario said, and I reared back at him saying her father’s name. We all knew he’d died a while back, that she’d had to go into foster care. Yet I knew more. Her letters, her words, echoed through my head. “I always relied on your father to tell me the truth,” Mario said the words softly.

Her eyes narrowed; a phoenix of feeling rose in her. Suddenly, anger and fury whipped from her toward Mario. You could feel it in the air, the control she had over the room.

She nodded at our boss, and I thought I saw her chin quiver, yet the sound that rolled from her lips was steady. “Because he wasn’t a liar. He never uttered anything but the truth before he died. I’m not one either.”

A few of us dropped our heads at the fact that she’d lost her father. Family ties ran deep enough that some felt another’s pain. Mario shouldn’t have used her father for leverage. Couldn’t he have used something else? Couldn’t he have been less calculating?

Mario lifted an eyebrow. “You’re right. Douglass was my kind of guy.” He clapped his hands together as if it was decided. “Tell me where Jimmy was last night. With you? All night?”

She turned to stare at her boyfriend. He glared back at her, bullets of sweat forming as his eyes bulged silently, commanding her to back him. She hesitated, and I swear if Jimmy could have, he would have strangled the answer he wanted out of her.

She whispered, “He was with me.”

Jimmy yelled, “See! I’m not making up stories. Don’t pin this on me, Mario.” His brow was furrowed as he pleaded with him.

The silence stretched as we all waited for Mario’s decision.

Katalina spoke up before anyone else did. “He was with me,” she repeated. “But after we fought some and he held his gun to my head, he left to see Sasha. He didn’t return the whole night.”

“You little stronza, do you think I give you what I do so that you can—” Mario’s muscle men shoved Jimmy down in his seat just as he was rising to go at her.

She didn’t cower or shrink back. She dragged her red fingernails across her lips. Her eyes shined like she enjoyed it, like a feline ready for a fight. I might have been the only one to see her brilliance in that moment, but it radiated from her. Katalina thrived in the midst of her lover’s demise. I wasn’t proud to admit my dick hardened watching her, and I wanted to know more about her than I should. I wanted to bottle up her radiance and study it, take her to one of the places I kept secret and hold her there long enough to slice away her layers and understand her.

She was the first enigma I’d come across that enraptured me.

But my heart jolted back as my mind registered her words.

“Sasha,” I whispered. The name matched my unborn baby’s mother, my ex-fiancée. The rhythm of my heart sped up, my stomach suddenly jumped into my throat.

It had to be a coincidence.

But there weren’t coincidences in the mob.

Mario set a hand on my shoulder. “Not your Sasha, son. She’s an untouchable. Who is this Sasha?” he asked.

Jimmy eyeballed us both. “Look . . .” He sighed and then ran a hand through his hair that was wet with his sweat.

The walls around me shifted at the fear in his voice. No one’s voice shook like that unless they knew they were about to reveal something unredeemable.

“This morning, I went there when you were working, Rome.” He groaned at his own story, as if he was disappointed in his actions. “I shouldn’t have been seeing her. You know how she was though? How she looked at you with those big doe eyes, huh?”

Was.

I attempted to rise from my chair, but Mario held me down, a hand on my shoulder. “You’re lying,” I said, but my voice cracked and I cleared my throat. “Don’t fuck with me, Jimmy. I’ve always wanted to kill you. Don’t fuck with me and make me do it.”

He shook his head. “She was going to cause problems, okay? She tried to tell me she had my baby in her belly and—”

I flew off my chair at the words. They rang too close to the truth.

The baby was mine.

No one was supposed to know about her pregnancy. We were going to wait to tell everyone.

Mario’s muscle men surrounded me. They were nobodies in the grand scheme of things. They did our dirty work when we needed scapegoats.

I shoved at them, fought them, took out one guy’s knee and hit the other guy in the throat. Three more jumped up, but Bastian and Cade pulled me back.

“Calm down,” Bastian kept whispering.

The rage consumed me, coiled around my soul, burned deep in my tendons and pumped through my arteries and veins. When I couldn’t break from my cousins’ grasp, I turned to Mario. “I get him. His life is mine.”

Mario nodded. “So long as it’s here. Now. Those are the conditions. Everyone sees now what happens when you hit an untouchable and traffic women with my family name attached.”

Our new way of life had come years ago. The Armanelli family endeavored to stop making money on drugs and women. We wove ourselves into businesses, undercut gas prices, played with the stocks.

Jimmy started crying, begging for his life.

I closed my eyes and saw Sasha. Her hair would whip in the wind so wild, she would threaten to cut it. And on our best days, I would tell her no, that it was beautiful, and she’d smile so damn big. We’d had our problems, but her light shouldn’t have been extinguished by a man like him. I snapped my eyes open. “You took what was mine, Jimmy.”

“I didn’t. She said you weren’t with her anymore. She said—”

I let the chain fall from the cuff of my long-sleeved shirt. The clank of the rusted metal on the cement revved the beast in me.

Jimmy’s rapid breathing turned to a wheeze at the sight of my chain, and he recoiled in his chair. “Please, Rome. Don’t do this to me. Don’t turn on me when I’ve been family—”

Letting him finish the sentence and use our family as a negotiation card would have been criminal. You can only hold back a monster for so long. I whipped the chain forcefully enough across his face that it tore away most of his cheek.

Some men believed in waiting a few minutes to let the pain sink in, but I piled it on. Pulling a knife from my pocket, I shoved it into his thigh. His scream fed my need to torture.

“Did she beg for her life? Tell me you made it easy on her.” My plea was real. I whispered the last word, “Please.”

“Rome, I swear it was quick. I shot her, man. I shot her, and she was gone pretty fast. I—”

“Where?”

“Huh?”

“Where did you shoot her?” I weighed the knife in my hand. It was nice and balanced. I’d had it sharpened just a week ago. It’d cut through his flesh precisely.

“Her stomach.”

“Right where she was growing my baby?” I asked so softly, some members leaned forward to hear me. “Right in the place where your stomach acid can eat away at your body for as long as an hour before you die?”

“It wasn’t that long. I . . . the baby was mine,” he blubbered as I stood over him.

I glanced around the room. Mario was shaking his head, and Cade and Bastian glared at the man in front of me. Everyone either squirmed in their seat because they normally didn’t handle the killing or they looked on excitedly to see the fucker go. When I met his girlfriend’s gaze, I glanced back at him. “What if your little woman over there was pregnant and I gutted her like a fucking fish?”

For a moment, he looked hopeful. “You mean like one for one? I’d be hurt, Rome.” He looked at her with a love so fake I almost laughed at it. “If that’s what it takes, though . . .”

I turned my head toward Katalina. She lifted an eyebrow at me, completely and utterly unfazed by the turn of events. Her mouth kicked up in one corner, and she looked as though she dared me to try.

“Were you part of this, Katie?” I tilted my head toward Jimmy, knowing he was dead as a doornail either way but wanting to know if I needed to kill her too. I would kill everyone to avenge my child.

“Part of my boyfriend continually cheating on me with your girlfriend?” She asked the question in disbelief. A scoff left her mouth, and her face twisted as if she were sick to her stomach before she whispered, “Seriously? Does it even matter?”

I shook my head. This was the shit no person should be a part of. The mob afforded you luxuries, but it plagued you with despondency too.

“The truth will come to light,” she muttered.

“My truth is in his death,” I replied.

She shrugged her shoulders like him dying didn’t mean a thing to her. “No skin off my back.”

“You little bitch!” he spat.

I cut into his stomach. He gasped and scrambled to cover the blood gushing out.

“You reap what you sow. Your stomach acid will kill you if the lack of blood in your veins doesn’t first.”

“You’re fucked in the head.” Tears sprang to Jimmy’s eyes as they bulged at the amount of blood soaking through his shirt. “Sasha told me how you killed all those people, how you’re a monster. She was fucking happy that baby had a chance of not being yours, and I bet she was thankful I killed them both, because a baby by you—”

I took his arm and yanked him off his chair. I snapped the shoulder out of place and sat on his back. I didn’t give him time to recover, jamming the knife into it. “I want you to know that as you’re lying facedown on the cement, you’re getting stabbed in the back just like you stabbed us all in the back.” I got up and let him blubber in his own blood. I walked to Katalina and crossed my arms over my chest. “Want to kiss him goodbye?”

She unfolded her legs. She wore tight dark jeans and pink stilettos that matched her sweater. Suddenly, the stilettos looked fierce, like she’d walked in with sheep’s clothing and now gave me a glimpse of the wolf beneath. Even with those heels, the top of her head barely reached my chin. Still, she went toe-to-toe with me. “I always see my men off. Haven’t you heard?”

With that, she walked over to Jimmy and gripped his arm with both hands. It took the full weight of her body to roll him over.

When he faced her, he mouthed, “Help me.”

She leaned in and whispered, “You got what you deserve.” Then she kissed him on his bloody lips before taking out a gun someone let her bring in. Another point in her favor.

She held it to his head and asked, “Feel familiar?”

His eyes went wide, and then he begged her, “Please do it. I’m in pain, Katalina.”

I almost lunged for her. That man deserved to suffer, but I saw the same posture in her that I had when I stood over someone evil while I had the upper hand. She was relaxed, not coiled to kill.

She looked around the room, everyone watching her. “I want in, Mario.”

He nodded. “It’s a blood oath. Family first, honey. You don’t get out. You bleed, we bleed. You die, we die.”

She nodded slowly as if she knew she didn’t have any other option. For some reason, I almost blurted out to stop, almost tried to tell her she didn’t need to be a part of this.

Yet I saw the hunger in her eyes when she looked back at her boyfriend. She wanted this. She wanted so much more than this.

“Goodbye, Jimmy.” She pulled the trigger.

A few of the boys jumped, ready for the gunshot. All we got was a click. Nothing happened. No bullets were in the chamber. She looked at the gun and shrugged. Then she laughed and laughed as she walked away to sit back down. Jimmy sobbed and begged for anyone to take his life.

Some of the men, ones that had only recently made it into the inner circle, started to squirm. Watching a man turn gray and cold as he bled out wasn’t easy at first. You had to get used to it. He wrenched in pain for a couple of minutes, the stomach acid starting to take effect.

Soon, most everyone lost interest. Some went about their business, talking to one another about other transactions we needed to tie up that day. Mario talked with Bastian and Cade about tomorrow’s plans. Others looked at their phones, handling more affairs.

Katalina and I stared at Jimmy. Every so often, I glanced her way. I saw a new look, one with much less bravado, fall over her features when he coughed up some blood.

She’d put on an amazing act for everyone in the family. She even pulled the trigger, and she must have thought it was loaded. She’d been willing to kill him, but there was a love there too. She was a young girl, still conflicted about her life, and she was going down the wrong damn rabbit hole to figure it out.

“I want to ask the girl some questions,” I whispered to Mario before I approached her.

Mario glanced at her and then me. “She’s a tough little thing, but I really like her, Rome. She’s good people for us. Good to have a woman among us, huh? Maybe she’ll teach us a different perspective.”

“She’s not a woman, Mario. She’s a girl,” I mumbled as I stood.

“Too late now. She’s known too much for too long.” Mario shrugged. “She’ll be like a daughter to me. I’ve always wanted one, and a ruthless one is even better.” A laugh burst from him, and he slapped his meaty, ringed hand across his knee. “The way she pulled that trigger, even I jumped.”

I shook my head, concerned for the very first time that we’d stripped someone of their last straw of innocence.

My black boots clomped across the floor to Katie. I waited for her to turn her attention my way as I stood over her, but her eyes stayed on her boyfriend like he was her world.

“You wanted him dead. What’s so interesting now that he’s dying?”

“I’ve only ever seen a person die exceptionally slowly. This is fast but painfully slow too.”

“You care about him as much as the father you saw dying?”

“Not even a little,” she retorted immediately, and her moon-gray eyes sliced over to me, filled with hate. “I just tried to kill him. Why would you think I cared about him?”

“I saw that. It was a nice act. Now I’ve seen you sitting here staring at him with, what? Is it pity? Love? You love a man who murdered a pregnant woman?”

Her cherry glossed lips pressed together. She stood up so quickly, I heard her knees crack. “I didn’t know he did that.”

I nodded. “I want to believe you, but when you’re born into a family like mine, you remember that everyone lies.”

“There’s no point in lying to you.” She folded her arms over her chest.

“Isn’t there? I could snap you like a twig.” Maybe I wanted to see her quiver under my threats, make her understand that this wasn’t a place for a girl like her. She needed to be afraid. She needed to know that I held the cards here, that this was my family and one of our untouchables had just been touched.

“You could, but you won’t.” She glanced at Mario, who studied us as he talked with his boys. “Mario makes the rules.”

“Most of the time,” I corrected. “When my father was murdered, I became Mario’s right-hand man. I’m the enforcer, the lone wolf of this family who gets to do as I please.”

She shook her head like that wasn’t fair. Yet the family operated the way it did now because Mario had to trust someone with his life and that someone was me. I’d proven my worth. The catch was, when I failed, they would kill me. The mob didn’t favor anyone because of sentiment. They did it because it benefited them.

Katie stared at her dying boyfriend and bit her lip, shaking her head at what I’d told her.

“Do you want to take him to the hospital?” I asked, knowing I was rubbing salt in her wounds. I didn’t care. The pain of losing my ex-fiancée fed the anger I felt toward her.

“I just don’t like suffering, Rome.” She sighed, and some of the confidence left her. “Where’s the bathroom?”

Funny thing about someone who wasn’t a part of the family: they’d ask something like that. They’d think this was a place where there were common amenities for them. Still, I entertained her. I ticked my head toward a white door in a darkened corner with a red exit sign above it. It led to the back hallway. Like a mall, this facility was big and the hallway led to other rooms where we held things no one should be going through. She took one last glance at Jimmy. He was unresponsive now, enough blood having left his body to prevent him from feeling death overtake him.

She shuddered and then stalked forward quickly on her own as if I wasn’t going to lead the way for her.

“Hey!” I yelled after her as she shoved down the handle of the door and barreled through it. One motion sensor long-tube light flickered on. And just as the door closed, Katalina vomited straight into a beat-up trash can that happened to be around the corner.