At forty-two, and as the leader of New Jersey’s most influential and profitable mafia syndicate, life could get pretty dull sometimes. For that reason, I liked to switch things up a little here and there.
My business flourished by employing a personal touch to keep my clients in line, and it worked well for my men, too. Whether that was torturing information out of someone myself, showing up at a christening to bestow my blessing, or carrying out the odd assassination personally, it paid to be unpredictable in this game.
I was expecting to drop by the warehouse on Clements Drive and see my busy worker bees getting my product ready for distribution. Imagine my surprise at seeing a group of rival cartel members on their knees, surrounded by my armed guards.
Today was turning out to be more fun than I’d expected.
“Atlantic City is a place where you can be whoever you want to be, or so people say.” I perched a hip against a beat-up vintage Chevy sitting in the dark parking lot behind the warehouse. On paper, Renato De Sanctis didn’t own a single thing in AC. In reality, I was closing in on half the strip. The other half was owned by a bunch of billionaires who needed me to clean their money. The casinos I didn’t own, I ran. Making money had always been my talent. Well, that and keeping order.
The man cowering before me worked for the Castillo cartel, a group who was determined to pump illicit chemicals into the casino scene. My casino scene. Nobody sold to my clientele except me.
Behind the man, about twenty of his lackeys waited to see what would go down. We’d cornered them along the north shore, far too close to the warehouse where we received some of our shipments. The cartel cockroaches were growing bolder all the time. I’d diligently stamped out every single one I’d uncovered, but I was far from finding the head.
The man before me was sweating. I could smell him. He shifted in his shiny white sneakers that probably cost as much as his rent. Sneakers, at his age. Alas, the old adage was true. Money couldn’t buy class. Or brains, for that matter.
“Who says that?” he asked, stalling for time.
I waved my hand in the air. “People. People say it.” They certainly hadn’t handed out spare IQ points when this guy had been born.
“I don’t know people,” he muttered, his eyes shifting to the side. He was trying to work out how to walk away from this alive. He didn’t realize that was a futile hope.
“Of course you don’t. The real question is, if you could be anything you wanted to be here, in this great, neon mecca for human greed and gluttony, what would you be?”
He licked his lips. “Look, man, we weren’t touching your stuff. We were searching for someone, a kid—”
“The older generation ushering in the new. While I love traditions, I wouldn’t lie to me, unless you want me to make it hurt.”
He blinked at me, trying in vain to decipher my meaning. It seemed clear as fucking day to me, but much like idiots who smoked and then were surprised when they got cancer, no one expected death to be imminent. If we truly understood the risk we took leaving the house every single day, we’d never cross the threshold. The truth was that humans were very breakable creatures, and this world was full of danger.
“I’m not lying. One of the new recruits, Miguel – he went missing. Last we heard, he was hanging out here, Clements Drive. We just want to know what happened to him.”
“Skipped out with some product, did he?” I asked.
I didn’t give a shit what had happened to a young, wannabe cartel cretin, but a subtle glance at my second-in-command ordered him to check it out. We couldn’t have the Castillos sniffing around our drop sites. The police were all over the new cartel, trying to root them out of the state. Unlike me, they had no connections in law enforcement who could look the other way, destroy evidence, and even make the odd body disappear now and again, and that was just the way I liked it.
I was the King of Atlantic City, and the capo dei capi of New Jersey, and no one would take that title from me. No one.
I stood, having gotten what I wanted from the conversation. My men shifted around me.
“Regardless, Castillos don’t come around my property. I trust you’ll give that message to your patrón.”
The sucker actually looked relieved. “I will, I promise, man. No problem.”
I loomed over the man. “I misspoke. I meant your worthless body and those of your men will send the message nicely.”
After that, all hell broke loose.
I ended the man I’d been questioning, the head of his little group, with a sharp slice to the jugular. I almost always carried a knife, and my thin stiletto blade was like an extension of my hand. The only thing I disliked about this method of killing was the gush of warm blood that hit my hand afterward. For that reason, I wore black leather gloves.
His face was frozen in a comically shocked expression. Once his body hit the ground, his men jumped into action. Some of them swung for me. Elio, my second, my bodyguard, and my most trusted man, intercepted, snapping necks and kicking out knees as he went.
My men were so well trained, I didn’t have to slow my pace as I strode from the parking lot. They cut down every attack without a single blow landing on their target. Me.
As the son of one of the richest, most vicious mafiosos in the country, I’d been a target my entire life. I was used to being a target, and my men acted accordingly. If you had an ounce of survival instinct, you didn’t dare come close.
Just the way I liked it.
In my office in La Leonora, my favorite casino – one of the oldest in the De Sanctis portfolio and named after my mother – the other member of my inner circle, Giada, waited behind my desk. She had her feet up, her shitkicker boots on the dark wood, and chewed bubble gum. She blew a perfect pink bubble just as we walked through the doors.
“Move,” I snapped at her.
Sometimes she felt more like my younger sister than my real sibling did. Sofia Chernova, formerly De Sanctis, lived in Maine with a crazy Russian gangster and their two children. As much as I’d struggled to trust Nikolai Chernov, – the Russian bratva gangster who’d become obsessed with my younger sister – we’d come to respect each other over the years. Besides, his bloodthirsty nature and talent for violence had earned him a reputation that ensured Sofia’s life remained unthreatened. Nikolai was known as the Palach, the executioner, and he was a powerful player to have in the family.
Giada, on the other hand – was my sottocapo, Elio’s, mouthy, hot-tempered younger sister – and was sometimes more of a liability than anything else. Despite that, she was family, and one of the few people who wasn’t scared to talk back to me. She had bigger balls than the rest of the made men in the family in that regard, and I respected that. She was also a tech genius.
She grinned at me and poked a hole in the bubble so it sagged against her chin.
“Say please,” she laughed.
I headed around the table toward her. She shot up, planting her boots on the carpet with a wink before sashaying away. I’d yet to find a subject that Giada took seriously.
Elio glowered at his younger sister. “Giada,” he muttered in warning.
“Oh, please, stop being boring! So,’ she sat down on the couch and leaned back, holding her face in her hands, ‘who did you kill?’
Elio snorted. “How do you know we killed anyone?”
“Ren is wearing his killing gloves, and I just have an instinct for these things. The real question is, why didn’t you invite me?” Giada sighed and sank into the leather. She turned to stare at the huge picture window that overlooked the strip. “I never get to do fun things. If I’d known there was a glass ceiling in the mob, I would have just worked for a bank or something.”
“Feel free to go and do that,” I deadpanned.
She rolled her eyes. “Maybe I will. Though, it won’t pay well, and do banks really need hackers? On second thought, I’ll just rent out my services to the highest bidder. Freelance hacking for criminals, that’s a thing, right?”
“Yeah, a thing that’ll get you killed. Did you eat?” Elio asked, falling into his usual dynamic with his little sister.
It was funny to think of Giada as little anything, considering how dangerous she was. I’d seen her torture men and laugh when they cried. They were bad men, sure, but still. Very few could find humor in human suffering. Besides being slightly unhinged, she was brilliant. Technology came to life under her talented fingertips, and there was nothing she couldn’t achieve with Wi-Fi, a laptop, and a steady supply of energy drinks.
“Of course, I ate. You think I don’t know how to take care of myself?”
“Last time you were working hard on something, you forgot to eat for four days and fainted in the shower,” Elio reminded his sister. “It took two men to get your wet, naked ass downstairs.”
“So what? It was probably the best day of their lives. Think of it as a charitable donation, helping ugly fuckers see some real tits and ass, instead of all the crap they watch online or at a club.” Giada grinned at her brother’s impassive face. Only a ticking muscle in his jaw showed his irritation.
“As entertaining as this is, I presume you’re here to update me on the Castillo situation?” I interrupted and stripped off my black gloves, finger by finger, before dropping them in the trash can beneath my desk. Taking a cigarette out, I lit up and inhaled the nicotine. It felt good crashing into my bloodstream. I only allowed myself to smoke after killing someone. A fucked up version of a postcoital smoke.
Giada nodded and pulled her laptop out of her bag. “Here’re the people they’re paying off to look the other way.”
“Make me a list of their names…Call it ‘Who to kill for being a fucking idiot,’” I sighed.
How anyone, no matter how much power they had in the normal world or how many billions they had in the bank, thought they could get their drugs from someone else at a cheaper rate in my city was baffling. Undercutting me was tantamount to suicide. Clearly, they were too dumb to live anyway, so I was really doing the planet a favor by wiping them out, hopefully before they procreated. Survival of the fittest in action.
“Your title is a little clunky…Let’s call it the Kill List,” Giada said thoughtfully.
“Whatever.” I clamped my cigarette between my teeth, picked up the small bottle of lighter fluid I kept on my desk, and squirted it into the fireproof trash can.
“Also, I prefer Excel,” Giada continued.
I gave her a dark look and flicked my lit cigarette into the trash can, watching my bloodstained gloves go up in flames.
“Giada,” I warned quietly.
She simply laughed. “Okay, boss, don’t get your boxers in a bunch. One Kill List spreadsheet coming right up.” She pushed herself to her feet, making sure to fix her tight black T-shirt where it had ridden up. Giada liked to dress her curvaceous body in skintight clothes. Those clothes on a body like hers pulled men’s eyes wherever she strutted, and it stressed Elio out. Causing her older brother anxiety was one of Giada’s favorite hobbies, so it worked out well for her.
After she left, Elio approached. He’d had his head buried in a tablet, and now, his lips had become a thin line of worry.
“What is it?” I asked, reading his mood immediately.
“I pulled up the CCTV of the warehouse on Clements Drive. The kid was there, and he wasn’t alone.”
Elio placed the tablet before me, and we both watched. The dumb Castillo goon wandered into the warehouse, and a little shadow followed him. In the grainy night-vision glow, I made out a girl, probably in her teens.
We observed the girl hide, and then saw two De Sanctis men, Tony Guardini and Aldo Vasi, move into the frame. They’d been there to make sure there weren’t any problems with the shipment. I’d recently taken them off the more face-to-face tasks that my men carried out, because lately they’d been getting a little too trigger happy. The video then showed them dragging the boy into the room. The shot was loud, even on the recording.
I didn’t have an opinion about killing the boy. He worked for the Castillos, and he was on my property, trying to take my product. But still, Tony Guardini was on thin ice. He’d been explicitly told not to kill anyone without my say-so. The most dangerous thing to have on your books was an armed man who you couldn’t control. It was bad for the De Sanctis reputation, and worse, it came off like I couldn’t rein in my men.
They left the body there, probably calling on our family cleaners to take care of it. I stared at the video a long time, until a small movement caught my attention.
Ah, that’s right. The girl.
She crept out from underneath a crate. She had been off camera for so long, I’d nearly forgotten about her. Just when I expected her to turn tail and run, another figure appeared.
A woman. She was older than the first one, but not by much. She gripped the younger girl’s hand tightly, her body curving around her like a protective shield. A sister?
“Call in Guardini and Vasi and let them know they fucked up. They need to answer for it.”
“And the women?”
In the video, they crept toward the door, the eldest’s face becoming clearer as she moved right under the camera. I reached out and paused the video just as she looked to her right, her face beautifully framed by the darkness around her. The classical lines of her face pleased the art lover in me. I stabbed a finger at her graceful profile.
“Bring her to me.”
