I bring the stale cigarette to my mouth and inhale. I don’t know why I still keep this pack hidden on the deck, it’s a disgusting habit, but I needed one. I needed something.

I still need something. I need something that will take my mind off what I had to say to Felony to push her away. But what other choice did I have? She was on her knees in front of my uncle, looking up at me like I could be her goddamn hero.

I’m nobody’s hero.

I gave her enough money to leave and start a whole new life somewhere else and she didn’t leave. She stayed here for me.

Here, where the Russians are picking the Italians off one at a time. Mutilating and gutting us out in the open. Tony’s been talking about a retaliation; a big one. But he doesn’t know whom to trust.

Thing is, I don’t know whom to trust either. And the things that Tony said about Felony—the way he treated her in front of me—that meant he didn’t trust me either. He was trying to see what I would do. Going against a boss over a woman, it’s not happening. I’m hoping I got him to see I’m still trustworthy.

And I’m hoping I can get her out of here. I just don’t understand it. She’s not getting anything out of working for Tony, she’s not working the parties or renting her pussy out, so why is she still here?

My cellphone vibrates on the table next to me.

It’s a group text message from Junior.

“What the fuck does he want?”

I swipe open the message and an image pops up. It’s a picture of Junior. His throat slit open from ear to ear.

Jesus.

I glance quickly at the numbers of the people in the group text. Me. Tony. Enzo. Salvatore. Carlo. They’re all getting this text the same time as me. They’re the names of the rest of the guys that made up Tony Fretolli’s crew.

How are the Russians getting so close to us?

I zoom up on the picture of Junior and the shock of what I see makes me physically ill, bile threating and bitter at the back of my tongue.

Junior’s throat isn’t slit; it is completely severed from the rest of his body, propped up by a blood-soaked pillow, with a cigar shoved in between his clenched yellow teeth.

Junior was a big guy. What kind of a man or group of men would do this to him? Could do this to him?

I click out of the picture, and there just underneath are three little balls, happily bouncing up and down. Someone is writing a message.

The bile churns in my gut, frothing and bubbling.

Another text message appears.

If one of you had to choose the next one of you to die, who would you chose?

Nobody wants to answer?

Not one of your guys would sacrifice themselves for you, Tony?

I know you’re reading the messages. They all have a read receipt next to them.

Maybe I’ll just get you all in the same place and blow all you pieces of shit up.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. BOOM.

I jerk when the phone rings, breaking the silence and my frozen stunned stare at the words. It’s a number I’m familiar with—a burner phone Tony got himself a few days ago. He made me memorize it in case there was trouble.

Jesus, now there’s more trouble than ever.

“Yeah?” I answer the phone.

I can hear Tony breathing heavily on the other end. “Club in twenty,” he says, then ends the call.

I change clothes quickly and head out, wondering if this is a meeting or another body. I’m on autopilot the whole drive, until I stop at a red light and reread the text messages on my cellphone. I enlarge the picture of Junior again, but this time I’m trying to see where he is. There’s a brown couch and a cream pillow—the same ones from his house.

How did someone get in Junior’s house? His security system is insane.

I park half-assed in the lot. Something I always rag on the other guys about, but this time I don’t care. Junior’s security system comes with video cameras and one of those doorbells that records everyone who walks by on the street. We can get these motherfuckers before they take out any more of our guys.

Tony’s pacing in his office. Enzo and Sal are sitting on the couch with heavy expressions and Carlo walks in right behind me.

“Shut the door, hurry up,” Tony snaps.

“It was at his house, wasn’t it, Tony?” I blurt out, holding out my phone with the image on the screen. “Look at that couch and pillows. That’s Junior’s place.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, get that picture away from me,” Carlo roars, shoving my hand away from him. “This is the carnival massacre all over again, I don’t want to see that shit.”

I turn to Tony, who’s lighting a cigar, his eyes puffy and red.

“Tony, you know as well as I do Junior has that crazy security system. It records everything.”

Tony nods his head and points his cigar in my direction, “Yeah, yeah. Corrado, you’re right. You remember, Sal? That’s how he caught Frannie sucking that guy’s cock when he was in Vegas.”

Sal shrugs, “Tony, I don’t remember. Frannie sucked everybody’s cock. Even mine. She was a great cocksucker, he never should have divorced her.”

“Okay, listen. I’m not hearing anything about this. Nobody on the street is talking,” Tony says, low. “Is anybody hearing anything?”

We all look at one another and shake our heads.

Tony stops pacing and sits heavily on the chair behind his desk, taking a long deep pull off his cigar. There’s half a glass of dark amber liquid in front of him and he swallows its contents in one big gulp, hissing out the heat. “Corrado, remember when you took care of Pattie?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“What did he say to you?” he asks, twirling the empty glass in his hand.

“Pattie said you were buying kids, little ones off the black market, and selling them. He said he was doing some paperwork for you and you were making money.”

“Adoption,” he says, expressively. “I was helping couples who couldn’t have kids.

He’s lying. I know by the way he smiles. “Noble cause, Uncle Tony.” I lean back against the shelves in his office, blocking the pictures of our family and the stupid trinkets he’s collected over the years. One photo is of me, Angelo, and Giana sitting at the restaurant that used to occupy this building, all of us slurping up mouthfuls of spaghetti. Angelo Fretolli was one of the best cooks I ever knew, authentic Italian food like you’d find in Italy. A real stand-up place until Tony turned it into what it is today.

Don’t get me wrong, we’ve always been mafia. The Fretolli family was one of the five organized crime families that had control over New York. There were books and television shows about us in the early years. Back then, the family’s chief criminal enterprises included drug trafficking, labor rackets, extortion, loan-sharking, and gun running.

Nothing like what Tony has his hands in today.

Tony opens his mouth to say something and I cut him off, “But that’s not all he said, if you remember correctly.”

Tony holds a blank expression. He’s always been good at that.

“He said the Russians stopped working with you when you bought some kind of—” I chuckle and rub the back of my neck. See, Tony taught me how to lie as well as him. I shake my head, like it’s the most absurd thing that could ever pass through my lips. “What the fuck did he call it?” I snap my fingers. “Oh shit, yeah. He called it a bio-chemical weapon.” I make straight eye contact with him. “Like you bought a jar of fucking Anthrax or something—something so fucking crazy even the Russians didn’t want to deal with it.”

He rubs his hand over his mouth. The other guys in the room are silent and they’re watching this back and forth between us, and we’re talking like there’s nobody here but the two of us. “I got a tip on a new medicine. A new type of chemo. The FDA won’t approve it here.”

Piece of shit liar. “I knew it, I knew it had to be something that would change the world, Uncle Tony. You,” I say smiling so wide at him, it’s just about killing me inside, “You’re like a fucking hero. A real hero.”

“So,” Carlo says, “if this is what it is, why is someone executing all the made men in this family?”

“Is it one of the other territories? Should we go to the Commission with this?”

“The Commission,” Tony laughs. “There hasn’t been anything said between families. Jesus, they don’t even know what’s happening.”

“So who the hell is it?”

Tony shakes his head. “It’s got to be the Russians. They want to take over the club, those fucking assholes come in here every night to watch the girls.” Tony smiles at me again—a real smile. “Especially to watch your girl, Corrado.”

I’m watching the club with sixteen rounds of hate just waiting for someone to look at me cross to use it.

But nothing happens. Nobody who looks even remotely Russian walks in.

The club doesn’t get crowded. The only crazy thing that happens is Candy has too much to drink and somehow falls on her ass in front of a group of construction workers still dressed in their bright orange overalls.

I don’t even have to handle it. Felony is by her side immediately, scooping her up off the floor and scolding the men who didn’t help at all. I don’t know what she says to them, but the shame is clear as day on their faces, and when they leave there’s a two-hundred-dollar tip left on the table for each of them.

Two hundred dollars.

My fists clench and rage boils in my blood thinking about every asshole in this place putting a price tag on her. Two hundred is nothing, not when it comes to Felony.

I wish she just took the money I gave her and left. It would do my dick good not to see her dance. It’s not even the dancing, I get rock hard when she walks past in that worn-out, oversized men’s camouflage coat she wears.

Now when her sets come on, I make myself busy in the office. That’s where Tony finds me when he gets back from checking out Junior’s place. I may have been on my tenth game of Solitaire—but I don’t own up to it.

“What did you find?” I ask, sliding my phone back into my pocket.

“What did I find? What did I find,” he says, as he walks in and heads straight for the mini bar. He exhales a loud breath and pours himself a glass of whiskey and pulls up one of the chairs in front of his desk to sit on. “I found out that these people know their way around alarm systems.” He squints his eyes at me. “It looked like magic. There’s footage of Junior’s living room with an empty sofa with a half-eaten box of pepperoni pizza on his coffee table. Then the scene cuts to Junior. Decapitated.”

“What about the outside cameras? The doorbell camera?”

“We found nothing.” He pours more whiskey, swallows it back and repeats. “We did, however, find the rest of Junior’s body.”

“I’m not going to want to hear this, am I?”

Tony shrugs. He looks pale, and for the first time I’ve seen in my life, frightened. “He was propped on his bed, naked under his robe with his hand wrapped around part of his dick.”

“Part of his dick?”

“Yeah, the other part? Well, let’s just what we thought was a cigar in his mouth, wasn’t a cigar at all.”

There’s nothing I can think to say to that. I just hold my head in my hands wishing I could just get the fuck out of here and take Felony with me.

“Go home for the night, Corrado. Tomorrow, I’m calling the rest of the families for a sit down. Whoever this is got themselves into a war they’re not going to win.”

It’s midnight and there’s someone knocking lightly on my door. I’m in my jeans and nothing else, stretched out across my bed watching Netflix when I hear it.

Do killers knock?

Tony never knocks when he wants to get in a room. Why the fuck would the Russians? Maybe they got manners.

I slide my gun off the nightstand and carry it in my hand. I’m not shoving it down my waistband like I usually would. Fuck that. If I’m dying tonight, someone’s coming with me.

I look through the peephole and all I see is a mess of wild black hair half tied up into a bun.

“Hey,” Felony says when I open the door.

“What’s going on? Everything okay?” I ask, searching the hallway and staircase behind her.

“Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Um…Tony just asked me to drop this off to you on my way home.” She hands me a thick manila envelope. “He…he still thinks we’re together, so I mean, I guess that’s why he sent me here.” She laughs nervously. “I didn’t know where you lived, I had to ask the girls. They didn’t know either. Well, Tatiana did. She told me. I…I didn’t want to ask Tony because that would look…” Her eyes look so wide and innocent, it makes me want to pull her inside.

“Yeah, good call. Tatiana’s probably the only one of the girls who knows where I live. She stayed here for a few weeks. Her boyfriend roughed her up pretty bad one night…so I helped her out.” I take the envelope, I know what’s inside—it’s probably ten to twenty grand for me to put aside for Tony’s extra-curricular activities from his wife.

“You’re a real stand-up guy.”

I can’t help stare at her. She’s in my doorway and all I want to do is kiss her but the need to shove her far away is stronger.

“You’re alone?” she asks.

Shit. “Yeah,” my voice cracks.

"Why is that?" she asks in a whisper.

"I'm the only one I trust." I don’t mean to say it, but it comes out—the truth.

"Want some company for a bit?" she asks softly.

Her eyes trail down to my chest and stop and stare. I know what she sees. She sees two names written in thick dark script. Angelo and Giana. Her eyes travel down across the scar I got from a knife fight when I was seventeen, then back up to the names. She takes a step closer and skims a finger over Angelo, then Giana. My entire body shivers. "Someone important?" she asks.

"They were everything to me."

Her brow creases. She doesn’t understand. “They are everything to you? Or they were?” She takes another step closer and crosses the threshold to my apartment. Shit, if she stays…

“Are, they still are. They were both murdered. Years ago. You’ve heard the stories and we’ve talked about—”

“You had their names tattooed on you all this time? Why?”

I rub my hand over Giana’s name. “So I never forget them. So they’ll be a part of me until I see them again. So they could live on, here, with me.”

She pushes past me in to the apartment. Her expression is unreadable. I’m not sure if she’s jealous. I would understand that. She’s up against a ghost, and the truth is, no one will ever match up to either of them. No friend, no brother, and no lover. I’m going to die alone. Just like Angelo and Giana did.

“If you could have them back, would you?”

I stepped back. “What kind of question is that?”

“If you could have one more day with them—if you could—”

My heart pounds in my ears. My chest aches with fire. What the fuck kind of questions are these? “The day I would choose would be that day. The day they died. If I could, I would jump in front of those bullets and take each and every one.” I can barely spit out the words. “If I could just have one more day with my best friend, Jesus. I would do anything. But Gi? I’d give up everything—anything just to have one fucking night with her—with the woman she should have been if she fucking lived. And my sisters? God, my baby sisters.”

Fuck my life. I said too much shit. I’m breathless, unstable, and raw. Everyone around me is dying—being hunted like animals—and all I’m worrying about is her and getting her away from it all.

And she’s standing here in front of me with this deep intensity about her, living, breathing and so fucking beautiful.

“That’s why I want you gone. It would kill me if anything ever happened to you.”