Mafia Heir

Chapter 7

Luca

New York City.

It was really only across the bridge from me, but as I stood at the window staring out at the smoggy skyline, it felt a million miles away. Charlotte was there somewhere. It was where she lived, where she worked, where she walked down the concrete sidewalks sipping coffee with friends. Where she grocery shopped, where she sat on a sunny bench in the park catching up on emails, listening to the sounds of the city around her. At least that was what I imagined her doing—and what my weeks of surveillance had discovered. I put her on watch under the guise that it was for her protection, but my reasoning was twofold. I wanted her safe, but I also wanted to know absolutely everything about her.

It had been five long weeks since she left, and Silvano's men seemed to have forgotten all about her—something I wished I could do. She had gone back to work at the gallery almost immediately. Tuesdays and Thursdays she took a yoga class, Wednesdays she stayed late to close the gallery. And Fridays were reserved for drinks with a few of her friends at a local bar where she liked to sip on margaritas until her cheeks turned the sweetest shade of pink. I even sent Marco to Rhode Island with her when she went to visit her family. It was almost unfathomable to me how routine and normal her life was, and even more unfathomable that she seemed to enjoy it. I hadn't heard so much as a peep from her in the time that she'd been gone, and as surprising as that was, maybe it was for the best.

Charlotte's life was amongst the bustling streets and the shadows of skyscrapers within those city limits. In her routine, in her cookie cutter, predictable life. In her normalcy. It was where her entire world existed, and mine was here. On the outside looking in. An outsider, an imposter, a wolf among sheep.

The sound of crushing bone from behind me was the starkest reminder of that. This was my normalcy. It was in the danger and the chaos and the mayhem that I thrived. There was nothing predictable or mundane about my day-to-day life, and that was exactly how I liked it. We were both where we belonged, and I needed to remember that. The hold she had on me was infuriating, and it was starting to interfere with my work. The longer I let my infatuation with Charlotte Parker go on, the lesser of a leader I became.

Forcing my thoughts of her to the side, I whirled around, facing the challenge in front of me like I always did. And today that challenge came in the form of a man named Rex. Rex was a contractor we used for clean-up occasionally, and he had bene busted a few weeks ago for a DUI. It was his third, which in the state of New York, meant he was looking at a seven-year prison sentence. Instead of keeping his filthy mouth shut, he sang like a damn canary, and gave the police the location of one of my storage facilities. It wasn't illegal to ship parts of guns the way we did, and it was mostly unregulated, so much to the dismay of the NYPD, they couldn't actually nail me with a crime. Instead, they just confiscated the parts we had stored there, and now I was out nearly five million dollars. I could have sold those parts for ten times what I had paid for it, and now that I was out that money, something had to give. The man barely had a hundred dollars to his name, and he could work for a thousand more years and never recoup that kind of money. So unfortunately for Rex, that meant he had to pay in other ways.

I had been raised inside of the Romano crime syndicate, and one of values we prided ourselves on was only killing those who deserved it. But if you were stupid enough to cross us, we were also the most ruthless. Most of the dirty work was done by my father as an enforcer and Capo to Antonio. Antonio was fairly hands off when it came to this kind of thing, but that wasn't how I did business. I had my hand in everything, and there wasn't a side of this business I didn't participate in. There was nothing I'd ask my men to do that I wouldn't do myself, but that was only part of this. I wanted my face to be last thing these motherfuckers saw as they died. I wanted to send a very personal message to anyone who thought they could betray us. I played the stone-cold part well, and our family's reputation wasn't going to lag on my watch.