Page 28 of Broken Mafia Prince
“All you haveto do is get in, locate the safe box here, attach the device to unlock it, grab the bag, and get out.” Emilio runs his fingers down the roughly sketched map on the desk.
“What about guards?” I ask, studying the layout carefully.
“They’ll all be focused on the arriving shipment and protecting the drugs. Don’t worry about them, just do your part and get out.”
Of all the men in my father’s employ, Emilio’s my favorite. He’s the head of my father’s security, a no-nonsense man with his head screwed on straight. He’s sharp when it comes to the business, and I’ve caught him reading a book a few times, which explains how he has that extra edge in this world.
Right now, he’s staring at me with searching eyes, and I know exactly what he’s looking for: hesitation, doubt, and fear.
“Can you do this, Raffaele?” the man asks, mouth pressed into a thin line.
The wordnorises in my throat, but before it can even make its way out, my father’s voice cuts in.
“Of course he can do it,” he snaps. “What kind of question is that? He has no choice but to do it. He’s a man now, and he has to prove himself as one. You think I’m going to hand over my business someday to someone who can’t even retrieve a package from a warehouse?”
This isn’t retrieval, I want to say—it’s theft. But I’m smart enough to know those words won’t go over well, so I swallow them down with a dozen other protests.
“Father, I think?—”
“He’ll do it,” he growls, his cold blue eyes narrowing at me. “And he’ll return with the item, or so help me god, boy…”
He doesn’t say the rest, but a shiver of apprehension goes down my spine at the inferred threat. I don’t doubt that he’ll follow through with a fitting punishment if I fail. To a man like Edoardo Gagliardi, his son isn’t just a person—he’s a legacy. And a failure in that legacy is worse than having no son at all.
He already sees me as his greatest disappointment, and he’d rather not have a son than have one who makes him look bad.
Everything for him is about appearance and his ego. He can’t stand not being the most successful, the most feared, the most respected. And I know that I’m the aberration to his perfect plan.
“You’ll be fine,” the head of security says, folding up the map. He hands it to me, and I accept it with shaky hands, swallowing around the boulder in my throat.
“Give him the gun,” Father says, blowing cigar smoke into the air. For the rest of my life, I’ll always associate the smell of Cuban cigars with him, and it’ll forever make my stomach roll with discomfort.
“The gun?” Emilio hesitates, his brows furrowed.
Father nods. “All that training he’s been doing, it’s time to put it into action.”
“I don’t want to shoot anybody,” I blurt out.
I realize a second later that it’s the wrong thing to say. Father’s eyes frost over as he sets his cigar down in the ashtray.
“With all your faults I already have to put up with, don’t add being a pussy to it,” he hisses. “Give him the damn gun.”
This time around, Emilio doesn’t hesitate to pull out a Glock from his waistband and hold it out to me. I take it from him, my hands clammy. The gun feels unusually heavy in my hand, and I know it’s because this time, I won’t be shooting at a marked dummy.
It’s not just a weapon now—it’s a promise I don’t want to keep.
I hope to god I won’t have to use the gun.
Get in, get the package, and get out.Facile.
The confidence that had filled me in my father’s study deserts me as soon as I find myself crouching behind a crate in a dark warehouse, trying not to breathe too loudly.
Two men sit a distance away, speaking in rapid Russian. One of them is showing the other something on his phone, and the sound of their laughter rings through the space. A glance at my watch reveals that I’ve been waiting for almost half an hour for the men to move away.
I only have about thirty more minutes before the men supervising the offloading of the shipment return and then I’ll be screwed. There are two options: I can either say fuck it and abandon this mission, or I can take my chances and hope the two men will be too distracted to notice me.
“Fuck it,” I mutter, inching toward the back of the building.
There’s a door at the far end that leads into a smaller room according to the layout Emilio gave me. Back there is the safe box containing the item I’m to retrieve.
