Page 58 of Dirty Mafia Torment
We banter back and forth in English and Italian, their English oozing sexiness while my Italian is rough around the edges.
Bianca’s gorgeous, bold, full of life, and a warm welcome to Italy. Camilla’s equally pretty, more reserved yet every bit as fun. Both are beautiful, ambitious free spirits living life.
Dolce Vita does exist outside the movies, I’m learning. There’s a whole new world outside the Life, where a woman isn’t an afterthought or a bartering chip.
I’m grateful, so damn grateful to have landed here. For their friendship. And for this lucrative job—Aunt Teresa’s restaurant’s always packed.
Bianca nudges me. “Are you ready for a taste of Roman nightlife?”
Her boyfriend owns a club that’s literally a hop, skip, and jump away. He’s handsome, older, rich, and a major player, Camilla tells me.
Bianca says he’s hung like a goddamn stallion and makes her sit on his face while he eats her out.
My mind flashes to another man. Someone I thought I knew. But now, looking back, I’m not sure any of it was real. I saw what I wanted to see, painted him in colors he never earned and didn’t deserve. I gave him my virginity. He gave me excuses and one hell of a vanishing act.
What remains is a bitter lesson.
Pleasure at his hands comes at a cost.
But the pain he brings for free.
“A night out is exactly what I need,” I answer Bianca with more force than necessary. A new city, with new faces and new flirtations, sounds like the perfect escape.
An opportunity to forget him, and everything between then and now.
CHAPTER TEN
RENZO
The barber steps back,finished with brushing talc from my nape.
I stare into the shop mirror, looking more like Sandro than myself. Cropped hair, freshly shaven, draped in a new designer suit I purchased late yesterday afternoon, after the meeting at the restaurant. I look the part of a ruthless capo di tutti capi’s son.
But there’s a new spring in my step for a different reason.
This morning, I initiated my plan of modernizing the Eleven. I’m now the proud owner of a million-dollar kill box. I’ve stitched together a fleet of drones, half spy tech, half battlefield monsters. DJI Mavic 3s, with wide-view lenses for clean daytime surveillance. The Switchblade 300s, with thermal imaging for nighttime hunting and grenade-sized warheads for impromptu strikes. These babies don’t just track, they end.
It’s the Warmates I’m most excited about. Sleek, fixed-wing bastards that circle like vultures, silent and patient. They can stay inthe air for over an hour, watch everything, strike hard. Doesn’t matter if it’s armored tanks, white cargo vans filled with stolen pistachios, or armed mafiosi vehicles on lookout. One press of a button and, poof, problem solved.
No fingerprints. No fucking DNA. No clue what just happened.Was it a lightning strike? Bad luck, that.
Who needs satellites when you’ve got death on autopilot?
My morning transitioned into an equally successful early afternoon. I hired my first team members, starting with a knobby-kneed sixteen-year-old tech wizard. Doubtful the kid or his friends even understand who I am or who they’ll be working for. Book smarts, meet the king of streetwise. But green around the ears or not, their robotics team placed first in Italy with knobby-knees as pilot. And hey, I’m all about investing in the future generation.
In two days, surveillance begins on Vito Cardini.
Within the next two nights, I’ll be a made man.
By week’s end, shit will hit the fan. Because no one, especially not my father, likes a skimmer.
I rise from the barber’s chair a new man. A horn honks as I exit the shop, as if Rome agrees that everything’s at my fingertips.
It takes five minutes to reach the club. A woman on cleanup flashes me a smile over her shoulder as she wipes a table. I pause to admire the view before heading to Dante’s office.
Smile in place, I push inside.
He greets me with a stare that doesn’t blink, doesn’t soften, just drills straight through me like he’s contemplating ending me. At last, he speaks. “Do I have stupid stranzo written on my fucking forehead?”
