Page 32 of Sinners Atone
Running a hand over my buzz cut, I let out a hiss through gritted teeth.
If outside is chaos, inside is delusion in its most maddening form. Rafe’s opening a third bottle of whiskey, and Cas is bent over the humidor, talking smack about the cigar collection. And for some reason, I’ve got some cunt with a measuring tape around his neck fiddling with the hem of my pants.
I keep having to resist the itch to give him a swift kick to the jaw.
Rafe appears beside me, bottle angled to my glass. “Need a top up?” He frowns when he realizes my whiskey remains untouched. “What, are you hungover or something?”
Of course not. Alcohol isn’t my vice of choice when I need to dull my thoughts.
Besides, how can I drink at a time like this?
But the lack of a watch on his wrist and the sloppy signatures on the documents I took from his desk and burned this morning tell me he is.
Rough Arabic comes through my earpiece:This is Emile for Commander. Over.
Scanning the grounds, I find Emile beside the truck, staring up at me expectantly, and nod. He nods back, slaps the cab door twice, and the drum on the back groans to life.
Rafe watches in disgust as the cement splutters out of the chute. “Of all the days to work on the lawn.”
“Of all the days to have a fucking wedding,” I grunt back.
He smirks and straightens my bow tie for the third time this morning. “Take the day off, brother. You know what Dante’s like. He couldn’t organize an orgy in a brothel.”
A sour taste brews at the back of my tongue.
My brothers are, well, my brothers, but fuck, they’re ignorant at times.
Raphael Visconti did exactly what our father said he was born to do: take the silver spoon in his mouth and turn it gold. Now he spends his days in a diamond-clad bubble, where the sun always shines, his casinos are always profitable, and his biggest worry is the one-inch scratch on his car from driving like an asshole.
He’s too busy with boardrooms and women to realize that if I ever took a day off, he’d be dead ten times over. Of all times totake a dayoff, today definitely wouldn’t be the day. Not when Angelo decided to pop a cap in Uncle Alberto’s ass and marry his fiancée a few weeks later.
My annoyance shifts from Rafe to Angelo, our oldest brother and Capo of the Devil’s Dip outfit. He was born to lead, and turns out, born to be a pain in my ass too.
He could have delayed the wedding. He could have done it behind closed doors or over Zoom for all I care. But no, he wanted a grand affair with champagne, cigars, and whiskey. In the middle of the damn National Reserve, where there’re over forty blind spots and sixteen entrances to secure, with a guest list including every extended family member we’re on speaking terms with. He wanted plus-ones, an orchestra, and an eight-course meal by a chef flown in from Italy, all of whom needed to be surveyed, searched, and swept.
It’s a logistical nightmare.
But neither Angelo nor Rafe have thought about that.
It’s not what they were born to do.
“What are you doing down there, anyway?”
Irritation flares up behind my ribs. Rafe loves a shit joke. They make up every other line of his wedding speech, but I can tell by his blank stare that this isn’t one of them.
I glance down at the tailor, who flashes me a nervous smile, then glare at Rafe. This is why his pool boy ended up hog-tied in the trunk of my car. He has no problem running his mouth around staff, then he wonders why they keep on disappearing.
“Top secret.”
“Ah,” he murmurs against the rim of his tumbler. “Gabe Visconti and his chamber of secrets.”
I’d laugh at how close to home his comment hits, but that gene skipped me. Even if it hadn’t, war is coming. And there’s nothing funny about that.
Rafe slaps me on the back, mutters something sarcastic about it being a good chat, then strolls over to Cas, who’s now sprawled in an armchair, running his nose along the length of a Cuban.
I crack my neck, but it does little to release the tension knotting it. I’m wound tight and burning beneath the surface, and not because I’m waiting for gunfire to ring out at any moment—that’s background noise at this point.
It’sHer.
