Page 4 of Betrayal of the Mafia Rebel
My shoulders crowd the cramped walls. I'm built for one purpose. Violence. I catch my reflection in the cracked mirror hanging over the rusted utility sink. Short-cropped dark hair, silvered at the temples in the Costa wayn. My father's dark eyes staring back at me. Deep. Restless.
Dangerous. My mother's sharp jawline, locked so tight the bone threatens to crack under the pressure. The roaring lion inked into my skin borders my left bicep. The thick gold chain with its medallion rests heavy at my throat, catching the pathetic light. A monster in a cage. That's what I am.
I yank the encrypted burner phone from my pocket. My thumb punches in the sequence. Three rings. Santi picks up. No greeting. Just the hollow static of a secure line.
"43rd street docks," I bark. The words tear out of my throat like shattered glass. "Run a sweep. Deep scan. Tell me what the Bellantis are moving through terminal four. Do it now."
Santi does not ask questions. The line clicks dead. That's the beauty of my brother. We don't need to speak to go to war.
I toss the phone onto the desk. It spins on the scratched metal. I pace. Three steps to the concrete wall. Pivot. Three steps back to the door. The walls press in. I can't stand still. The blood roars in my ears. She gave me the docks. She offered the intel like a shield, daring me to test it.
If the intel is fake, she's bait. A trap set by her family to draw us out. And if that's true, I get to kill her. The thought should bring me peace. It brings me the kind of rage that scares me. Theidea of snapping her neck makes my stomach heave. The idea of anyone else touching her makes my vision go black at the edges.
The damp cold of the speakeasy seeps into my bones. It feels like the rain. The rain on the night that broke us. The memory claws its way up from the dark, tearing through the scar tissue I spent two decades building over it. I was seventeen.
The house was quiet. Too quiet. A storm battered the windows, throwing rain against the glass like handfuls of gravel. I sat on the edge of my bed. Waiting. I didn't know what I was waiting for, but the air in the house was wrong. Thick. Suffocating.
Then Matteo's voice bled through the drywall.
It was a low, fractured sound. A sound a man only makes once in his life. The night he loses everything. He was on the phone. The words were muffled, but the tone was unmistakable. Total devastation. Uncle Carlo was dead.
Lured to a warehouse. Executed. Dumped in an alley six blocks away like trash. They found him in the rain. The county morgue called the house the next morning. Our parents were hit the same night. A coordinated slaughter.
The silence that followed Matteo's call was worse than the scream. It swallowed the entire house.
Then came the sound of something breaking. Glass shattering. Furniture splintering. Matteo tearing the study apart with his bare hands.
I sat on my bed. Seventeen years old. The silence ringing in my ears. Grief didn't come. No tears. No mourning. The sadness bypassed my heart and crystallized into rage. A need to retaliate. To burn the city to the ground. To find the monsters who did this and rip their throats out with my teeth.
But Dominic didn't let me. My oldest brother stepped into the blood and took the crown. He became the boss. And he leashed me. For two decades, Dominic kept me close to home.He handed the deepest infiltration runs to Santi and Dante, gave the strategy to Enzo, and reserved me for the work that wouldn't put a bullet between my eyes. He kept me on a short leash, assigning me to guard duty, to logistics, to shadows.
I hated him for it. I spent twenty years furious at my own blood. I thought it was distrust. I thought Dominic looked at my rage and saw a liability, a loose cannon, a brother who couldn't be trusted to execute a clean hit. The resentment festered in my gut like a disease. I raged against the man keeping me locked away.
Then the truth came out. Dominic confessed. The full scope of the war against the Bellanti family. The reason behind the hits. The scale of the enemy we were fighting. When he finally laid the cards on the table, I went pale. The fury did not disappear.
It redirected. Every cage Dominic built around me was love. He kept me off the front lines because he could not bear to lose another piece of his family. He smothered my violent potential because he was trying to keep me alive.
Love is a suffocating iron trap. I don't want it. I don't know how to live inside it.
And now, the enemy is locked inside my tunnel.
The burner phone vibrates against the metal desk. The harsh buzz yanks me back to the present. I snatch the device.
"Speak."
Santi's voice is flat. Clinical. "Perimeter team logged a torch attempt at the river grate. Three strokes, then they pulled back. Sentries are on it now. The grate held."
I breathe out once. Clean. The probe Catalina heard from the grate end of the tunnel. Real. Contained.
"Terminal four," I prompt.
"Terminal four is hot. Four shipping containers. Manifest says industrial machinery. Thermal imaging shows irregularheat signatures. Guards are heavily armed. Bellanti tactical gear. The shift rotation matches a high-value asset transfer. The intel is solid, Fabio. This is a hit they'll feel for years."
The line goes dead again.
The phone drops from my hand. It hits the desk.
She told the truth.
