Love and War 2 (12 page)

“Why are you cooking all this food?”

“You guys are not going to cook for yourselves, so I’m making what I can and freezing it.”

Caprice took another sip of coffee and the jolt of caffeine awakened her brain. Maria’s words immediately started to make sense.

“Nico went to Staten Island without me? Who was with him?”

“I don’t know, Caprice.”

There was sharpness to Maria’s words. Caprice figured that she was still angry from last night’s argument. It didn’t matter. Even being loved down by her man didn’t change Caprice’s stance on going to a safe house. She still wasn’t leaving New York.

“And you’re cooking like this because we’re staying in this house, right?” Caprice guessed.

“That’s what your brother says. He has Mateo and Giovanni bringing some of your stuff from your condo too.”

“Noooo!” Caprice shouted in horror. She couldn’t imagine Mateo and Giovanni handling her expensive clothes and shoes. She cringed at the thought of her BCBG and Dolce & Gabbana being stuffed in bags or thrown in suitcases without proper care.

“Maria!” she whined. “They’re going to ruin my clothes! How would they even know what to bring? Besides, Diesel lives there too! He can bring my stuff.”

Maria ignored Caprice’s outburst and began chopping garlic on a huge wooden cutting board.

“Talk to your brother,” she said. “In the meantime, you’re going to need to hire staff for this place. I don’t know how long you’re going to be staying here, but this house is too big for you to handle alone. Gabriella had a great service she used. You should call them.”

“Can’t you do that?” Caprice whined. “What do I know about hiring maids and shit?”

Maria sighed. “I won’t have time. Nico and I are leaving for Oregon tonight. Go in the study and find the number. I’m sure the number is saved on Gabriella’s rolodex.”

That was the last thing Caprice planned on doing. Caprice was a Boss, not a damn housewife. Though, she did understand why the Bonatelli estate was the best place for her and Nico to stay while they got things sorted out.

“Before you do that,” Maria said, “you might want to put some real clothes on.”

“I’m chillin’.”

“Rocco is on his way up here. Nico said the two of you needed to talk.”

“Fuck!”

Caprice groaned and turned up her nose at the idea of talking to Rocco. She had made a point not to speak to Rocco, not to see Rocco, and not to think about Rocco. But she did go upstairs to throw on some jeans with her t-shirt.

She had no choice to accept Fausto’s directive that Rocco was to remain unharmed. The general consensus was that Rocco was a great asset to the team, even though Caprice felt completely betrayed by the man.

That was why she avoided him as much as she possibly could. His face irritated her. Rocco was Nico’s friend and he still did a lot of work for Paolo. After the Aries shooting, when Nico was trying to fall back into Paolo’s good graces, he and Rocco picked right up doing the work they’d done before. Nico may have forgiven his homeboy, but Caprice had nothing to say to the man.

Without waking up Diesel, Caprice slipped on her jeans from last night and went back downstairs. She settled into her father’s study and powered on her Macbook. She was so engrossed in writing a new social media marketing campaign for Island Silk that she didn’t hear Maria let Rocco into the house.

“You look just like Uncle Dom,” Rocco said when he walked into the study.

Caprice shut her laptop and angrily glared at Rocco.

“What do you want? Why are you even talking to me?”

Rocco sat in one of the leather desk chairs and smiled at Caprice. She remembered how fascinated she used to be by his smile. She loved the way it never really stretched across his face, even when he was really happy. Rocco hadn’t changed at all since the day she met him. He still favored black clothes; still wore the same two pieces of silver jewelry. His Bonatelli ring still needed to be cleaned.

He was exactly the same person...yet he wasn’t. The Rocco that she knew, the Rocco that she had wanted to love her the way she loved him was gone. Replaced by a man she couldn’t trust anymore.

“You and I need to call a truce,” Rocco stated evenly.

“You and I don’t need to do anything.”

“Yes we do, Caprice. I’ve been hearin’ things. Nico told me about Italy. We need to talk.”

Caprice emphatically shook her head. “Rocco, we agreed to maintain our distance.”

Rocco burst out laughing. “Are you high? The last time we talked, you told me that you didn’t need me in Atlantic City because Mateo and Giovanni were there.”

Caprice nodded. “That wasn’t the last conversation we had though. The last time I had an actual conversation with you, I told you to tell your mother to stop calling me and begging me to take you back. What do you want from me, Rocco? Why are you here?”

Rocco leaned forward and stared at Caprice until she was forced to meet his eyes. He remembered what she was like before her fight. She certainly wasn’t the same girl who used to flirt with him in his car and get upset because they had to sneak around. She wasn’t the same; she was better.

He knew her potential the first time he and Nico took her to the gun range. Rocco would have never said anything to Domani or Nico, but he knew that, if given the opportunity, Caprice could take over the world. That was why he asked Domani for her hand.

“What do you want me to do, Caprice? Kiss your ring? Pledge my loyalty in blood?”

“You can knock off the sarcasm,” Caprice answered. “And you don’t want to talk to me about loyalty.”

Her angry words felt like a punch in the face. Rocco knew that she was mad, but disloyal? He was never disloyal. He wasn’t the one talking about moving against Paolo when all she was supposed to be doing was taking orders from him. He wasn’t the one sneaking to Allenwood to visit Fausto every chance he got. Caprice had a lot of balls to be questioning his loyalty!

“Don’t ever say I’m not loyal!” Rocco yelled. “Where was your loyalty when you were making deals with the enemy?”

“The same place yours was when you were blabbin’ to Paolo.”

“I was doing my job! You were being reckless.”

“You almost got me killed!” Caprice fired back. “Aries was supposed to show up to that house alone. Do you realize that everything going on right now is actually your fault?”

Rocco leaned back in his chair and chuckled. “How?”

“Paolo would have never known what we were doing. BDM would have fallen back in line, I would have gone to Atlantic City, and he’d go about his life, pretending that he actually had rank. But you ran your mouth and got him feelin’ some type of way about me and Nico, to the point where I had no choice but to start making moves. Now we’re in this fucked up situation. All thanks to you. You can’t possibly understand how much I hate you.”

Rocco could see that Caprice was mad enough to shoot him right there in her father’s office. If she was going to disobey a direct order from Fausto, she had the perfect chance. Something was stopping her. He made a last ditch effort to speak to the girl that used to care about him.

“If an apology is what you’re lookin’ for, you got it,” he said. “I apologize, Caprice. I grew up in this family. There are protocols to follow. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. Paolo was going to pull rank on you whether he’d known about the Aries hit or not. It was just a matter of time.”

“You don’t know that,” Caprice said. “Above anything else, how could you do that to me? Every night in Miami, you kissed me goodnight and told me you loved me. As soon as I came home, the one person who should have had my back, stuck a knife in it. I’m supposed to forget about that?” she asked with raised eyebrows.

“You don’t have to forget about anything, but I never lied to you. I never let you think I was cool with what you were doing. And don’t act like you don’t have any wrong in this. Diesel, Caprice? We were supposed to get married, but you’re fuckin’-”

Caprice burst out in a fit of laughter. “We weren’t ever getting married! That was you and my father’s bright idea. I never agreed to that bullshit. So I’m asking you just one more time, Rocco, because I really don’t have time for this...what the hell do you want?”

Rocco could only look down at the huge dark cherry desk with regret. Caprice and Nico outranked him now. It was different than the way any other family was run, but the Bonatelli organization was a smooth running ship with two captains at the helm. Despite everything that had happened up until that very moment, Rocco owed his life to Domani. He would respect the hierarchy and do his part to keep Nico and his little sister alive. No matter how mad at him Caprice was.

“I want to help with...the situation.”

“Hmph,” was Caprice’s reply. She didn’t trust him. She didn’t want his help. For all she knew, he could have been one of the people who wanted her dead. However...

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
.

Other than the Caldarone twins, Rocco was the best shooter they had. She’d rather have those skills on her team than on Paolo’s.

“For the record,” she said, “I trusted you. When Nico was worried that you weren’t okay with us asking Paolo to step down, I wasn’t worried. I trusted you because my father trusted you. He loves you like a son and what you did would break his heart if he knew.”

Rocco’s eyes widened. “You haven’t told him?”

Caprice slowly shook her head. She wanted to tell her dad about Rocco. Every day they were in Greece, each time Domani mentioned his name, she wanted to blurt out that Rocco was a traitor and that was the reason they weren’t together anymore. But she didn’t. Domani would eventually find out on his own. She wouldn’t do anything that would deliberately hurt her father.

“I didn’t-” Rocco started to say something, but Caprice held up her hand.

“Don’t. You say you want to help, fine. Help by telling me who went to the Bosses. You know, don’t you?”

Rocco honestly had no clue who was behind the hit. All he knew that he was in a key position to find out. For the last year and a half, he had been Paolo’s right hand man since the organization had split into two factions.

When Caprice overhauled the strip clubs and bars, Rocco went in to make sure the guys she put in charge understood that they were in charge of nothing except keeping the business open and making money. Everything that went on in the back offices, the deals and meetings that were made on the property were none of their business. Caprice put non mob guys in charge of mob run businesses. Everyone expected the system to fail, but unbeknownst to Caprice, Rocco worked his ass off making sure it didn’t happen.

“I don’t know, but I can find out.”

Caprice stood up and walked over to the picture window. She grinned when she noticed the pool cleaner had arrived. Her sister in law knew exactly what to do to keep her from complaining too much about staying at the estate.

“You do that,” Caprice advised Rocco. “And since we’re going to be working together, let me tell you something.”

Caprice turned around and stood in front of Rocco’s chair. He could have stood up and towered over her, but he remained seated. He watched her expression change from hard to soft in just a few seconds. Caprice sat in the chair next to him.

As Caprice looked at Rocco, she didn’t to expect him to be so humble towards her. She’d expected that they were going to scream and holler and threaten to kill each other. She looked down at her hand and knew that the reason that Rocco didn’t stand when she stood over him was because of her ring. He respected her rank, therefore he respected her. Anything she wanted, he would do, like a good soldier.

Surprisingly, she didn’t want that from him.

“You and I,” she started then paused. She started over. “You and I will never have what we had before. But you were there for me in Miami and I respect that. Having you there made me feel safe. But I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m not the same naïve girl that I used to be. I just want my family to be safe. Whether I like it or not, you are family because my brother and my father believe you’re family.”

“But,” she continued, “I’m in love with Diesel. I don’t care how that makes you feel. I don’t care if you’re not happy about working with him. He’s going to be around, doing the same thing that you used to do...keeping me safe. You know that my father doesn’t know about us and we’re going to keep it that way. Just like I kept your secret, okay?”

Rocco wasn’t sure how to respond. He barely knew Diesel, but he didn’t like him. They’d had a few run-ins in the past, but if Caprice trusted him after everything that had gone down with the Black Diamond Mafia, then he would trust her.

“Fine. If Nico can do it, I can deal with him too.”

Caprice parked her Lexus next to Diesel’s Range Rover and stepped out into the early morning New Jersey sun. The Capri construction crew was already moving around the site. From the outside, the site looked like a mess of confusion, but Caprice knew better. The exterior was almost finished. Every time she set foot in the site something else had been completed.

Caprice took her hard hat out of the trunk and walked off to find the project manager. His urgent emails were the reason she had to make a two hour drive into the city. Nico wasn’t thrilled with her leaving the Hamptons. He never wanted her to go anywhere. She refused to sit in seclusion and left the estate as often as she could. The place was so big that he rarely knew she was gone.