The Enforcer (Untamed Hearts Book 3) (36 page)

“There
is
something to be said for
Siciliani
,” Lola agreed. “I thought it was just you, but—”

Tino grimaced. “Stop.”

“You’ll grow into yourself nicely,” Lola finally decided. “You’re talented now. In ten years you’ll be incredible. Your pretty girl will come around, Tino. She won’t be able to help herself.”

“I don’t want her to come around,” Tino admitted, even though it hurt to say out loud. “I would never make you do anything I wouldn’t do myself. You know that, sweetheart. That’s our deal.”

“That’s what makes you beautiful,” Lola said softly and then sniffed. “That’s why they all want you.”

“Is it?” he asked curiously.

“You’re stronger than most, and they sense it. Women crave a strong man. It’s instinctual. We can’t help it,” she said with conviction. “You make their husbands seem weak. Women see it now, but just wait. Even men catch on eventually. Ten years. Everyone thinks it’ll be Nova, but they’re wrong. You’re the one they should fear.”

“I’ll never be more powerful than Nova.” Tino said it with absolute certainty. “I don’t
want
to be more powerful than him.”

“I’m not talking about power,” she said slowly in the way of someone truly intelligent. “I’m talking about fear and strength. There’s a difference.”

Tino looked at the partition that separated him from Lola, because he remembered a discussion with Carlo about something eerily similar.

“People fear Carlo, you know?” he confessed when he knew he shouldn’t. “He’s not just an enforcer. He’s our lead enforcer.”

“I’m not surprised. It makes sense.” Her voice was choked again. “It’s instinctual. Women can’t help it. It’s so easy to fall in love with a strong man. I think I’m sad for your Brianna.”

Lola was a girl whose father made her to sell her.

She stopped crying for herself a long, long time ago.

So Tino was silent and let her cry for Brianna instead.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tino’s shit week carried over to the next and got progressively worse.

He dropped out of dance after the fight with Brianna, and someone must’ve clued in Mary. So Tino was busy in a way he didn’t want to be, and he was one very small step away from asking Lola for some blue pills.

He didn’t know if it was too much pot, or too many oxys, but he was having issues he couldn’t afford. He kept trying to imagine Brianna like he normally did, but all it did now was leave him feeling gutted.

He leaned against a tree one block down from Rosie Campelli’s house, trying to get his mind straight. She wasn’t the worst woman to deal with on a Wednesday. She was sweet, one of those who liked Tino to pull her hair, and usually that worked great for him, since Tino was inclined to hair pulling than things of a more Mary nature. He didn’t mind being on his knees for a woman, but he didn’t want to feel like a dog being there.

Rosie texted him this morning, and he said yes because someone worse could show up. Plus Mary fucking freaked when he turned down last-minute appointments, and made the alternative so much worse. It was the easiest stop all week, but he was crumbling.

Tino was sixteen and officially sick and tired of fucking.

He pulled his phone out of his pocket to check the time, seeing that it was 4:04 p.m. He was late, but he just looked at it, willing up the strength to get this over with. Maybe, if he was very lucky, Mary wouldn’t be waiting for him when he got home, and he could take a shower, smoke a little, and go to bed.

He had a text from Nova.

Home late. Wrapping merda up before Romeo gets out.

Tino texted him back.

Dance supposed to run over. Gonna be late too. I’ll eat in Bed-Stuy.

He hadn’t told Nova he quit dance. It was easier to have Nova believe his afternoons were still tied up since Mary had started double-booking him on weekdays.

He looked at the time again: 4:05.

Tino took a long, deep breath and ran a hand down his stomach, tucking in the black shirt he wore under his jacket. Then he felt for the rubbers in his pocket and the gun in the back of his jeans.

More and more he felt safer with a gun than without.

Nova packed too.

Ironic that it was a habit they’d picked up in Dyker Heights.

In Harlem they were perfectly fine defending themselves without the firepower.

Of course, Tino started hooking and using drugs in Dyker Heights too.

The suburbs made him ghetto trash.

He stared at his phone once more: 4:10.

He closed his eyes one more time and pushed aside all the bullshit. Brianna’s house wasn’t far, and he used years of conditioning to imagine sneaking over to see her instead of Rosie. It hadn’t worked since their fight, but he needed it a little more now and tried harder to forget the bad shit.

He walked to her door and knocked softly, feeling that familiar tug in his stomach. What if they got busted? But then she answered the door, and Tino told himself it was just the light that made her hair look darker. He ignored it and smiled at his Brianna, willing her to stay solid in a way she hadn’t since the fight.

“You’re late.” She frowned, looking disappointed.

“I know. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I
am
late,” he apologized, because he had wanted this for so long. “I’ve spent all week missing you.”

She smiled brightly, which made her dark eyes look more like the green they were supposed to be, because she obviously believed him.

It wasn’t until he was in the shower that he started to notice it was Rosie’s bathroom. It was her Italian tile and double showerhead beating hot water down on him. Something about the water always jerked him a little too close to reality before he was ready.

“Coffee.” She opened the shower and handed it to him, made with cream and sugar the way he liked. It was obviously a thing for her, the coffee after sex, and Tino certainly wasn’t complaining. Rosie was by far the easiest stop for the week. When he took it silently, she asked, “Did you mean it?”

He pulled the glass door shut, using the excuse of water on the floor to hide from her. “Mean what?” he asked and took a sip of coffee. It was dark roast, made by an Italian woman with excellent taste. “
È buono.
” He set it on the ledge and said, “Grazie.”

“You said you think about me,” she pressed, sounding shy to admit it out loud. “That I’m the only one you fantasize about. Is that true?”

He looked at the glass door, seeing the outline of a woman with dark hair, but he knew if he stared long enough through the shower spray, she’d be lithe instead of curvy, with those long legs that haunted his dreams. She tied her hair back while she waited for an answer, and it was done with the same unconscious flip of her wrist she used every afternoon for dance practice.

“Yeah,” he said, and it wasn’t a lie. Brianna was his last fantasy every night and first on his mind in the morning, and he was still high enough to pretend it was her. “Only you. Always.”

“I miss you all week.” She took a long, shuddering breath. “Maybe one day we could do more than this. You think?”

He heard it all the time.

And he always said the same thing as he thought about those beautiful long legs and warm green eyes. “Maybe one day.” He sounded as hopeful as her. “Anything can happen, sweetheart.”

It must’ve worked. She left him alone to shower and drink his coffee and enjoy his high from the drugs he took before he left. Lately, he’d been taking more because they made him feel like he wasn’t going to fucking die over Brianna.

It was a weakness.

It left him vulnerable, but it wasn’t the first cheat he’d been guilty of in the past week.

He’d been getting more and more careless. Smoking while dealing and doing crew work for Nova. Taking more pills without the excuse of Mary. Lots of things he would’ve never considered before the fight.

But Lost Boys had to survive somehow, and the paper insert that came in the bag the pharmacist handed him with a knowing look of disappointment said the pills good ol’ Dr. Acciai prescribed led to a false sense of well-being.

That always seemed more like a perk than a side effect.

Sign Tino up for more of that.

It wasn’t until he heard Rosie screaming from the other bedroom that Tino understood what a false sense of well-being really meant. By the time he ran out there, it was too late. Her husband already had a gun shoved in her mouth.

Tino’s breath caught.

For all the crew work, he’d never killed anyone.

And he’d never seen anyone killed until that motherfucker pulled the trigger and killed his wife.

Just like that.

Blood and brains all over the white carpet.

Rosie was never making another cup of coffee for a man in the shower.

She wasn’t perfect, but she certainly didn’t deserve that.

There was something about how quick it was that stunned Tino silent. He remembered how difficult it was for him to die in the basement. How fucking hard he tried and how Nova forced him back after all that work.

Tino didn’t see the other guys with Lorenzo Campelli. Tino just looked at Lorenzo’s wife instead, sprawled out on the carpet, dead for fucking a whore when she was supposed to be loyal to this motherfucker instead.

No wonder Mary made so much off Tino.

This system sucked, and it was especially cruel to women.

All any of them wanted was a little kindness, even if it was paid for.

“Get on your knees, motherfucker.” Lorenzo pointed his gun at Tino’s chest and then seemed to think better of it and pointed lower, since Tino was still naked.

Tino dropped to his knees, because his gun was downstairs thanks to the false sense of well-being from the oxys. He kept staring at Rosie, wondering if that was going to be him in the next thirty seconds.

The thing was, Tino wasn’t that pissed off about it.

He could think of a lot of worse ways to go.

He could run. He could maybe even fight them, but he didn’t, and he wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was the three oxys he ate before he got here that left him just not giving a shit about survival.

“That’s Nova Moretti’s brother. I recognize him,” one of the other guys cut in, sounding very nervous. “You can’t kill this kid, Lorenzo.”

“He fucked my wife. I can kill him if I want.” Lorenzo Campelli’s hand was shaking. “I’m sick of these fucking Morettis getting everything. I can kill this little shit. I’m a made man. No one touches what’s mine.”

“Just take it to the commission. They’ll probably agree with you.” His friend’s voice shook as badly as Lorenzo’s hand. “But you gotta take it to the fucking commission. You’ll start a war if you don’t.”

Lorenzo shook his head. “They’ll give him a pass. That brainiac Nova makes them nervous.”

“You gotta take it to the commission,” one of the other guys agreed. “Fucking footage was too grainy. We didn’t know it was a Moretti fucking her.”

Lorenzo shrugged. “Fine.”

But then he fired without warning, and pain exploded in Tino’s thigh. He shouted from the impact of it. His mind hazed white for several long seconds. Then he found himself naked and flat on his back, pressing his hand against the gushing wound in his thigh.

Tino bit his tongue hard, because he’d stopped giving sadistic motherfuckers the satisfaction of hurting him a long time ago. Thanks to his father, he was able to just glare up at them when he found himself surrounded by a bunch of thugs from the Savio Borgata.

“We can wait a few weeks to tell the commission,” Lorenzo said darkly. “I don’t recognize this kid. Do you recognize him?”

Lorenzo was one of the Savios’ top capos. He got the spot thanks to his mother, and Tino knew it because Rosie talked about it sometimes, even though Tino had zero interest in the Savios’ hierarchy. Nephew to their don, Lorenzo was one of those entitled suburban gangsters Nova hated. He had power without bleeding for it, but that didn’t make the Savios unique.

Lorenzo glared at the other guys in his crew, daring them to acknowledge Tino.

“Nah, we don’t know him,” one decided, and the others all seemed to grunt in agreement like good button men were supposed to do. “Never seen him in my life.”

Tino closed his eyes, knowing right then he wasn’t going to end up with his brains blown out on the carpet like Rosie. It was never that fucking easy.

Never.

* * * *

“Why do I need to know this shit?” Carina sounded frustrated and whiny. “Who gives a fuck when the Alamo happened?”

“I give a fuck,” Brianna said as she looked up from her book. “If we forget history, we repeat it.”

Carina gave her an annoyed look. “Geek.”

“Probably.” Brianna sighed and went back to taking notes for their test tomorrow. “I wonder if Tino’s studied.”

“Yeah, right,” Carina said dismissively. “He’s failing this class almost as badly as I am. I doubt that’s changed in a week.”

Brianna realized right after the fight that so much of her life was tangled with Tino’s. Usually they’d be cramming for this test with him. He’d be agreeing with Carina over history being useless, but Brianna would make them keep studying, and they would get good enough grades to pass like they did every year.

“If he doesn’t study, he’ll fail.
Actually fail
,” she added, because even though Carina said she was failing, Brianna knew she was passing the class. Barely. “Jasmine said he could get a scholarship, but if he doesn’t study—”

“He dropped out of dance.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Brianna closed her book, because this seemed so much more important than a history test. “He can’t ruin his life just for a fight with me. You should talk him into coming back to dance. Jasmine helps us get into some of the best performance colleges. He could get a scholarship. Jasmine said he has a real chance. He could actually
do
something, Carina.”

“He hurt you,” Carina reminded her.

Brianna couldn’t hide the way hearing it stole her breath, but she fought down the urge to cry because she’d been crying for a week, and there came a time when she was done.

“Yes, he did.” Brianna took another hard breath. “But I don’t want him to ruin his life because of it.”