He didn’t look at me, just stared at the actors playing their roles on the stage. “Boo, bam, boo.”
I stared at him until he met my eye.
“We leave tonight, Mariposa.”
I’d been dreading this day, but I knew it would come sooner or later. “Why?”
“One of my buildings in New York was blown up.”
That line concluded our time in Greece.
We’d be back in New York, back to reality, by the next day.
21
Capo
Every step I took was planned. Nothing I did was by accident. In my world, unforeseen circumstances could get you killed. After my death, I had learned to time my breaths to each second that passed. I remembered all too well how sixty seconds equaled a lifetime—the next possibly my last.
I had caused the wars. I went in unsuspected and killed brothers, sons, uncles, and good friends. All evidence pointed toward the Scarpone family. I even fucked with the Irish. And as I’d planned, all hell broke loose. No one trusted anyone, not even a cent. It was a cent that usually kept them square with each other.
I knew whom to kill in each family. I knew how to set it up, how to make it look. At one time, that was who I was: the king’s prince, the one he sometimes called the pretty-boy killer. When Arturo wanted someone dead, someone who had done something personal to him, he called on Achille or me to handle it.
We were the wolves after sheep to slaughter. Arturo never thought of anyone but the Faustis as competition. He called them lions, a different breed of animal. We didn’t have to worry about them or take them down because they had territory of their own. But when it came to taking other wolves down, the ones who challenged him, wanting to be the alpha, we were sent in to destroy.
I’d let the daughter of another wolf go, and in Arturo’s eyes, the sin was unforgivable. So he sent a pack of wolves after me. They came close to tearing my throat out.
Then I became a ghost. I saw it on every face of every man I killed after my death. They thought I had come to lead them to hell. It was especially sweet to see the recognition on the faces of the animals that had a hand in my death. The cowards who held my arms while the knife cut me deep. The ones who held a woman against her will and assaulted her in front of me until they tore her apart.
One thing about death—you have nothing but time. So that was what I did. I bided my time. I got lost in Italy for a while. I started going by the name Amadeo, to begin with. Then a visit with Marzio Fausti brought me back to life. He loaned me enough money to invest in tanking businesses. In return, I’d kill for his family, until I paid him back every cent with interest. He’d offered to kill Arturo, but I asked that he be spared. I wanted to do it my way.
I wanted to seek revenge in a way that fed the soul that had been ripped from its body and starved for too long.
After my investments paid off—the hotels, the restaurant, The Club, plus numerous investment properties, along with investments Rocco made for me—my plan really started to take shape. It looked like a vengeful wolf with teeth sharper than the rest. I left little clues here and there, enough for them to catch a hint of a new but also familiar scent.
Vittorio?
No, it can’t be.
Ah, but it is motherfuckers, it is.
Small clues led to medium clues until medium wasn’t cutting it anymore. My schemes became bigger. Not enough to give me away, but enough that the scent got stronger. Every so often one of the Scarpones made a trip to Italy on the guise of “visiting with family.”
I laughed, a cold breath forming out of my mouth. “Family.” I said the word like a taunt, a joke.
After the father and son’s last trip, when Arturo and Achille almost discovered me in church, they started creeping around buildings in New York. Buildings owned by one Amadeo Macchiavello. If I was still alive, they were trying to draw me out in the only way they knew how—striking. They couldn’t seem to find proof of my existence any other way.
Achille had even tried to find me at The Club after his son had been killed. I watched him from the private floor above. He was mad with loss of power. He kept grabbing black-haired men and turning them around, looking for me in their faces.
For the record, they never found Achille’s son’s body. My empty grave was the last place they’d look.
There was a meaty story. After the man Arturo had sent to kill me thought he did, he was supposed to take my body and dump it in the Hudson River with the rest of the fleshy scraps that were disposed of. However, they hadn’t counted on an angel to arrive.
Tito Sala.
He showed up not long before I took my last breath, and he saved me. Rocco and Dario were with him. The man who slit my throat was killed in a car accident two days later. His brakes had gone out. Apparently, he never told Arturo that he hadn’t dumped me because he didn’t want Arturo to kill him. After all of the men had fled, and only the man who had “killed” me was left, he had seen the shadows coming for him in the alley next to Dolce. He had taken off, going straight to the King Wolf to deliver the lie—yeah, he’s gone.
His lie hadn’t saved him. Nothing would’ve. Arturo never left witnesses. It was too risky. So he had the man killed. It worked out for me, though, because Arturo killed him before finding out the truth.
Angelina was already dead, our blood mingling in the alley. It was a fitting final goodbye.
The Faustis left my blood in the alley, but they also left traces leading to the Hudson. I didn’t want to be found, and I knew this was where the man was bringing me next—while he sliced my throat, he had whispered in my ear, “You’re not even good enough to leave on the street next to the dumpster. Your old man wants you down with the fish in the Hudson, a watery grave.” He talked too much when he’d been attempting to slit my throat.
The detectives labeled our cases, Angelina’s and mine, as murders, but after no clues pointed to the murderers, the case went cold, and the evidence box was sealed shut.
Yeah, they hadn’t looked too hard. Even if they had, they would’ve never found me. I was a ghost, as some called me.
The Scarpones were feeling the pressure of that ghost. When medium clues got too boring for me, I started dropping the big ones, the ones that would lead them a little closer. I wanted to fuck with their heads before I chopped them off.
In an attempt to convince the other families that it wasn’t the Scarpones starting the wars, killing their men and taking their stolen shipments, they pinned it down to one man.
Me.
A man they didn’t know. A man who, from out of the blue, started stomping on all of their turfs. Of course, Arturo never mentioned Vittorio Lupo Scarpone to the other families. If he did, it would paint Arturo unstable, and the last thing he wanted was to be labeled mad, unless it came to violence.
Seeing ghosts? Believing the son you had killed had come back from the dead? Yeah, not good for business.
So the heat was on me. I was getting hit from all different sides, but after a couple of months, the other families moved on, convinced that the Scarpones were to blame, since no man looking to start a war had been found.
However, the Scarpones hadn’t let up. They were determined to smoke me out, make me show my face, or throw my fucking ashes to the wind. For every property they set on fire or blew up, I did the same to two of theirs. And their shipments of stolen goods? Gone. Gone. Gone. Never arrived. Then, a few days later, some of their items would float up from the Hudson.