1
Gabriel
I pass the blade from one hand to the other and back again, assessing the man in the chair. His white wifebeater is soaked with sweat, and his dark brown curls stick to his forehead and cheeks. It’s not that warm down here. He’s just a sweaty sort of guy. His gaze keeps shifting around the room, as though any moment one of my men is going to step forward and release him.
Not a chance. Dom Rozzi and Antonio Linetti are my most trusted men. Dom has been my capo since the beginning and has saved my life on more than one occasion. My lieutenant Antonio was once my father’s lieutenant, but he is the kind of soldier that doesn’t mess around with politics. In his world, it’s simply a matter of serving who is in charge. I respect that kind of straightforward philosophy.
“Nobody is coming to save you, Felipe,” I say, drawing his focus back to me. “The only thing you should be focusing on is how painful you want your death to be. Do you want a little pain or a lot of pain?”
His brown eyes flare, but his lips stay firmly together.
I glance back at Dom, who brought him in. “Is he always this chatty?”
Dom is leaning against the wall, his thick arms crossed over his chest. With his square jaw, arrow-straight mouth, and closely cropped brown hair, he looks like a young Jean-Claude Van Damme—all muscle, no funny business.
“Not a peep in the car. I think he’s shy.”
I turn back to my captive.
When I look at him, all I see is death and destruction. He is a member of the Cartel, a Colombian drug outfit that has been bleeding into my city like toxic waste for years. First, they secretly backed the Irish mob, led by Andrew Walsh. Once he was out of the picture, they sank their parasitic claws into his son Patrick and me, forcing us to work together to distribute purple heroin through the city.
Purple heroin is a vile substance. Because the heroin is mixed with carfentanil, it’s both cheaper and deadlier than the pure variety. I hated every second that I was made to pump that poison into the city’s veins, but the Cartel had dirt on me, and I needed time to figure out how to extricate myself from their stone grip without going down too in the process.
A month ago, someone made that call for me. Patrick is dead, and I’m free, though I don’t know how long that will be the case. The Cartel used their trump card and released evidence that linked me to my father’s murder. Now my fate is in the hands of a team of lawyers, and I am on the knife’s edge.
Unfortunately for the Cartel, that has only made me more dangerous.
I bring the knife to the man’s throat. “You’re going to tell us where the Cartel are storing their most recent shipment, and you’re going to tell us now. It’s not even ten in the morning, and I’ve already used up all my patience.”
The man’s chest heaves, and a bead of sweat rolls down his nose. I curl my lip in disgust.
I swipe the blade down the man’s cheek, and he yelps in pain.
“A little pain or a lot of pain?” I ask again, and make a matching gash on the other side.
“Okay, okay!” he yells, his voice heavily accented. “I know where it is.”
I take a deep breath.
Finally. One small win in what is by all accounts a losing game.
The past month has been nothing but a shitstorm, and it feels like I’ve been battered on all sides. The Cartel have been closing in on my territory with their Irish allies, and the police are a hair’s breadth away from making a discovery that could bring me down for good. To top it all off, I’ve got a baby on the way—and the woman carrying that child is the very person who betrayed me and sent me hurtling into this shitstorm in the first place.
I grit my teeth and force those thoughts away. Now is not the time to think of Alexis Wright, the curvy temptress who nearly lost me everything. I spend enough time thinking about her as it is.
My captive gives a breathy description of the warehouse and its location, and Dom leaves to order reconnaissance while I continue the questioning. There is one piece of information that has eluded me so far.
“Tell me who is in charge of your organization,” I demand.
The man shakes his head. “I don’t know. I only know where I get my orders from.”
“I don’t believe you.” I bring the point of the blade a fraction away from his eyeball.
The man whimpers pathetically. When Dom caught him, Felipe was antagonizing a junkie he’d just sold purple heroin to. I guess he isn’t so tough now.
“I don’t know!” he cries, keeping perfectly still. “They give me product, I sell it. They tell me to be somewhere with a gun, I go.”
“So, you’re just a good little soldier?” I ask.
“Yes. I promise.”
His word means nothing to me, but I believe him. Every member of the Cartel we have captured so far has said essentially the same thing. They operate under a cloaked chain of command, a tactical move that makes it difficult for me to determine the scope of the organization. I don’t know the size of the snake, and I don’t know where its head is.
I hand the knife to Antonio, and he presses a gun into my palm instead. The man starts to beg and plead, and I silence him with a bullet to the head.
Frustration leaks into my bones as I storm out of the cellar. I got information today, but not enough. I need to know more about my enemies if I’m going to fight them.
In this and everything else in my life, I feel like I have lost control, and I’m desperate to regain some semblance of it. I have given all the bribes I can to the police, and Alexis is a lost cause. That means the only other way to regain control is for me to smash the Cartel and Kevin Lynch into the ground. And I need to do it quickly.
I am familiar with the warehouse that the captured Cartel member named, and I initiate a plan to storm it that evening after dark.
The air from the open window is chilly on my face as I drive through the sleepy dockyard, moonlight casting a spotlight on the quiet convoy sneaking past the rusted structures and parked trucks. The sky is cloudless, though we are too close to the city to see many stars.
Antonio, Dom, and Mirko Bernadino—one of my other capos—follow behind me with a handful of their men. I keep an eye out for sentries, but the two men I sent ahead on foot have taken care of that. Dom’s reconnaissance earlier turned up only Irish on-site, though no sign of Kevin Lynch.
Our attack will be swift, and it will be fatal.
When we are just around the corner, we stop and pile out of our vehicles. Antonio lumbers up beside me, checking the chamber of his Glock 19, the misty plume of his breath twisting toward the black sky.
Antonio is in his fifties, and with all of the action recently, I wonder why he doesn’t just retire somewhere warm with his wife and their many cats. He had some quiet years under my father, but since my father’s ill-fated plan for expansion two years ago, it has been a bumpy ride.
Antonio cocks his gun and runs a hand over his bald head, muscles flexing. He stands around six-three to my six-five and is as wide as the warehouses that surround us. Maybe that’s why he has stuck around—this is the only thing he’s built for.
“I want you to burn it to the ground,” I tell him. “Don’t forget to clear the men out first.”