~ 1 ~
Angie felt naked without his gun.
Slipping on his suitcoat, he missed the press of his shoulder rig—the cross of the straps over his back, the heft of his Beretta under his arm. Unlike Nick or Donnie, the don and the underboss of the Pagano Brothers, Angie didn’t regularly hobnob with the rich and famous, and he thus had no cause to be out in the world unarmed, trusting his protection to others. He was the protection. As the Pagano Brothers’ head of security and enforcement, he was rarely off the job, thus he was rarely unarmed.
Now he was both on the job and unarmed, and he felt naked. Exposed and vulnerable.
But not even the great Nick Pagano had enough pull to get his people on a commercial flight packing heat, so Angie straightened his cuffs and buttoned one button of his made-to-measure Armani, checked his look in the mirror of this Berlin hotel room, and picked up his two-suiter bag.
For now, until it was time to get dirty, he wasn’t Angelo Corti, caporegime in the Pagano Brothers Family and consigliere to Don Pagano. He was Andrew Rutland, printing company executive, looking to expand his business into Eastern Europe.
Andrew Rutland and his colleagues didn’t carry guns.
Angelo Corti and his team were going to need several. He hoped like hell they had the allies they thought they had when they landed in Kyiv.
~oOo~
Tony Cioccolanti and Trey Pagano were both waiting for him in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Berlin. Seated and in conversation, they didn’t see Angie coming, and he slowed his step and considered those two young men as he crossed the wide, echoing space.
His team. Were they up to this job? He thought so. He fucking hoped so. Because they would all be bloody before it was done.
Angie was fully aware of his reputation. People saw him as a thug, with ice for blood, a stomach of iron, and a taste for cruelty. He’d earned that rep, and it served him well. If people believed you were willing and able to inflict any horror, if you’d proved that you were, then you rarely had to push them so far to get what you wanted.
So yes, he was capable of brutality, and when it was deserved, he felt no angst in meting it out. But he was neither cold-blooded nor, he thought, naturally cruel. The capacity for violence wasn’t really what made him good at his work, anyway. The thing that made him good was his curiosity and perception. He was a natural people-watcher and innately intuitive. He saw what was not being said. He saw where there were secrets, and he found the weaknesses to exploit and bring secrets into the light.
Since Trey Pagano had been part of the organization, Angie had studied the kid. Trey was Nick’s cousin, but the nearly forty years between their ages made them uncle and nephew—to the extent that they called each other by those terms. The very moment Nick had brought Trey in, the rumor mill had begun to churn. Though Nick hadn’t made his plans clear to anyone for years, not even his closest advisors, Angie had known almost from the start that the rumors were true: Nick wanted his young relation, should Trey prove himself worthy, to lead the family some day.
Which would have been the obvious choice, under most circumstances. Trey was the only other man in the organization that shared Nick’s blood. Nick’s father and uncle had begun the Pagano Brothers, had been the Pagano Brothers, and of course he would want his blood to continue at the helm when his own time was over. Moreover, Trey was smart and capable, and had his head straight on his shoulders. He’d make a good don when he was ready.
Il sangue non mente. Blood doesn’t lie. It was the first principle of their world. You could trust your family, your heritage, your legacy. Your line.
But Trey was not full-blooded Italian. His father’s first wife, a crazy bitch the Paganos had erased, had been some Irish-Anglo mutt. In the tradition of La Cosa Nostra—the kind of tradition that was effectively law—only full-blooded Italians could rise above associate or soldier, much less lead a family. In fact, it was deeply controversial even to make a half-blood, and those few in the world who were could never be capos.
The rumors in the early days had cast Trey as a test case; that idea was still knocked around some. Nick had a son of his own—Lorenzo, the youngest of his four children—and it was said that Nick meant to elevate Trey in order to clear a path for Ren to walk when he was ready. Nick had married outside the blood, so his own children were half-bloods, too.
Ren was young, barely a teenager. But he was old enough for Angie to be fairly sure about two things and absolutely certain about a third. First: Ren would never cut it in the organization. He was soft and sensitive and wouldn’t have the stomach or the spine for the work. Second: Ren wouldn’t want it. See: soft and sensitive. See also: sullen and antisocial. Maybe he’d harden as he grew up, but Angie would be surprised to see the kid change that much.
And the third thing? Trey wasn’t a test case but the one true heir. Angie didn’t think Nick had ever had any intention of making a path for Ren to come up behind him, but even if he had once considered it, Nick knew as well as Angie did that Ren wasn’t Pagano Brothers material.
Angie would do everything he could to keep Ren away from the dark side of his father’s world—and Nick would, too, when it came down to it. A soft, sullen king who sat on the throne for no other reason than he was born to the right man? That would destroy the Pagano Brothers.
All you had to do was look to Boston and see what Tommy Sacco was doing to his family. That asshole had no business sitting at the head of one of the Five Families. He hadn’t even been a good capo. But people had been cleaning up his fuckups and covering up the mess from his rages for years, and they were doing it to this day—double-time since he’d taken the seat. Even with all that full-time damage control, Tommy threatened to turn the Sacco Family into a laughingstock.
Old Gabriel had tried to leave his son with a mentor; he’d all but given Nick control of the Sacco Family in his last, waning years, so Tommy would have a strong seat to take over and a guiding hand at his side. But Tommy had taken Nick’s guidance like a petulant teenager, and iced Nick out before Gabriel Sacco’s corpse was cold.
His father had known his son would be a bad don, but he was bound in tradition, and saw no alternative but to name his firstborn as his successor. He had only two children, and his younger child was a daughter. Even less likely than a half-blood at the helm of a family was a woman there.
At that thought, halfway across the lobby, Angie laughed. After several years of cleaning up her brother’s messes and basically running the family, Giada Sacco had tired of the sidelines. She was preparing to make her move and take over Tommy’s seat.
Nick wanted to put a half-blood at the Pagano seat on the New England Council, and Giada intended to put her shapely female ass in the Sacco seat.
Their world was going to fucking burn. Nick was pouring the gasoline, and Giada was striking the match. Thinking about what was coming made Angie’s head hurt.
But it wasn’t coming quite yet. Giada was still putting her pieces on the board. So was Nick. Neither had taken their plans out of the shadows.
Trey wasn’t yet even made yet. After—what, five, six?—years in the family, he was still a lowly associate, though he’d been given responsibilities and perks well above his station. A few times, Angie had been prepared for the move that would turn Nick’s intentions from rumor to truth: the day Trey would be made. Those few times, Nick had put Trey in a situation to make his bones, but each time, he’d pulled him back at the last minute.