Long Live the King (An Italian Mafia Romance Duet #2) (20 page)

Tommy looks vexed. He furrows his brow as his eyes dart around the room nervously.

“What did you just say?”

“I told you a long time ago that the rules change when it comes to Alannah, but you didn’t listen. You took Alannah from me, so I took Laura from you.”

Tommy’s eyes bulge as he realizes what I’m saying. I see the tears making their presence known as the rage starts to overtake his rational thoughts.

“You motherfucker,” he says quietly, but his words are dripping with venom. “I’m gonna fucking tear your heart out. Then I’m gonna spend the rest of the night raping your little cunt girlfriend until she passes out from the pain, before I finally slit her throat and let her bleed to death right on top of your lifeless carcass.”

He drops his gun, but I wait a second longer, because we all know Tommy’s name. After another second, he pulls out his other gun and tosses it to the floor. When it lands, he starts to speak again, but it’s too late for words now.

Like my blood has been replaced by jet fuel, I run at Tommy faster than I thought humanly possible, and the collision feels and sounds like two giants just crashed into each other. Tommy goes flying backwards and I land on top of him, throwing punches the second our bodies hit the floor. I raise my fist in the air and bring it crashing down onto his face with every ounce of strength in my body. Tommy’s head bounces off the floor from the impact as I repeat the act over and over again, before Tommy finally manages to reach up and grab my face with his hands.

Although blood pours out of Tommy’s nose and mouth, he’s still Tommy, he’s still big and strong as fuck, and he squeezes my head like he has super powers. He brings his thumbs to my eyes, and I know that if I don’t get off of him now, I’ll literally never see Alannah again, so I quickly jump off.

I have to take a second to let my vision return to normal, and Tommy climbs to his feet while I struggle to see. I hear Alannah scream, warning me that Tommy’s coming, but my vision is still blurry, so I don’t see the punch coming. It hits me with a force that rocks me backwards, and the next punch is to my stomach, stealing the air from my lungs, then an elbow to the side of my head that sends me to the floor.

Alannah screams again, so I know Tommy’s about to be right on top of me in less than a second. So, I instinctively put my knee up just as he tries to get on me, and send him barreling over my head. He lands behind me and the two of us get up at the same time.

We face each other, fists balled and raised to protect us. We’re two warriors ready to do battle, two boxers in the ring, and this is how one of us will die. We’ll fight to the death like this abandoned house is our Colosseum. It all ends now. No one will ever threaten Alannah and survive the night.

I don’t waste time letting him catch his breath. I fake to the right, then swing with my left. My fist lands on Tommy’s cheek, rocking his head sideways just as my right hand lands on the other side of his jaw. He stumbles back and I charge him again, like a linebacker for the Rams, slamming him against the wall. I use one hand to push his face against the wall as he struggles to wrap his hands around my throat, and I use my other hand to deliver vicious blows to his rib cage.

I punch Tommy in the stomach over and over again, until he can no longer stand upright. He struggles to breathe and hunches forward in pain, so I wrap my arms around his head and neck. Tommy tries to use his arms as best he can, but it’s no use. I have him bent over in a chokehold, and I squeeze with every muscle fiber that makes me human. I squeeze like my life depends on it, like Alannah’s life depends on it, like my best friend stabbed me in the back by hurting the woman I love. Images flash in my head of Tommy in this house alone with Alannah, threatening her, scaring her, hurting her, and it fuels me. My body tingles with the anger that only a person in love can ever feel, and the next thing I feel is Tommy’s body go limp in my arms.

He doesn’t struggle anymore. He drops to his knees, arms dangling at his sides, and still, I raise myself up onto my tippy toes and lift my arms as far up as I can get them. I’m rewarded with the sudden, jolting snap that echoes throughout the blackened house like a gunshot. I hear Alannah gasp as I let Tommy’s lifeless body drop to the floor like the guns I dropped earlier, his neck broken into two separate pieces. He’s gone.

I look down at him, and I feel a surprising sting starting up in my eyes. Tommy was my friend. He’s been with me a long time, and I chose him to be my underboss. I chose him because of our loyalty to each other, but in Our Thing, there really is no such thing as loyalty. La Cosa Nostra breathes life into us, and it snatches it out of us when it sees fit. It’s our guardian angel and our grim reaper. All you have to do is give it time, and eventually the good things in your life will be washed away. La Cosa Nostra is the destroyer of all things, and I never realized it until now.

“Dominic,” I hear Alannah shout from behind me, snapping me out of my daze.

I turn and run over to her, kissing her face all over like I can’t control myself. She has tears in her eyes, and I kiss them away. She’s safe now, and I’ll never leave her unprotected ever again.

“I’m so fucking sorry,” I say as I kiss her wet cheeks. “I’m so sorry, baby. I never should’ve left you. I don’t know what I was thinking trusting anybody in this fucking business. I’m so sorry for not being here to protect you. I’ll never let it happen again. I love you so much. I’m sorry.”

It feels like I can’t say it enough. My heart hurts with the thought of Alannah being alone with Tommy as he did whatever the fuck he did. He only did it because I wasn’t around, so my absence almost got Alannah killed, and I can barely stand myself for it. I almost made the biggest mistake of my life.

“It’s okay, Dominic,” she whispers to me, still crying. “You came back and saved me. I’d be dead if you hadn’t shown up. You saved me.”

“I never should’ve left you,” I reply as I reach over and grab the knife I dropped earlier to cut off the plastic ties shackling Alannah. “I never should’ve left, and I’ll never leave again. I won’t make the same mistake twice. From now on, we’re together, because it’s obvious that the only people we can trust is us. It’s us against everybody now.”

Once Alannah is free, she wraps her arms around me and we embrace. In this moment, I have no regrets about what just happened to Tommy. I’ll never feel bad about it now, because the cost for hurting Alannah is death, no matter who’s paying.

“Now that you mention it,” Alannah says, pulling away from me to look over at Tommy’s lifeless body. “We can’t forget that he was working with someone else. He has a partner.”

“Yeah, and we still need to figure out who it is.”

“No we don’t,” she says, to my surprise. “He called them. He had a whole phone conversation right in front of me with whoever it is. I heard everything.”

“Holy shit. Okay, so who is it?”

“He didn’t say their name, but his phone is in his pocket,” Alannah says, and we move at the same time.

I turn Tommy’s body over and feel for a phone in his pockets. It only takes a second to find it, and to my surprise, it’s not a smart phone. It’s an old school flip phone, the kind you don’t want someone to know you have, otherwise known as a burner. Burners don’t have passwords that keep people from accessing their info.

I flip the phone open and search to find the numbers that have gone out and been received, and when I see the last number dialed, it’s a contact in the phone, so it’s both a number and a name.

I don’t know if my vision is still damaged from the fight with Tommy or not, but I can’t believe my eyes. Alannah gasps as she reads the name, and I feel like all the blood in my body just rushed to my head. I drop the phone in complete shock and have to sit down so I don’t fall down.

“This can’t be right,” I hear Alannah say, although her voice sounds like it’s far away.

“It is,” I reply in a whisper. “It’s right here in front of us.”

I look down at the phone and read the name over and over again, never getting over the feeling of being stunned and betrayed.

The name in the phone is Gloria.

As in Gloria Giaculo.

My mother.

Alannah

W
hat in the holy fuck is happening?

Dominic and I ride in silence towards Belleville, and I have no idea what’s about to take place. I don’t have an idea about
anything
anymore. All of this has just become too much to even think about, let alone make sense of.

I sat in that house with Tommy for nearly two hours before Dominic showed up, and from the moment I got there, everything has been pure craziness. Tommy’s phone call, watching Dominic show up just as Tommy was making the decision that it’d be okay to kill me, and then watching Dominic and Tommy literally fight to the death was maximum overload to my brain. But things really went berserk and to a whole different level when we looked in Tommy’s phone and saw the name Gloria as one of the contacts.

Now, there’s a chance, of course, that this Gloria is some other Gloria. It could be some old lady living in Chicago or some place, with some sort of vendetta against Dominic for some reason we don’t know, but that’d be the most insane coincidence known to man, and we both know there’s no chance that’s the case. So, I sat there with Dominic for about twenty minutes in silence, while he tried to understand why his mother would do something like this. Why would she be working behind the scenes with Tommy to try to have her own son killed? What does she stand to gain from Dominic’s death? How the fuck is this even possible? Did she go to Tommy about this or did Tommy go to her? If Tommy went to her, why would he go to the boss’s mother, of all people? What is this, kindergarten? You don’t like how things are going down, so you go to the mom and tattle-tell? So many questions that are truly mind-blowing, but we’re going to get the answers.

Dominic didn’t say much after we saw the phone, but the one thing he did say was definite and final. He didn’t care what time of night it was, we were going to go see Gloria tonight. Right now. So, Dominic grabbed everything in the house that could be linked to either of us, and set the abandoned house on fire with Tommy’s body in it before we left. The house was already burned out from a previous fire, but it’ll come crashing down to the ground now, right on top of Dominic’s betrayer. The city didn’t want to tear the house down since it was in a poor neighborhood, now they won’t have a choice.

After all that’s happened, it’s obvious we’re in something really deep. Tommy’s death isn’t the end of something, it’s the beginning. Victor Fronzo has tried to call Dominic twice since we left the abandoned house, so the issue with him still isn’t over.

And the thing with Tommy presents another problem of its own. The fact that Tommy killed Raphy, another made guy, without Commission approval, means he was bound to be killed, sooner or later. The Commission doesn’t allow made guys to be killed without the green light from them, so if Dominic would’ve gone to them and told them about Raphy, Tommy was going to die anyway. However, Dominic didn’t go to the Commission. He took matters into his own hands and killed Tommy without talking to the Commission first, so there’s a chance this whole thing could blow up in Dominic’s face. If the Commission finds out about Tommy’s death, they could put a contract on Dominic’s head, and then every member of the Family could potentially be after us.

So, things just got crazy, and I know Dominic is going to need my support now more than ever. His best friend is dead, he can’t trust anybody else at this point, and Victor’s money is still a problem. It’s a lot of pressure to be under, so I have to make sure to be his sidekick as best I can. We’re partners in this, from now until forever.

I thought I was going to die tonight. I was convinced Tommy was going to pull that trigger, and I’d only hear the beginning of the gun’s pop before everything went black and my consciousness ended. I thought I’d never see Dominic again, and in that moment, I’d never been more convinced of my love for him. I love Dominic more than I love myself, more than I’ve loved anything, and being with him is the driving force behind everything I do. Just when I thought the lights would go out forever, Dominic came in and shined his light on me, making sure I’d never be in the dark again. I could never repay him for how good he is to me, but making sure that I’m his rock at the time he needs me most is a good start, I think.

After a silent forty-five-minute drive, Dominic turns the Challenger into a residential area in Belleville, Illinois. The houses here are beautiful, all two-stories with bright green landscaping that is beautiful even in the dark. It’s gorgeous, and I can’t help but think of how nice it’d be to live here, to get away from the hassle of living in St. Louis, with all its traffic and murder. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. In fact, I don’t think I’ve been here since I dropped a letter off in Gloria’s mailbox the day I moved to Alaska.

Memories flood my brain of that day, so I know as Dominic comes to a stop across the street from the house he used to live in with his mother, he’s filled with more emotions than I can even imagine.