Lawless: Mob Boss Book Three

A
ngel Rossi opened
her eyes all at once, fighting disorientation in the moment before she remembered where she was; the sofa in her office —formerly her father’s office.

It wasn’t unusual for her to take a nap in the middle of the night and then work until morning when she would run home for a shower and change of clothes. In the four months since she’d taken over her father’s businesses — and the Syndicate’s Boston territory — she’d spent almost every waking hour at Rossi Development.

She stretched and checked her phone. Two am, which meant she’d been dozing for almost two hours. She would need to work through the night to finish auditing the financials on the subsidiary that looked to be an off-the-books payroll service for the crooked cops who had worked for her father.

She wondered if Luca was still in the office next door. He’d been her almost constant companion since Nico’s death, but she would have to send him back soon. Allow him to run New York properly, the way Nico had intended when he’d appointed Luca Underboss before his death.

Nico…

She shouldn’t have worried that she would forget him. She could see his face as clearly as if she’d seen him yesterday, could still feel his hands on her naked body, his breath against her hair when he pulled her close in the middle of the night. He was as real as ever, and sometimes the permanence of his absence hit her out of the blue, the worst kind of surprise. She would double over then, heaving, gasping for air, sure the blood was turning to sludge in her veins, that her heart was slowly coming to a stop without him.

She was always surprised when she woke up the next morning. She forced herself to put one foot in front of the other even when it seemed impossible. It was what Nico would want, and she focused with obsessive single-mindedness on remaking her father’s empire — and plotting revenge against the people who had supported Dante in his bid to oust Nico.

Raneiro had come to visit shortly after she’d removed Frank Morra. The head of the Syndicate had been impassive as he’d quizzed her about her plans for the Boston territory. She wasn’t fooled. Possession was nine-tenths of the law, and right now, she was in possession of Boston. But she knew he had concerns. Her father hadn’t intended for her to take over when he died, hadn’t even bothered to tell Angel about his business with the Syndicate. She knew Raneiro thought she was
in over her head.

It might have been true in the beginning, when she’d been driven more by fury than ambition. But her anger had fueled a sustained determination to dismantle the machine that had killed Nico and ruined her chances of having a normal life. That had traumatized David to the point that he could hardly leave the brownstone even now, months after Dante kidnapped him and cut off two of his fingers in an effort to gain control of the New York territory.

Dante had been the head of the snake, but he hadn’t been alone. Men from other families had joined him in an effort to kill Nico’s twenty-first century business model for the Syndicate — a model that was seen as too soft by men accustomed to the brutality of old world organized crime. They had all worked with Dante in one capacity of another. Offered him help, support, resources. She had made it her mission to destroy every one of them.

She started by learning the books at Rossi development inside and out. Learning where the money was hidden, how it was laundered. Learning which cops were on the payroll, which men had aided her father in the murder of Nico’s parents. Now she knew who was involved in the most despicable of the Syndicate’s income streams — child pornography, human trafficking, bad loans to those already down on their luck, identity theft of innocent people.

And she was slowly picking at the threads that would unravel it all.

She sat up as something rustled nearby. Was it outside the office? The janitors usually didn’t come until later, and everyone else was gone except Luca. He rarely left her alone, and when he did go back to the apartment he was renting downtown, he made sure Marco or Elia had eyes on her. It had been disconcerting at first, but she’d gotten used to it. After what happened in Los Angeles, she didn’t trust anyone but them, and she needed to stay alive long enough to finish the job she’d started and make sure David was back on his feet.

She heard the sound again, then saw something shift out of the corner of her eye. She stood, heart pounding, and reached for the gun she’d set on the coffee table before she’d gone to sleep. She’d rejected David’s suggestion that she might have PTSD, too. That she could benefit from counseling. She’d gone to the shooting range instead, hired an instructor, practiced until she had a ninety percent kill ratio at seventy-five feet.

She scanned the office, her eyes coming to rest on a shadowy figure leaning against the wall across from her.

She raised the gun, thumbed off the safety. “I suggest you identify yourself,” she said. “Unless you’d like your DNA to do it for you.”

The figure stepped forward, arms raised in surrender, hands empty. But that was all easy to register, easier than the face that slowly came into view in the faint light spilling from the lamp on the desk.

She shook her head. “No. It… It can’t be.”

He stepped closer, and she was assaulted by the smell of him, the scent of leather and soap and something else now. Pine?

He gently took the gun from her hand and set it back on the coffee table. Then he met her gaze, and she knew it was true. His face was thinner, but it was him, the amber eyes piercing hers in the darkness, the set of his shoulders as uncompromising as ever under his white T-shirt and a familiar leather jacket.

He touched his knuckles to her face, ran them gently down her cheek, his eyes locked on hers. She couldn’t breathe, didn’t dare move. She registered with detachment that her face was wet, tears streaming from her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Angel,” he said.

She lifted a hand and cracked it hard across his face.

N
ico stared after her
, listened to the sound of her heels clicking on the marble floor of the lobby before she disappeared into the elevator. When she was gone, he paced to the window overlooking downtown Boston. It was pretty, but it wasn’t New York. He missed it. Missed the chaos and noise, the honking and swearing, the history that was baked and frozen into the concrete and stone.

He hadn’t been back since before he and Angel left for Miami just before summer. Then there was the frantic trip to LA to save David, the chaos of his rescue, the aftermath that Nico had been forced to watch from afar.

He slipped a hand into the pocket of his jeans, touched the rosary beds he sometimes carried there. He still wasn’t sure he believed in god, but the beads had brought him comfort during the long months when he’d been alone. It was some combination of the repetition as he slid them through his fingers, the memories they brought of childhood when everything had seemed so simple.

Angel didn’t understand. He couldn’t blame her. Faking his death had been a last resort. The only way he felt sure she would be safe — and the only way he stood a chance of figuring out what was really going on in the Syndicate.

He’d known as soon as they got to LA that the conspiracy against him went deeper than Dante and a handful of traitors from various families. The effort to sabotage the Vitale family had required too much manpower, too many resources, to be attributed to Dante alone. Something bigger was happening behind the scenes, and Nico had no doubt that once they rescued David, he would be next on the list.

And whoever came for him wouldn’t be satisfied with a couple of fingers.

He didn’t care about himself. If he’d been alone, he would have surrounded himself by the men he trusted, brushed up on his Eskrima and tactical training, taken his chances.

But he couldn’t do that with Angel. Wouldn’t.

He didn’t know if she intended to stay with him after her brother was rescued, but it didn’t matter. Whoever was after him knew that she was his weakness, and that meant she was a target as long as he was alive.

He and Luca had started formulating the plan in the days they spent at Locke’s beach house before David’s rescue. Luca hadn’t liked it. Hell, Nico wasn’t exactly thrilled either. But it had seemed the only way to put meaningful distance between him and Angel. To buy him time to do some real investigation into what was going on. It hadn’t been a guarantee of her safety, and he’d made damn sure Luca had someone on her 24/7 ever since, but Nico had bet on the fact that with him out of the picture, his enemies would be satisfied with keeping an eye on Angel, at least for awhile.

He’d been right, but now their time was up. Nico would let her calm down, and then he’d explain. She’d understand. She’d have to.

He turned to face the luxurious office where Angel spent most of her time. It wasn’t the first time he’d been there since she took over Rossi Development and the Boston family. Luca kept him informed about Angel’s movements, and Nico had gotten good at watching her in the post-midnight hours when she slept on the sofa in her father’s old office. He’d just needed to see her up close. To see the way pieces of her hair fell out of the bun at the back of her head, the childlike way she folded her legs under her while she slept. She looked so different then. Different from the way she looked marching into the office in the mornings, her face an expressionless mask.

He almost hadn’t recognized her the first time he’d dared to watch from the sidewalk as she entered the building. She’d looked so focused, so emotionless, so devoid of the vulnerability that made him want to end anyone who so much as hurt her feelings.

But when she slept he could see her the way she had been in his bed. Then he remembered the feel of her porcelain skin under his palm, her body moving under his as she welcomed him into her moist heat, her passionate cries as she came apart in his hands.

She belonged to him. Being without her had felt like missing a piece of himself. It was the worse kind of phantom limb, a dull ache in his chest that was a constant reminder of her absence. He’d spent the last four months skulking in the shadows, sleeping in dingy hotel rooms, eating shitty food while Luca ran New York under Raneiro’s watchful eyes.

And he’d done it for her. To insure that she was safe, that she stayed that way.

He would just have to make her see it. It didn’t matter whether she forgave him. Not really. What mattered was letting her know the extent of the danger she was in. And eliminating that danger once and for all.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. He reached for it with one hand while heading for the door.

“What is it?”

He listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. Five second later he was running for the elevator.

L
uca was leaning
against the building, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, when she stepped outside. She stopped in front of him, her heart racing so fast she thought it might beat out of her chest.

“You fucking asshole,” she said, her voice low.

He opened his mouth to speak, but she was already moving past him, down the sidewalk toward the brownstone that had been in her family since she was born.

“I’m sorry,” he called after her.

She heard his footsteps on the pavement, and a moment later he was walking next to her, his long legs easily keeping pace even though she was practically running to get away from him.

They walked together in tense silence for a couple of minutes, the city dark and quiet except for the street lights and an occasional car. Usually she liked walking home in the dark, even if Luca or one of the other men was always on her heels. But now she was almost shaking, her mind and body overwhelmed with Nico’s sudden reappearance.

“How could you?” she finally said without looking at Luca.

“I had no choice.”

“Bullshit,” she said as they turned the corner. “You let me think he was dead. You…” She inhaled a deep, shuddering breath, dimly aware that her anger was the only thing keeping darker emotions at bay. “You let me go to his funeral. Let me think I was burying him.”

She had a flash of the coffin, the smell of the grass when she’d gone to the cemetery that night, the hole that opened up inside her when she thought she was leaving Nico’s body there.

“I know,” he said. “But this is bigger than the two of you.”

“Sounds like a cop out,” she said.

“It’s not. You’re just going to have to trust me on that.”

“Well, I don’t.” She practically spat the words as she crossed her arms in front of her. “Not anymore.”

He didn’t say anything, but she felt him tense next to her. They’d become close in Nico’s absence. Or she thought they had anyway. Luca had been the one constant in her life, and her most powerful connection to Nico. She couldn’t even fathom the extent of his deceit. All the times she’d been sad and lonely. All the times she missed Nico so much she didn’t think the blood would keep flowing through her veins. Luca had known Nico was alive and said nothing.

They continued down Commonwealth until they came to the brownstone. In the spring, cherry blossoms colored the trees outside pink. Now everything was pale and green, on the verge of the riot of color that would signify fall.

She stopped at the steps leading up to the front door and turned to face him. “Does Marco know?” she asked. “Elia?”

He shook his head, and she saw the regret in his eyes. “I’m the only one.”

She thought about that, about Nico in hiding for four months with no one but Luca to know he was alive. But no. She couldn’t start feeling sorry for him. He had done this. He and Luca. And they had put her through hell.

“Go home, Luca,” she said.

“Can’t do it.” His blue eyes flashed under the shock of dark hair. “Boss’s orders.”

The words called forth a fresh wave of indignity.

“I don’t think you understand.” She spoke slowly, evenly. She had become one of them, the measure of her fury evident in the level of calm forced into her voice. “
I
am the boss. Now go home.”

She headed for the house, but when she got to the front door, she looked back to find him leaning against the iron fence next door. Of course, he wouldn’t leave. It pissed her off, but there was nothing she could do about it. She’d learned not to bring attention to herself, to Rossi Development, to any of their business dealings or associates. Being part of the Syndicate meant being subject to rules and limitations that made even the most straightforward of situations seem complicated.

Fine. Let him stand out there all night then.

She opened the door and locked it behind her, then stood listening in the entry. The house was quiet. David was probably upstairs in his room, watching Netflix or sleeping off the anti-depressants prescribed to him by the psychiatrist he’d been seeing since he got out of the hospital. She hung her coat near the door and made her way up the stairs.

David’s medication made her nervous, especially since she was at the office so much of the time. She made sure to check on him several times a day, but she still lived in fear that he would accidentally take too many of the pills — or that maybe it wouldn’t be an accident at all. He’d been kidnapped and tortured. Had lost two of his fingers, been afraid for his life before he was rescued in the hail of bullets that had finally killed Dante Santoro. David wasn’t himself, might never be himself again because of her.

She shook the thought from her mind as she reached the second floor landing. She couldn’t look back. She’d done what seemed right at the time; helping Nico, trying to figure out who was targeting him. She couldn’t have known Dante would come after David. She couldn’t have known any of it would happen like it did; that she would kill the man standing between her and Nico, that she would require two hours of emergency surgery to remove the bullet he’d fired into her stomach on his way down. It had been traumatic for all of them, but most of all for David who had gone from being a college student grieving his father’s death to being held hostage by one of the Syndicate’s most brutal men.

She stopped at the closed door of his room and listened for a few seconds before rapping softly on the carved wood. No answer. She tried again, then eased open the door.

The room was dark, the heavy curtains pulled shut like always. It didn’t matter if it was nine in the morning or six at night, David’s room was always cloaked in darkness, as if the thick velvet draperies could keep his fear at bay.

He was laying on his back, light brown hair flopping onto his forehead, lanky limbs splayed out across the mattress. He’d always slept that way. When they were little and could convince their mother to let them sleep in the same bed, Angel never lasted long before retreating to her own room. David had been a bed hog even then.

His left hand was still wrapped in a bandage, even though it had mostly healed. She thought it was because he didn’t want to look at his disfigured hand, didn’t want to admit it was permanent, and she felt ashamed at her relief that the bandage meant she didn’t have to admit it either.

“David,” she said softly, lowering herself onto the mattress next to him. She touched his hair, said his name again.

He stirred, and a split second later his eyes flew open and he sat up, terror playing across his features in the dim light making its way into the room from the sconces in the hallway.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s just me.”

He lay back down, his body slowly relaxing. “What time is it?”

“It’s the middle of the night.” She felt guilty as she said it. Why did she wake him up? Was she scared he’d OD on his medication? Or was she just looking for company? “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Is everything all right?”

She fought the urge to laugh hysterically. “It’s fine,” she said softly. “I was just checking on you. Go back to sleep.”

He nodded and rolled over. “Love you, Ange.”

She ruffled his hair. “Love you, too, loser.”

He snorted into his pillow as she eased from the room.

She closed his door and headed back downstairs. It was nearly four am, but she wasn’t ready for sleep, and she continued toward the kitchen at the back of the house.

She still wasn’t used to being back in Boston. Filled with antiques and art chosen by her father’s decorator, the house felt stiff in a way Nico’s family home in the Hudson Valley hadn’t. But she hadn’t had time to redecorate, hadn’t had energy for anything except taking care of David and plotting revenge against the men who had betrayed Nico. She felt a sudden longing for her little apartment upstate; the tiny bedroom, the living room with the threadbare thrift store couch. It hadn’t been much, but it had been hers, and it had been bought and paid for honestly. She had already packed up her father’s penthouse apartment. She would need to do something about the brownstone eventually, too.

She pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge, and poured a healthy sized glass. Her hands shook as she brought it to her mouth, and she took a long swallow before setting it back on the counter. Her nerves smoothed out just in time for reality to hit her.

Nico was alive.

She closed her eyes against the memories. Nico’s perfect body moving over her, his breath in her ear, his strong hands spreading her thighs.

A sob escaped her mouth, and she bent over at the waist, muffling her cries against her hand. Waves of emotion crashed over her; anger and relief and bitterness all mixed together in a hurricane that threatened to undo the facade of control she’d constructed over the past four months. It went on and on, the pain of losing him wracking her body while her mind tried to reconcile it with the fact that he he had been alive all this time.

Alive, alive, alive…

She was suddenly overwhelmed with the need to see him. What had she been thinking when she’d walked away? She needed him in front of her, needed to know it was real. Then she would deal with the why of it all.

She straightened, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and taking a deep cleansing breath. She was reaching for her cell phone when glass exploded behind her head.