Married to the Mafia Boss

Alessandro

I was eighteen when my father started giving me tasks from the family business to help with. He’d send me to places to collect, repress or shoot someone in the face. Romero Sorvino had been a brutal father, but there had been lessons to learn.

One of the people he’d been conducting business with thought they could get a one-up on him, make him bend to their whims, so they’d targeted Dom’s boarding school and kidnapped him.

It’d been the first time I’d really understood what it had meant to be a part of a mafia family.

They tortured him, just sixteen or probably less at the time, and had sent the tapes to our father, and whenever he had to watch it, he’d call Frankie and me to sit and watch with him.

That was the first “real” job he gave me. Saving Dom.

Frankie, me, and some of our men found where they were keeping Dom. I’d lost it when I saw him cowering in the corner of a cage like a dirty rat.

It hadn’t even been the kind of anger that made you scream like a wild animal. It had been the kind of anger that made your senses sharper and calmer.

That day I understood what my future would be like, having to protect my family when I became the Don.

That anger paled in comparison to what I was feeling now.

My armory was open, and I was carefully strapping myself with the weapons I needed for my hunt. Humming to the tune of an old kindergarten rhyme.

Gun, knives, hand grenades.

I hadn’t done field violence in a while, that was officially Dom’s territory, but tonight, I couldn’t have cared less.

Katya was missing.

No, not missing, taken. Like a bad joke, I’d gotten the report only a few hours ago, and it had been hysterical.

I’d laughed for half an hour straight, tears leaking from my eye. Somehow the men that had brought the report hadn’t seen the humor, they’d passed silent glanced among themselves.

Of all the things in the world to do, Maxim Triev decided to take Katya.

He was already a dead man when he’d made a move on Yuri, now, what I wanted to do to him would have made him unfit even for hell.

God would look at his fucking body and let him into heaven just to make up for it.

But even that, I paused, I couldn’t do.

I’d promised him to Katya.

I drew a deep breath and continued, before pulling on my jacket and wristwatch.

Maybe Maxim wouldn’t face my hands, but I was pissed as shit, and somebody was going to pay for it.

Frankie and Dom were in on the hunt too, nothing much, just looking for a little bit of information to help us with Maxim’s whereabouts. They would let me know as soon as they had a lead, meanwhile, I was going out on my own tonight.

Nowhere fancy, just the shitty hotel the Trievs had bought and remodeled.

I leaned against the passenger door of the van, whistling to myself-I’d been playing the tune of the rhyme, but I couldn’t remember the words-while the men I’d brought with me wreaked havoc inside. The screams reached me, and occasionally somebody would run out to try and escape.

Since the place was remodeled, it wasn’t officially operating. Instead of a hotel, it was more of a joint for Triev operations. A place for his people to drop off reports, victims, or whatever the hell they did,

If they ran up the street, in front of the van, I reached inside the passenger seat for a shotgun, aimed and fired. And if they went the other way, I had a man at the back to shoot them.

There was chaos inside and, on the street, but that was only the beginning.

I was going to turn up the heat until somebody gave me something I could use to find my fucking wife.

With all the noise, nobody dared move on the street, but some of them must have had the good sense to phone the cops.

The cops wouldn’t be coming though, not when I’d already made a very direct call to the attorney general. A man on the Trievs’ payroll.

The little shitty stunt that they had been pulling for the past weeks, breathing down our necks and disrupting our businesses, had only been taken with humor because of the merger between the Petrenkos and us, but since my wife was now fucking missing, and her father was being guarded in the hospital, there was no Petrenko left to whisper in my ear about being reasonable.

If they so much as made a sound I didn’t like, I’d made it clear to him that there would be instant, significant, and very severe consequences.

All he had to do was receive his fat bribery check and stay put until I had my wife back.

By the end of the raid at the Triev hotel, I had five business managers captured for me. I intended to question them until I found out where she was being kept.

Preferably before I lost my mind.

I didn’t even know how they’d taken her, but she was missing, and all fingers pointed to the Trievs.

And since they had a history of human trafficking and were not above using medieval methods, as they had with the stripper from the Petrenko strip club they’d raided, I needed to get her back quickly.

I hadn’t slept since I had gotten the news, and this was the second establishment of the Trievs I had visited.

Katya.

If anything, anything at all, happened to her, I was going to go insane and that was going to mean crap for everybody.

All I’d done so far was think, and it was true. We might have started fast and hot, tossed on a fucking rollercoaster that didn’t know how to slow down, but somewhere along the way I must have fallen for her without realizing.

It wasn’t just how she looked, she was the most beautiful woman, yes, but it was more. Every time I was alone, it was her scent, that subtle mix of a delicate flowery scent with musky undertones that made me want to bury my nose in her neck and stay there.

I wanted to catch a whiff of that scent and follow it to her.

I wanted to see her challenging smile, hear that laugh, and watch those icy blue eyes scrutinize her environment before settling on mine.

I hadn’t said it to her, but by fuck when I got her back, I would. Every damn day I would tell her I loved her until she understood it and more.

My heart ripped when I realized she was missing, and I had laughed like a psychopath because it couldn’t, shouldn’t, have been true.

I combed through hallways and corridors littered with dead or dying people. Not batting an eyelid as they led me to where the men I needed were.

Tied to chairs, the five men were in a small windowless room. Maybe it was the wreckage from the attack, the bloodstain on the walls, carpet, and ceiling, but I hadn’t been overly impressed with the hotel’s interior.

Maybe I’d just done Triev a favor because this hotel wouldn’t have lasted half the year if it had started operating.

I entered the room, and one of the tied men opened his mouth.

“Do what you want, we’ll ne-” he was starting to say before I fired at one kneecap, and he screamed.

Then he tried to talk again, and I fired at the other kneecap. “Now you’ll never fucking walk,” I said with a surprisingly calm voice. Inside me, I was falling apart. I snapped for a chair and dragged it to the front of the man I’d just shot, and my boys filtered out of the room, shutting the door, and getting to work cleaning up the street. They didn’t need to bother with this place, it would be burnt to the ground soon enough.

I pulled out a knife and started the torture, digging out for the bullets lodged in his knees.

His screams were blood curdling and distracting, so I stopped after getting the second bullet out.

“Normally, I would have asked you a question, but I think you were just about to say that you’d never talk, yes?”

If looks could kill, I’d never have made it past twenty years old, but here I was, well into my thirties, being given a death stare that was severely laced with fear.

It was unlucky for him that the death stare wouldn’t hurt him the way I planned to.Text property © Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org.

I pulled out a knife and went for the tongue. If he wasn’t going to talk, then he didn’t need it. His comrades watched me mutilate him in perfect silence.

A scapegoat was what I’d been looking for, and the universe had provided it accordingly.

I started humming again after tossing the tongue to one corner of the room, listening to the heavy breathing of the other managers.

“There are only two things you can do if you want to live,” I said, ripping the man’s shirt so I could start carving out his torse, “one would be able to tell me where the fuck your boss took my wife to. The other, if you could remind me what the fuck I’m trying to sing. I can’t remember the words.”

The first time I carved a living thing must have been a rat from my childhood; it had snuck into my stash of snacks, and I’d set a trap for it.

With his stomach open, the first man died very quickly.

When he went limp, I pushed him back, so his chair tripped and fell over, and scooted my chair to the next man.

He was soaked in blood from the first man’s spray, sweat, and tears.

“Will you also not tell me what I need to know?”

He was shaking his head and already begging. “I don’t know. I swear, I don’t know. I don’t have the level to know, they didn’t tell me anything, I swear.”

“Not even the rhyme?” I asked, wiping the blood off my knife on his shirt.

Sanitary was preferred.

“…I don’t know…” his replied in a pleading tone.

Not good enough.

I didn’t know how many hours later before I was the only living man left in the room, with blood everywhere on me, but there were five dead men tied to chairs on the floor, and I still wasn’t any closer to finding Katya.

I called Frankie first, but he too had nothing. He’d raved through another of Triev’s property but found no fucking information.

Dom too, only that he was having a lot more fun with the torture.

I threw my head back and looked at the badly painted ceiling, finally remembering the rhyme that was stuck in my head.

Wherever she was, I was going to find her.