Chapter One
Max
It’s time they realize they’re no longer in charge.
I folded back into the nighttime shadows of a nearby building not far from Benito Brambilla’s lakefront warehouse. The shipment of drugs had arrived not long before. Heat infused my blood, despite the unseasonably cool May temperatures. The hypnotic crash of Lake Michigan’s waves would soon aid our approach as we converged on our target. The wind whipped off the tumultuous water, rushing over the beach and through dark city streets. Dense cloud cover blocked the moon’s rays.
A storm was coming, and not only the one nature provided.
My team—my cousins—were in place. Like a well-oiled machine, we would strike when the time was right. It won’t be long.
I’d waited to enact my plan for more years than I wanted to admit. While in Sicily, we’d studied Chicago until we were as familiar with the city’s grid as we were with our home in Italy. Then we examined Brambilla’s holdings and how he conducted business. His father-in-law, Vincenzo, had been instrumental with that intel. Drugs, after all, were what he considered bad business, and he demanded that any involvement with them and the Brambilla line come to a swift end. I agreed. But that wasn’t the only thing Vincenzo and I had discussed.
He’d given me an eight-by-ten photo of his gorgeous granddaughter, which was never far from my mind. The picture had been taken close to six months before, when she’d been on winter break from her last year of college, leaning against a window and looking out as if lost. Vincenzo had had no contact with her after her mother had been murdered—that was something we had in common. Hers was killed close to the same age as mine, leaving us both with fathers that didn’t want us. Mine had abandoned me. In a way, hers had too.
Part of me worried that when I met her, I would want to kill her for taking part in the pain she and Benito had inflicted on Vincenzo. But I’d promised Vincenzo that I would keep an open mind, especially when he’d told me our situations, at heart anyway, were not that different.
From Vincenzo, I knew that Julia, his daughter, had visited him in Sicily several times with her young daughter, Liliana, before she was murdered. He had been devastated, and rightly so.
When he’d emerged from his grief and contacted Benito to arrange for a visit with his granddaughter, Benito had made threats to her safety should Vincenzo attempt to contact her—why, we weren’t sure. But the end result was that Benito had poisoned his daughter’s mind against her grandfather, telling her that Vincenzo was the one who’d sent men to kill her and her mother.
That was where I came in. Vincenzo wanted me to give Liliana the protection of my name, freeing her from Benito’s grasp. Only then would he risk approaching her. Soon, I would infiltrate Benito’s home, where I would protect her with my life.
It wasn’t the time to get distracted, and for a fraction of a second, I suffered pangs of regret over what I would be doing later that night and the destruction I would unleash on one arm of the Five Families. The Italian-American Mafia would have been my world, too, if not for Benito Brambilla and my father. As soon as the thought entered my mind, heralding the bitter chill of abandonment, I shut it down. What they’d done, combined with the fact that they’d stolen my position in the Mafia, was why I chose to retaliate. To take back what should have been mine from the start.
My finger curled around the 9mm that was like an extension of my hand. Two men exited the warehouse. Our objective wasn’t to kill them all, just enough to make an impact. We weren’t there for the men but to destroy what was inside the building. An hour before, a truck had delivered the shipment of opioids and cocaine. With the exit of the driver, we’d waited for the crew remaining in place to guard the building to settle into a false sense of calm.
The last couple of attacks I’d led against Benito had put the boss on alert, but his ego continued to get in the way. He hadn’t deviated from his scheduled shipment. He’d increased his guard, but it wasn’t enough to stop my team. I had a plan that would bring him and Antonio Caruso to their knees.
It was phase one and would catapult me to the next, an invitation to work for the Brambilla boss himself under the guise of Matteo “Matt” Trambino rather than my rightful name. Max would ring too many bells. He wouldn’t know who had stripped him of power until it was too late.
The roar of an engine drew my focus back to the task at hand. Cars started, and the inside crew who hadn’t remained past the initial delivery—the time frame when we’d attacked Benito’s other warehouse operations—pulled out. We waited to deviate from prior hits, causing unpredictability and confusion. Our masks were firmly in place. We wouldn’t leave anyone standing who could recognize us.
Cristiano was in position on the roof adjacent to the warehouse, taking point as our sniper. He covered the front of the building and the south side, where we didn’t have a man in place to watch the windows. No one left behind would escape our ambush. We had planned the raid far in advance, wore tactical gear, and spoke into our earpiece communication devices only when necessary.
My focus sharpened, and adrenaline coursed through me as I balanced on my toes. Any second now.
Tommasso gave the first signal, and Cristiano went to work. We waited as he took out the guards stationed within sight. The whiz of the sniper rifle’s bullets was music to my ears. Tommasso, Sal, and I hit the ground at a sprint in the darkness of night, converging on the front, side, and back of the dimly lit warehouse. I counted the targets in my head as I eliminated them.
Until then, nature had been on our side with the almost moonless night and whistling winds. We’d hoped to outrun the storm, but we didn’t. A flash of light negated the usefulness of our night vision goggles. I pulled mine off and let my eyes adjust.
Lightning split the sky, highlighting our approach but marking our targets as well. The strobe light bisecting the night was too late to save them. The pop of bullets and cries of alarm cut off as more men fell, blanketed under an ominous roll of thunder.
I fired my last bullet then ejected the magazine and slammed another into place in a matter of seconds. More men exited the warehouse, returning fire. Bullets peppered the air around me. One grazed my neck. The resulting burn sent a wave of cold fury that only fueled my determination to take them out.
Through the haze of bloodlust, Tommasso’s “clear” registered. Kicking the prone body I’d just shot out of the way, I yanked open the steel door. I took aim and entered the interior as Sal came through the window to my right. Three bodies lay in a growing pool of blood. No others stood in the way of our target.
We weren’t in the clear yet. I notched my head at Sal. He took off in the direction I’d indicated—there were offices in the back. Tommasso and I surveyed the tables and pallets teeming with the contraband we sought to destroy. That was his favorite part. Mine was the attack. Sal’s “all clear, boss” as he checked the back offices sent a thrill through me.
Cristiano remained on the roof, listening to the police scanners and watching the grid around us. We had time to dismantle the few cameras we hadn’t already shot out. In the back offices, Sal worked furiously to wipe all traces of our presence from any recordings. Any images stored elsewhere wouldn’t matter—the bulky jackets, indiscernible clothing, gloves, and face masks camouflaged who we were. Our clothes all matched. There were no labels, and the masks had padding sewn in to further obscure the shape of our faces. Black face paint coated our lips where they were visible and around our eyes. The night vision goggles would have been ideal for hiding even more, but they were rendered useless with the light.
We played the long game. Whatever it took. Until we were gone, nothing was removed. No exceptions.
A sense of satisfaction sizzled just beneath my skin. Causing problems for Benito Brambilla was easy. The next day would be another story. The third and fourth parts of my plan were trickier, but I was more than up for a challenge where the reward would punish those who’d wronged my family and taken what should have been mine all along.
I gave the order. “Light it up.” I didn’t have to see it to know that a wide grin curved Tommasso’s mouth. With a rush of heat, his flamethrower sent a stream of fire across the tables in front of him.
Sal emerged from the office as fire consumed the pills, powders, and syringes stacked on the tables. Flames licked the pallets and would soon spread to every inch of wood present in the building. I set C-4 charges to destroy everything inside.
As the inferno progressed, we backtracked to safer ground. The flamethrower winked out, and the three of us hightailed it out of the building. We had about thirty seconds until the first explosion. Sal slapped me on the back as he passed. I slowed until Tommasso joined Sal. I would be the last to exit. Kicking up my pace, I took up the rear as we ran from the warehouse.
A black Lexus screeched to a halt on the block over. Behind tinted windows, Cristiano waited. We arrived at the car, yanked open the doors, and dove in as explosions rocked the night. Cops would be on the scene shortly. As Cristiano peeled away, our guard didn’t slip. A false magnetic sheet covered the license plates. We sped through intersections, passing cars, and by some miracle, no cops. A slight veer to the right took us onto the ramp to the streets beneath the city, where we raced through twists and turns at breakneck speed.
Pulling into an underground hotel parking lot, we slid into a spot and killed the engine. We’d taken care of the cameras on the lower level. Even so, we would not use that car again. A gray van pulled up behind us, blocking our car in and further obscuring direct sight. The side door rolled open, and we piled in. John lumbered out of the passenger seat then rounded the front of the van while Nick remained in the driver’s seat. John bent down then peeled magnetized license plates from the car, leaving the ones hidden beneath visible, then climbed into the Lexus. He went in one direction, and we went in another, maintaining a moderate speed. John would wipe down, strip, repaint, and sell the car we’d driven.
We didn’t speak or remove any article of clothing until we were topside and the divider was in place to shield us from the front windshield. We stripped out of our masks and black clothes then pulled on jeans and nondescript hoodies. We stored our gear in a hidden compartment behind one of the work shelves that contained carpentry tools.
Dressed, I leaned back against the empty side of the van, my head resting against the metal as the adrenaline released its hold and my body relaxed. With a wide grin, I turned to Sal. “That’ll cause an uproar.”
“At the very least.” Sal agreed. “You ready for tomorrow?”
“You have to ask?” Tommasso laughed. “He was born for this. You, on the other hand, lacked some finesse climbing through the window.”
I met Cristiano’s gaze while Sal and Tommasso hurled good-natured insults at one another. They were brothers. Cris and I were used to their ways.
When the van slowed, we got out and stepped into a dark alley with no cameras, where Nick left us for the time being. Joe pulled away nice and easy so as not to alert anyone who might have been walking down the sidewalk in front of the alley that he’d stopped at all. We exchanged hushed goodbyes.
As I slipped through a narrow passageway between two businesses, I allowed part of my mind to recap what had gone down. With many of the police force on the payroll for the Mafia, our takedown of Brambilla’s warehouse wouldn’t make much of a stir and would most likely be reported as faulty wiring. The drugs would never make the news. But what it would do was cut the legs off of Brambilla’s operation. Anticipation curled in my gut. The next phase was already in motion.
Benito had arranged a meeting with me. Word had reached his ear about an Italian hit man who delivered results for difficult or troublesome situations. Brambilla would hire me because of my stellar reputation and promises of confidentiality, in the hopes of diminishing any publicity for his crumbling empire.
Miles from the warehouse, I let myself into a lakefront brownstone. I owned the entire building. After dropping the keys on the entryway table, I headed to the kitchen and poured myself a whiskey. Glass in hand, I settled on the couch with the folder of intel I’d collected over the years. I planned to thumb through the documents one last time before my meeting with Brambilla, which I knew would lead to my hire, even though I’d committed the contents of those pages to memory. As I removed the eight-by-ten glossy on the top of the stack, my heart kicked up a notch. I wasn’t sure if it was from the image of the woman herself as she laughed with two other Mafia princesses or the knowledge that she would soon be mine to protect.
