Page 10 of Capo

I lie unmoving for a long time, listening to the silence as pain pounds heavy in my head, my face, my arm, my chest. The room spins as soon as I try to open my eyes. When nothing else happens, I reach for my bag with my good arm, screaming from the agony as I move. I feel through the content until my fingers close around my phone. Curled up in a fetal position, I force an eye open and manage to unlock the phone and call 911. It takes a few tries, but finally I get the numbers right.

Luciano

At first I don’t know what wakes me. Then the phone chimes again and I groan as I pick it up and check the time. Four fucking thirty in the morning. Christian.

I kill the call, turn off the sound, and turn on the other side.

“Motherfucking sonofabitch!” I grab the phone that now buzzes against the bedside table and tap open the call. “For fuck’s sake,” I roar, then I kill it again. He’s probably drunk out of his ass.

My sheets reek of sex and my mouth is dry. I kicked out the redhead hours ago, limping and whimpering, her backside flaming red. The memory of her hot, tight little cunt makes my cock twitch to life again. I sigh and push the comforter off me, hitting the intercom button.

“Sir?”

One of my staff answers almost immediately.

“Send someone to fix my bed. It stinks.”

“Yes, sir.”

I push my fingers through my mess of hair and find a pair of track pants in a drawer. A little further down the hallway lies my gym. An hour with the weights should take some of the pressure off. There’s always something. Eric’s planning a hostile takeover of the Crimson Clubs and that’s gonna make us some new enemies to keep an eye on. We need to find good staff pronto to not lose income. There’s the issue with one of my men making contacts in Vegas. He’s been taken care of, but we need to weed out whoever else might have been involved, and we need to sort out what the motherfucker disclosed about us.

My head hurts as I work the barbell. Pecs. Deadlifts. Lunges. I’m sweating profusely, feeling how the booze from last night leaves my system.

Then there’s my nephew, Christian. He’s fucked up royally. He shouldn’t have gotten involved with his hit, even though I admit she’s a one-of-a-kind lady.

My mind spins as I drop the barbell to the floor with a heavy thud and head back to my bedroom and a shower. It’s early morning. My bed has been made and a window stands ajar. The first birds have started singing hesitantly and the ever-present fog lies like a carpet over the vast lawn. The sun will chase it off in a couple of hours, but right now it mutes the world, embraces it. I like the heat and the sun. It’s a wonder I chose the city of fog to settle in, but here we are, and my network is too intricately woven into the community on the West Coast. I can’t tear it up now.

As I shower and let the cool water re-energize me, I think of the woman who made me set foot here in the first place. Elena Wokowska. She was forty. I was twenty-four. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. We were never a real thing. It wasn’t love. But with her being a masochist, and completely uninhibited, she awoke the sadist in me. I was already ruthless. I killed whoever got in my way without a second thought, but it wasn’t until then that I knew what I wanted. Sex before Elena had been an uninteresting push them down, spread their legs and fuck them until I got off. Sex with Elena, and after her, became my own savage art form. I know I hurt them, and that’s exactly how I want it, how I need it. It makes me invincible, above everyone, puts fear in the men and the women who pass through my life. I’ll never again have to go back to being cold, hungry, dirty and abandoned. I take, and everyone else gives.

My cock grows and I wish I hadn’t sent off the redhead. I should have just chained her to the wall and gagged her. If she’d sat out there right now, I’d have pulled her up by her thick, lush hair and pushed her face first to the bed, ravaging her tight little ass.

I turn the faucet until the water is ice cold and finish the shower. It’s six, and I probably didn’t sleep more than a couple of hours, but I might as well start the day.

The house is silent as I leave my wing and walk through the rooms until I reach the kitchen. There I stop flat. At the table sits a hulking Christian, disheveled, hunched over, nurturing a large cup of black java. The scent of coffee is enticing. The sight of my nephew isn’t.

“What the fuck are you doing here? You woke me, you piece of shit.” I cross the kitchen and turn on the espresso machine, waiting for the pressure to rise. Placing a cup of water in the microwave oven I let the thick china preheat as I drop beans into the grinder.

“I’m a bad man,” mutters Christian.

I raise an eyebrow and turn to him, unsure how to respond to that. Apart from his loyalty to the family, and his admirable protective instincts of his sister Angela, there’s not one good fiber in him.

Preparing my cup, I then take it to the table and sit opposite my mess of a relative.

“No, I’m really fucking bad. I went to Kerry’s friend.”

“And?”

“I beat her up. Bad.”

“And?”

“I don’t have a habit of beating up girls. I don’t know what the fuck’s wrong with me, Luci.”

“Dude. If you don’t get ahold of yourself, I’ll fucking throw you in chains. Does she know who you are?”

Christian sighs. “I think she understood that pretty well. Kerry told her more than what was good for either of them.”

“You need to go back and finish her. Who is she?”

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