Page 69 of Assistant to the Mafia

Mo nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

Tracey started laughing again after Mo disappeared. “You fuckers think I’m afraid of your boss?” He twisted as much as his chains allowed, attempting once more to wiggle upright. Once more failing. “I never would’ve cloned his fuckin’ phone if I were.”

Romeo strode back up to him, bare handed, and tipped his head to one side. “Oh, that was you? You cloned my brother’s phone and lured my fiancée out into that ambush?”

Tracey offered up a truly feral grin. “Ramires ain’t shabby with the new shit, I can’t take credit for the actual cloning. Just the use. But the rest, yeah, that was all me. Sent that stupid text, killed the phone before it could be traced.” He chuckled some more. “Even paid a group of assholes to stand in the road so her escort would be forced to take a detour, because Ms. Workaholic wasn’t gonna let some amateur protest keep her from her job.”

A fresh surge of anger churned in Romeo’s stomach as he listened to Tracey’s words. It’d been months since they’d even heard Gustavo Ramires’s name, as the man had been one of the many to vanish the previous fall. Yet learning that he was still in the area, still active, was nothing compared to the rest.

“But the best part,” Tracey continued, “was lookin’ straight in through that shiny SUV’s windows and pullin’ the trigger on the rocket launcher. I’ve always wanted to light one of those babies off. Let me tell you, did not disappoint.”

Romeo reached back and curled his fingers around his handgun. This motherfucker. Maybe, just maybe, if he filled this piece of shit with holes, Grace would be freed from the nightmare of that afternoon. The exploding SUV, being trapped inside while it rolled, the sight of Al’s body, the goddamn kidnapping and shoving her arm through a taillight she had to kick out. All of it. He wanted to take it all away.

Cris laid a hand on his arm, just below the shoulder, and held firm. “Cousin, don’t.”

Romeo shot him a glare. “The fuck do you mean, don’t?”

Cris didn’t let go. Didn’t flinch. “Everything you and I have done to him so far, and the only thing this bastard’s really given us is his affiliation with Coughlan and a load of crap. Until now.” He squeezed Romeo’s arm. “He’s afraid, cousin. He doesn’t want to meet the Dragon. So we have to make sure he does.”

Romeo dragged in a breath, held it, and pushed it out again. He uncurled his fingers, releasing his grip of the gun. “Right.”

Tracey made a sound of protest, but Romeo opted to ignore him and instead allowed Cris to resume control of the scene until Dante arrived. There likely wasn’t much more to learn, and Romeo recognized he’d reached his tolerance limit. So he put his back to the wall and watched, barely even listening, while Tracey prattled more or less the same bullshit.

Dante arrived twenty minutes later, his face a mask of hard lines that made the dragon tattoo arching up his chest that much more intimidating. He cut a glare toward the man still chained to the floor. “Filip Tracey, I presume.”

Romeo approached his brother. “Want me to fill you in?”

“I heard Coughlan thinks he can taunt us with a message boy,” Dante said, never taking his cold glare from Tracey. “Has the messenger copped to anything we can’t assume?”

Romeo rolled the question through his mind, trying to look at it from a less emotional perspective. “Ramires is the technical one,” he said. “That’s about it.”

Dante nodded and stepped closer to the man on the ground, simultaneously holding out one hand. “Bring my torch.”

Romeo watched Mo step forward with the requested tool in hand, guessing it had arrived alongside Dante, and Tracey finally spoke again.

“You really are fuckin’ nuts, aren’t you?” There was a wobble to his voice, though he tried to hide it, that hadn’t been there before. Cris had been right. For all his bravado, the man understood that facing death and facing the Dragon were two different things.

“I’m actually a very reasonable man,” Dante said as he inspected his tool. “Up to the point that some feckless motherfucker threatens my family.” He fired up the torch. “Then I become quite single-minded in my determination to burn that threat out at the root.”

Romeo accepted the packet of nose clips from Mo that he kept in the Navigator, grateful Mo had thought to grab them for him. He had them in place by the time Tracey’s first pitched scream ripped through the air as Dante knelt over his writhing form. There were times, though he’d never admit it aloud, that he wished he could wear ear plugs when he had to watch his brother work, too. Times when even if he agreed that the individual in question was nastier than the scum under his shoe, watching Dante burn words of caution or victory into their flesh—or simply disfigure that flesh with his fire—turned Romeo’s stomach.

This was not one of those times.

And though he knew that ultimately Filip Tracey’s body would be dismembered and disfigured to the point that his remains would need to be identified using DNA once they were found, Romeo still hoped he would get to put a hole in the fucker. He knew the largest portion of Tracey’s remains would be conveniently deposited in the vague vicinity of the area the previous Coughlan Mob had called home. The location itself would be a message, in addition to whatever Dante was burning into Tracey’s skin and in addition to the general reality of Brendan Coughlan’s lackey being found there at all. Layered messages all amounting to the same thing, the same thing the De Salvo family had said to the Coughlan Mob decades earlier.

The De Salvos were not to be fucked with.

“For fuck’s sake,” Dante cursed as he cut the torch and pushed to his feet.

“Something wrong?” Cris asked.

Dante stepped away from Tracey’s groaning form. “Mo, go out front and tell Enzo to grab my spare pants from the car.”

“Yes, Boss.”

Romeo arched a brow, waited until his usual guard had disappeared again, and said, “You keep spare pants in your car?”

Dante tossed the torch at Cris as if it weren’t a dangerous tool, scowling. “You never know when you’ll get blood on you.” He gestured down himself. “Or end up kneeling in some shithead’s piss.”

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