Page 122 of Mob Knight

“Sweet dreams, motherfucker.”

I put as much force into the punch as I dare. I don’t need to kill him, just knock him out. It lands against his right temple, and it’s night, night for him. I mangled his face, and it’ll take weeks for the bruises to heal. He can’t stay home that entire time, so let the world know he got the shite beaten out of him. That public humiliation’ll be worse than the physical pain. That’s the point.

With his knife, I find his clothes in the closet and slash through most of his suits. He’s rich, and his family’s like mine. They can swap clothes interchangeably. This’ll be inconvenient though. We rush from his bedroom after I toss the knife on the bed.

Tempting as it is to fuck up more of his house, we won’t because we’re here to punish him, not Heather. We make a beeline for his office, though. Three shots, and the door’s open. We clear it out. We grab his laptops—the one on his desk, and the one we know he hides. It took us a moment to find it, but we all think alike. Behind three loose stones in the fireplace.

Dillan starts a fire as soon as we clean out the safe with the computer and an array of fake passports and thousands in foreign currency. Finn and his brothers sort through papers they pull out of drawers and off shelves. Once there’s a blaze, they toss things into the flames. Seamus and I work together to break the massive wood furniture he favors. We smash table legs and rip apart cushions. Together, we hoist his desk and toss it onto the sofa, breaking both.

“We gotta go.”

I’ve been glancing at my watch. We’ve been inside nearly ten minutes, so we’ve been on the property nearly fifteen. If his family’s gotten any alerts, they’ll be here any second. This can’t spill onto the street, so we can’t afford to get trapped in the house. Tempted as I am to risk the house going up in a fireball, I put the grate in front of the hearth as Aleks’s shite burns.

We’re climbing into the SUV as we see Maks and the others arrive in their personal vehicles. They knew better than to come on foot, but they couldn’t get any of their SUVs in time. All Four Families get aftermarket parts at the same place. If the two neighborhoods where all the married couples live are Switzerland, then that body shop is the fucking Vatican. We all pray at the altar of vehicle customization. The wheels on our SUVs still roll, even if they’re punctured. There are metal plates covering the chassis to protect against any street bombs or grenades. All the windows are bulletproof.

The only way to tell the families’ SUVs apart are the hub caps. We have emblems that distinguish them. None of them are what people would expect, and the designs are tiny. They’re discreet, but we all know what to look for that way we never get in the wrong one if we’re all leaving in a hurry.

Shane’s driving, so he pulls onto the street as the rest of us fasten our seatbelts. I look back over my shoulder to see Misha stick his head past the gate. He aims a gun at us, but he won’t shoot. We’re not close enough.

We have another job to do before we’re done for the night. We stay in Queens but head toward the Flushing River. We have a railway station in the Bronx as our secret lair. The bratva,Costa Nostra, and Cartel didn’t venture far from home and stayed in Queens. Too fucking obvious.

The bratva has a warehouse, theCosa Nostrahas a garage, and the Cartel uses an abandoned bodega. We know exactly where each place is. It's not hard to figure out since we all turnour phones off about ten miles from our bat caves. We track where the other families do that. From there we draw a ten-mile radius inward and can pinpoint the abandoned buildings because they don’t appear on any city records. No one’s bothered to figure out where ours is. We don’t think they’ve bothered to find each other’s.

We drive directly to the bratva warehouse, ramming through the fence that encircles the property. I wind down my window as my brother hands me my preferred weapon of mass destruction. At three feet long and fifteen pounds, the rocket-propelled grenade launcher fits in the SUV.

“Around the south side. That bay door is open.”

Shane heads to where I can see the perfect target. If our tires could squeal, they would as he makes a fast turn and brakes. Seamus and Dillan scramble out of the SUV after me, their rifles raised to provide me cover. Walking in lockstep, we advanced away from the vehicle. Shane, Sean, and Finn get out and guard the SUV. If we lose that, then we’re fucked. We’ll have no means to escape.

There’s poetic justice here the bratva will likely guess. This is an RPG-7. It and the version before it were designed by the Soviet Union and are still made in Russia. Mother Russia’s about to fuck over six of her sons.

I load the first missile. For the havoc they create, they’re shockingly light. Only a few pounds.

“Here we go!” I sound like a kid about to go on their first rollercoaster.

We watch the blue-white smoke tail as I launch the first one. It sails beneath the half open bay door. I’m loading the second one before the first one explodes. I aim for where we suspect the office is and fire. Within seconds, flames consume the building. I’m certain my house looked much like this, but on a far smaller scale.

“Let this be a lesson to those motherfucking pieces of shite. Come for me and my house, and I’ll barge the fuck into yours and fuck it all up. We might not have fully trashed Aleks’s place, but we did some damage.”

Now…

Now, they’re royally fucked. They’re going to need a new place to take their captives and will have to build a new torture chamber. That takes time to get just right, and it’s not cheap nor inconspicuous to buy industrial size vats of acid.

An abandoned building isn’t hard to find in New York City. One that isn’t on any city maps or plans that has no deeds in a neighborhood where no one asks questions is entirely another story.

Seamus’s thoughts run along the same line as mine and probably all the other guys’ as we watch the destruction.

“The bratva once struck us where it hurts most. This won’t cut as deep, but it sure as fuck will sting.”

Our ancestral home of sorts. The first home the O’Rourkes had in America. We’d kept it in our family until the Kutsenkos came along. They went on a rampage thanks to Declan’s lasting shitstorm and took out a few of our businesses too. Fortunately, no one lived in the old family house.

My brother and I have always thought alike, so I know what I’m about to say matches what’s going through his head.

“They didn’t come into our homes like we went into Aleks’s. I’ve made sure they know there’s nowhere safe to hide. Losing a couple businesses was inconvenient, but it was nowhere near as personal as taking out one place that was supposed to be impenetrable to them.”

Dillan shakes his head, his expression smugger than it was a moment ago.

“This—this fucked them over to a level that’ll take time to recover from.”

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