Page 5 of La Dolce Vita

“She’s mine,” Lorenzo said. He stared up at the building. It was once a retirement center for the elderly. And before then it was known to be the most fertile land in Sorrento for lemon groves. Now it was a polluted heap of shit. A collection of rundown apartment homes, with garbage covering nearly both sides of the streets. The dregs of society littered and congregated here. Isabella had evaded Gio and his men for months; Lorenzo would not believe she did so to squat here. It smelled like a trap.

“I’m going in with you,” Renaldo said.

“I can handle her myself. If something goes wrong, she’ll take the back to escape. Cover it. Wait for me there.”

Renaldo shook his head as if he didn’t agree. There was no time to debate the plan. Besides, for what he intended to get from Isabella, he didn’t need witnesses. He touched Renaldo on the shoulder. “You’ve got holes in your chest because of this bitch. It’s personal. But understand me. She’s mine. Not Gio’s. Not the clan’s. She's my sister. Giovanni will have his revenge when I bring him her head.”

Renaldo looked torn. He glanced to the hostel and then back to Lorenzo. After a long pause, he reluctantly nodded his agreement. He then checked his watch. “Thirty minutes, and if you don’t come out, I’m coming in.”

“Thirty minutes,” Lorenzo said and tucked his gun under his blazer to the back of his pants. He spat on his hand and smoothed his hair back. “It shouldn’t take that long.”

Lorenzo dashed across the street, narrowly missed by a car. The men out front of the hostel averted their eyes in an attempt to pretend the meanest underboss in theCamorrawas not in their midst. He pushed open the door to the hostel and went in. The stench of tobacco and bleach smacked his senses. The first person he saw was a man with a mop and bucket cleaning the floor. The guy reminded him of Rocco. Shriveled by age, with a balding head of silver hair, he wore overalls and rubber boots. He looked up at Lorenzo and then turned and mopped in the opposite direction. Lorenzo decided against the elevator. He found the emergency exit and took the stairs up five floors. When Lorenzo arrived at his destination, he removed his gun.

The door he stopped before was room 535. He knocked once. The door opened. Lorenzo put a bullet between the eyes of the woman who answered. She let out a soft gasp before falling backward to the floor. Blood pooled and spread from the back of her skull like a halo. He stepped over her body and put two more bullets into her chest for Mirabella and Giovanni. The first was for him. She was dead. He frowned at the woman. She looked too young to be his long lost sister.

“Drop the weapon,” a woman said from behind him. He felt the cold hard steel pressed to the back of his head.

“Isabella?” he asked.

“You found me,” she said. “Now drop the gun.”

“Why would I do that?” Lorenzo answered.

“You came to kill me. I know. But before you pull the trigger and do away with the only sister you will ever have, I think you need to hear what I have to say.”

“I’m not putting down my gun, sweetheart. I don’t give a fuck what you have to say,” Lorenzo answered.

“Then let me give you some motivation. Killing me does nothing to protect you. Right now my people are here in this hostel, and if I die, they deliver a special package to every clan boss in the Campania. Want to guess what’s in it?”

Lorenzo raised his hand with the gun. He used his thumb to reset the safety.

“Good boy,” she said and took the gun from his hand. “Now go over there and have a seat. I think you and I have what... ten, to fifteen minutes left before your man in the alley comes crashing in?”

He smirked but didn’t reply. By the look of his watch, she had twenty-two minutes before the game changed.

“It won’t take me that long,” she smiled. She stepped back over the dead girl. Lorenzo didn’t bother to ask who she was.He didn’t give a fuck.The truth was he had a good look at his sister and what he saw chilled him to the bone. She was the same height; same build and possessed the same lethal beauty of his mother.

“I only have one regret in all of this. And can you guess what it is?” Isabella asked.

Lorenzo didn’t answer.

“You. My baby brother. All these years and they kept us apart,” she said. She tossed his gun to the other side of the room. She gripped her gun with both hands and trained it on him. “If we had a chance. If we truly had a chance, we could have been what our mother wanted. We could have started our dynasty.”

“You don’t know our mother. And from what I hear, she couldn’t wait to throw you out with the birth water.”

“Shut up!” Isabella let out an unholy scream. It had to reach through the walls of every room on the floor. She trembled with rage “That’s a fucking lie. My mother loved me. But Tomosino and Rocco. They forced her to give me up. She had no choice.”

Lorenzo chuckled.

“What’s so fucking funny?” she demanded.

“Like I said. You don’t know a damn thing about our mother. No one ever forced her to do anything.”

“Well here is what I do know. You’re desperate. You always have been as Giovanni’s shadow. That’s why you wanted the old man dead when Giovanni was sent off to college. You thought you’d be the next one to the throne.”

The accusation was not one worthy of a response. Lorenzo stroked his jaw. “So you set me up. Got your hands on those tapes and thought what? You could turn me against Giovanni?”

She laughed. “You should be more grateful. After all, I gave you your half-breed wife.”

---