Page 279 of The Tempted

“You need to find where they are and fuck the drugs,” Mike insisted.

“What if we don’t choose one method and go with both?” Wolf questioned, but it sounded like he was asking himself and not the group. I looked to him, watched as he narrowed his eyes and worked shit out in his head.

Come on, give me something.

Anything.

“Don’t put all your eggs into one basket type of thing?” Bones asked, but Wolf didn’t answer. He was too wrapped in his train of thought to even hear him.

“We work on getting the drugs but while we’re doing that we try to uncover his location. If we can get him or one of his men to leave wherever he’s holding them and meet us, we can follow him back to where they are,” Pipe offered.

“It all comes down to the drugs,” Bones replied. “He’s not going to meet unless it’s to get the product.”

“Or make money,” Anthony supplied. “He’ll do anything for money, so if he needed to do a score he’d leave or send one of his earners,” he continued, lifting his eyes to mine. “No guarantees, brother but I think I have a way to him.”

I stared at him questionably until he broke our stare and turned his head, contemplating his plan.

“Work that shit out, whatever you need us to do, just say the word,” Pipe assured Anthony.

“That leaves the drugs,” Wolf said, and the room grew silent again.

“I know where we can get the drugs,” Riggs said, breaking the silence and turning his gaze to mine. “But if we do this, we might as well sign our own death certificates,” he added, giving me the first glimpse of his serious side.

“I’d rather sign my own death certificate than either of theirs,” I replied.

Last words.

We all utter them right before the end.

Before the mayhem takes over.

They were the last words I said that mattered.

My words became my vow to the woman I loved and the man I called my brother.

A promise from me to them.

My life or theirs.

Always theirs.

“That’s him,” Bianci said, as he leaned over the steering wheel of his truck and stared at the man crossing the street. The man he was referring to looked a hundred pounds soaking wet, if that. He stumbled through the crosswalk, scratching his arms profusely barely making it to the other end of the street.

There was no way this man was who Bianci claimed he was.

“Are you sure you got the right guy?” I asked, staring in disbelief at the junkie roaming the streets desperate for his next fix and tried to picture Anthony’s wife with him.

“Oh, that’s him,” Bianci confirmed. “Adrianna, showed me pictures of him when they were together, you can’t even imagine the difference,” he muttered. “Luca resembles him,” he said, lifting his eyes to mine as he spoke of his son. Bianci wasn’t the biological father of Adrianna’s son, no, Vinny, the crackpot on the corner owned that honor.

Not too long after the kid was born, fresh out of rehab, Vinny tried to hit Adrianna up for money. Bianci threw the guy a beating and in the end Vinny didn’t take a dime from Adrianna. He signed his rights over to her and told her his son was better off without him. It was men like Vinny that made the choice easy for men like me to want to keep the streets of New York clean. Vinny was a man controlled by temptation, a good guy who had created a beautiful boy, but instead of being a father to his kid he chose drugs. There are people in this world who can’t fight against temptation, people who surrender their lives to it.

It worked out because Anthony loves Luca. He is his son in every way it counts. But as a man who buried a child, I couldn’t understand how a man willingly gives up the chance to hold his son and guide him through life. How was it that a man could hand over his son just to get high? The world was fucked. We were fucked. And people like Jimmy were the reason.

“Let’s go,” Bianci announced, turning off the car and reaching for the door handle. We climbed out of his SUV and made our way to Vinny. The closer we moved toward him, the harsher the reality of who Vinny had become stared us in the face. Vinny’s eyes latched with Anthony’s, widening in fear as what little color he had left, drained from his face. He moved to run, but I was quicker and blocked his escape.

“I just want to talk, Vinny,” Anthony said, reaching for him.

“I stayed away, I swear,” Vinny whined, as I hooked my arm through his and brought him against my side.

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