Page 34 of Forbidden Surrogate

It’s hard to stay close to him with screaming people shoving and pushing towards the emergency exits in various tangled mobs. When we get close to the dancefloor, I feel a hand wrap around my wrist and assume it’s Luigi. My head darts back and forth, searching for his face, when I find a dark brown gaze attached to the hand firmly holding mine.

Who the hell is this?

The next thing I hear is a loud explosion.I’m deaf.That’s the last thought that crosses my mind before my body seems toseparate from my thoughts as I careen forward physically across the dance floor and mentally into deep unconsciousness.

Chapter Nineteen

Luigi

My ears ring and my head hurts so badly that I can’t move it. I might have hurt my neck or hit my head on something on the way down.Fuck.I’m out of the smoke but still feel it in my lungs and the more I cough, the deeper the heavy particles seem to get. Each breath grows heavy and more challenging. My mind slips…

There’s fire. More fire. More smoke. This is fucked up.What the hell happened?I reach out for a hand, but there’s none waiting for me.She’s not here.

I hear sirens. That’s a bad sign. We have a guy with the fire department – we have connections to Italians all over the city – and we have a couple cops that work this part of downtown, but a bomb going off in a downtown Buffalo nightclub can’t stay “under wraps”. It won’t be long before dad gets down here…

My ears are ringing as my head snaps around and I struggle to see or feel anything. I’m in a waking nightmare, barely capable of holding on to anything at all, much less consciousness.

I fall out of reality again and wake up to Peter and Mikey dragging me to my feet. Mikey pours cold beer from the can he always keeps in his back pocket for emergencies when we go outover me to wake me up. I groan as the beer slides into my mouth and then makes sticky, icy rivers all over my skin.

I shake the liquid out of my hair as I force myself into consciousness. I sense Peter about to slap me and give him a “don’t you dare” glare that holds him in place.Delphine.A sharp stabbing sensation wrenches my gut deeply.

“Where is she?” I growl. “What the hell happened?”

Dad’s coming down here. He’ll be here soon and I have no idea where the hell Delphine could be.

“She’s gone,” Peter says, clearly unhappy to be the bearer of bad news. “Angela chased after her, but Mikey brought her back. Your father’s orders…”

My father’s orders wouldn’t have included protecting Delphine, especially because he has no idea she exists.Fuck.

“I need to get her back.”

“You need to get your shit together,” Mikey says forcefully. “This should have never happened on our watch.”

“It’s not my fault,” I growl at my cousin.

The Pittsburgh mobstersareresponsible for this. Turns out their trip to Buffalo involved a lot more than surveillance. But how would Carmine’s death give them permission to bomb a nightclub in our city? How could they possibly benefit from pissing my father off?

Maybe it’s the old man’s death out in Pittsburgh. They assume because he was old and weak, it would be the same with my father. There’s no one like my father.No one.

I take charge with the EMTs, the firefighters and the cops. We say as little as possible and they tread carefully around questioning us because of the family name. Our reputation goes a long way in a small city like this one.

Long after most everyone clears away from the crime scene, my father arrives in a black car with Pino Corsini and Nick, one of his best gunmen. He seethes with cold anger, most likely because our job ought to have been simple and while my father might not be any weaker at his current age, he doesn’t enjoy having to leave his bed in the middle of the night for a firebomb.

“What the fuck happened here?” he asks me in a calm, low voice. His anger is precarious.

“It wasn’t anything we could predict.”

“Our city is going to be a shithole like Pittsburgh if we don’t stop this shit before it starts.”

Given the scent and charred appearance of the building in front of us, it’s hard not to think that we’re behind, and that whoever blew up this club – most likely someone from Pittsburgh – already has a head start.

“Carmine died,” my father says slowly. “This has people on edge. But I didn’t think Maury Gravina would be such a fucking moron that he allowed his people to break that truce.”

“You think Aunt Nicola knows anything about this?”

My father’s sister, Nicola, married Maury Gravina against our grandfather Don’s wishes. He might not have been perfect, but Don understood family history and the complicated ways intertwining families can influence each other.

Maury’s marriage to Nicola has kept us deadlocked in this truce for years when truthfully, I suspect my father could have won any war against the Sicilians out in Pennsylvania.

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