Page 35 of Vasily the Hammer

“You get me killed and Uncle Franco will have your legs chopped off,” Angelo warns her.

“Uncle Franco is too busy figuring out where Granny Margie hid the marshmallow salad at Easter, and Granny Margie has been dead for a decade!” Benedetti shrieks at him.

Kostya and the other shadows circling the room all attempt to tamp down their laughs. Family’s family. I genuinely don’t know if I’m going to kill Angelo Fiorini— it does take a lot for me to kill someone, and I don’t know this guy or any wrongs he’s done to me, so I’m thinking not— and I do believe Benedetti that this wasn’t a ploy to keep me from killing him, but I do think she’d be devastated if I did. I don’t know the family tree very well, but she and Ana are related, as well, so Angelo might be Ana’s cousin, too.

But every death that’s come at my hands has devastated someone else. Every soul that’s perished because of me was the most important person in someone else’s life. I’ve made it a priority to ignore that, whether the person devastated is a stranger or someone I know intimately. Benedetti might leave the silo with tears down her cheeks and a body bag in her back seat, but that will be her cousin’s fault.

“Sounds like you’ve been wasting a lot of my boys’ time today,” I say to Angelo, walking into the halo of bald light illuminating him while casting long shadows down his body. “And my boys’ time is my money.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you need newboys.”

The way his dark eyes meet mine tells me that even though I don’t know who he is, he’s not some young punk and he’s not an underling. The power structure of the Mafia is a lot different from the power structure of the Bratva, at least in my experience with them here in the Southwest. It’s not a mountain so much as a mountain range, hundreds of tiny mountains that lead to low tops instead of a pinnacle everyone seeks to climb although hardly anyone makes it to the summit.

I am the summit.

Angelo has his own little plateau, that’s my guess, and he’ll never be anything higher, doesn’t even have a path to that, but he’s the king of his kingdom, however small it might be.

His words are wisdom, although I’ll likely reject that wisdom because I do have a much larger kingdom. Still, I say, “Oh? What did myboysdo to deserve, ah, what is it your men like so much? Cement slipper?”

“Oh, right,” Angelo sneers. “Your people prefer a genocide.”

Not my people. Me. And not a genocide. That’s just what the night in Flagstaff when my brother was gunned down came to be known as. Simply because I was a bit too casual in my words.

But seriously, everyone knew that when I ordered the execution of every Irish man, woman, and child, I meant the IRA goons and their affiliates. Not even family members who were connected solely by blood. Deirdre Corcoran was still in her classroom teaching eighth grade history the next day and Rory O’Sullivan was still there in the first row. I don’t actually support genocide.

For the sake of scare tactics, I nod. “Yeah, and I’m about ready to take out every Italian in sight if you don’t start talking.” And because I like a bit of the dramatic, I pull out two guns and aim them on Angelo and Benedetti. If I had a third hand— I have athird gun but no hand for it— I’d be aiming it at Delaney on the opposite side of Angelo, too, just to prove the point. He’s one of my guys, but he’s a mutt. Yeah, there’s some Russian in him, but Italian, too, and fuck if I know what Delaney is. Irish, probably.

But he’s one of my guys. See, I’m not pro-genocide. I’m just making a point.

Angelo leans back and crosses his arms over his chest, rumpling his dress shirt further. The way he has his hands allows me to see the twitch in his pinky, though. Nerves are starting to get to him. Or fatigue. He’s in a shitty folding chair, and he’s a big guy. I know how much those chairs bite into the ass after sitting in them long enough. “I told them the minute they hauled me here that my message was for you only. In fact, I told them that when I was in the lobby of your place, so you can also thank them for wasting your time. This could have been resolved in ten minutes if these pencil dicks hadn’t gotten all womanly hysterical on me.”

Benedetti, who still has my gun trained on her, pulls out her own gun.

Points it at Angelo.

Angelo points a finger at Benedetti. “See? Womanly hysterics.”

I want to say Artyom and I never squabbled like this in public, but I know we did. Constantly. And Kseniya is my only remaining bully to this day. She jokes that it’s the real reason I don’t go to Flagstaff, and honestly, as much as I miss her, it is nice not having her embarrass me in public now that I’m thepakhan. So I tuck my guns away, although I cast a glare at Benedetti. “Why did you not get me when he showed up? He’s your cousin.”

“I didn’t know he was coming! I wasn’t even in town. They called me in when he namedropped me— which, holy shit, Angie, what a pussy fucking move that was, calling for your cousin becauseyou walked your own stupid ass into enemy territory and just expected a goddamn red carpet. I should have let you drown that time you fell in Nona Gia’s pool.”

She calls him Angie. Yeah, these two are thick as thieves, although clearly, she had no idea he was going to show up at my place and is more pissed at him than anyone else here is.

“As soon as I got here, I called you,” she tells me. “And no, before you ask, I don’t know why he’s here. He won’t tell me shit.”

“Because like I told you and everyone else, what I have to tell Vasily is for Vasily’s ears alone. I come as a friend.”

“You are no friend of mine,” I bristle.

“No, but the man who sent me is. And the message I have can go only to you.”

He stares me down intensely. I see the truth there. I don’t know that his message is truly a friendly one. He might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Who’s dressing as a wolf. He’s Mafia. Base level, he is the villain in my story. If this is the mole Benedetti warned me of, fucking fail. But Benedetti is Mafia and ATF, so I recognize that villain is more than just how one identifies.

And the message that can only go to me, the way he says that, could be what I’ve been suspecting is more likely than a mole.

A traitor.

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