Page 101 of Tide of Treason
New York’s was thick with the kind of rot you could scrub at for a thousand years and never fully bleach out. It was the blood-soaked stairwells of old tenements, the iron stink of industry mingled with the perfume of fresh-cut roses, the hush of money laundering its way through church donation baskets. It was men like me and men like him, staking our claims with bullets and banknotes, rolling the dice on lives that weren’t ours to gamble.
I leaned against the passenger door of Rafael’s coupe, watching the headlights sweep past as he took the exit onto the Bronx River Parkway. We’d driven in silence for most of the trip, neither of us in a rush to get there.
“Any last words before we roll into hell?” he asked.
“Yeah. If I get shot, don’t let me die in a Jersey hospital.”
Rafael killed the engine. “You sure you don’t wanna turn around?”
I opened the door, the thick night air pressing in as I stepped out. “Not unless you’ve got a rocket launcher tucked under the seat.”
He huffed. “No, but I’ve got a rusty tire iron.”
“Sentimental.”
The diner sat on the border between New York and New Jersey, one of those relics from the ‘50s that should’ve been condemned, but no one had the balls to tear down. Rust bit through the neon tubing, the flickering red glow of Eat 24/7 burning like a half-dead ember against the darkness. Weeds choked the parking lot cracks. A single black SUV sat parked out front. Dark windows. Tinted to the legal limit and then some.
Braga’s men.
My nerves twitched, muscle memory of boyhood fear urging me to backpedal, but I fed that instinct to the worms and walked in.
Inside the diner, I flipped a chair around and dropped onto it backward. My arms hung lazy over the backrest. Rafael remained standing at my six—arms crossed, gaze on the man in front of me. A human barricade I didn’t need but appreciated all the same.
“Coffee?”
I rubbed my jaw. “Didn’t think you flew all the way tothe Big Apple for small talk.”
“Came for a lot of things.” Sergius picked up a fork and rolled it back and forth between his fingers. “Came for my city. Came to remind a few people who the fuck I am.” His gaze flicked over me, calculated. “Came to see my son.”
That last word caught fire in my chest and burned all the way down to my guts.
“Funny, I didn’t know I had a father.”
“No? What’d you think you were, boy? Immaculate conception?”
Honestly, the idea was a hell of a lot easier to stomach than reality. I’d imagined this reunion in a hundred ways. Never in a threadbare diner with a busted jukebox, never with him sitting across from me in the dead of night, wearing the same shade of eyes I found in the mirror every morning. I forced a calm bite of air through my nose, knuckles whitening against the tabletop.
“Let’s not pretend you ever cared,” I said evenly.
“Fine.” He dropped the fork and pressed the meat of his thumb against the tines in a casual show of disinterest. “Your wife’s cute.”
I dragged a hand over my mouth, covering a grim smile. Viviana had been collateral the second she was born, and she sure as fuck wasn’t the first girl in this world forced into a marriage to keep men in power. Didn’t help that he was looking at me like I was some green kid who didn’t know the way of the world, expecting me to just take this shit and nod along.
“But her sister . . .” He clicked his tongue, savoring the thought with a languid, cruel relish. “Now that’s a woman worth the trouble.”
The implication was clear: if he won the vote, he’d marry Kayla. If I lost, I’d be dead, my marriage to Viviana would be a memory, and my father would pluck another Italian rose to keep the Cosa Nostra and Cartel alliance intact.
“You think she’d marry you?” I asked quietly. The thought of him touching her, putting his hands where only mine belonged . . . venom rose up, cold and primal. Red at the edges of my vision.
“Women do what they’re told when you take away their options.”
Kayla Sforza, obedient?
Not in this lifetime or the next.
“Symbiotic relationships.” I rapped my knuckles against the edge of the counter. “You know the kind. Little fish living in the mouths of sharks, cleaning scraps off those teeth. The shark gets a shiny smile. The fish gets to breathe another day. But you know the thing about those little fish?” My gaze hooked his, black to black. “Sometimes it remembers it can swim away. Sometimes it learns to bite. And when that happens, when they stop cleaning, even for a second, the shark doesn’t notice at first. Rot creeps in slow, until one morning the king of the fucking ocean wakes up with his jaw falling apart, bones eaten from the inside out.”
His eyes thinned to slits.
