Page 45 of Tide of Treason
A violent, graceless sound that made a tiny sparrow screech and bolt for cover. I froze, eyebrows climbing. Portuguese curses spilled after it.
“Bless you,” I deadpanned.
His glare smoldered and was promptly eclipsed by a high, ragged scream splitting the distant air. Ah. My favorite. The unmistakable sound of a man realizing death wasn’t a polite dinner guest; it came crashing in, uninvited, armed with rusty scalpels and questionable medical ethics.
Vito had tossed Brando’s sorry, bleeding body into the back of a blacked-out Escalade, where he’d spent the next several hours marinating. Crispin, our family’s unlicensed, morally bankrupt former surgeon who worked out of a windowless basement in Long Island, had been deliberating whether to amputate or simply let infection and karma do their thing. From what I’d gathered, the bullet wound was now dangerously close to festering into some Henry VIII, gangrenous-leg, medieval-doctor-with-a-bone-saw type of situation.
“Should’ve aimed lower,” Lucius declared beside me. “Or higher.” A wistful sigh. “I’d happily do it again.”
I dragged my thumb over the sundial’s rim, contemplating Uncle Brando’s increasingly dire predicament with the mild detachment of someone watching a cockroachstruggle on its back. Sympathy wasn’t something I had much left to give.
“Do you ever shut up?” I asked, without heat.
“When I’m eating pussy.”
A bee buzzed too close to Lucius’s collar and I felt a vindictive sense of justice when he flinched.
“Brave of you to assume there’ll be a next time.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s the thing about brave men, Kayla. We do a lot of assuming.”
A metallic clang echoed through the garden, followed by the muffled, garbled wail of a man who had just realised he was dying incredibly out of fashion.
They were cauterizing.
I angled my head, vaguely curious. At least Henry VIII had the decency to die in a palace, propped up by flattering court fools. Poor Brando, on the other hand, was rotting in the rear of an SUV, flesh seared shut by a quack who didn’t even bother faking credentials anymore.
Live, laugh, learn, I suppose.
12 | Lucius
23 years old
Present day
“De Luca, youhave sixty seconds to handle that Fed before I walk in there and handle him myself.”
“Got it, boss.”
“Andrade, wait—”
The back door slammed shut behind me.
Vargas was already overseeing the offload, crates of Cartel product disguised as top-shelf tequila. The Feds had been our delivery men tonight, which was a poetic kind of irony—government payroll employees running my drugs through the city like good little errand boys.
“Shit,” Dominguez muttered, shaking his head. “That was fucking beautiful.”
I laughed. “Talk to me after the money clears,pendejo. Then it’ll really be beautiful.”
He shook his head. “No, boss—when that Fed was sweating through his badge, I swear to God I almost came.” He ran a hand over his face, still trembling.
“Keep it in your pants,” Vargas snapped, prying open a crate with the crowbar’s screech.
“Fuck off. You didn’t see his face.”
The driver was already barking orders at the other men, and I stepped back, flicking open a lighter and bringing it to my cigarette. “This city would fall apart without us,” I mused, inhaling deep.
Heaving the crate open, Vargas said, “Yeah? Try telling that to the next Fed who thinks he can shake you down for a bigger cut.”
