Page 28 of Primo DeLuca

Chapter Eleven

Primo

The sound of my phone buzzing at six in the morning wasn’t unusual. The phone waking me up early had never bothered me until this moment, with Nevah lying in her rightful place on my chest.

Dammit!

The last thing I wanted to do was leave her alone, but duty called. I placed a delicate kiss on her forehead and cheek and eased from beneath her. She released a low whimper before settling her head into the pillow.

“Yeah,” I called into the phone when I was out of earshot. It was Brizio.

“Calling cousin Aurelio to the city has paid off. His behind-the-scenes-working-ass wouldn’t let me help him, even after I practically begged. I’m sure, by now, there’s a trail of dead bodies all over this city and possibly state, but he managed to find us a lead as to who put the hit out on you.”

Brizio was a creature of the night, so at six in the morning with darkness still flirting with the moon, he was bursting with enough energy that I could feel it through the phone.

“Aurelio’s hunt led to a low-level member of the Vittorio family, who I found whispering about mingling with an enemy that would soon be taken out. I didn’t know if Aurelio found a way to put him right under our noses, but guess where I found him?”

It wasn’t a question, and I could tell from the glee in his tone that Brizio was enjoying this hunt we were executing.

“His dumb ass had the nerve to be sitting in my fucking club while talking shit. I ran the surveillance to figure out what he was saying. Needless to say, I have his grimy ass in my basement.” He paused, and I swore a low moan sounded. “I damaged him a little for the shit he was talking about, but so far, I haven’t been able to get any more out of him.”

“I’m on the way. Don’t damage him to the point that he can’t tell me what I need to know.”

“Okay,” he said, his words rushing out after a loud thump was followed by the man I informed him not to damage, yelling out in pain.

Brizio had a mean streak in him that few knew about. He showed people what they needed to see to have a good time while he studied and siphoned information from them the whole time.

After one last peek at Nevah and taping a note to the bedroom door, I locked the house down. I hated treating her like a prisoner but was unwilling to risk her being harmed because of my current situation.

***

By 6:35 a.m., I stepped into my cousin’s club for the second time within a twelve-hour window. The floor was littered with discarded paper, empty glasses and bottles of wine, and trash was on every surface.

The place smelled like a mix of hyped-up testosterone and heat-seeking pheromones. If you stood in place long enough to analyze the scents, you could distinguish perfume from cologne, body odor from body aroma, cigarette smoke from weed smoke, and much more.

“Capo,” Brizio called while I was taking the final few steps into his secured basement. It doubled as a sex dungeon and torture chamber, one I had used to conduct business as often as him.

When I turned the corner, I was brought up short. There were two men, each tied up from head to foot and dangling from a thick metal pipe like pigs on a spit. All that was missing was the apple in their mouths.

“Brizio?”

“Meet Creto Vittorio and the crooked federal agent he was in my club with.”

A smile spread slowly across my lips, giving life to the sparks of joy coursing through me. The feds always had the kind of information we were searching for and were the first to spill their guts when pressure was put on them.

I bent, getting face to face with Creto. His family was mainly based out of New York, but he worked for one of the Vittorio family operations that was run out of Kansas City, Missouri, about three and a half hours away and on the opposite side of the state. The temptation of the DeLuca family’s success often brought spies, and some over the years had been dumb enough to poach in our territory.

“Why are you in my city, Creto? You know better. I stay out of your business, and you stay the fuck out of mine, and we’ll never have a problem. However, you being here means we have a big fucking problem, especially when there’s a squad of hitmen aiming to take my life. Did your family hire them?”

“I came here to meet with a contact that invited me,” he said, glancing at the agent.

“Okay, but that doesn’t explain why you were in this club with said contact while two groups tried to take me out. What the fuck are you up to? What would your family gain by allowing you to breach our territory, not to mention you mouthing off about a member of the DeLuca family on the verge of being taken out while you're inside of a DeLuca establishment?”

“I was talking shit.” His face squinted in a mix of confusion and fear. “How could you possibly know what I said?”

Brizio read lips and body language like a bibliophile raced through good books, but I didn’t answer Creto’s question.

“We don’t have any beef with you crazy-ass DeLucas. I wouldn’t have shown up if I wasn’t invited here by one of you.”

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