Page 29 of Primo DeLuca

Creto denying what he was truly up to was pissing me off. I extracted a metal ball from my suit pocket and twisted it until it glowed to life. The sight of the little sphere, with its blinking red light in my hand, had the agent shaking his head with fear-widened eyes. Even Creto was smart enough to stop talking and pay attention to the little jawbreaker pinched between my fingers.

I turned, my black Ferragamos scraping the floor as I inched closer to the begging agent. My dress etiquette was an element of my personality that had been inspired by Don Ermanno. As a result, I rarely went anywhere without dressing in a full suit.

“No!” the agent yelled out, his head shaking so vigorously, spittle flew from the corners of his lips.

“Don’t come near me with that thing. I only feed the family inside information about cases that may cause them problems and the occasional scraps of information we’ve gathered on your family.”

It appeared he was speaking the truth. Was he aware that he’d admitted to feeding our enemy information the feds had gathered on my family? Did he know he’d verbally signed his own death certificate?

“Why were you in a DeLuca club?” I dragged each word of the question out since they were hard of hearing.

“I already told you. We were invited,” Creto sputtered, his eyes fixed on the little metal ball I was lifting towards the agent’s mouth.

“If you were invited, who the fuck invited you?”

“I don’t know, but they claimed they wanted to discuss business.”

“Sounds like a fucking lie to me,” Brizio stated, rolling his eyes at Creto. There was no doubt in my mind that Aurelio had found a way to entice these two idiots into the club. A part of our training had been learning to pimp a lie into a convincing truth.

The agent shook his head like his life depended on it to keep me from shoving the sphere into his mouth. His desperate movements forced me to put a knee in his chest to control him long enough to shove the ball into his mouth. A few of his teeth cracked during the process. The sound caused Creto’s wide eyes to grow bigger.

Brizio was kind enough to hand me a piece of packing tape to keep my little toy inside the agent’s mouth. My cousin was nothing if he wasn’t efficient. Who was I kidding? My cousin was an undercover sadist who somehow managed to find people who begged to be tortured at his hands. Therefore, watching me scare the shit out of these two was a little thrill for him.

If Brizio thought I didn’t hear the scratching and muffled groans of whoever else he had tied up down here in his dungeon of sin, he was crazy. I didn’t even bother asking. The sad thing is, I didn’t know if it was someone who had volunteered to be down here or not. However, pretending not to hear the sounds seemed to add to the amount of fear pouring into Creto and the agent’s hearts.

I dragged the agent up into a sitting position before instructing him to slide closer to Creto. The man’s mumbling words were almost understandable, him begging me not to proceed with what was rolling through my savage mind.

I reached back to my cousin for the roll of tape while keeping my eyes, one of them twitching, on the begging men. The agent continued his muffled cries while Creto had no shame in mouthing the word “please” repeatedly.

My phone rang.

“Yeah,” I answered, keeping my dead eyes set on Creto’s fear-drenched ones. A smile crept across my lips at the update.

Creto wanted to know what I was being told so badly, I could feel the anxiousness rolling through him and pouring from his begging eyes. I swiped my phone off and shoved it into my jacket’s inner pocket without taking my eyes off Creto. My quiet stare was driving him nuts with the way he chewed into his lip and the rapid movement of his shaking legs.

“Come on, Primo. You know I didn’t mean any harm. My family has nothing to do with this hit that’s out on you.”

“You’re lying. I have it on good authority that the men who came after me worked for your family. Imagine that? A whole damned squad of twenty. What I can’t understand is, why? Even if you take me out, I already have a replacement. And trust me, I made sure he is just as, if not more vicious than me.”

“I don’t have anything to do with the hit that’s out on you. I do what I’m told, and I was told to come here and meet with our CI,” he said, glancing at the man who continued to mutter sounds around the tape over his mouth.

“Your father is doing the right thing, making you work your way up, but you’re the nephew of a Don. Neither he nor your father is going to send you into the belly of the beast without a reason or without protection.”

His eyes grew wide at the revelation, like it was rocket science I’d figured out.

I extracted another sphere from my pocket, and although Creto didn’t seem a worthy adversary due to his blotchy skin and flabby body, he fought harder than the agent to keep me away from his mouth. However, I forced the sphere inside and slapped a piece of tape over it before taking a step back to admire the beginning of my handiwork.

“We found your protection detail,” I informed Creto, peeling more tape from the roll. Brizio stepped up and shoved the two men’s heads together, producing a fleshy smack. With their cheeks kissing, I taped their heads together, leaving them each one eye for visibility. Impairing their vision was a way to make their situation that much more intense.

Brizio roped them together so tightly, they hardly had any wiggle room to breathe. He also assisted me in loading the men after I dragged a dolly closer.

We rolled them down the dark hall, through the underground passage out of the club, and to Brizio’s van. Muffled cries and two pleading eyes were all the men had in their favor while we pushed the dolly up the ramp and shoved the two into the back of Brizio’s van.

“I’ll follow you,” I told Brizio. He nodded, stepped around the side of the van, and climbed into the driver’s seat, whistling the tune, Whistle while you work.

The sun had long ago painted light across the darkness, allowing the day to emerge. The warm July wind blowing against my face helped awaken my mind to clearer thoughts. I didn’t doubt the Vittorio family had other spies out there keeping tabs on us, the same way we kept tabs on them and any other family we’d had beef with in the past.

What I couldn’t understand was why Creto would be dumb enough to come into a DeLuca establishment even if someone had invited him. Did he have that much faith in his protection detail? Or did he have that much fate in their hired guns ability to take me out?

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