Page 161 of Savage Roses
None of that’s relevant.
What’s relevant is that I’m coming up the ranks. I’m squeezing my way in.
I’m gonna show Leandro he can’t do whatever he wants with no consequence.
I’m gonna make life happen. I’m gonna step out the dark and take control.
Just like Pop showed me.
* * *
Stefania’s a slut. The bitch is pregnant. She doesn’t know I know. My own fucking fiancée, spreading her fucking legs for whomever, whenever—and not just any whomever either.
My fucking brother.
She won’t let him go.
Hard-headed as hell.
The dumb bimbo won’t accept that she’s not his. She’s mine. My whore.
And my whore doesn’t get to go around fucking other men. It takes some work, but I stamp it out of her. Make it clear she’s nobody and I’m the somebody she answers to. She should be grateful—if I wanted to, I’d carve that bastard baby right out of her swollen stomach.
I’m nicer than I get credit for. Even agree to raise him as my own. A mistake I soon realize.
The little shithead cries and cries. Every time I glare at him, his eyes fill with tears and he opens those pink lips of his and blares out a wail like a fucking alarm system.
He shits all day long and chokes on his own spittle. He’s fucking weak and pathetic, and looking into his little face, I’ve never hated somebody more.
His face… it’s just another reminder. He looks just like him.
The man my wifereallyloved.
She’s barely ever let me touch her. Of course, I do it anyway. But it’s not as if there aren’t issues. I’ve always had… problems in that area.
There’s a rumor in our circles that I’m a sweaty, lazy,shrimpyfuck. Some kind of tall tale one of the bitches I dated in the past started and circulated and everybody believed. Stefania chooses not to dispel the rumors—she could easily tell everybody I’ve got her satisfied.
Yet she never does.
When those moments between us happen, she’s quiet as a mouse. Her face goes blank and she’s a dead fucking fish. Actually, a belligerently drunk fucking fish is more like it. As if I can perform when she’s giving me nothing!
But she gavehimplenty. That’s what it always comes down to, my whore wife is in love with another man. In love with my damn brother of all people.
If I let myself focus on it, I’d go crazy.
So I concentrate on my big ambition. I’m promoted tocapo, and I’m close enough with Leandro that I’ve got his most personal number. My brother lingers in our circles, some kind of business associate of Kozlov, who has also earned the respect of Leandro. I won’t let him fuck shit up for me. He can hang in the background like the loser he is. I don’t give a fuck.
The bottom line is that I’m gonna take over Leandro’s empire and become the most powerful man in Northam.
I’ve already drafted up the detailed plan.
When I’m exposed, I’m more surprised than anybody. Leandro’s been fed the truth about me, likely at the hands of my pathetic brother, who has to be jealous I’ve taken his woman from him. No wonder he’d spill the details on me!
That I’m not full blood Italian. That I’m part Russian. That I’m not really Lucius Mancino.
Leandro stares at me with unnerving detachment when it comes out. It’s a night that feels like any other social event we’ve had, hosted at the Northam Society club, where we drink like fishes and smoke like chimneys.
The Neptune Society that Leandro created decades ago was a cover for his schmoozing with the powerful elite in the city. People like the mayor and police commissioner and the many CEOs in the business district.