Jesus, Dom. What’s wrong with you?
It was dangerous to even entertain these thoughts. He’d learned that the hard way back in his younger days when he’d sneak off to San Francisco or LA or Vegas at every opportunity. He’d check in somewhere under a fake name, and get his rocks off with any willing set of cock and balls he could find.
He hadn’t gone back since he was twenty-one though. Nearly getting caught by a pair of Cusimanos had scared him right out of that sense of adventure. The Cusimano and Maisano families hated each other, and that had been during a period of violent strife between them. If the two goons had seen him and they hadn’t killed him themselves, they could’ve turned him over to his uncle and let him know they’d found him sucking a guy’s dick in the backseat of a cab.
Even today, the thought of his uncle finding out he was gay sent chills through him. He knew all too well what happened to cocksuckers in this family. To this day he was haunted by the night he’d had no choice but to carry out a contract on a cousin who’d been outed.
Dom shuddered and took a deep swallow from his glass. Nearly getting busted had scared all the horniness right out of him for a while, and being tasked with “removing that degenerate pervert from this town” had terrified him. There’d be no coming out. No exploring his remaining curiosity, or scratching the itch that a good-looking man had always aroused in him.
So he’d tamped it all down and ignored it, and he’d resigned himself to eventually marrying a woman just like he’d resigned himself to being his uncle’s hitman. He hated both roles, wasn’t made for either one, but there was no room in this family for men who couldn’t kill or men who wanted men, and there was no leaving this family either. He’d had no choice but to live and breathe as a straight Maisano.
Maybe that was why he was itching to see the stripper again—a chance, however slim, to revisit that delicious past before he surrendered to respectability.
He couldn’t do it, though. It was too risky.
Much, much too risky.
No matter how tempting it was.
Chapter 5
Sergei didn’t need as much time as he’d thought to arrange the hit.
Framing Eugenio Cusimano would be easy. He was notorious for drinking himself senseless and taking his expensive cars out speeding on the highways while he was drunk off his ass. Though he spent two or three weeknights at his mistress’s condo in Crescent City, every Friday and Saturday, like clockwork, he showed up at Dame Kelly’s bar at eight o’clock sharp and stayed there until last call. Then he’d hit the road and, by the grace of God, always managed to make it home alive. Sergei just hoped the booze didn’t kill the man—and the man didn’t kill anyone else—before he’d had a chance to complete the job.
Nicolá Cannizzaro didn’t make it quite so easy. He wisely varied his habits and his routes. He didn’t drink to excess—few Mafiosi did, and Corrado Maisano frowned on it especially hard. Nicolá wanted the favor of his sister’s father-in-law so badly it was pathetic, to the point he toed the line like nobody else in the family.
Sergei stalked the pristine motherfucker for three days before he found a weakness he could exploit. Every man had one, and Nicolá was no exception. In his case, a god and a girl. One he was devoted to as publicly as possible, no doubt to impress the boss. The other, a closely guarded secret, probably because the boss would be decidedly unimpressed.
As Sergei parked his stolen sedan in the lot outside St. Leo’s during Wednesday Mass, he felt a tiny bit guilty. His father would’ve been horrified if he’d lived to see Sergei stalking a murder victim at a church. Then again, if Papa had lived this long, Sergei wouldn’t have been killing Italians in the first place, so he didn’t let the thought linger.
Mass finally came to an end. Sergei watched closely as the parishioners filed out the front door, each pausing to exchange a few words with the priest. It was strange, watching Cusimanos, Passantinos, and Maisanos coming out of the same church without giving each other a second look. There was only one Catholic church in town, and even avoiding enemies wasn’t a good enough reason for these wise guys to slum it at the Russian Orthodox church downtown. So they’d agreed upon a holy ground ceasefire some years ago. No one discussed or carried out business here.
Which made this the perfect place to abduct Nicolá. Though he wouldn’t be taken right from the church steps, it would be the last place anyone saw him alive, which meant it was entirely possible there’d be a rumor that someone had broken the sacred agreement. Just another gust of wind to fan the fire Sergei had been stoking. Then he—
A man emerged from the church, and Sergei did a double take so hard he nearly snapped his neck.
Was that—