White Knight (Dirty Mafia Duet, #2)(9)

Oh Lord. Now is not a good time for my stomach to roll, but as his nicotine breath wafts toward me, my insides revolt.

“If you don’t want your head in a box to be the entertainment, then I suggest you move along. Now.”

Finally, GTR jerks his attention to Cannon, his chest puffed out like a bull. “What the fuck did you just say to me? We’re here to firm up terms of a truce, and you’re threatening to put my head in a box? I don’t fucking think so, asshole. This meeting ain’t fucking happening. I’m out.”

He steps back and turns around to smack directly into Dom.

Holy hell. All I want to do right now is run. But I stay still, invoking a combination of the three wise monkeys who see no, hear no, and speak no evil. In other words, I adopt all the qualities of a great fence post.

“You got a problem, GTR?”

As the head of the Casso family stares him down, GTR seems to actually shrink under the intensity of Dom’s presence. “Uh. Well. You see—”

As he stutters out some gibberish, Dom stops him. With a hard slap to the face.

I jerk back in shock, my shoulder bumping into Cannon, and his hands land on my hips, as if keeping me safe and anchored to him. Given the volatile situation we’re witnessing, I lean into his touch. That’s twice today he’s comforted me when he could have thrown me to the wolves.

GTR lifts his fingertips to his cheek in stunned silence as he stares at Dom.

“You ever run your mouth in my presence again, and I’ll carve out your vile fucking tongue. You understand that, punk?”

I expect to hear GTR spewing vitriol and protests, but his sense of self-preservation must have kicked in because he does nothing but stand silently.

“That’s what I thought.” Dom claps his hands and replaces the menace on his face with a cocky smirk. “Your mother should have taught you better manners, boy. Go sit down before I have to tell your father what a piece of shit he raised.”

GTR backs away from Dom with two steps and then turns to head to the conclave, but not before leveling a malevolent stare on Cannon and me.

Freaking fabulous.





8





Cannon





The meeting didn’t go well. The truce between the Rossettis and the Cassos lasted about as long as I expected, which wasn’t long, and Dom is fucking pissed.

As soon as Dom’s bodyguards and Grice escort the Rossetti contingent out of the Upper Ten, Dom looks at me and points to the door of the meeting room. “Shut it.”

I rise and obey, waiting for his next order, because I know that this discussion isn’t over. Lorenzo Angelini, who I’m still shocked had the intelligence to keep his mouth shut during the meeting, kicks back in his chair and puts his feet up on the antique table.

Clearly, Dom’s number two’s intelligence only lasted an hour.

Dom reaches out to smack him upside the head. “Sit right, you fucking idiot. You aren’t five.”

As Enzo practically falls out of his chair to comply, Dom points at me and then to the seat across from him.

“Take a seat. We need to discuss what the fuck happened to blow all this shit up after I spent a goddamned year maneuvering Giancarlo into this.”

“We all know what happened,” Enzo says. “GTR. He ain’t following Papa Rossetti’s orders anymore.”

When Dom’s heavy gaze lands on Enzo, instead of waiting for Dom to speak, Enzo points toward the door and spouts off again. “Why don’t you just give GTR the bitch he wants? I’m sure that’ll get shit back on track, especially if he was willing to roofie her to get her.”

As soon as the suggestion is out of his mouth, coupled with the information I gave Dom about the results of the test from Yoder, I want to vault over the table and beat him until he’s sorry he ever uttered such horseshit. Instead, I curl my hands around the knobby ends of the arms of the chair and wait for Dom to explode.

He doesn’t disappoint.

“You say one more word or do one more idiotic thing and I will slap you even harder than I hit the Rossetti punk. You want to pick up your teeth off the floor? Open your mouth again, Enzo.” Dom loosens his black tie as if getting ready to do just that.

Apparently, the reign of Enzo’s favoritism has ended. Still, I stay silent. It’s one of the most important things I’ve learned over the last thirty years since I realized Dom was my father and not just a guy who visited my mom to take her on dates.

“That’s what I thought,” Dom says after a beat of silence. He leans back in the heavy wooden club chair, like a king holding court, and his attention swings to me. “What do you think we should do, Cannon?”

It’s a test. Everything with Dom is a goddamned test. After the day I’ve had, I’m fresh out of patience for his games, but I play along anyway out of necessity.

“How much money have you made in the last twenty-five years?” It’s my best guess for how long the feud has lasted. It’s probably closer to thirty years, to be honest, because my mother’s death wasn’t the beginning. No, she was targeted as a way to retaliate for something Dom had done to the Rossettis.

Dom blinks twice before reaching up to tap a finger to his lips. “A hell of a lot.”

I lean on the armrest. “How much money would you have made if there’d been no feud with the Rossettis?”