If The Seas Catch Fire(41)

Corrado looked Dom right in the eye and gave him a subtle nod.

And that was that. The contract was issued. Corrado had deliberately groomed Dom to pick up certain cues. Even if they were in the middle of a room packed with cops, bugs, and federal agents, he could order Dom to take out a hit, and no one would know except for them. Law enforcement couldn’t overhear conversations that didn’t happen.

Corrado issued his orders via subtext and subtle gestures, and Dom carried them out without ever breathing a word to anyone. With equally subtle cues, he’d let Corrado know when the deed was carried out. Nothing spoken. Nothing written.

There’d be no evidence except the body and the ever-increasing amount of blood on Dom’s hands.



*



Eugenio Cusimano was a drunken idiot, but the family had him on a tight leash after the accident. He didn’t go near bars anymore. Didn’t drink. He still had his habits and haunts, but he started varying his routes. When he visited his girlfriend in Crescent City, he never returned via the same road, and that was a challenge considering just how few roads went in and out of Cape Swan.

Dom monitored him, stalked him, memorized his every move. He barely had time to go into the office—as always when he was hunting someone down, most of Dom’s waking hours were spoken for.

Not for long, though. It only took ten days to get close to Eugenio. As close as he needed to be, anyway.

Late one night, as he often did, Eugenio parked in an alley a few blocks over from his girlfriend’s condo. Dom found the man’s car, parked his own on another street, and then strolled down the alley. There was no one around this time of night, and a Dumpster hid the car from view of the road. Probably just in case Elena Cusimano came looking for her husband. Smart thinking—the wrath of a made man’s wife was not something a mistress wanted at her front door.

Certain he was alone, Dom hid two devices on Eugenio’s car. Beneath the front bumper, a GPS tracker. Beneath the rear passenger side wheel well, a small explosive.

Then he went back to his own car, drove a couple of miles, and waited.

Sitting on the shoulder of a back road, he watched the little green dot on the GPS screen and waited for it to move. He tried not to think about the chain of events that would be set into motion when Eugenio left his girlfriend’s place. It was unavoidable. Just like he did every time he was on a job like this, Dom had already run through every possible alternative at least a dozen times.

In the past, Dom had tried to convince his uncle that a situation could be resolved without bloodshed, but Corrado had made his decision, and Dom had his orders. And when he was seventeen, he’d nearly learned the hard way what happened when he didn’t obey a command like this.

“Don’t let this happen again, Domenico,” Corrado had warned him over the top of a nine millimeter, the muzzle digging painfully into Dom’s forehead. “Understood?”

Yeah. He’d understood.

But just for good measure, Corrado had pulled him aside a few months later, and without any explanation, taken him to a concrete-walled garage in the back acres of his property.

There, a middle-aged man had been bound and gagged on his knees on the floor, and across from him, a younger man who couldn’t have been more than twenty. The faces, the eyes, even the hair—they were quite obviously father and son.

To Dom, Corrado said, “Stand there.” He pointed to a place a few feet away from the terrified men. “And learn.”

Both tied men had looked at Dom, eyes wide with palpable fear and unmistakable pleas for help. Dom hadn’t helped. He’d stood there, as ordered, and he’d watched.

And God, he’d learned.

He’d learned just how much a man could scream around a gag, and how loud a room could get when a person was trying to scream in pain while the other tried to beg for mercy. How much a punch could reverberate through the air when a fist made contact with the younger man’s gut. How sickening it was when the impact of a pistol shattered teeth. How much a man had to struggle to spit out teeth fragments, blood, and vomit with a gag pulled tightly across his mouth.

And how much damage Dom’s calm, calculated uncle could do with a knife without killing someone. Blood smeared on Corrado’s arms. Splattered on his shirt. Pooled in the lap of the younger man. Spread on the floor around his knees. Every cut of Corrado’s knife made the son whimper in pain and the father cry out with an entirely different breed of agony.

Eventually, Corrado cut off the younger man’s gag.

“Please,” the son moaned through tears. “Kill—” He vomited, nearly hitting Corrado’s shoes before croaking, “Kill me. Please.”

The father’s agonized sobs would stay with Dom until the day he died.

Finally, Corrado killed both of them—first the father, then the son—each with a bullet between the eyes.

Afterward, he’d casually wiped down the gun and his hands like a chef who’d finished preparing a meal.

Dom hadn’t been able to breathe. He’d witnessed violence before—some far too close to home—but never torture. Not until that day.

His uncle’s hand had been heavy on the back of Dom’s neck, and though Dom was still partially deaf from the gunshots, he’d heard Corrado say, “Do you want to know why I brought you here, Domenico?”

Dom had been petrified. Shaking. Ready to puke. But he’d nodded anyway because he was pretty damn sure that was the only right answer.