Deep (Pagano Family #4)(3)

Nick shook his head. “I’m sorry, Uncle. I want my father’s shooter. And I want Church. I’m rolling up my sleeves until Church is done. If I can’t do that and stand at your side, then maybe Julie is your better choice.”

Everybody turned back to Ben. He stared across the room at Nick, and for several moments during which the tension was literally audible, in the rustle of fabric over shifting bodies, in the rasp of deep breaths, and in the solid tick of the mantle clock, the room held and waited.

“There’s no one better to gain vengeance for your father. And you deserve that respect. But I want you at my side. Stand with me with your sleeves up until that work is done. But to name Brian capo is to change our world too much. Take the day, bring another name, or I will name someone myself.”

Julie and Dom relaxed on the sofa, somewhat mollified that one offense had not been topped by another. Nick, however, was not mollified. Brian was his best friend—more than that, in the borgata, he was worth ten of Julie and Dom. He was smart, he was steady, and he was loyal as hell. That he couldn’t rise above the rank of soldier because his mother was a blue-eyed blonde European mutt—that was old bullshit. The kind of old bullshit that was going to bring the Pagano Brothers down.

Someday, Nick would be don. When he was, real change would happen.

But now, he would mourn his father.

And then he would avenge him.





1



Nick woke and eased a slender arm off his chest. He stood and stretched, then went to his bureau and pulled out a pair of track pants. He stepped into them as he walked out to his kitchen. He could already smell the coffee his coffeemaker had started brewing ten or so minutes before.

As he reached up to get a mug out of the cupboard, he caught a look at his hand and pulled back. He still had blood around the edges of his nail beds. He’d washed, he’d thought thoroughly, several times since he’d been in a situation to get blood on his hands.

Standing there in his kitchen with his hand on the cupboard pull, he thought about his life in the hours since he’d had his hand in a man’s guts. The afternoon with his mother. A family party to send his cousin Carmen off to Maine with her man and their baby girl. And the night with Vanessa.

Nick used gloves when he did wetwork, of course, but yesterday’s work had been particularly wet. The mess had been all over his hands and arms by the time he’d stripped out of his protective gear. It had been years, though, since he left a job like that with any trace of it lingering on him. He f*cking hated for one side of his life to cross over into the other. Bringing another man’s blood into his mother’s house? Around his family? Into his own bed?

He closed the cupboard door and went to the sink to scrub his hands until they were red and shiny, digging deep around his cuticles until he was sure he was clean. No longer in the mood for coffee or breakfast, he went around the counter to the living room and grabbed his smokes from the table near the front door. Then he went out onto the balcony.

The day was still young, and so was spring, and the sky was heavy with clouds, so the sea breeze off the water was on the brisk side. Nick took a deep breath, letting the chill and the salt air clean out the gunk in his head. He let it out with a cough; he didn’t smoke nearly enough to hack up a lung every morning the way his father had, but he felt the effects occasionally.

Felt them, and ignored them. He lit a smoke now, needing the calm it brought, and looked out over the beach to watch the morning waves roll up and back. The ocean fascinated Nick—not like it did his cousins, though. They were all of them surfers and sailors and beach bums, constantly throwing some party or another on the sand, always out ‘getting wet,’ as they called it. Nick had never been into any of that. He was active in other ways.

He’d bought this seaside condo not because he wanted quick access to the beach so he could surf or dive or whatever. What he wanted was proximity to the power of the sea—the roar and crash of the surf, the vast miles to the horizon, the blow of storms at his windows. He stood on his balcony on a morning like this, with his head dark and his thoughts snarled, and felt an elemental kinship with the ocean. Maybe that was arrogant, maybe it was delusional; maybe it was just absurd. But it was nonetheless true.

The ocean was a place of darkness and mystery, full of predators and secrets, and infinitely deep.

He didn’t sail, but he had a cabin cruiser he took out frequently, sometimes even recreationally. More often, though, he had business to conduct out in the deep. That was what the ocean was to Nick: a place that swallowed secrets and fed beasts.

Movement on the sand broke his reverie, and he shifted his eyes from the horizon and the overcast sky down to the beach. A group of six—no, seven—people, all women but one, were arrayed on the flat sand near the tideline, standing on long, narrow mats in various colors. He hadn’t noticed them when he’d first come out, but he knew who, or at least what, they were—a yoga class organized by the condo committee. They’d started doing their thing on the beach the week before. A group of granola-eaters doing some kind of tantric voguing didn’t hold much interest for Nick, so he hadn’t done more before today than register their existence. But this morning, his mind was feeling mired and indolent, and he was slow to shift his attention away. He watched them for several minutes, his focus moving from one body to the next. A couple of the women were slender and lithe, moving their bodies with obvious ease and expertise. A couple were heavyset and struggling to follow the leader.