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“Don’t you dare”—I jabbed his chest with a finger—“give me that. You can’t be boss this way. You show up no matter what.”

“So you’re saying Gian deserves to be boss more than me?”

“No. I’m not stepping down. Not while Bianca might face retaliation. Because it wouldn’t take long for our enemies to know I would kill anyone who touched her. They will go after her to get to me. I need all the power of this position. There’s no stepping down after this.”

“I understand.”

“You should.” If I knew Bianca would leave with me, get a new identity far away from Manhattan, maybe on the other side of the world, I’d fake our deaths. However, she wouldn’t want to be cut off from her family. But killing the men who threatened her had forever sealed her fate to mine.

I went to the fridge to get a beer. Uncapping it, I drained half of it. “I already postponed the meeting with the Toronto Albanians to two days from now.”

“How’s Bianca?”

“She’s sleeping.” My shoulders drooped. “I need to figure out a way for her to see her family.”

“Raffa…”

A derisive laugh escaped me. “Fuck Raffa. After what he did, he’s lost his credibility as an elder. I decimated his minions, including those two loyalist fuckers as unhinged as he is. He made a big mistake coming for Bianca.”

“Well, our capos and soldiers are waiting in the wings to declare their loyalty to you,” Tommy said.

“Good.” I pointed my beer toward the foyer. “Supervise the disposal of the bodies. They’re already outside. Contact Sloane for a more thorough cleanup. Can you do that for me? I needSticks on top of other things.” Mainly finding out if we had more leaks in our security.

“Of course.”

“I don’t want to leave Bianca’s side so soon after shit like this happened. You’re my underboss. Let our men know I appreciate their support.”

“You don’t want to do the wholeGodfatherkiss-the-ring thing?”

“Fuck no. I don’t want this place crawling with mafia soldiers while my queen is vulnerable. Got it?”

Tommy moved to leave. “Don’t worry. I got this.”

“And, Tommy.” He turned to look at me. “Don’t screw up again.”

Chapter

Twenty-One

Sandro

Bianca wanted to stay in bed the next morning and I indulged my girl. I reviewed the security footage. She gave quite a fight. I was damned proud of her. She told me that Raffa wanted the mob doc to gather evidence that she and I were having sex. I couldn’t even wrap my mind around how unhinged that sounded. But we were the mafia. If we had a middle name, “unhinged” would be it.

However, this should not have surprised me. The Rossis had historically manipulated the pregnancies of their women. Bianca’s uncle, Charles McGrath, had an affair with Sofia, Raffa’s sister, and gotten her pregnant. My grandmother took her to Italy to hide her pregnancy, and when they returned, they gave the child to the McGraths to raise. Charles, at that time, was in prison.

And then there was my own screwed-up parentage.

I was eighteen when Wilma dropped the bombshell to the entire Rossi crime family that I wasn’t her son. Carmelo hadpissed her off for the last time, and she revealed the whole sordid truth.

He forced her to fake her pregnancy because she couldn’t have more children.

There were actually companies that provided you with fake baby bumps and sonograms. I had to wrap my mind around that, too. I guess if you could fake death, you could fake anything. It made sense why Wilma showered affection on Frankie and appeared to hate my very existence despite how I tried to make her love me. I had crafted handmade cards and gifts that were discarded in the trash. At around eight years old, I took the hint and became the withdrawn, antisocial son of the Rossis. A beginning of a fresh hell because Carmelo became frustrated with me and started using his fists to make a point. Come to think of it, that was probably why I never understood the concept of love because I’d never received it. I built walls around myself to hide the fact that I was unlovable.

When the truth came out, I hated Wilma less and despised Carmelo more. In a way it was her absolution for why she wasn’t able to love me the way she loved Frankie.

I stopped calling her Ma and she’d been fine with it.

Wilma told me my biological mother died at childbirth, but Raffa revealed the truth after Carmelo’s funeral when I was twenty-four, recently released from a Russian prison.