Page 3 of Dirty Mafia Torment

She’s relentless.

A teenage hellhound with her nose in our business. A girl with dark black hair, emerald witch eyes, long legs, and a flat, prepubescent chest. She’s wearing a frilly pink dress fit for a princess, over what I bet are virgin white cotton underwear. The devilish cock to her head gives nothing away.

One pity wink, and now she’s clingier than Saran Wrap.

It galls me knowing, while Sandro slunk off with the lovely Maria, I was preoccupied and feeling sorry for this hellhound.

Her father, Don Lombardi, a West Coast capo, was ripping her anew asshole in the kitchen, giving her a stern lecture about decorum, behavior, and the consequences of embarrassing him. He’d caught her alone with Massimo, “the enemy,” and now “men are talking.”

Like Massimo or any red-blooded mafioso gives a rat’s ass about Lombardi’s thirteen-year-old pot-stirrer.

We locked eyes from where I lurked in the doorway, and in a moment of weakness, I offered her a wink. Encouragement, recognizing her father’s a notoriously temperamental prick.

One wink, and the hellhound thinks she owns me.

“The Beneventi library’s impressive but lacking poetry,” she prattles on in a husky, sexy voice that contradicts the little-girl-plays-princess ensemble she’s wearing. All that’s missing are a fucking sparkly tiara and magic wand.

“Did you hear something?” Sandro asks me.

Her sigh is overexaggerated. “You’ve already acknowledged me, dimwit.”

What I heard was a girl with a death wish. Prowling around our home and sneaking into my father’s library. She’s lucky her ass hasn’t yet been tossed into the Beneventi dungeon. She could spend her time reading the words written in blood on the cell walls. “Just some incessant buzzing,” I smoothly reply, playing along with Sandro. “Nothing worth paying attention to.”

“Robert Frost’s poems should be added to the collection,” she continues, unperturbed. “You boys would benefit from reading his work, especially one poem in particular.”

The evil glint in her eyes captivates me.

Sandro, hating being on the losing end of a power play, ignores the warning signs and like a baited fish demands, “What fucking bullshit are you spouting now? Like I give a rat’s ass about poetry.”

My eyes narrow. She’s positively glowing with anticipation.

“You can learn a lot from it.”

I elbow Sandro in the side, but it’s too late. “Like what?” The question dangles like low-hanging fruit just waiting for her to snatch hold of it.

And she does, brilliantly.

“If I were you two, I’d start with, ‘The Road Not Taken.’”

Sandro stares at her, probably wondering if this annoying girl, every inch resembling the thirteen-year-old she is, with her chin cocked high and fire breathing from her nostrils, recognizes the innuendo.

But any illusions of innocence and misunderstood sexual dynamics—especially the kind involving lovely Maria—Elia Seraphina Lombardi shatters as she hammers out a final double-fisted blow.

“My advice, boys, is to stop drooling over Maria.” She spins to walk away, but not before firing a parting shot.

“Take the road less traveled. One your father hasn’t been down about an hour and a half ago.”

Five years ago

The bedroom’s a goddamn mess.

Evidence of her struggle is everywhere; tangled sheets, a broken lamp on the floor, the slackened ropes that bind her ankles. A shard of glass rests beside her on the mattress, and I can tell she used it to pick away at the shibari rope binding her wrists.

I’ve got Elia Seraphina Lombardi trussed up like a flamingo ready for the fire pit.

I close the bedroom door behind me. “Miss me?”

She glares daggers. Because she can’t reply; I’ve gagged her with a silk tie.