Page 163 of The Enforcer

“That was impressive,” Carina added, still texting. “I forgot how good you two are together.”

“I didn’t. I never forgot. Not once.” Tino squeezed Brianna’s bare thigh lightly. “You were awesome, baby. Badass.Sexy badass.”

Brianna turned and looked at him curiously. “The dancing?”

He smiled. “That too.”

Chapter Thirty-Five

Tino had been doing a lot of blow over the past two weeks. Not his fault; it’d just been a crazy month. The second he got the cushy Carina-babysitting gig, it seemed Cosa Nostra decided to take a shit, and every shady gangster had tried to either flip against the Borgata or steal from them.

Lately, Carlo had been favoring chemicals to get rid of bodies since the feds had been watching the docks, and he was apprehensive about taking out the boat. There wasn’t anything quite so unpleasant as the smell and sound of chemicals dissolving a human body. The visuals weren’t too fucking great either.

Tino thought he was immune to death until Carlo pulled the lid off that first barrel and the two of them stood there in protective gear, huffing and puffing as they fought with the body of a dead dealer who’d been speaking to the feds like a fucking moron. He acted like it was a big fucking shock the old man had eyes and ears in the government.

What was he? New?

Didn’t matter now. Tino strangled him using wire, because Carlo had Tino do most of the hits these days. Not to be an asshole; Carlo just wanted to desensitize Tino in case a bullet got Carlo and Tino ended up alone. Carlo had been talking about that shit a lot lately, which didn’t exactly help Tino’s blow habit.

For several months after Tino started being an enforcer, he developed Nova’s stomach issue when it came to stress. He spent a lot of time puking his guts up like he had that first night in the bathroom after Mary left him.

He felt like his soul was being raped all over again.

The first job he went on, they had to shoot the target through the eye, up close and personal. They ended this capo, a guy neither of them knew, because his name ended up on a piece of paper. It was a message job, and they had to leave the body there to be found as a warning that they were watching the crew Don Moretti knew was stealing from him. Not the best introduction to enforcer work, and Nova lost his shit when he saw the report on the news, especially since he was the one who’d tipped the don off on the stealing. The idea of Tino doing a job that left that much evidence nearly sent Nova over the edge, but Tino point-blank lied about being there.

In Cosa Nostra, no one was supposed to know what another person was doing. Even brothers. It was a solid rule. A good rule to protect everyone, most especially the administration, and Tino made sure he protected Nova.

His brother didn’t need to know the dirty details that had Tino puking on the side of the road after he made Carlo pull over.

But that was a lot of hits ago.

Now he didn’t think anything could get him, but those fucking chemicals were really pushing his limits. He could smell them every time he closed his eyes, and tonight he couldn’t seem to get to sleep to escape it. He was still hyped up on the adrenaline from the roof. Hours later and his heart didn’t want to stop beating fast. He had that horrible hot-cold feeling crawling up the back of his neck, making him realize his body was itching for blow. He’d taken a shower when they got back to Carina and Brianna’s apartment, but he was still sweating.

He had the blow on him.

He and Carlo got special boots made last year that had a secret compartment in the heel. If they got patted down, they weren’t going to get caught for narcotics—packing heat, fuck, yes, but narcotics, no. With any luck, even if he got pinched, the cops would never find the blow in his shoes.

Tino lay on the couch, shirtless in only his jeans, and shifted as he tried to stop himself from reaching for his boots. He had a strict rule that he didn’t do blow unless he really needed it. When the rush of invincibility might just save his life. When it was absolutely necessary for the chemical high to hit his brain and make his reality a little less horrific.

Lying there and hearing the muffled sounds from Carina and Paco in the bedroom down the hall was not a good reason for blow. So he looked at his phone, actually hoping for a text from Carlo to meet him.

Nothing.

It’d been quiet for two days when it’d been busy for weeks, enough that he was starting to get too dependent on the white-powdered happiness. Not for the first time, Tino made the decision to just suffer the withdrawal, if for no other reason than it’d make the next time he used it much better.

Last thing he fucking needed was for the blow to stop working as well and end up like one of those assholes who was snorting it every time they went to the bathroom to take a piss.

Carlo kept his shit together. Like Tino, he only did it when he was on the job, and he never seemed to get itchy without it.

Carlo told Tino once that he did blow when he was working to make the jobs easier, and he fucked when he wasn’t working to make life easier. He never mixed the two. Even if he went weeks without a job for the Borgata, he kept them separate, and it worked because Carlo was Siciliano and fucking would always be more fun than blow.

Made sense to Tino.

Except he wasn’t fucking.

He was sitting here sweating and twitchy on Carina’s couch, listening to his sister get some instead of him. It felt like a very sad reality all of a sudden, and he was starting to make mental excuses to do the blow.

He needed a distraction.