Page 50 of The Enforcer

Tino would end up having a very close relationship with death. He would touch it from all sides too many times, and there was something morbidly serene about it. When it got close enough, people often froze rather than run. They would stand there and let it slam right into them.

Other hit men didn’t understand it.

But Tino did, that slowing of the world around him as they forced his shirt off. When his father jerked his head back, his voice sounded far away as he asked, “Tell me how many?”

Tino considered lying, but at this point, he was pretty sure that wouldn’t help. They’d have to be stupid not to know Tino had been counting.

So he used his kick-ass math skill and whispered, “A h-hundred and twenty,” before they shoved his shirt in his mouth and showed him firsthand why Nova’s eyes had gone wide.

Chapter Thirteen

Their ma was dead.

Nova cried for a long time. This soul-wrenching, broken sobbing after he’d gotten done destroying anything remotely breakable in the apartment. Truth was, he made a bad day unnecessarily worse, because it wasn’t like it was a fucking shock.

Their ma had been sick for a few years.

She’d been a shell of a person for the past three weeks.

She hadn’t talked for days.

There was a part of Tino that was relieved she wasn’t hurting anymore, but Nova came unglued. There was no calming him down. He just freaked. So Romeo crawled into the bottom bunk with Tino, and the two of them let Nova cry.

Romeo stroked his hair, pushing it away from his forehead in the same long, sweeping gesture their mother once used, and whispered, “Va tutto bene, piccolo. Andrà tutto bene,” until Tino fell asleep to the sound of Nova’s sobs.

It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be okay.

It was the fingers in his hair.

He wanted to pretend they were his mother’s, maybe Romeo’s, but they were shaking, frantic, grossly sticky when they caressed his face.

“Open your eyes. Come on. Please, God. Please. Please. Please.” One hard, desperate kiss was pressed against Tino’s hairline, before Nova went back to begging in Italian, “Madonn’, Ma. Please. Make him open his eyes. Open your eyes, piccolo. Cazzo, Ma. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

There was just this raw desperation to the prayer.

It made him feel like Nova was reaching in and jerking him back. Tino really wished he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to come back. He did not want to open his eyes. He did not want to remember the way Nova had kept his face buried against the cement, elbows tucked tight to his ears, hands in his own hair as he hid from watching them beat Tino.

The whole time as Tino lay on the basement floor, choking on his screams he reached out to Nova, believing in some strange way that Nova was going to save him. That something would click in Nova’s brain, and he would figure out a way to stop their father from hitting him over and over and over again until Tino was lying in a pool of his own blood.

Maybe Nova thought he wouldn’t have to look Tino in the face again.

Maybe Nova wouldn’t have to, because Tino passed out when they stopped with his back and jerked his pants off to tear into his thighs instead. When the basement finally faded out, Tino thought he was going to see his ma again.

In a way he felt like he’d earned it.

The hard way.

Except Tino’s eyes flew opened when the pain came back and slammed into him like a Mack truck. He sucked in a hard gasp of air from the shock of it, but then he was choking. His entire mouth tasted terrible and chalky, and he turned his head, spitting something out at the same time he let out a scream.

“Fuck. Shh.” Nova grabbed his face, forcing Tino to turn toward him. “Be quiet. I know it hurts, but you have to be quiet. I want you to stay awake, but you need to be quiet for me, okay?”

Tino used to have this natural tendency to do whatever Nova told him to if the cards were down. If he was in danger, he trusted Nova implicitly to get him out of the shit.

He was pretty sure he’d never been in more trouble than he was right now, and Tino trusted Nova exactly zero to save him.

But he stopped screaming and just cried.

The pain was all-consuming, ripping him up from the inside out. His head was resting on Nova’s lap, but he couldn’t stop moving, writhing from the agony, wanting to somehow crawl out of his skin and get away from it.