Page 35 of The Enforcer’s Revenge (Untamed Hearts #4)
CHAPTER TWENTY
T ino wasn’t sure how long it had been quiet, but it started to occur to him that he was supposed to be stressed about something, except he had forgotten what.
Just like the Anti-Nova—always forgetting shit.
Seriously, though, Tino was pretty fucking sure he was dead.
Even Lola was there, but she was smacking his face in a very un-Lola-like way. He blinked at her, seeing that her light eyes were wide and terrified.
Something was off.
Lola did a lot of different things with her hair, but she never went blonde. The Brambinos were blonde. And she fucking hated those motherfuckers. They all did.
Tino might be dead, but he knew that much.
Maybe he’d find those bastards in hell.
“Is he dead?” Nova’s voice, loud and terrified, started to wake Tino up a little bit. The gears began churning out of necessity because Nova sounded like he was going to keel over from a heart attack as he shouted, “Did I fucking kill him?”
Lola smacked Tino again, harder this time, and suddenly, pain exploded in his head.
Blonde Lola was mean.
He grunted and touched his temple as he rolled over, realizing now he was lying with his head in Mean Lola’s lap in the back of the Bentley.
“He’s not dead,” she announced.
It started rushing back at Tino too fast. This felt like waking up in the shower when he was twelve. Why the hell did he want to be here in this shit storm?
“What about the other guy?” Tino’s voice sounded scratchy even to him.
She frowned at him. “Huh?”
“Your bouncer?”
“Oh, he wasn’t so lucky.” She didn’t seem too broken up about it.
Tino sat up. He didn’t feel comfortable having his head in her lap. He knew now it was Carmen, not Lola, but the wires were all trying to rearrange themselves in his brain. He got the key information first. Brianna at home. Lola dead. Nova killing someone out in the open for anyone to see.
“Are you okay?” Nova asked Tino frantically in Italian and reached back from his seat behind the wheel, grabbing Tino’s knee like he needed to touch him.
“No, I’m not okay!” Tino reached forward and smacked Nova’s head. “What the fuck, Casanova?”
“I know!” Nova shouted, not sounding nearly as apologetic as he should. “But she was supposed to be protected! Hurting her is like spitting in my fucking face!”
Tino touched his temple again, feeling for blood as they drove over the bridge from Tampa toward their hotel on the Gulf of Mexico. It felt like his skull was cracked open, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding.
He looked at his shirt under the flashes of streetlights, seeing the stain of red on his clothes. He turned to Carmen, really studying her, because her dress was stained, too.
Tino beat on people for a living, and he knew something wasn’t right. If they left the dead guy behind, where was all this blood coming from?
Why was it on Carmen?
He highly doubted she touched the dead bouncer while Tino was out. Wasn’t she in the car when it all went down?
“Are you hurt?” Tino asked her.
She stared down at herself, and it was obvious she was in shock, too. Life had coldcocked her far more forcefully than the 9mm that got Tino. She still hadn’t cried. Instead, she had a horrible, dazed look in her eyes, as if her life suddenly became too horrific for her brain to process.
“I don’t think so.” She pulled at her dress, staring at a large crimson spot. “But where did it come from?”
It wasn’t just the blinding headache.
There was a very important key to this puzzle missing.
The streetlights kept flashing faster and faster in the car when Nova took his anger out on the gas pedal, casting quick, haunting shadows over Carmen’s beautiful features.
“They were fucking selling her! That was against the agreement!” Nova was still raging. “The bastardi are protected by me! They’re protected by our entire Borgata! I had every fucking right to end that motherfucker!”
“Where’s the blood coming from?” Tino asked as a frantic need to know rose to the surface like a freight train.
It felt cardinal to survival. As desperately as he would’ve fought for air if it were being stolen from him, that was how badly he needed to know.
“Why are we covered in blood? I’m not bleeding!
She’s not bleeding! Where’s it coming from?
” He pulled at his shirt again, staring at the splashes of red. “Where the fuck is it coming from?”
Something about Tino’s raw terror must’ve broken through the rage.
Nova pulled off the road into a weird clearing toward the end of the bridge.
Dark, ominous mangroves rose around them on either side, and Tino realized the car was parked on the banks of the intercoastal.
He could hear the slow, steady splash of small waves over the hum of cars still driving by on the bridge.
Nova turned off the car and rested his head against the steering wheel. “I should just fucking drown all three of us right now.”
Carmen looked to Tino, her light eyes hollow and sad, as if waiting for him to give them a reason why Nova shouldn’t do just that.
That was how wrecked Cosa Nostra left the three of them.
The idea of Nova sinking them didn’t seem nearly as crazy as it should. Tino knew Nova was dead serious. His brother was one heartbeat away from stomping on the gas and solving all their problems—permanently.
Weirdly, though, Tino wasn’t too inclined.
He had too many people back home.
Instead, Tino surged forward and turned off the car before Nova did something they couldn’t take back. “Where’s the blood coming from?”
Nova fell back against the seat and pulled at one side of his unbuttoned shirt. It was hard to get a good look because it was dark, but Nova’s bare chest glistened in the flashes from the cars driving by that lit up the inside of the car.
“Oh my God,” Tino choked and pushed the button to turn on the dome light.
He let out a strangled sound of horror because the gorgeous cream interior of Nova’s Bentley was bathed in blood.
Nova’s blood.
Tino pushed Nova’s shirt aside, seeing the nice, neat hole in his chest slowly gushing blood.
“Madonn’, Casanova, he shot you! You’re shot!” Tino lifted Nova’s shirt, staring at the bullet wound closer. “Is it your heart?”
“Well, obviously, if it were my heart, I’d be dead already,” Nova said in annoyance, like Tino was just clueless about something mundane.
Tino felt Nova’s back, looking for an exit wound, and didn’t find one. “You have a bullet in your chest, stronzo.”
“Thanks for the update.”
“We have to take you to a fucking hospital.” Tino started hyperventilating. “We have to call 911.”
Tino reached for his phone in his pocket, but Carmen caught his hand and stopped him. “If you call the cops, they’ll have him for murder. He’s going down for sure, and you’re not in a great position either. None of us is.”
Tino gaped at her, realizing she expected him to choose between prison or death for his brother. “What makes you think they won’t know anyway? Your Desi friend’s gonna sell us out when the heat shows up.”
Carmen looked away rather than answer.
“It’s against Omertà for the Brambinos to cooperate with law enforcement.
It would be a death sentence for the whole Borgata.
The other families would level them,” Nova reminded him, his voice tight, his words clipped and controlled as though the pain was making it hard to talk.
“I’ll have to answer to the commission for going after the Brambinos without permission, but they can’t sell me out.
If someone calls the cops, they’ll have to play stupid with the heat.
Legally, we might get away with it if we head back home. Tonight. Pretend like we never left.”
Tino fell back against the seat next to Carmen, realizing Nova and Carmen were right.
If they got back to New York, they could get away with it.
They would still have the not-so-small problem of the commission coming down on Nova, which might make the police preferable.
Tino had first-hand knowledge of what happened to wise guys who broke the rules, but they could worry about that next week.
Except Nova had a fucking bullet in his chest.
“If we’re doing this, if we’re running, we have to do it now. Right this second,” Carmen snapped at him. “Do you have somewhere safe to go back home? Will your administration help him?”
“Yeah. He is the administration. He’s a Zu.”
“What kind of Zu?” Carmen surprised Tino by asking. “I knew he got all of us out, that he’s still getting others out, but I didn’t know he was that high up in your family.”
“He’s Consigliere, but not your average Consigliere. He’s very important to our Borgata. We have doctors on call who will take care of him.”
“And what the hell? Why would the Morettis send a fucking Zu to Tampa to tell me my sister’s dead? Especially Nova Moretti. Do you know how important he is to all of us? You don’t take better care of him?”
“Usually, we do.” Tino felt a little insulted since it was part of his job to protect the administration, but he also couldn’t argue that he’d failed since Nova had a bullet in him. “This is a fuck-up, obviously.”
“I promised Carlo I’d get you home to claim Lola’s body. It was personal,” Nova said from the front seat. “I do try to keep my word, but I didn’t want to tell you like that. I couldn’t think of another way to get you out of the building. I’m sorry.”
“Oh my God.” Carmen covered her face with her hands. “My sister cannot be dead. This can’t be happening. This can’t be how it’s going down.”
“I’m sorry, too.” Tino choked when he said it.
“We could end it,” Nova reminded them again, sounding serious. “This will unequivocally be a shitshow, I’m sure of it, and I’m a professional at these things.”
Carmen huffed at that. “So, it can be my fault that you die, and everyone can hate me for it until the end of time? The circle is the only family I have left, and I’m not going down like that. No thanks.”