Page 44 of Vicious Behaviors (The Next Vicious Generation #3)

My father looks at Aldo as if trying to decide whether it’s worth breathing the same air as him. I turn to Dom, waiting for the backstory in all this.

I’ve never seen my father coming to the club’s basement in all the years I’ve worked for the Outfit. Mostly because it’s down here that we usually do our interrogations and other less distinguished things.

“His wife died last night in the ER,” Dom finally answers, his tone unexpectedly cruel.

“A hit?” I ask, confused. Aldo’s a low-level soldier. Nobody would go to the trouble.

“No. It wasn’t a hit,” Vincent growls, shrugging off his suit jacket and draping it over the back of a chair.

“She died from having her skull caved in. With an iron, no less. The same iron I suspect must have ruined one of this bastardo’s shirts.

” Still gagged and bound, Aldo looks at me as if pleading for his life.

“But that’s not all, is it, Aldo?” Vincent seethes, pulling off his tie and rolling his sleeves up to the elbows.

“He made his little girls watch. How old are they, Dom?”

“Seven and five, boss,” Dom replies, his voice low and dark.

Seven and five years old.

Their innocence tarnished forever by watching their mother be murdered by their own father.

Vincent takes a slow step forward, his tone calm, almost conversational. Almost. “Tell me… how many times did they cry for you to stop? How many nights did they lie in bed, praying you’d leave their mother alone? What kind of father are you? What kind of husband? Are you even a fucking man?”

There’s something in my father’s eyes I’ve never seen before. I’ve seen him cold. I’ve seen him triumphant. I’ve even seen him angry.

But this? This is beyond anger. Beyond rage. This is his demon, unleashed from the deepest part of his soul, and it’s hungry for its pound of flesh.

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Vincent asks, though he never removes the gag. “A prayer, perhaps?”

Aldo’s water-filled eyes find mine once again, pleading with me as if I were the only friend left in the room. I step forward, just enough for him to see me clearly. To see that he has no friend in me.

“Any man who hits a woman doesn’t deserve to breathe the same air as me,” I say, my voice steady, final. “That’s been the Outfit’s law since my father took the throne. And you, Aldo, you’re not a man. You deserve what’s coming to you. May God have pity on your soul, for you will find none with us.”

I take a step back and fall in line with Dom, just as Vincent looks at me over his shoulder. And there in his eyes is a glimmer of what I want to believe is pride.

Then it begins.

My father rains down hell, and neither Dom nor I make any attempts to stop him. What my father does to Aldo for the next few hours would make even the monster inside me flinch.

As he slices and dices into Aldo’s flesh, a thought takes root in my head. This… this is what my father wants me to become. This is the lesson he’s been trying to teach me for over a decade. He found a way to tame his demon. It only comes out when he lets it.

My mind runs a mile a minute as I try to make sense of the scene before me. If my father has found a way to coexist with the darkest part of himself, then maybe I can too.

These are the thoughts running wild in my head as Dom and I remain rooted to our individual spots as Vincent’s crisp white shirt turns crimson.

Aldo barely clings to consciousness when Vincent finally steps away from him, breathing heavy after a job well done. However, the mad look in his eyes tells me he’s not finished with Aldo yet. In fact, he’s only just started.

“Wake him up,” my father orders. “Marcello’s next.”

Dom nods and walks over to a nearby metal table where all sorts of cruel and blood-soaked instruments lie.

He picks up one of three syringes on the table and injects the poison into Aldo’s neck.

I’ve used these types of syringes before to know that they are a cocktail of adrenaline and stimulants strong enough to drag a man from his deathbed.

I don’t wait for the drugs to take effect, and peel off my coat, rolling up my sleeves just like my father.

I then take three long strides toward Aldo, or at least what’s left of him.

And as I stand there, I think about his wife.

His daughters. The fear they must have lived with, having him as their protector.

The hell that was their home. The cruelty they had to endure just to survive.

Then I see my mother’s loving face, followed by flashes of my sisters—Stella and Annamaria. I see them covered in blood, the man they vowed to love for eternity, standing over their cold, lifeless bodies.

The images of my sisters disappear afterward, replaced by images of Izzie’s face—bruised, beaten, lying dead on a kitchen floor. And just like that, the voice that had been dormant for the past couple of days springs to life.

‘Kill him! Kill him! And make it hurt!’

This time, I don’t resist the monster. I become it.

We all have monsters we try to hide from the world.

Aldo had his. And now he’s about to become acquainted with mine.

“What will happen to his daughters?” I ask after Aldo’s final breath.

“Their mother has a sister in Detroit,” my father replies, his voice still sounding rough. “We’ve made arrangements for them to go live with her. The Outfit will make sure those girls never want for anything. We failed them when they needed us most. We will not fail them again.”

He looks worse for wear, with shadows under his eyes that weren’t there this morning. The weight of this oversight—of not catching the signs of Aldo’s abuse on his family sooner—rests heavy on his shoulders.

It’s another lesson my father has taught me today.

Being the head of the famiglia means our family extends far beyond blood.

It stretches to every capo and every made man under our banner, including their wives and their children.

They are all under my father’s protection.

However, if any break his laws, they must also answer to him.

My father has to always be vigilant. Always watching. Even among his own. There’s honor in wanting to protect the most vulnerable… but crippling guilt when you fail to.

“What will happen to Zappa?” I ask, needing to know how he’s going to deal with his capo, since Aldo was under his responsibility, and therefore his wife and daughters under his protection.

“He’ll face the same sentence as Aldo did, though a bit more civilized,” he replies.

In other words, Elio Zappa will get two in the back of the head, while facing his Capo dei Capi, so there’s no mistake in the sin he committed when he dies.

Word will spread far and wide that Zappa was killed for either his lack of judgment in trusting a man like Aldo, or by not caring what a man like him did in his own home.

“I’ll go with you,” I volunteer.

“Not tonight, son. Tonight, you’ll go home. I will do the same,” he says, his voice raw and tired.

“Bruno is waiting outside to drive you home. Gio and I will stay in the city tonight,” Dom interjects, coaxing a rare, soft, and grateful smile from my father.

“Thank you, brother.”

Not everyone would understand their exchange or the underlying meaning behind it.

By Dom offering to hold down the fort in the city with Gio, my father can return home alone to my mother.

He can fall apart where no one else can see but her.

He can seek comfort in her embrace, without needing to share her with his brothers for the night.

And knowing what I know about my mother’s past and how she grew up in the Butcher’s household, I can understand why she might need him just as much.

“You did good, kid. Real good.” Dom claps a hand on my shoulder, giving it a firm squeeze as we walk back up the flight of stairs and out of the club together.

The bass from inside the club thrums through the pavement, blending with the thrum of shouting, laughter, and the sharp bark of a bouncer’s voice.

The sidewalk is a crush of bodies pressing closer to the velvet rope, their chatter spilling over into the street in drunken bursts.

Everyone is too excited to get in to notice the blood on my cuffs or the dark, drying spatters across Dom’s shirt.

That’s when I realize that night has already fallen. One glance at my watch tells me it’s well past midnight. We spent over fifteen hours in that basement, Aldo’s stench still lingering in the air somehow.

We watch Bruno get out of the driver’s seat to open the car door for my father and usher him inside. But instead of driving off, he keeps the door open to look at me.

“It’s been a while since you came home. You know that you can always come home, don’t you?”

Which is to say he’s worried that the beast inside me might still have some bloodlust left.

“Give Mom a hug for me,” I say, before shoving my hands into my pockets and walking toward my car parked on the other side of the street.

Like my father, I should head home. Sleep off the night and drown in darkness the memories of Aldo’s screams. But there’s an ache inside me that wasn’t there before.

A pull for something softer, something kinder.

Something a lot like what my father is returning to.

A need for comfort after wading through that much evil.

So it’s no surprise that, half an hour later, I find myself sliding a key into Izzie’s apartment door, one of the perks of owning the building.

As I step inside, I see the mattress still lying in the middle of the living room with Izzie fast asleep beneath a duvet, curled up small.

I strip off my clothes and slip in beside her, wrapping my arm around her waist, burying my face in her hair.

“You came back,” she whispers, ending my assumption of her being asleep. “Why?”

“Because I needed you,” I admit truthfully. “Needed this.”