Page 61 of Sweet Revenge
“Are you all right?” I asked him, shaking my head.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just a couple of those shotgun pellets made it around the stupid bulletproof vest you made me put on, and Tom here was a field medic in Iraq, so I’m good.” Vin gave Tom, one of our newer but most trusted soldiers, a nod.
“Thanks, Tom,” I told him before returning my attention to Vin. “I know they’re uncomfortable, but now they’ve saved both of our asses, so there you go.”
“Ma’s dead?” Dezzy asked from his spot down the hallway.
“Yeah, she’s dead.” I shrugged, like maybe it didn’t matter so much. Eventually, we’d all have to deal with the fact that our mother was the monster here, not that our old man had been much better. But I now knew she’d been the one behind all of the horrible things that had happened in my life, and the fact that she was gone was both a relief and unsettling. I wasn’t sure what it all meant.
“I guess that means it’s all yours now.” Vin grabbed hold of one of the men next to him, who helped him sit up.
Once again, I found myself nodding. “Guess so. Should’ve been anyway.” Turning to look at one of my mother’s goons, I said, “You, what’s your name?”
“Gio,” he muttered, fear radiating through his face.
“I still hear gunfire outside. You and my brother Dezzy here are gonna go spread the word to the rest of those bastards that Lillian is dead, got it?” I saw no reason for them to continue to fight if their leader was dead. They could surrender, and if they could prove their loyalty to me, I might let them live, but I wasn’t taking any chances. “Take names, Dez.”
“Yes, sir,” my traitor brother said. This would also be his chance to prove he was no longer my enemy. For now, I would give him the benefit of the doubt. He’d been lied to by someone he trusted, and now that the lie had been exposed, he had no reason to turn against his family again.
For the next half hour or so, I went around checking on my guys. A couple more of them had various wounds, mostly superficial. No one was going to die. Tom proved to be valuable in patching people up.
In the meantime, it didn’t take long for the shots I’d heard outside to cease. Word had spread that Ma was dead. The war was over.
Bodies littered the mansion, all of them my mother’s loyal subjects. “We need to clean this mess up,” I told everyone. “I’m not going to have a bunch of corpses lying all over my home. Once the stink gets in the wood, it takes weeks to get rid of it.”
“I’ll call in the girls.” Tilda, who’d been a huge help throughout this entire ordeal, stepped up to the plate again. “No one can get bloodstains out of an expensive rug like a Latvian girl with a bar of soap and a scrub brush in her hand.”
A chuckle escaped my lips. I couldn’t argue with that. Having all those girls in the house had been annoying at first, but they could clean like no one’s business. A lot of them had found work elsewhere, but Tilda would do a good job of rounding up her own troops to make sure the work got done quickly. The house would be shiny and clean again soon.
And mine.
Since Vin was wounded, I left it to Mikel to take care of the bodies. I didn’t give a damn where he dumped their remains as long as they were no longer on my property. Traitors deserved to be hacked up and dropped in a shallow grave somewhere or fed to the fishes.
As for our mother, we’d give her a funeral because it would be expected of us. If we didn’t do so, the other families would start to ask questions. In the back of my mind, I considered coming up with a murder-suicide pact to explain my mother’s death and La Rosa’s, but I hadn’t quite decided yet. I had her body moved to the basement until I could sort out the best way to handle it all.
I didn’t give a flying fuck if she got the proper burial she would’ve wanted, but I didn’t want any of our enemies to know how badly the Petrov family had been divided before today. I’d had enough fighting recently to last ten lifetimes.
It took a few hours for all the work to be finished. For the most part, I stood back and observed, answered questions, gave directions, that sort of thing. Elisa did the same, paying more attention to Tilda and her mob of maids than the body removal process. In the end, everything was returned to normal except for a few vases and other decorative items that had been broken in the fray. Even the office door was rehung from where it had been kicked in right before Vin got shot.
Satisfied that my kingdom had been righted, I called a meeting. “All of you meet me in the conference room in fifteen,” I ordered. “It’s time for us to get our ducks in a row.”
“Champagne all around!” Mikel grabbed a bottle of my mother’s finest from a nearby shelf and held it up in the air. “Everyone bring a glass.”
That got lots of cheers and laughs. I nodded in agreement. We needed to make sure we were all on the same page, but we also needed a few moments to celebrate our victory. It had been a long time coming. When I thought back over all the guys we’d lost in the last few months, fighting against forces led by someone who should’ve been on our side, my heart felt heavy in my chest. But it was all over now, and these guys deserved a few moments of celebration.
While Mikel and Dezzy broke open Ma’s most expensive booze and passed the bottles around, I crossed the living room to where Elisa was standing next to Tilda. I took her hand and pulled her toward the stairs. “Will you accompany me to my war room?”
Her eyebrows rose as she tried to figure out what my summons meant. “Of course,” she said. “Do you want me at the meeting?”
“Fuck yeah, I do,” I told her as we headed up the stairs, still hand in hand. “You’re my girl. I care more about what you have to say than anyone else.”
She chuckled. “I hate to break it to you, but you’ve got about a hundred guys in your organization who have more knowledge and experience than I do.”
“And you’re wiser than all of them combined.” We reached the landing at the top of the stairs, and I pulled her in for a kiss, relishing how perfectly her lips fit against mine. I could kiss her all night.
But first, I had a meeting to conduct.
Inside the conference room, the fish swam about like they hadn’t just witnessed their owner taking her last breath right before she joined them for a dip. Sometimes, it might come in handy to have a three-second memory, but in my line of work, forgetting was a good way to end up dead. A mobster with a long memory made sure that anyone who did them wrong would pay the price.