Page 1 of Twisted Throne

Chapter One

Paul

The coppery smell of blood filled the small room as I stared at the man slumped in the chair in front of me. Johnny Blaze, a scuzzy dealer that we used to move some product for us. A bit player who thought he was an operator, he kept a constant ear out to fuel his next scam. So when he wasn’t too fucked up on his own stash, he was an occasional source of information. But apparently he’d been been working with the Sabitino family as well. What’s the world come to when you can’t trust your very own scumbags?

Lucky for us, Johnny Blaze is an idiot. I stepped toward him slowly, footsteps echoing on the concrete floor. He was still trying to play the tough guy act, but judging by the panic welling up in his voice, he wouldn’t be able to keep it up much longer.

“I had no choice, Sabitino would have killed me!” he said as blood trickled down his face from his busted nose.

I chuckled. “And I’m going to kill you now. The only choice you have is whether it’s quick or not. The slow option begins with missing fingers, then works its way inward. But tell me how Sabitino knew where we were storing our product, and Carlos will put a bullet through your head.”

“I don’t fucking know! I swear!” he squeaked, dropping all pretense of trying to keep it together. “Please!”

I glanced up at Carlos and gave him a nod. Before Johnny had time to react, Carlos had pulled a knife and buried it to the hilt in his thigh. Johnny strained against the ropes binding him to the steel chair bolted to the floor. His screams filled the room. I leaned back against the wall and waited for him to shut the fuck up already.

“Once more, where did Sabitino get our information? How did he find the warehouse?”

The room was stuffy and I was anxious to finish dealing with this piece of shit already and get out of here. But I couldn’t do that until I got the information I needed. One of our soldiers had caught Johnny trying to set fire to one of our smaller storage warehouses. Good eyes on that kid; if he had succeeded we would have lost thousands in product. Lucky for us, Johnny had dipped into his stash before going to do the job and didn’t even bother checking for guards. The kid took him down with a single blow and held him until I could get here. He’s a solid guy, with just the right amount of ambition. I’d mention him to Angelo, once I was done with the night’s business.

No one outside of the family should have known where this particular warehouse was or what was stored inside it. Sabitino got the information from somewhere, and I was going to find out where.

Johnny was still blubbering, snot mixing with the blood on his face. “All I know is that he has someone giving him information on you! I don’t know who! Please… Christ, please just let me go.”

I stared down at him in disgust as a dark, wet spot appeared on his pants. But I believed him. I highly doubted Antonio would tell this low life anything important. And if he had, the sniveling coward would have given it up by now. He would turn on his own mother if he thought it would save his ass. Unfortunately for him, however, his fate was sealed the moment he set foot on our property. And that was just as it should be. Every breach of LaRosa territory I took as a personal offense, it pulled the beast in me out just a little more, and if taking it out on Johnny helped me secure thefamiglia’ssafety and property… well. Too bad for Johnny.

“Take care of him, then have Frank clean up. Me and you, we need to talk,” I told Carlos as I turned and walked out, back toward the car.

The cool night air filled my lungs and cleared my head of the stench of piss and fear sweat. I didn’t miss the smell, but I did miss the simplicity of shaking Blaze down.

If someone in the family is giving information to the Sabitinos, then we have a massive problem. Although the LaRosas have always had a tenuous but mutually respectful relationship with them, that changed after all the years of cigars and scotch caught up to Antonio, Senior. He dropped dead of a heart attack a few months ago.

His son, Antonio Jr., stepped up as the head of the family and the tension between our two families has been building ever since. Junior’s been poaching and flipping some of our lower-level dealers and associates like the unfortunate Johnny Blaze here. Worse, he’s been slowly pushing into territory that has belonged to the LaRosas for years.

A few minutes later, a shot rang out. Carlos exited the building and spoke briefly to Frank, then strode over to me.

“Paul, what the hell was he–”

“Not here,” I interrupted him, glancing around at the handful of men still milling nearby. “Let's go.”

The engine hummed as I pulled my car out onto the highway, but both of us were silent. My hands gripped the smooth steering wheel so hard my knuckles were white. The thought of someone betraying us to Sabitino made my blood boil. A scumbag’s a scumbag, but once he’s bought he should stay that way.

“Do you believe him?” Carlos asked cautiously. We had worked our way up the ranks together as teenagers. He knew me better than anyone, and he could tell that I was fighting to keep my anger in check.

“I do. How else would they have known where to send him? And they’ve been putting pressure on some of our associates as well, some that they shouldn’t know about. I’ve wondered if we had a leak but I didn’t want to believe it without something solid to go on. Now that we have confirmation, we need to act fast,” I replied. “Antonio Jr. is getting braver, he’s been pushing and testing us for a while but now he’s getting ballsy.”

“Agreed. But who in the family would rat on us?” he replied.

I took a minute to think about who else in the family would have access to the information being leaked. There was Angelo’s nephew, Alec, who deals mostly with intel and informants. Rocco, head of security, Johnny our digital hacker. “Other than Angelo himself, you are the only one I trust,amico.”

“You know when we tell Angelo he’ll share the information with Alec,” Carlos said, giving me a sideways glance.

It was no secret that Alec and I don’t particularly get along. He’s always felt that since Angelo has no children, Alec should automatically be his second as his sister’s son. But Alec got his rank through an arranged marriage that brought us allies, while I got mine through fists and fighting. Needless to say, when Angelo chose me instead he didn’t take the news well. He was never quite disrespectful enough to take the conflict from words to fists, but he knew the line he was walking. And the fact that I found nothing he said or did intimidating in the slightest drove him absolutely crazy. If I had to choose someone that might have turned traitor, Alec is definitely high up on my list. And it wasn’t just that I disliked thestronzo. He played the dutiful nephew well enough, but I’d seen flashes of hostility ever since his marriage to Elena.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But Angelo has to know. We’ll keep a close eye on Alec and see how he reacts to the news. In the meantime, reach out to some of our people that Sabitino has been putting pressure on, and see if they’ve heard anything about who he’s been working with. Take Ricky or Frank with you. Make sure they’re more afraid of us than Sabitino. Hopefully, we can find out something that will help us track down who’s been spilling to Sabitino.”

It would have been better if Antonio’s brother, Matteo had stepped up instead. He would have been more reasonable to work with. But the two of them had had a falling out years ago, and Matteo split to do his own thing.

When Angelo reached out to Antonio after his father’s death Antonio made it quite clear he wasn’t as content with our unspoken truce as Antonio Sr. was. Even somebody as hardheaded as Junior knew better than to mouth off to Angelo, but he’d been testing us ever since, undercutting deals and poaching suppliers wherever he thought he could get away with it.