SWNOVELS Sinners Condemned : Chapter 7
Devil’s Hollow.
Tension drips off the craggy ceiling, and underneath it, made men plot revenge against one of their own.
Voices are low and expressions are somber. Leaning against the bar gives me a view of the club through a wide-angle lens, and I drink it all in over the rim of my low-ball glass.
“What do you call a nightclub full of quiet Viscontis?”
My gaze skims left, where Castiel, my oldest cousin and soon-to-be capo of Devil’s Hollow—if Uncle Alonso ever fucking checks out—is pouring out two fingers of whiskey.
I cock my head and consider the punchline. “No idea.”
“Me either. Never seen it before.”
He smirks and I huff out a sardonic laugh. I down the rest of my whiskey in one, but before I slam the glass against the bar, he grabs it from my hand.
“Easy there, cugino,” he drawls. “This bar top is African Blackwood. Just had it fitted last week.”
My eyes fall to his ring-clad hand caressing the wood grain. “If you touched your woman like that, she might not be sitting in the corner swiping right on every man on Tinder.”
We both look up at Alyona. She’s the long-legged heiress to Russia’s largest vodka distillery and Cas’s unwilling fiancée. By the way he’s glaring at her, I don’t doubt the feeling is mutual. She sits crossed-legged in a velvet booth with a face like a spanked ass, eyes glued to her cell. Sure enough, her thumb is working overtime.
Cas grunts and refills my glass with Smugglers Club whiskey. Sometimes, I wonder if being the CEO of the company means he ever gets sick of drinking it. He gently slides a napkin across the bar and places my glass on top of it, before bringing his to his own lips. “I wish Dante would have given me a heads up he was going to blow up the port tonight,” he mutters into the amber liquid. “I’d have dropped her slap-bang in the middle of it.”
“Such a hopeless romantic.”
“I’ll leave that title to Vicious.” His cell vibrates in his pocket. After pulling it out, he glances at the screen and strides away with it to his ear.
I swipe my fresh drink and regard my brother Angelo and his new wife with the same level of interest one has when watching a David Attenborough documentary. They’re standing in the center of the room, oblivious to the tense conversations being had around them. Angelo’s hands are cupped tightly around Rory’s jaw as he murmurs something for her ears only. His dinner jacket is slung over her shoulders, concealing most of her wedding dress.
Mild amusement prickles at my skin. Angelo’s nickname isn’t Vicious for nothing. He’s forcing a calm exterior for his wife’s sake, but the vein thumping in his left temple tells me he’s going to slip away to an empty room at the first opportunity and rip apart everything in sight.
His temper is, and always has been, like a gas leak. Bring a small flame near him and he explodes, seemingly out of nowhere.
Sometimes, I wonder if he really did go straight for nine years, or if it was a long fever dream on my part.
I’d like to say he returned to the Cosa Nostra and finally claimed his rightful role as the capo of Devil’s Dip because he came to his senses, but it was actually because he lost his fucking mind.
Long story short, he wanted Uncle Alberto’s twenty-one-year-old fiancée, and when he didn’t immediately hand her over on a silver platter, he popped a bullet in the old man’s head and started a war with his eldest son and successor, Dante.
I knew Dante was a cunt the moment he cheated at one of my poker nights, but I didn’t realize he was lobotomized, too. He blew up the Devil’s Dip port, which all three Visconti outfits, including his own, run their businesses out of.
Angelo and Rory break into a game of tongue tennis, and I’d rather pop my eyeballs out than watch the match. So, I shift my gaze to Gabe, our youngest brother and newly appointed consigliere of the Devil’s Dip outfit. He’s sitting at a poker table with three of his most-trusted soldati. Like Angelo, he’s calm in appearance, but his gaze is lit like a live wire.
My brother is a mystery, and despite being as thick as thieves growing up, all I know about him now is that he has a constant hard-on for violence and a hatred for sharp tailoring. I’ve probably seen him in a suit twice in my life: today at Angelo’s wedding, and nine years ago at our parents’ funeral. As he grunts orders at his men, he twists his bow tie around his fists, like he’s weighing up who he should strangle with it.
He suddenly stabs the map on the table with a thick finger, and a figure flinches in the booth behind him.
It’s the lady my cousin Benny picked up at the wedding. My eyes skim over her then move an inch to the right, to the idiot himself. He meets my gaze with a smug smirk, then raises his glass to me. Cheers.
I wipe my hand across my mouth in a poor attempt to hide my amusement. Seems like only minutes ago Nico and I were watching him shoot his shot with her on the dance floor, taking bets on how long it would be until she kicked him in the nuts.
“You owe me twenty grand.”
Speaking of Nico. He saddles up beside me at the bar and pours out two shots of Don Julio ‘42. He slides one across to me with a flick of his wrist, giving zero shits about the African Blackwood.
“Read the room, cugino. Now’s not the time to be settling trivial bets.”
Nico laughs. “Double or nothing says he fucks her.”
A pulse flickers in my jaw. “Deal.”
Like everyone else in the family, Nico knows I don’t, can’t, turn down the opportunity to play a game or make a bet, even if it’s guaranteed I’ll lose. My self-control is iron-clad and galvanized, and yet, the click-clack of a dice or the thawp of a roulette wheel spinning is like crack to me.
My whole life is a game, but it’s a predictable one. I own half the hotels and casinos and collect protection from ones I don’t. In a world of fixed odds, all of them stacked in my favor, my only excitement is getting to shake the dice and throw them into the unknown.
Nico slams the shot and pours out another. “You’ve fucked up.”
“Yeah?”
He flashes me a shy grin. “Yeah. I slept with her at the bachelor party, so I already know she’s mafia meat.”
“Jesus,” I mutter. “You and Benny are one Saturday night away from incest.”
He laughs quietly, then picks up a stack of shot glasses with one hand and tucks the tequila bottle under his arm. His jovial whistle slips through the air like oil in water. In my peripheral, I see Griffin, the head of my personal security team, stop pacing the shadows to glare at him as he passes.
“Fucking idiot,” he grunts, before returning to his hushed phone call.
I don’t agree; in fact, Nico is one of the few cousins I wouldn’t deem an idiot. He’s just grown up with warfare hanging over his head like a constant storm cloud. He’s not an idiot, he’s just immune to things like explosions and bloodshed.
Left alone again, I eye the tequila shot Nico poured out for me. As a rule of thumb, I don’t drink any liquor that’s clear unless I’m trying to secure business with the Mexicans or Russians, but fuck it.
I slam it and wait.
To my mild disappointment, it burns down my throat and trickles into my chest, yet does nothing to extinguish the flame of unease that flickers there.
Dragging a knuckle over my jaw, I turn and rest my forearms against the bar. Mainly so Angelo doesn’t catch the crack in my indifferent facade. Out of all the Viscontis, I’m the calm one. The voice of reason in a cesspit of ego and testosterone. The one that puts out their fires with an ice-cold bucket of reality and a plan. But I must admit, I’m struggling to adhere to that reputation tonight.
The Devil’s Dip port is up in flames, and there’s a niggling feeling in my chest that somehow, I’m responsible.
It was just a coincidence.
With a shake of my head, I roll the whiskey glass down my palm and press it against the inside of my wrist in an attempt to cool my blood. Of course, my brain knows it was a mere coincidence. Dante’s been laying low for over a month now; it was about time he pulled his finger out of his ass and retaliated. And what better day to do it than Angelo’s wedding?
The red-haired girl had nothing to do with it.
I close my eyes for a brief moment, suddenly aware of all the tension knotting in my back.
She’s not my doom card.
Behind me, Angelo clears his throat. “Men, Cas’s office in one minute.”
I roll my neck on my shoulders. Smooth the band of my bow tie and realign my composure before turning around. Made men stride through a door at the back of the club in a line of tuxedos and crystal tumblers. Angelo fists Rory’s hair and plants an angry kiss on her neck, before she joins her bridal party in the corner. A few of Gabe’s men form a protective barrier around them, while Angelo turns his attention to me.
He stares at me, silent but expectant. Cocking a lazy smile, I hold my hand horizontally in the space between us. Both our eyes fall to it, and as usual, it’s deathly still.
My brothers and I have played this game since we were kids. From breaking our mama’s fine china by rollerblading in the kitchen, to realizing there’s a security camera outside the house of our latest Sinners Anonymous victim—any time danger touched us, they’d turn to me to gauge the severity of it. I guess it’s because I see things through a logical lens, or because I don’t make any rash decisions.
The rule is and always has been that if my hand doesn’t shake, their hands shouldn’t either.
He swallows. Nods. But when his eyes travel back up to mine and narrow, I can tell he’s not convinced.
“It’s Dante, for fuck’s sake.”
My protest doesn’t lighten the darkness on his face, and I look back down at my hand to double-check there’s not even the slightest tremor in it. I can’t believe I’m doubting myself, but I have to admit, the red-head has thrown me out of whack.
When she came into the bar last night, I heard her before I saw her.
Those muddy boots stomped down the stairs and up my spine, forcing me to read the first line of an email twice. That alone got my back up, and all before I’d even seen her.
And when I did, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look twice. And then a third time, because she slid up beside me at the bar and took her coat off like a fucking stripper.
Of course, the first thing I noticed was her copper hair. So messy and so much of it. I couldn’t tell whether she’d just been fucked senseless on polyester sheets or been dragged through a bush backward. The second thing I noticed was the green dress that showed too much skin for a Thursday night. And the third? The security tag still fastened to the hem of it.
She was trouble and my gut knew it before she even opened her smart-ass mouth.
Usually, I find it easy to be a gentleman. I have a talent for laughing on cue, cracking a well-placed joke, then making a graceful exit when the small talk gets so dry it makes my eyeballs itch. At least one member of this family has to have manners, and I suppose that task falls on me.
But Penelope made me want to be anything but gentlemanly.
I’m wary of talking to women on this Coast, unless I’m on a one-and-only date with them. There’s nothing less attractive than looking at a lady and seeing your last name flash in lights behind their eyes.
But hers were big and blue and lacked any spark of recognition—at first, anyway. Somewhere between her proposition and me taking a phone call from my brother, she figured it out, and I’d be lying if I said the sadist in me didn’t rear its ugly head when I saw her trying to scurry up the stairs and out of my clutches.
The excitement had me throw my caution and self-control into the fire, so I shouldn’t have been so surprised when I got burned. She hadn’t cheated; she’d won my Breitling fair and square, and the way in which she did it only piqued my interest in who she was and what the fuck she was doing in Devil’s Cove with a suitcase and a stolen dress. I slipped my timepiece into her pocket along with a Sinners Anonymous card in the hope I’d find her secrets waiting for me in the voicemail box by the end of the weekend.
I never thought I’d see her again. So when I spotted that red hair billowing in the wind from the other side of the lake, talking to my little cousin, unease crept under my collar, sticky and hot. It only got worse when she had the fucking nerve to try swindle me again. Talking about luck, of all things.
And then the explosion happened.
My molars grind on instinct, but when I feel Angelo’s gaze growing sharper, I roll my shoulders back and pin him with my best look of indifference. “Would you like to see if my dick shakes, too, or shall we figure out what to do with our dumb-ass cousin?”
Without waiting for a response, I slap his shoulder and stroll into Cas’s office. It has little more than a desk on one side and a long boardroom table on the other, where Viscontis gather like a pack of wolves. Angelo and I take our seats at the head of it.
I pull a poker chip from my pocket. Roll it between my thumb and forefinger. Suddenly, I’m fine with the fact I was unable to drown my unease in liquor, because the adrenaline of sitting next to my brothers at the head of this table by far overpowers it.
This is where I belong and I’ve always known it. Not in Vegas, but in Devil’s Dip with my brothers. Despite all my success on the Strip, there’s always been a black void in the hollow of my chest, an empty ache with the need to be home. I’ve waited nine long years for Angelo to return to the Coast. The moment I got the call he was moving back, I was on the next jet out, much to the dismay of my investors and security detail.
An electric silence cloaks the room. Three heavy beats pass before Gabe breaks it by slamming his fist against the table.
“Never liked the cunt.”
The two younger Hollow brothers murmur in agreement, but not Cas. Instead, he leans over with his silk pocket square in hand and rubs the spot Gabe just punched. “This family is the reason I can’t have nice things,” he mutters.
“Nah. You can’t have nice things in case your scary Russian fiancée throws them at your head,” Benny quips. There’s a ripple of snickers around the table.
“Enough.”
Angelo’s voice is sharp yet simple, cutting through the room like a steak knife. He loosens his bow tie and rubs a palm over his jaw. His wedding band glints under the recessed lights.
“It’s my wedding night. I should be at home fucking my wife and looking up the weather for Fiji. Instead, I’m deep underground in Devil’s Hollow with you bastard reprobates. I want a plan drawn up in the next ten minutes so I can get Rory out of here. Gabe, what are you thinking?”
Gabe leans back in his chair, snapping his bow tie like a whip.
“Grenades or a rocket warhead.”
From the door, my latest recruit, Blake, calls upon Jesus under his breath. I hide my smirk behind my knuckles, before Gabe gets up and snaps his neck.
All of my men are ex-Delta Force or CIA, and they are bound to their instructions tighter than the laces in their combat boots. They are quiet, obedient, and stick to the shadows until I summon them to the light. Half the time, I forget they are there.
They are a far cry from Gabe’s soldati, who all look like they’ve survived the apocalypse. Griffin was both pissed and bewildered with my decision to leave my shiny, gated compound in Vegas and move back to the Coast, and now that the port has been blown up, I’m sure I’ll be hit by a gruff I-told-you-so the moment he catches me alone.
But he’ll never understand me like these men around this table do. Being a Visconti is like a blood-type, you can’t escape what you’re born with. Wouldn’t want to, either.
Angelo’s jaw ticks in thought. He hisses out a puff of hot air, before jerking his chin to Cas and the other Hollow brothers. “And you guys?”
I stop flicking my poker chip and cut a look at Cas in anticipation.
When Angelo put a bullet through Uncle Al’s head and started a civil war with Devil’s Cove, the Hollow clan decided to stay out of it, despite their territory being slap-bang in the middle of us. Think of Hollow as being the Demilitarized Zone, Cas had said at the time. We won’t choose between family.
Out of everyone in the Cosa Nostra, he’s the most like me. A businessman first, a made man second. Now, though, I can see the dilemma biting at the edges of his conscience. Eventually, he steeples his hands and steels his jaw with resolve. “Smugglers Club is a global brand. We export over fifty-percent of our stock through your port, so Dante’s little stunt has cost us millions.” He swipes a thumb over his bottom lip, deep in thought. “He needs to pay.”
“Yeah, with a grenade,” Gabe grunts.
Cas shrugs. “Not the worst idea you’ve had, cugino.”
“Rafe? What do you think?”
Feeling the weight of everyone’s eyes on my skin, I turn to meet Angelo’s gaze. I spin the poker chip in the air and catch it, before slipping it back in my pocket.
“I think it’s boring.”
Gabe snorts. “You think a grenade is boring?”
My gaze shifts lazily to him. “Only kids are entertained by things that go bang, brother.”
Angelo huffs out a sardonic laugh.
The whole mafia cliché holds no appeal for me, and now that I’m finally back with my brothers, I refuse to be tied to archaic traditions and sleeping-with-the-fishes attitudes. We’ll be wearing fucking fedoras next.
I check the time on my wristwatch, then rise to my feet. “Gentleman, we won’t take up any more of your time, you’re all free to go.” I hold up my hand, slicing through the start of Gabe’s gruff protest. “We’ll keep you in the loop.”
Suspicion flickers over Benny’s features. “Free to go? We haven’t agreed on how to take the fucker down yet.”
I pin him with a tight smile. “It’s a Dip issue; we’ll handle it. In the meantime, if you need any extra men, talk to Griffin on the way out. I’ll be happy to lend you a few members of my personal security detail.”
“But—”
“He said we’ll handle it,” Angelo says, finality biting his tone.
Spines stiffen. The air crackles with words better left unsaid. Eventually, everyone rises to their feet, except Angelo and Gabe, whose glare is hot enough to burn a hole in the opposite wall.
“Fine. But we don’t need your men,” Benny grunts, grazing his shoulder against Blake’s chest as he passes. “This one here looks like he wouldn’t know how to use a gun even if it came with an illustrated instruction manual.”
“Don’t need a gun. These fists work just fine,” Blake growls back, stepping in Benny’s path.
I grind my back molars as Cas grabs Benny by the scruff of his collar and drags him from the room. I’m starting to wonder why Griffin thought Blake would be a good recruit. He should know the average Visconti would pop a cap in his temporal lobe just to prove a point.
The issue with my men following to the Coast is that they only know me as Raphael Visconti the businessman. They see the endless meetings, the VIP booths. They receive their elimination instructions in sealed manila envelopes and carry out the hits in quiet parking lots. They don’t see the dark, violent underbelly attached to my family name. I’ve done well to keep both separate, and anything handled within the confines of the Cosa Nostra, I get Gabe and his men to carry out.
I’ve shielded them for so long, I’m concerned the likes of Blake think the Cosa Nostra is a figment of Francis Ford Coppola’s imagination.
The door clicks shut, plunging us into silence.
That vein in Angelo’s temple does a tap dance. “This is a game to you, isn’t it?”
It’s not really a question, because my brothers already know the answer. Gabe punches the table again, and this time, there’s a loud crack from under his fist.
“Mama should have put you in anger management when she threatened she would,” I muse.
“What, do you wanna challenge Dante to a friendly game of Tic, Tac, Toe?” Gabe’s eyes find mine, furious and wild. Unhinged. “He blew up our port. Three confirmed dead already, and fuck knows how many more to come. Do us all a favor and leave the combat to me and my men, and go back to dry-cleaning your suits.”
As I study him, it briefly occurs to me this is the most I’ve heard him talk since that Christmas. Shortly before our parents died, he came back to the Coast for the holidays with a haunted look in his eyes and a fresh scar running from his eyebrow to his chin. He was a whole different man.
Wouldn’t say what happened to him—wouldn’t say much at all, in fact. But something about plotting revenge has brought him to life, and I almost don’t want to take it away from him.
And I wouldn’t, except, my ideas are always better.
“Lay off the steroids, brother.” I stride over to the desk, giving Gabe a patronizing pat on the shoulder as I pass. “They make your brain fuzzy and your dick small.”
I sink into the armchair behind Cas’s desk and drag his chessboard in front of me. With mild amusement, I realize it’s the one I bought him last year for his birthday. Judging by the thin film of dust covering the pieces and the fact he owes me twelve grand, he hasn’t been practicing.
Gabe stops behind me, casting a dark shadow over the board.
“Let me dumb it down for your ‘roid-raging brain.” With a flick of my wrist, I backhand all the chess pieces, sending them flying across the desk. “This is what you want to do. Immediate retaliation; total destruction. Sure, Dante rents his brain cells and only on alternate week days, but even he’ll expect us to bite back tonight. At the very least, his men are guarding the perimeter of Cove as we speak.” Slowly, I pick up all the pieces, taking my time to put them back on their rightful squares. Behind me, Gabe’s impatient huff slithers down my shirt collar. “But you know what he won’t see coming?”
“A Molotov cocktail?” he snaps.
“No reaction from us at all.”
Angelo cocks his head. Strokes the stubble across his jawline. “Rafe’s right. Dante’s going to be sitting behind Big Al’s desk, scratching his balls and waiting for a war.” He jerks his chin at me. “What’s the plan?”
I settle back in the armchair. “We play dumb and extend an olive branch. We tell him that somebody has blown up the port, and we need to put our differences aside to figure out who. Because surely,” I add dryly, “nobody would be stupid enough to bomb the port that they fucking use.”
“And then?”
With a smirk, I turn back to the chessboard. “And then, his luck begins to turn.” I flick off one pawn. Then another. “Heart attack. Car crash. Drug overdose. All his associates and soldati meet their deaths in unfortunate, yet unsuspicious circumstances. One day, he’ll look up and realize there is nobody left to fight with him.”
We all look down at the board, where one black king stands alone, opposite an army of white chess pieces.
Gabe reaches over and snatches up the queen from the pile of discarded pieces. It looks comically small in his busted paw. “His consigliere, Donatello, has gone already. Last I heard, he’s shoveling horse shit on a farm in Colorado with Amelia. A kid on the way, too.”
I look up and flash Angelo a knowing wink. “You do crazy shit when you’re in love, right?”
He scowls at me, picks up the rook and the knight, and slips them into his pocket. “The twins, Vittoria and Leo, we can leave out of it. They’re barely sixteen and probably scared shitless.”
Gabe reaches for the bishop, but instinctively, my hand shoots out and curls around his wrist. He glares at it like he’s about to take a bite out of my flesh. I pick up the bishop myself and twirl it between my thumb and forefinger, before knocking over the black king and setting it down in its place.
“Tor stays.”
The ice threading through my tone is a rare occurrence, and behind me, I feel Gabe stiffen.
“No.”
“I’m not asking you. I’m telling you. He stays.”
Torquato Visconti might be Dante’s brother, new underboss, and the Coast’s biggest dickhead, but he’s my best friend and one of my finest business partners. Aside from turning up at the wedding, he’s laid low ever since his father was shot.
But I have no doubt in my mind he’ll come around.
“Yeah, he came to the wedding,” Angelo says pensively, strumming his fingers against the table. “But it’s funny that he was nowhere to be seen after the explosion.”
“He left straight after the ceremony.”
“That’s because he’s in on it,” Gabe snaps.
“Nah,” I shoot back.
Angelo’s expression hardens. “I know you’re five inches up Tor’s asshole, but Gabe’s got a point. We can’t assume he’s not backing his brother on this.” He checks his watch, raps his knuckle against the desk, and straightens to his full height. “Fine. Cas and I will reach out to Dante and arrange a meeting. Gabe, you regroup your men and figure out an action plan based on Rafe’s idea. And Rafe.” His eyes rest squarely on mine. “Let me know when you hear from Tor.”
Without another word, he strides around the desk and heads to the door. He stops within its frame. “By the way,” he grunts, glancing at me over his shoulder. “Your new bar has been blown to shit. Secure another location, and fast. I want a joint so grand it makes the whole of Cove look like a children’s birthday party at Chuckie Cheese.”
Ah, yes. Construction was well underway for Devil’s Dip’s first casino and bar. Cut into the cliff with panoramic views of the Pacific, it would have pissed all over Cove’s nightlife, especially with my name attached to it. But it was directly above the port, and well, shit happens, I suppose.
“Now that, I can do,” I murmur, slipping the poker chip out of my pocket and tossing it in the air.
Gabe shakes his head. “We’re going to war, and all you assholes care about is a good time.”
Angelo’s gaze darkens. “No. I want to show the cunt that a shitty little explosion isn’t enough to take down the Dip brothers.”
Amusement pulls at the corners of my mouth as he spins around and disappears into the main bar, calling Rory’s name.
Now alone, blistering silence sizzles between me and my younger brother. I turn around and bask in the heat of his stare.
“Problem?”
“Yeah.”
I glance at my watch and slowly rise to my feet. “That’s a shame. I’d say take it up with the HR department, but I don’t think the Cosa Nostra has one.”
His glare burns into my back as I walk to the door. “Glad you’re back, brother.”
Nico’s waiting for me as I step into the main club. He falls into step with me and lowers his tone. “About the money you owe me.”
I roll my eyes, giving him a flick on the jaw without breaking pace. “Fuck off with the money talk, will you? You’ll find that cash in the cracks of the sofa if you dig deep enough.”
When he doesn’t reply, I glance at his face. He wears a somber expression instead of his signature lazy grin, and the contrast makes me slow to a stop.
My gaze narrows. “What?”
Nico drags his teeth over his bottom lip, his gaze shifting over my shoulder.
“I’ll wipe the debt if you do me a favor.”