CHAPTER ONE
Massimo
He was supposed to be alone.
I had been watching the asshole for almost two weeks, getting used to his routine since he was constantly surrounded by family and friends and associates, so I had to be even more careful than usual to make sure there were no witnesses, no one who could look in my direction, see me, possibly recognize me, then trace the hit back to my Family.
The whole reason they hired me to do the dirty work was because I was good at it, because I made sure no one ever knew who I was or who I worked for.
That was why I was still camped out up in the state capital instead of home in Navesink Bank, unwinding, having a good, home cooked meal with my ma, brothers, and sister. Maybe some cousins, seeing as word always got out that one of the moms was cooking, prompting everyone else to invite themselves over.
I was getting tired of take-out and quick shit I could grab at the convenience store to hold me over until my next meal.
This job was important, though, so I just had to grin and bear it.
I wasn’t stationed in the “good” side of the capital either.
No.
I was in a sketchy neighborhood late at night, waiting for the fucker to get back to his apartment.
It took over the entire top floor of the building, and from the looks of things, had been completely gutted and redone.
It likely cost a cool hundred grand.
Money he put into a building that looked like the heat went wonky in the winter and the air never worked in the summer.
But if you were going to be a guy doing illegal shit and you didn’t want to get caught, staying in your old neighborhood despite being able to afford to move out was a good way to stay under the radar.
Unless you gave the cops a reason to come snooping, they would never know you had a three-thousand dollar fridge or what looked like a TV that would cost even more.
And, well, if you were a criminal worth your salt, you made sure the cops never had a reason to come to your door with a warrant.
That was why this guy had to go, after all.
He was good.
He was a threat.
And he was just fucking stupid enough to think he could align himself with an organization that wanted to take on the whole of the New Jersey mafia.
Assholes like him, they likely listened to what the talking heads said on TV. That the mob was dead. That RICO and snitches had done us all in.
Sure, there was a time when that had been true. After the Golden Age, after a bunch of the dons went away for life, yeah, there was a lot of fucking snitching and disloyalty.
The thing was, that was the old generation.
The new one?
We were working out asses off to bring back Omertà—the code of silence—and with it, the respect that our organizations had once been so well known for.
We weren’t about to be brought down by some kid named Cody who saw himself as a boss.
I mean, he was the kind of guy who made statuses and captions on his social media saying shit like:Making Moves #BossShit.
Yeah.
He was going to align himself with a bigger organization that wanted to take down the fucking mafia.