“He wants what’s yours,” the other man interrupted, looking desperately at Elio, “your business, your land, your girl, everything.”
“You’re dead.” Jacob laughed through his own pain as he eyed his traitor. “You flipped like a pancake, for what?”
“I flipped because I don’t want to die.”
“Well,” sweet smoke wafted from my mouth, “you’ll die with less pain, anyway.”
“I’ll take that.” He nodded, and I respected his wish to go out easier.
“What else do you know?”
“All I know is he isn’t moving girls. That was just a front.”
“Shut up, you fool!” Jacob hissed as he tried to breathe through his agony.
“He’s always smoke and mirrors.” the man went on. “Nothing is ever what it seems.”
“Who’s Mikey?”
“Ah,” he closed his eyes while he thought, “I don’t know, but there was a Mari or something.”
“Mariano?”
“Yes! That’s it.” My blood burned white hot.
“How long have they been working together?”
“Maybe eight-nine years?”
I glanced at Francesco then at my cousins, who all now wore the same expression. The son of a bitch had been playing our family since the start.
His buddy next to him shoved off his knees to ram him, but I grabbed him by the collar and belt and kicked him off the ledge into the ocean. His bound legs and arms would prevent him from swimming.
“Where were we?” I paused to dab the seawater from my face with my silk handkerchief. “Oh, yes, anything else?”
“Just that Stefano paid Mariano a lot of money to find your girl. He was supposed to deliver her to him but didn’t. I guess he wasn’t ready to give her up just yet.”
I cleared my throat and tugged on my suit jacket, trying to focus on the fact that she was still with me, and that Mariano would be taken care of very soon.
“Stupid coward,” Jacob hissed like the reptile he was. “You betrayed your oath to me and to the Coppola name!”
“Since you still have your eyes, you can watch this.” I directed my comment to the guy who had given me the info.
I dragged Jacob by his shirt over to a grinding wheel and signaled for Vinni to turn on the machine and watched as the coarse stone spun.
“I don’t care. Do what you want.” He moved his head around as though looking for some sort of escape even as he said it. His eyes were still red from the gasoline. I was tempted to put a match to his shirt which was still soaked with it but held off for now.
I grabbed his hand and pushed it against the wheel and watched the splatter of blood and flesh as it instantly ate away to the bone.
“You like to inflict pain?” Sienna’s terrified expression popped in my head, that of her face when she jumped into my arms, covered in her own blood that night in the hotel room. Blood this man had shed. Hatred coursed through me, and I held his other arm to the wheel. He screamed and bucked as the blood and sparks shot around like fiery-eye spinning fireworks. His screams, however, were far from the ones you would hear at a holiday event.
His face went white, and saliva pooled at the corners of his mouth. He moaned and jolted as his brain tried to process the damage and pain.
“Sweet Jesus.” The man who had offered the information looked away in horror.
“Did you enjoy carving your initial into my girl’s skin as she screamed and begged you to stop?”
“She’s,” he cried out and attempted to act as though the shock didn’t consume him, “she’s lucky that was all I did!”