Veiled Vows: An age gap, marriage of convenience, secret pregnancy, mafia romance (Mafia Lords of Sin)

Twenty-four hours after discovering those further messages on my mother’s phone, I stand across the street from the parking lot where Roman agreed to meet her. It’s tucked away on the edge of the city, secluded and dark. The perfect place to lure a fragile woman and kill her. Several of my own guards mill around at various vantage points; two are on the roof of the building behind me, one tucked away in the dark next to the dumpsters in the parking lot, and a handful scattered up and down the street hidden in the shadows.

I’m ready for him.

And yet, deep down inside, I’m not.

The plan I laid out to Theresa involved never having to see Roman ever again, and I was determined to stick to it. Until now. Reading those messages reignited the confusion in my gut about our relationship. A relationship he claimed was all lies and manipulation.

Is it my love for him that seeks another reason? The baby in my belly?

Or just heartbreak?

God, this is such a mess.

My father is six feet under, dead to the world. My mother is barely holding herself together, and if I’m not careful, she’s going to spend the rest of her life in a hospital. And now the man I fell in love with is about to turn up to kill my mother, and I’ll have to kill him instead.

Happiness is fleeting, it seems.

“You good?” The captain of my security squad appears at my elbow as I rub my eyes.

“Tired.”

“How long do you want to wait?”

Glancing at my watch, I sigh. “Another half hour?”

“Alright. We’ll do another sweep.”

“Thanks.”

He walks away and melts into the shadows behind me, becoming a ghost identifiable only by his radio that crackles to life every so often. We stand and we wait.

Roman doesn’t show.

The seconds tick by painfully slow. My nerves fray further and acid fizzes uncomfortably at the base of my gullet. I’m gonna need a prescription for antacids at this point. Is the life of a leader always this stressful?

The rumble of a car engine suddenly fills the air and the entire street feels like it stands to attention, waiting to see if the car rolling down the street is what we’re waiting for or just someone who took a wrong turn. It’s not a plate I recognize, but it does pull into the parking lot. The engine turns off. The lights dim.

The door opens.

I bite the side of my tongue and walk forward out of the shadows as my heart races, preparing myself for what it will feel like to look Roman in the eye before killing him.noveldrama

But it’s not Roman that climbs out of the car and looks around with a frown.

It’s Alto.

What the fuck is going on?

“Ah. Shit.” Alto’s face twists into a frown when we lock eyes, and he keeps one hand on the open car door. “The fuck are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” I reply coldly. “Where the fuck is Roman?”

“Roman?” Alto sneers his name like it’s a slur. “Why the fuck would Roman be with me?”

“Are you in it together, is that it? Is that the big fucking joke? All this time I thought you were against each other, that the brotherly conflict was justified, and it was all a fucking act, wasn’t it?”

“The fuck are you talking about?” He moves as if to get back in his car, and I whip the handgun out of my belt and aim it at him.

“Don’t even think about it. Did you two have a good laugh together, huh? Was it fucking fun to bond while tormenting my mother? Did you have a great time preying on an already fragile mind? I bet I was just some pawn to you both, right? Shunting me back and forth like it was some game and then having a good laugh about it behind my back!”

Surprise drifts across Alto’s face as he steps away from the car, his eyes on the gun. “You found the phone then.”

“Of course I fucking found the phone,” I snap. “Didn’t he tell you? You know what, I don’t care. I have had it with you and your fucking family messing with mine. I am sick and tired of Gattis being everywhere I turn, causing pain for my family for no fucking reason other than greed. Now get on your fucking knees!”

“Jasmine—”

“Get on your knees!”

He obliges quickly and raises both hands near his head. “You’re fucking crazy.”

“Am I?” I snarl, stalking forward. All my pent-up frustration, upset, and anger suddenly have an outlet, and it’s drowning me in its desperation to escape.

“Yes! I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!”

“Let me refresh your fucking memory!” My mistake is glancing away to look for the evidence phone in my pocket. The second I do, Alto launches up from the ground and tackles me full force with the curve of his shoulder causing most of the impact.

He collides with my gut and air is forced out of me. I trip and together we hit the pavement. My head snaps back and I briefly see stars, but as Alto rises above me with his fist raised, I let the anger flow. The heel of my hand slams into the tip of his chin and sends his head snapping back with a clack of teeth. My other hand slams into his throat, and as he surges backward, I twist my leg up and shove my foot hard into his crotch.

Alto stumbles back with a choked cry of pain, but he recovers quickly and tackles me once more as I try to climb to my feet.

We go down again. My elbow catches on a pothole in the pavement, but the pain doesn’t register. I’m furious. I want to gouge his eyes out, tear that fucking sneer from his lips, and watch the life fade from his eyes.

He punches me in the face and my teeth sink painfully into my tongue.

I throw my other elbow back into his face and catch his cheekbone, then roll over and slam my knee into his crotch once more. As he rolls away in pain, I scramble to my feet and kick him hard in the face.

Alto goes down hard, but he’s up quickly, and when he throws himself at me, his fist delivers a powerful blow to my breastbone.

Suddenly, I can’t breathe. My entire chest seizes up from the blow, and Alto doesn’t stop. He punches me on the face then in the stomach. I double over, and he uses my hair to pull me back upright and punch me again. Blood trickles down my cheek from a cut above my brow. Pain blooms across my body and heightens when he grabs my throat and drives his knee hard into my stomach.

My baby!

Energy I didn’t know I had surges through me even as I collapse to the ground. Heavy boots thunder around as my security team charges in to take Alto down, but they stop as I raise a hand, coughing up blood.

Alto is mine.

The cocky son of a bitch is laughing as he stands over me. His last mistake.

I surge up and punch him as hard as I can in the crotch, then grab onto his jacket and use that to pull myself up and then onto him. I clamber over him like a spider monkey, wrapping around his back and head with my arms and legs. One hand grips his jaw and wrenches it to the side while I drive my elbow down onto the top of his head.

He yells and tosses me back and forth, trying to dislodge me, but I cling on with every ounce of strength I have. As he overbalances, I flip off and land less than gracefully, then swiftly kick his kneecap. Bone crunches as his leg snaps in the wrong direction just as he bears down with his weight, and he crumples down in front of me.

I lift my leg, slam my knee into his face, and he falls backward.

Defeated.

But I’m not finished.

My captain hands me my fallen gun while I wipe blood from my nose and out of my eyes, then I hover over Alto and place my boot on his chest. Leaning forward onto my knee, I aim the barrel between his eyes.

“Tell me one thing,” I say as Alto wheezes in pain through a broken nose and God knows what head trauma my elbow and knee caused. “Did you and Roman plan to fuck me over before or after the proposal? I need to know.”

“The fuck … are you talking … about?” Alto wheezes. He grabs my ankle, but there’s no real strength there.

“I feel like that question is pretty clear. Was I always the plan and the wedding just made things easier? Or did you two come up with this sick little game afterward?”

Alto begins to laugh. It starts as a wheezing sound and develops quickly into weak but hearty laughter. “You’re so fucking scorned, aren’t you? You can’t handle that he chose us, can you? He’s like a kicked puppy that just keeps coming back for more. Fuck that. That rat might have pretended to love you, but it’s not my fucking fault you fell for it, alright? Crazy fucking bitch.”

My racing heart skips a beat making me feel dizzy for a second. “Chose you? Because you were fucking working together!”

“Together?! You know what he is,” Alto wheezes between his pathetic laughter. “He’s a fucking half-breed, always vying for daddy’s attention. Well this was me, not him. You hear me? I’m the one that’s terrorized you, and I won’t let that fucker get the credit. It was me! He’s too pathetic for anything worthwhile, don’t you see? All it took was a little threat to kick him out of the family, and he came crawling back to us like the dog he is. He’s got no fucking loyalty to anyone.”

“What?” The world falls away and I slowly lean up as a strange silence settles around me. “You were … going to kick him out of the family? When?”

“I don’t fucking know,” Alto snarls, gripping my ankle tighter. “Soon as he found out, he ran all the way over here, but it was too late. My plan was already in motion and he came running back, so I proved what he really was. A coward.”

Kick him from the family?

In a single, painful second, everything makes sense.

Roman and Alto weren’t working together.

And Roman didn’t lie to me to cover for his family either.

He did it to protect me.

He must have faced an impossible choice; helping me or losing his chance to get revenge on Santino. His carefully laid plan of decades was about to go up in smoke, and he still came to see me. Only to learn that Alto had been manipulating my mother all this time. No wonder he turned so cruel. No wonder he told me to trust no one and acted like it was all one gigantic plan.

He didn’t know what Alto’s plan truly was, or how deep it went, so he did the only thing he could to keep me safe. He made me so angry that I took extreme steps to protect myself.

He let me go.

“Roman isn’t a coward,” I say between gritted teeth. “He’s so much more complex that a tiny brain like yours can’t possibly comprehend!”

“Doesn’t fucking matter,” Alto wheezes. “He’ll be dead soon and so will you.”

“Where is he?”

“Fuck off, like I’m going to tell you.”

“Where. Is. He?!” Each word is punctuated by a shot near Alto’s head, with one being close enough to tear through his left ear. I fire until the gun is nearly empty, and finally Alto screams out an address.

“Now who’s the coward?” I spit down at him, then shoot him clean between the eyes.