Caligula
I’m running so fast my lungs might burst, but if I slow down, I’m dead. And I’m not going to die like a rat in some dirty alley.
Not tonight.
I was track champion all through high school. Right now, those years of training are the only thing keeping me alive. All those line drills in the August heat…
Worth it now.
I eat up the sidewalk as I sprint toward a bar a block down where there’s enough life to offer safety. Or witnesses, anyway.
I’ve reached full velocity when a colossal figure steps out of a dark alcove directly into my path. I try to dodge, but there’s no chance. I clip him hard and head teeth-first toward concrete.
But before I hit, I’m swung around and upright, set back on my feet as though I weigh nothing at all. It’s like hitting a wall that decided to help me out instead of letting me face the consequences of physics.
“Careful, pretty boy. You’ll hurt yourself.”
His voice is warm honey spilled on gravel and broken glass. Around my biceps, his hands are iron bands holding me effortlessly in place. I look up—up—up to see a face that looks rough, unfinished. As though the artist sculpting him wasn’t working with marble but clay, pummeling his face into place with fists, and forgot to smooth it all down before firing. The black hair is cropped short and a shadow darkens his strong jaw.
He’s not…unattractive.
And when his dark eyes meet mine, they’re hungry. Like I’m his next meal and he’s debating which bite to take first.
His attention shifts, scanning over my shoulder, and something he sees makes his grip tighten, fingers digging into my arms hard enough to make me gasp. I crane to look over my shoulder and see the hooded figure running toward us, the guy who’s been on my ass since I bolted from my grandfather’s townhouse.
Since I left my cousin’s body cooling on the floor.
The stranger angles himself to shield me. It’s such an instinctive, protective gesture that I almost forget to be terrified of him. Almost. The asshole chasing me pulls up short, reassessing. My rescuer—captor?—doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, just stands perfectly still, silently daring him.
The other guy backs up. Turns. Runs the other way.
Only when he’s out of sight does my companion’s attention return to me, and that ravenous focus is back, cranked up to eleven.
I pull myself the fuck together. “Let me go,” I tell him in my most imperious tone.
He tilts his head, considering. “Should I? Seems like you need someone to keep you safe.”
Every impulse I have is a conflicting signal. Run. Stay. Submit. Fight. Lick his neck…
What the hell?
“I can take care of myself,” I manage at last.
His lips pull back in not quite a smile—more like a wolf showing its teeth. No, not a wolf. A goddamn grizzly bear, looming over me. “Can you, though?”
With that, he pins me against the wall, one enormous hand flat on my chest, where he must be able to feel my hammering heart, and the other gripping the back of my neck. He leans down as though to kiss me, and I just stand there, speechless.
“You’re shaking like a rabbit,” he murmurs close to my ear. “Breathe.”
He’s right, I am shaking. And now I’m breathing only because he told me to, pulling air into my lungs with sharp, desperate pants. His thumb strokes across the nape of my neck, and my entire body lights up like a Christmas tree. Heat floods me, making me warm despite the cold, and—
“So,” he goes on conversationally. “What did a pretty thing like you do to get chased through my city?”
His city? This city belonged to my Family not so long ago. My grandfather ran half of Manhattan before this jerk could tie his shoes.
And I don’t appreciate the victim-blaming, either.
I shove forward, hard, and he lets me go. “Lets” being the operative word—I feel the exact moment he decided to release me, which pisses me off more than anything.
He steps back with his hands raised, that dangerous smile still in place.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” I demand.
He reaches up to adjust his jacket collar. Tattoos pepper his hands, disappearing into his sleeves. But one symbol in particular, just below the webbing of his thumb, makes my stomach drop. The stylized “G” that marks high-ranking members of the Giuliano Crime Family.
The Giulianos are former allies turned hyenas, gorging on my Family’s corpse. Opportunists who forgot generations of friendship the second my grandfather’s body hit the floor.
“You sure you’re alright, little Clemenza?” he asks.
He knows who I am. Alarm bells start ringing—and I hear it now, the enjoyment in his voice. He’s watching my reactions, relishing them. But then his tone shifts. “You’ve got blood on you.”
I look down. There’s blood on my hands, my sweater, soaked into the navy fabric where I couldn’t see it in the dark.
“I’m fine,” I spit out, backing away. “I’m fine.” I hold his gaze until the last possible second, and then I turn and run.
“Run all you want,” he calls after me. “I like a chase.”
I run faster.
And I absolutely do not think about the way my body responded to his hands on me. It was adrenaline. It was fear.
It was nothing.
The hotel I end up in is a shithole. The guy at the desk doesn’t look up from his phone when I check in. Cash only, no questions asked.
My kind of place, these days.
I turn on the TV the second I get into the room for noise cover, and to give the illusion I’m awake and alert. Then I lock myself in the bathroom to survey the damage.
He was right, that giant Giuliano. There’s blood all over me. My hands, my sweater, dried rust-brown under my fingernails. Clemenza blood.
Not mine. I found my cousin, Louie, in a puddle of it three hours ago, shot in the back of the head.
Louie was the heir apparent. He’d texted me to meet, told me he’d figured out who was picking us off. I was desperate enough to go, even though there was no love lost between Louie and me. I found his corpse and the killer still lurking, waiting around for my dumb ass to show up.
I tripped over Louie when I turned to run, stumbled through a sticky pool of blood on my way to the door. I was still fast enough to get away with my life. And now I’m the only direct descendant left. The very last grandson of Don Louis Clemenza.
The last of my kind.
I wash my hands until the water runs clear. Rinse out my mouth to quell the nausea. Scrub at my sweater in the sink until the worst of the stains fade, and then hang it over the crooked chrome towel bar to dry.
In the dirty mirror, I take in the face that’s always thinner than I expect these days, the smudges under my eyes that make them look darker than their usual amber, the greasy cast darkening the roots of my hair, tarnishing the blond to bronze. It’s longer than I’ve ever worn it, months since my last cut.
I look like shit, but at least I’m still standing. Still alive.
Still a Clemenza.
The eyes of that cold, implacable stranger in the mirror travel down to the marks on my arms. They’re new. Where—ah. The Giuliano. His fingers closed on me so hard…
I rub my bicep as the memory alone makes it twinge. Traditionally, the Giulianos don’t come to this part of town without an invitation. It’s not their turf. And they wouldn’t come solo, either, unless he was sent alone for a reason.
My attention is snagged by a familiar name coming from the TV in the other room.
…been identified as 26-year-old Louis John Clemenza the third, rumored heir to the Clemenza Crime Family who terrorized New York through much of the eighties, though their influence waned with the…
My cousin Louie’s face comes up on the screen in multiple photos from his social media accounts, followed by his mug shot. Our grandfather and my cousin’s namesake, Lou Clemenza, had been furious about that mug shot. Clemenzas don’t get arrested! Of course, that was before Nonno Lou got put away himself for a few months on some trumped-up charge.
They cut to the live reporter on the street outside the townhouse, but I look past her to a silhouette in the background. Massive. Unmistakable.
The Giuliano.
He turns quickly to avoid the camera, but a flash of blue from the police lights catches his face. It’s him. For sure.
Why was he there? Was he working with the guy who chased me out of the townhouse, the one I assume killed Louie? But if so, why the hell would he go back to the scene of the crime?
I sink onto the edge of the bed, legs unsteady as my adrenaline crashes. It’s not the memory of dark, voracious eyes, the phantom pressure of hands on my chest, at the back of my neck, the way I responded to being pinned down like a—
Maybe I need another shower. A cold one.
To shock some sense into me.
The bruises from the Giuliano develop during the night, so the next morning I’m greeted with indelible fingerprints on my arms that make me feel grubby even after I shower. My clothes, which I washed last night as well as I could in the bathroom sink, are stiff but dry, and the blood doesn’t show on my sweater. Good enough.
Today I’ll approach one of the last potential allies I have left. Tony Stuccio was my father’s oldest friend and the Family lawyer. After the Clemenzas disintegrated, the Feds stuck to “Uncle Tony” like glue. I couldn’t tell whether he was cooperating or not, and the cost of making a mistake was too great. Now the cost of staying on the streets is much greater. After Louie’s death, there’s no more pretending.
I’m next.
Louie was careful. Tough as hell. He made his bones at seventeen and he was deeply embedded in the business. If they got him, they can definitely get me.
I check carefully before I slip out of the hotel, but there’s no sign of the Giuliano, or anyone else who seems interested in my movements. When I arrive at the Midtown block that houses Stuccio & Associates on the third floor of an older building, the offices have been open for a while. The receptionist, a woman with a tight face too young for her silvery hair, gives me a quick once-over, taking in my wrinkled clothes. She tells me unsmilingly to take a seat when I give my name and admit I don’t have an appointment.
But surely Uncle Tony will make time for me. He and my father went to Princeton together, were members of the same club. He taught me to fish at our lake house upstate when I was eight. On my acceptance to Princeton, he looked just as proud of me as my Dad, gave me a Montblanc pen to celebrate the occasion, told me he expected great things. A few months later, he stood beside me at my father’s funeral, his hand steady on my shoulder.
I never went to Princeton. I put it off for a year. And in that year, everything changed. My grandfather was murdered in cold blood during what was supposed to be a peace-talk dinner, and so began the inevitable fall of my Family.
I sit in the waiting area, watching men and women in expensive suits walk past. I know a few faces—people who used to smile and nod at Clemenza functions, who jockeyed for invitations to our Christmas parties. Not one of them acknowledges me now. In fact, as soon as they recognize me, they look away.
Funny how that works. When the Clemenzas were on top, everyone wanted to be seen with us. Now we’re poison. I could sit here and build a list of every single turncoat. Names, dates, betrayals. I’ve got nothing but time and nowhere else to go.
Eventually, the receptionist calls me back over to the desk. “I’m sorry, Mr. Clemenza, but Mr. Stuccio is not available.”
“I can wait.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Clemenza,” she says again, in the exact same tone. “Mr. Stuccio will not have time to see you.”
“Then I’ll come back tomorrow. What time would suit him?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Clem—”
“You know what? I don’t think you’re sorry at all.” A flash of my grandfather’s legendary temper.
It doesn’t faze her. She gives a small sigh and a false smile. “Would you like to leave a message?”
“As I said, I’m happy to wait. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll wait right over there until Mr. Stuccio has time for an old Family friend.” I put a little emphasis on those last two words.
I do just what I said, and sit in the corner of the reception area, picking up an old magazine to flick through unseeingly. When I glance back at the reception desk, the woman is talking into the phone in quick, hushed tones.
I smile to myself.
A moment later, Tony Stuccio is marching down the corridor toward me with the expression of a man being led to his own colonoscopy.
I stand. I beam. I extend my hand like we’re at a cocktail party. “Uncle Tony!” I say loudly. “You look fantastic. Have you lost weight?”
He stops short, ignoring my hand. His eyes dart around—checking for witnesses, the coward. “Cal,” he snaps in a low voice. “You can’t be here.”
I keep the smile on my face. “I understand you’re busy, Uncle Tony, and I promise I won’t take up much—”
“Cut out that ‘Uncle Tony’ bullshit,” he mutters. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Didn’t you see the news last night? Louie was murdered.”
“Keep your voice down,” he says sharply, then leans in close. “Where are you staying?”
“Here and there,” I say, because there’s no way I’m going to confide in a potential FBI informant. “Why don’t we have lunch, and we can—”
“Whatever courtesies I might have extended to you and your Family previously, they were done under duress. And that’s what I told the FBI and the DEA and the ATF and all the rest of them when they dropped by. Do you understand me?”
I do understand him. Just like the rest of New York, he’s turned his back on the Clemenzas. This man, who once claimed he loved me like a son, doesn’t care if I live or die.
In fact, it would be more convenient for him if I did die.
“I understand completely,” I tell him, still with that genial smile on my face. “In fact, Uncle Tony, the only reason I came by was to thank you for your friendship. I hope one day to pay you back for it.”
Stuccio takes a step back. “Get out of here and don’t come back.”
“You have yourself a great life, Uncle Tony. What’s left of it, anyway.”
He goes a satisfying shade of puce. I turn and nod a polite goodbye to the receptionist before making my way to the elevators. I’m pretty proud of myself. I don’t even start shaking until I hit the street again, and then, hopefully, it’s from rage, not fear.
Because it was an empty threat. Grandstanding bullshit. The Clemenzas are done and dusted, and someone out there is making sure the line goes totally extinct.
But even at my lowest, I won’t show fear. And I swear to God I will find a way to pay Tony Stuccio back for his cowardice and disloyalty. To do that, I need to make sure I stay alive myself. Stay far, far away from that Giuliano and his hungry, burning, unforgettable eyes.
Unforgettable? Jesus. I need to get it together.
I need a plan. I need money. I need someone in this city who still owes me a favor, or at least someone dumb enough to get involved for the thrill of it…
And I think I know where to find them.
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