Lies & Lullabies
Authors: Courtney Lane
Lies & Lullabies
Copyright © 2016 by Courtney Lane
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.
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Cover Artist: Courtney Lane
Images courtesy of: Shutterstock, Inc.
Edited by:
K. Swiss
Silla Webb
Judy’s Proofreading
Prologue
Marcin
Fourteen months ago…
I grew up outnumbered by women with two sisters—Denice and Jory—a mother who loved the bottle more than her kids, and a father who was never present. He made a decent living for himself and the "family" as the capo for the Di Stefano family; poor decisions dirtied his business.
My father’s death fucked up a lot of things for everyone. My mother’s drinking reached epic levels when he was murdered. Denice’s life became the streets. Jory’s loose hold on her sanity had all but disappeared. If she wasn’t hurting things or people, she was hurting herself.
I started working for Michael Leone indirectly doing odd jobs for his soldiers. A year later, I was stuck doing the same shit, never getting close to the man I wanted to kill.
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Jory trudged into the kitchen. She’d either been depressed or in one of her moods. Pajamas were her uniform and it looked as though a decade had passed since the last time she ran a comb through her hair.
“Morning,” she mumbled and blew by me to sort through the refrigerator. She was never one for affection. She faked it in public—oftentimes, badly. “So are you one of the bad guys now?”
I had many hopes for Jory. She’d never get ahold of her crazy and accomplish any of it. She was satisfied living with our mother, having no hopes or dreams of her own to fulfill. She was the baby of our family, and it wasn’t because she was the youngest of the three of us. Denice had that honor.
Jory was blunt, but fragile. She could barely handle much of anything that existed outside her world—a world where her actions never had consequences.
I took care of her as much as I could without resorting to sending her to a psych facility. I lost count of how many times she’d try to take her life, or the life of someone else. Chasing death was her drug and her addiction wasn’t managed. She’d disappeared for a week and recently returned. She wouldn’t say where she went or what she did. Wherever it was, she returned depressed and more volatile.
“Jory, why don’t you go out to the garden?” I sent my girlfriend a closing message after she reluctantly wished me luck with what I had to do today and closed out my texts.
Jory slammed the refrigerator closed. “Hate when you fucking baby me.” Facing me, she bit her nails down to her skin until the nail beds bled, and spit her skin out onto the floor. “I don’t want to go to the garden by myself. The shitbags you’re getting in bed with might be out there and want to kill me…like they did Dad.”
“I’ll be right out in five minutes.” I pulled up Candy Crush on my phone; it was a game I knew would put her obsessive personality into overdrive and take her mind off the things that didn’t matter. “Play this on the way.”
“I don’t do games.”
“Try it.” I gave her a taunting grin.
She plucked the phone from my hands and began to fiddle with it. Within seconds her interest was magnetized. With a nod, she shuffled her feet and disappeared out of the room.
The clacking of heels announced my mother’s arrival from the foyer. The open floor plan of the French chateau carried every sound. Her shoes were drum beats, echoing into the kitchen. “Hello?” The slurring of words indicated my mother had her breakfast of vodka with a little tomato juice. Alcohol had been her diet since she was sixteen, made worse when she met our father.
She was the queen at home, but forgotten when the first pretty woman pushed her tits into my father’s face. Thinking she was never good enough for her husband, and the knowledge of his many affairs, pulled her into a vortex of self-hatred and self-destruction.
My mother came from old money. Combined with my father’s savvy business ways with investing (legally and illegally), our family was set for life.
Last night, the alcohol controlled her and she spilled her secrets to me. My mother knew the location of my sister Denice when she originally claimed she didn’t. Denice was in a brothel in the middle of nowhere—one of Michael’s places. She wouldn’t tell me how she found out the truth, and said she lied because she was ashamed of Denice. Denice, according to her, went willingly to work there.
I didn’t believe it. Michael Leone hadn’t stopped fucking up my family’s life and probably had my sister there against her will. He would kill her when he was done with her. That couldn’t happen. I would find her and get her home before I took Michael Leone out of the picture.
Everything was in the timing.
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Michael Leone entered the foyer of his home in Hidden Hills. Two other men were at his side. They spoke in code not meant for the common person’s ears using pidgin. They were concerned about the disappearance of the consigliere’s daughter—a woman who did work for Michael—and the underboss for the Di Stefano family, who I once thought of as my grandfather. He turned his back on my sisters and me when my father died.
They weren’t able to figure out who could’ve taken them. They were going to find out by torturing and eventually killing everyone they thought was far from a hundred percent trustworthy until they found answers.
A capo mentioned something about a contract hit man’s connection to a little girl who was recently kidnapped—no more than seven years old—from Connecticut. No one would say if they had done it. Another capo said he heard from one of his contacts in the government that the contractor worked for the CIA occasionally and wasn’t a man to be fucked with. The underboss corrected him and said he heard the man was really the son of “The Gun,” also known as the super boss—the elusive man who ruled all the families from coast to coast. Only the administration knew his call name; my father was the only reason I knew of it. No one knew his real name or his true identity.
They made their verbal lists of who to pump for information using tag names and parted ways with satisfied nods.
Michael gestured for me while the underboss was busy whispering indiscernible words in his ear. “College boy, come here.”
“It’s been a long time since I graduated, sir.” I presented him with a curt smile.
He moved forward to quickly greet me like I was family. “A lot of us get our education from the streets, you know.”
I smiled, pretending the mere act of his hands on me and his lips on either sides of my cheeks didn’t send a surge of hatred through me. “I know. My father wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
He nodded to the men on either side of him, telling them to give us privacy. “I knew your father.” A sick smirk was on his lips. “Do you remember me?”
“I do.”
“So?” He gestured around the lobby with dark clunky wood in the floors and the walls. “Is that what you’re here for? Revenge for your old man because of what I did to him? If I remember right, he told you to stay away from me.”
Michael took over my father’s businesses forcefully. Luckily, my father had enough money to take care of the family. I’d never understand the reason Michael killed him. My father gave him what he wanted, and the asshole murdered him anyhow. “And then you broke his nose once for saying that.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “What do you want? His businesses back?”
“If I wanted revenge, I’d have killed you a long time ago. I want to work for you, sir.”
I wasn’t sure if he was offended or impressed. “Listen to this fucker.” His round face brightened into a smile; he laughed as though he had an audience to fall in line and laugh with him. He sat on the edge of the server table. His thick body leaned away from me. “I have enough employees, why do I need you?”
“I’ve done a lot for you, sir, to prove myself to you, and—”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re book smart. I need someone who can fuck around in the streets and get what I need done. I’m full up.”
“But you’re not full up on loyal employees.” I picked up my phone and sent him a video. The chime on his phone widened his eyes.
“What’s that?”
“It’s something you should probably see, sir.”
“What I can’t figure out is why a boy like you who should be out on Wall Street making money for the rich cats or some shit wants to work for me? Your father didn’t want that. He was so against it he stole from me. People tell me you’ve been living high off the fuckin’ hog. It’s got me thinking, maybe your whore mother had the money this whole time.”
Not really bothered by his name for my mother, I flashed a grin. What bothered me more is that he claimed my father stole from him.
“No, she earned it legally.”
“So she did.”
Michael picked up his phone and began to play the video. He immediately straightened up. He held his phone so tight his hands turned sheet white. He threw it across the room and turned his back on me. “You know who that was?” he spoke through clenched teeth.
“The woman? I hear she’s your girl. What I do know is she’s really your daughter.” Respect mattered to the organization. Fucking with another man’s woman—mistress, wife, daughter—was a death sentence.