Chapter One Hundred and Eight

Chapter One Hundred and Eight
Gloria stared down at the bodies of the men who spat at her feet: six. Six men would rather die than follow her. She inhaled slowly and squared her shoulders before turning to the other men who had sworn fealty to her reign: twenty-four.

“You all will stay here with Accardi’s men. Get cleaned up, get a night’s rest and tomorrow we’ll meet again to discuss our next moves,” Gloria announced.

“Which would be?” a heavily tattooed man asked with his arms crossed.

“Your name?” she asked in return.

“Nicholas,” he told her.

“Well, Nicholas, there is a man who poses a threat to our organization. Sergei Vasiliev must be taken down. He will be our next objective,” Gloria informed them. She then pointed to one of Accardi’s men. “You’ll give your information to this man and he will set you up with accommodations for the night. I will be in touch.” 

They all turned to Accardi’s man and started relaying their names and phone numbers. Gloria looked at the house and a shutter went through her. It was nearly destroyed. Where once it sat crooked on its foundation, now it was practically dismantled from it. It looked as though an infestation of termites had gone through, only for a hoard of woodpeckers to be set on them. Every window was shattered. The boards on the porch sat askew. A few of the pillars holding the roof up above the porch had been split. That wasn’t even the worst of it. The yard that Frankie had spent days maintaining, or rather preparing, looked like old photographs of battlefields from World War Two. 

The front door came open and then fell off its hinges entirely. Leo strode out, key fob in hand, while Accardi followed after… with an incapacitated Frankie slung over his shoulder. 

“What happened?” Gloria asked, rushing forward to see if she could help.

Accardi scoffed. “He got shot six times. What do you think happened?”

Gloria placed two fingers to Frankie’s neck while Accardi continued toward the car. She let out a breath of relief; he was still breathing. 

“Funniest thing ever,” Conor said, strolling casually out of the house, a piece of wedding cake in his hand. “Started yelling at me for cutting into a cake half blown to bits anyway and just…” Conor made the sound effect of someone jumping off a cliff followed by a muffled explosion. 

“Adrenaline wore off,” Leo guessed, opening the back door of a blacked-out SUV so Accardi could throw Frankie inside.

“I’m taking him to the hospital,” Accardi stated.

“No,” Gloria objected. “Not the hospital. They’ll keep him way too long. We need to stay vigilant. No stalling in the hospital for weeks. We can take him back to our apartment. I have everything we need there.”

Accardi shook his head. “The apartment isn’t safe.”

Gloria laughed. “From who? My dad is dead and Sergei is still underground, isn’t he? The apartment is the best place for us all to debrief. There are guest rooms too, so the Donatis and Nora can stay there. It makes the most logical sense.”

Accardi shot Leo a look as his face paled. Leo rolled his eyes. “I’ll take him. You go pick up Gen and Luce,” Leo said, sliding into the front seat. 

Gloria heaved herself into the back seat, but before she closed the door, she called out to Accardi. “I need to talk to you. Are you meeting us at the apartment?”

Accardi gave a nod and a dismissive wave as he walked to a sedan Conor was also climbing into. Gloria shut the door and started to examine Frankie as the car pulled away from the curb. She clicked her tongue as she counted the various wounds: three had grazed him in the arm, leg and neck… that was a lucky one as a few centimeters the other way would have killed him for sure. Of the three that penetrated, one was through and through in his right calf, while another was embedded in his left arm and the third in his right thigh. 

Gloria sighed and looked up at Frankie’s face, relaxed in sleep. “Just when I think you can’t get yourself into more trouble. You freaking fool. I could have handled it. Why couldn’t you just trust me?”

“The first time I saw Frankie was on this street corner,” Leo said, pointing to an intersection. Gloria followed the path of his finger to a corner in which there sat a small bodega and a delicatessen. “There was a group of guys walloping up on someone, so I decided to take a look. I recognized the guys doing the beating. Some street punks who had been causing trouble. Bullying little kids, stealing from older folks. Real scum bags.” Leo took a turn and fell silent for a moment.

“What were you doing in this part of town? Doesn’t seem like Accardi’s scene,” Gloria pressed as she tried her best to stop the bleeding from the worst of the wounds.

“I was scouting,” Leo told her. “Accardi had run through… Oh, I don’t know, six second-in-commands in four years at that point.” Leo shook his head. “Little shit was picky. Real picky.”

“So you thought you’d come to the rougher side of town to find someone out-of-the-box?”

Leo chuckled. “Pretty much. Had my eye on a couple of the bullies, in fact. Sure, they were assholes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing in this industry. Accardi’s far from a fucking saint.”

“So who was Frankie beating the heck out of?” Gloria asked, 

Leo laughed again. “Frankie wasn’t beating anyone up. He was the one getting his ass kicked.”

Gloria looked up at that. “Excuse me?”

“Are you surprised? Look at him, little shrimp,” Leo said, though a smile was creasing his expression. “Anyway, the police eventually showed up and the boys scattered. I went up to the body lying on the ground and kicked his shoe. That little fucker opened one eye, looked around and popped up as though those goons had been giving him a shiatsu massage rather than stomping him into concrete. I asked him what the hell had happened. He’d shrugged. Said they had been picking on his little brother, so he pick-pocketed some gum from the biggest one and made a grand show of it too.”

“Gum? He got beat up for gum?” Gloria asked, dubious.

“Apparently he said if they wanted the gum back, they’d have to beat it out of him. Little fucker blew a bubble right in my face, winked, and strolled off.”

Gloria smiled down at her unconscious idiot. 

“Got me thinking. The guy got his ass beaten cause he was sticking up for his little brother: showed loyalty. Provoked the fight in a creative manner: showed tenacity. Made it so that even though he was outnumbered, he could still get a win: showed intelligence. Took a beating like none I’ve ever seen and then hopped right up after.” Leo looked up at her in the rearview mirror. “Proving that when he’s made a decision, he’ll see it through no matter the cost to himself.”

“What are you saying?” Gloria asked, knowing the older guard had a point he was trying to make.

Leo shrugged. “Frankie Donati analyzes situations faster and more effectively than anyone I’ve ever known.” He looked up again. “Don’t ever fucking tell him I said that.” Then he looked back at the road. “While the rest of us were twiddling our thumbs, trying to figure out how to get you out of harm’s way without compromising the situation, Frankie was testing my strength, a plan already cemented in his mind on the best course of action on how to protect the thing that matters most to him. The second he figured me out, he had me on the floor, Conor immediately after and a gun pointed out the window.”

“He shot me,” Gloria growled.

“And you dropped your gun so you couldn’t hurt yourself.”

“I had things under control,” she argued further.

“Those six men who didn’t pass your test? They weren’t the only ones who would have done so, Miss Rubanov. The others were lying in the yard around you with bullets expended from that man’s guns… and shrapnel from his explosives,” Leo added with a prideful smile on his face. “While I understand the merit of what you were thinking, and admire what you did in having to kill your own father, a leader seeks counsel, especially when they’re first starting out.”

“Accardi sought counsel when he was signing my name over to Sergei?”

“Yes,” Leo said, parking the SUV in front of Frankie’s apartment building. However, he did not unlock the car. Instead, he turned in his seat to look her dead on. “Matteo Accardi is many things, but a solo artist isn’t one of them. He looked to his mother, his brother, me, Frankie, his cousins, as many other perspectives as he could. He delegates. He negotiates. That’s not to say he doesn’t make his own decisions. After all, it’s his name and his blood that seal every decision, but he doesn’t make them without at least one other person standing over his shoulder.” Leo smirked. “He still looks to me for everything. A bit codependent, that one. Even looks to me for help with Mrs. Accardi when she says something he doesn’t know how to respond to.”

Gloria recalled how just ten minutes earlier, Accardi had looked to Leo when she wanted to return Frankie to their apartment. She flattened her palm on Frankie’s chest.

“I don’t want to appear weak.”

“But you are,” Leo told her boldly. “Today was your wedding day and now, at the end of it, you’re holding the man you weren’t able to marry as he bleeds out on the seats I just had reupholstered, wearing a wedding dress covered in your father’s blood.”

A knock came at the passenger-side door. It was Conor. Accardi had apparently dumped him before driving off to get his wife. Conor raised his arms in question and then tapped his nonexistent wristwatch.

“I needed to prove myself,” Gloria said. Leo looked back at her, ignoring the impatient man outside. “Those men, they see me as a young, weak woman who doesn’t know what she’s doing. I had to make a statement,” she rationalized, knowing she couldn’t start wondering if she’d done the right thing. She couldn’t allow doubt to creep in. She couldn’t let the lives she’d taken be meaningless. “I had to show them dissension in my ranks wouldn’t be tolerated.”  

“Congratulations, you accomplished that. You planted fear among them instead. Fear is a good tool, Miss Rubanov, but it cannot be your only one.”

“I have to be a leader, not a follower,” she told him firmly. “That’s what it takes to survive in this world.”

Leo looked down at Frankie, who was rapidly losing color. “Being a leader won’t keep you alive. Having good followers will. And that man is the best one you’ll find. But you have to listen to him. Take his opinion into consideration, at least.” Leo smiled and shrugged. “For a time, anyway. Till you get your bearings. Then kick him to the curb. You can do a lot better,” Leo said before ending the conversation by kicking his door open.