His Mafia Prince
Chapter 285: And Then, It Was Over

Chapter 285: And Then, It Was Over

{SASHA}

There is a drawn-out moment where Clemenza weighs up his options, and Tyler and I sit there, watching him. Under the table, Tyler is jigging his thigh against mine, nerves getting the better of him, although his face is serene.

At last, Clemenza shifts in his chair. "Fine," he says. "You might think you’ve outplayed me, Sasha, but I’ve been done with this life for a long time. It will be a relief to leave it. And denying you satisfaction in your misguided vendetta, well. That will be a pleasure I cradle to my heart for years to come."

I can’t deny I’m disappointed. I honestly thought Clemenza would refuse, let me settle things tonight. Because I still intend to pay him for what he did to Tino.

Next to me, Tyler has gone stiff with anger. I put a warning hand on his knee.

We will have other opportunities. Once Clemenza is gone from this city, I can go after him quietly. So I smile now, and say, "I’m glad you saw sense, Clemenza."

He sneers at me. "Sense? Fah. I want you to swear to it, Adonis, that you’ll honor my decision. That you won’t come after me, send some assassin in the night, get around the Commission’s wishes that way." When I say nothing, he growls, "So you’re not a man of honor. I always knew it."

"I am a man of my word," I tell him, my anger rising. Lou Clemenza, of all people, dares to question my honor? Tyler’s eyes are flashing dangerously as well in response to Clemenza’s insult. "And I’ll swear to it, Clemenza, if that’s what it takes to get rid of you."

"You don’t even respect tradition enough to do this right," he grumbles. "Didn’t Castillo tell you how it’s done? Or Alvarado?"

"Tell me what?" I’m getting impatient, but I refuse to let it show.

"You can’t just give your word," Clemenza scolds me. "You want me gone, you gotta drink with me, and that seals the deal. Capisce?"

The last thing I feel like doing is showing this old asshole any respect. But I know as well as anyone that there are traditions around our business. Traditions, expectations, ways of doing things. So it’s out of respect for my Family, for the old ways, when I agree. "Alright," I say, standing. "We’ll do it right, Lou. I’ll drink with you."

Tyler stays sitting there in stony silence until Clemenza turns to him. "You, stand up. I want you to see this. To act as a witness, eh?"

Tyler stays where he is, looking at me. At my nod, he stands, but slowly, his jaw clenched.

"Not whiskey," Clemenza snaps when he sees me lifting the decanter from the silver tray that sits on the drinks cabinet. "None of this Irish shit. Where’s your sambuca? It’s gotta be sambuca, that’s how it’s done."

"Underneath, Sasha," Tyler tells me. He looks down at the closed glass doors of the drink cabinet, and I wait for Clemenza to shuffle out of the way so I can open them. But I keep an eye on Clemenza, because even now, I don’t trust him.

In fact, I trust him even less in this moment than I have the entire time I’ve known him. It’s too easy.

It’s just too easy.

I bring out the bottle of sambuca, show it to him, and ask, only half sarcastically, "Does this meet with your approval, Don Clemenza?"

He takes it from me, looks it over. With a grunt, he nods. "It’ll do. Coffee beans?"

Tyler looks puzzled, but this request is familiar to me. It’s a common Italian tradition to add three coffee beans to sambuca, symbolizing health, happiness, and prosperity. I wish none of those things for Clemenza, but there’s no harm in pretending.

Still—there’s something wrong.

I don’t like the way Lou’s eyes are flitting back and forth from me to Tyler. But Clemenza is an old man and unarmed. I can take him if I need to. Hell, Tyler could take him. And I know there’s no way Clemenza has brought a weapon in here with him. My men patted him down themselves.

Clemenza is holding onto the bottle still, peering at the label.

"Drink up and get the hell out of my house, Clemenza," Tyler says.

Clemenza shakes his head. "That’s your problem, right there, Tyler. Outsiders, they don’t understand tradizione."

"Enough!" I snarl, and Clemenza gives a satisfactory cringe at the tone in my voice. "Let’s just get this done." We have coffee beans stored in the drinks cabinet as well, for this very purpose in fact, and I pull out six, dropping three each into small tumblers.

"Not those glasses!" Clemenza wheezes. "Do you know nothing? Those ones there—those—" He grumbles on in Italian under his breath, nodding at the glass-fronted drinks cabinet, at the martini glasses he can see in there.

I hesitate, just for a second, as old insecurities rise up. Martini glasses? Surely not.

But I needed so much help from Tyler in the early days—I had no idea how to dress, how to speak.. My eyes go to him automatically, questioning, seeing reassurance. He gives a tiny shrug, his mouth twisting. And although I just threatened Clemenza for saying it, it’s not untrue—if I don’t know the Italian traditions here, I can hardly expect Tyler to know them.

Maybe Clemenza is just trying to make me ridiculous, but I’ll play along for now. I want him out of here as fast as possible, before Tyler says or does something unwise. So I squat down in front of the drinks cabinet with a sigh, and reach out for the glasses.

From the corner of my eye, I see Clemenza make a sudden movement.

I glance up at him; with hatred and vengeance twisting his face, he’s taken the neck of the heavy sambuca bottle in both hands like a baseball bat, and is swinging it straight for my head.

My arm goes up defensively, but before the bottle contacts my skull, there are three loud explosions, and the sharper sound of shattering glass. The bottle hits my shoulder, but lacks force, thudding to the ground unbroken.

Clemenza staggers into the drinks cabinet before falling to the ground, gasping like a fish out of water. His shirt is turning red before my eyes, blood pooling underneath him on the floor.

There are shouts and running feet deeper within the mansion, and I pull myself to my feet and stare at Tyler . He’s coming around the table, gun still in his hand, and once he’s standing over Clemenza, he puts two more bullets directly into his head.

"Are you alright?" he asks me calmly.

In two seconds, Clemenza’s bodyguards will be here. I leap at Tyler, grab the gun from him, and shove him behind me.

"What the fuck?" booms the first of Clemenza’s guards, who has arrived in the doorway at the same time as Miles. The bodyguard stares at his dead Boss, locks eyes with me, and makes an assumption.

"Don’t," I warn him, raising the gun, but he begins to move toward me despite it, a snarl on his face. From the doorway, Miles shoots him dead immediately. He drops, his blood seeping across the floor to join the puddle from his master.

Two more bodyguards have arrived, one shoving Miles before sending a punch toward his jaw. But before I need to intervene, the other Clemenza bodyguard, the same one who patted Tyler down at the start of this evening, wraps an arm around his compatriot’s throat, pulls him away from Miles, and breaks his neck.

It’s as efficient a kill as I’ve ever seen.

He lets the guard’s body drop to the floor, and puts his hands up at once when I turn the gun on him. Giulio and Tramonto have also appeared now, weapons out, waiting for instruction.

"Don’t shoot, Boss," Miles calls out to me, rubbing his jaw. "This is the guy, the one Vollero sent. He’s with us."

It’s not just the Alvarados and the Adonises who had a problem with Lou Clemenza. Many factions within his Family wanted to get out from under his thumb. Now, I suppose, they can.

When I decided to break up the Clemenza Family, it seemed the best option was to find all those pre-existing fissures and put pressure on them.

Al Vollero, who had previously made his grievances with me and the other Triple Triads senior members well known in the wider community, was the perfect plant. A disaffected, disgruntled, aging Capo who demonstrably preferred the Old Don’s way of doing things? Clemenza ate up everything Vollero fed to him, never stopped to think about whether it was true.

Never stopped to question why everything that came out of Vollero’s mouth fit so well with what he wanted to hear.

And along the way, Vollero managed to turn more than one Clemenza member into a friend of the Adonises.

"You’re the one Al Vollero turned?" I ask the lone surviving Clemenza bodyguard, who nods vigorously, hands still high in the air.

"Prefer to say I came to my senses," he says, then adds, "and there are a lot more of us...Boss." He dips his head.

I keep Tyler firmly behind me. "Good to hear. But I’m sure you won’t object to staying under watch for the time being." Giulio and Tramonto are already hustling him away from me.

"Happy to help," I hear him call back down the hallway.

"What happened here, Boss?" Miles asks, indicating Clemenza’s body with his gun. His eyes go over my shoulder to Tyler, then back to the body.

"Clemenza wouldn’t take the deal," I say at once. "Went for Tyler . I had to put him down."

Miles is no fool. He knows my shooting style better than almost anyone else in the Family, and a cursory glance at Clemenza would tell him this wasn’t my work. But he pulls his eyes away from the corpse and shrugs. "Well, that’s a real shame. You’ll have to get new carpet in here. And after all those renovations I just did."

Tyler steps out from behind me, pulling my arm around his shoulders, looking wide-eyed and innocent. "Thank goodness Sasha was here to protect me," he says, and looks up at me, so guileless that for a moment, I almost believe my own lie.

"Thank goodness," I echo him, looking down into his face. Tyler gives me a very small, knowing smile.