Mafia Don’s Secret Twins: Chapter 29

Cousin.

The world is roaring around me. Andrei still moans, writhing on the ground, but it’s a background sound compared to the blood rushing in my ears.

Cousin.

“The fuck are you doing here?” I snarl at him.

Nico, who looks to be a little older than me, bows. “Oh, your brother sent me.”

“Brother?”

For a second I’m confused. Do I have another fucking brother to deal with?

“Yes. Marco?” Nico says.

My jaw is on the fuckin’ ground.

“Anyway. Marco got in touch with me, and I am here to take you to Greece with me.”

Oh.

Fuck no.

“Hell fucking no,” I growl. “I’m not going fucking anywhere with you.”

“Can you get us back to New York?” Marisol peeps from behind me.

“Naí, beautiful lady,” Nico practically purrs.

I’m going to punch this motherfucker’s lights out.

Growling, I move to do that, but Marisol’s hand on my elbow keeps me still.

“Dino,” she whispers. “He can take us back to the girls.”

“I will take you wherever you want to go, beautiful, so long as we leave this place right now. I fear my disguise is ah… done,” he says.

Sure enough, there’s shouting nearby, and I have a feeling that those soldiers are going to come ripping through the camp at any moment.

Fuck.

“Dino,” Marisol says softly.

She doesn’t need to beg.

“Fucking hell. If you fuck with us, I’ll rip your stomach out and feed it to you,” I snarl at Nico.

He smiles, his grin broadening. “I like you.”

“Fuck off,” I snap.

I grab Marisol’s hand, and we follow my… cousin.

I’m still not used to the words in my mouth, and they taste like ash sitting there.

Nico, however, leads us on a winding path through the tents and workers of the relief camp, until we pop out the edge. There’s a Jeep there, stashed underneath a tarp, and he whips it off and starts the Jeep quickly.

“In!” he yells at me.

I help Marisol into the back seat, then get into the passenger side.

As soon as the door snaps shut, he slams on the accelerator and the Jeep roars away.

“How do I fuckin’know you’re who you say you are?” I say once we’re rolling through the city.

Nico shrugs. “You could probably check my passport, if you needed to.”

“I fuckin’ need to.”

“Good. This type of attitude is very nice. It’s going to work out for us,” he says calmly. He rifles through the center console, handing me a gun in the process, and then whips out a passport.

Sure enough.

“Nicolas Drakos,” I read. I look up at him. “Did you forge this shit?”

“It’s nice that you think we have enough money for a quality fake,” Nico remarks dryly.

I narrow my eyes. “The fuck does that mean?”

“It means, dear cousin, that you, and your connections to the Rossi family, are the only lifeline that our small family has to survive.”

What the fuck?

Marisol leans forward from the backseat. “What do you mean?”

Nico sighs. “The story goes that my uncle, your father, was desperately in love with the woman who would marry the De Luca heir. She found him favorable enough, it seems, but the De Lucas ruined us in an attempt to bring her back into the fold. She caved, bringing my beloved cousin with her, and leaving us completely… broke,” Nico announces.

“Broke?”

He turns, winking. “We’ll be flying coach back to New York.”

“With what money?”

“The cash that your dear brother, my cousin…. Once removed? Ah, I don’t know,” he mutters something in Greek. “It doesn’t matter. Marco has offered us an alliance that was altogether too enticing.”

“Of course he fucking did,” I growl.

Nico glances at me. “You did not want to be saved? I probably will not take you back to the camp because I rather wish to not be shot by Brazilian soldiers, but I can take you if you wish.”

I open my mouth, but Nico laughs. “Actually no, I cannot do that. Marco has offered a lifeline.”

“He fuckin’ sold me to you, didn’t he?” I say bitterly.

“No.”

“Then what’s the fuckin’ deal?”

Nico gives me a sideways look. “To talk to you. Take you where you want to go. So that you can make… an informed decision about your future.”

I bristle.

Marisol leans back. “I just want to get back to my children,” she says quietly.

Softening, Nico looks at her. “You are so close, beauty. So close.”

“Shut your fucking mouth when you talk to her,” I snap.

His eyes wrinkle with something that looks an awful lot like he’s happy. “That would be quite hard, no? How do I talk to this lovely creature with my mouth shut?”

“YOU don’t. I do. Fuckwit,” I growl.

Nico laughs. “Oh, cousin. I am so glad to know you.”

“I’m not.”

“Marco told me of your demeanor. How you are… what did he say? A ray of sunshine,” he grins.

I’m going to kill him.

And Marco too.

“Dino is wonderful. He’s just a little tired and stressed right now,” Marisol says from the backseat. “He’s going to be just fine once we get the hell out of here.”

“And that, we shall, beauty.”

Eventually, the Jeep rolls up to… the airport. Like the full on, actual airport. Nico gives us passports, wallets, and smiles.

“Shall we?”

I have no fuckin’ clue how he pulled this shit off.

Plane tickets. Passports. Border questions. Nico is a polyglot, just like Marisol, and the two of them sound like fuckin’ kittens as they chat in Portuguese with the border patrol agents. The documents, though, are good, and they pass inspection.

The tickets are first class. We have an entire section to ourselves. The seat folds out into a bed.

Because Marco, apparently, has a sense of fuckin’ humor.

We’re on the plane, hours into the flight, when Marisol finally falls asleep.

I shuffle her slightly, so she’s tucked into her long sleeping seat against the window. I turn to Nico sidling in next to him in the empty seat, my voice low.

“You, motherfucker, are going to tell me exactly what the hell is going on? No games. No fuckin’ questions. Got it?”

He pulls his sleeping mask off, and takes his seat out of the reclined position.

“Why do you have a problem with your brother helping?”

“Because Marco’s help doesn’t come without a fuckin’ price,” I growl.

Nico nods. “He thought you would say that. Here,” he says, handing me a phone.

I blink.

“In the videos. He made you one. Play it,” Nico says, handing me headphones.

I don’t want to.

But my fingers put the headsets into my ears. My hands shake, but I find the video, the only one, and I press play.

Marco’s face fills the screen.

He doesn’t smile. As per usual. He gazes solemnly at the camera, and speaks.

“I know you’re pissed. I know that right now, you’re probably thinking of ways to remove Nico’s spine, and shove it somewhere that spines shouldn’t go. I know, Dino. And I know you’re mad at me.

But I had to.

I’m not trying to fish you out of this, brother. You chose to go to Benicio, you chose to take on the competition.

I’m proud of you.”

That sentence, somehow, pokes at something in my chest.

“I’m proud of you, Dino. I always have been. You had the courage to do something I could never do, which is to forge your own path. You and Sal both have made your way in the world, and even though I interfered with that at various points, you had the courage to tell me to fuck off. To tell dad to fuck off. I admire that, and I wish I hadn’t seen that as something bad. You are who you are without any concerns, and I’m… I wish I could present myself to the world as you do.”

There’s a strange, grim regret in his eyes, and for a second I wonder what the fuck that’s about.

He sighs, continuing. “Nico is your cousin on your father’s side. I offered them a million dollars to retrieve you, but you’d be interested to know that they turned it down at first. He wanted to get you himself, because he said he wanted to get to know his cousin. The money, I will give them, but don’t let Nico fool you. He was more interested in you than the money, and I think it’s because he’s an idiot who has no interest in running the dredges of the Drakos family.”

I snort at that, casting a glance at Nico. I don’t think he’s an idiot, by any means, but I absolutely can see that Nico has no interest in being a head of family.

He’s far too happy for that.

“You have a chance to make your own path, this time, again. A family to start over with. I know we weren’t the family you wanted…. That I wasn’t the brother you wanted,” his voice trails off, and regret clutches my stomach.

“But, I hope this could be a chance for you. You can forge your own path with the Drakos family. See what you can do. We’ll be here if you need us, but you’re better than an enforcer for Elio. Better than a dock supervisor for me. You are my little brother, and I love you. If you need me, you know how to find me,” Marco says.

The video ends.

I stare at the screen until it goes blank.

So many emotions swirl through me, I don’t even know where to begin. I fucking hate it, because I don’t know what to do.

Marco said he loved me. That he was proud of me. Some very small part of me, a little boy inside my chest, is beaming and parading like a fuckin’ show pony.

I hate that it matters so much.

I don’t fuckin’ trust Nico. Not by a longshot. I agree with Marco’s assessment that he’s not interested in being head of his family, just in the few hours we’ve been around each other, but I need to know a couple of things before I decide what to do.

I poke Nico, pulling my headphones out.

He yawns, pulling the sleep mask up off his eyes again. “Your manners could use some work, cousin⁠—”

“Are you head of the Drakos family?”

Nico stills. “What?”

“Right now. Are you head of family?”

“I am,” he says, his normally cavalier voice guarded.

“Do you fuckin’ want to be?”

For the first time, all the humor and goofy-ass shit falls from his face.

“No,” Nico says, his voice honest.

“Why?” I demand.

“Because I don’t have the stomach for it.”

I raise an eyebrow.

Nico sighs, his voice low as he leans forward.

“After the De Luca family financially ruined us, your father disappeared. We do not know if he is dead or alive, but we presume him to be dead. My father did not recover from the loss of his brother, his twin. He succumbed to a heart attack nearly a year ago. I have been searching for help since then. I do not want this,” he says fiercely. “I do not want to be in charge of a failing empire. I do not want to walk into a room and have to… I am not made for it.”

“What are you made for?”

Nico gives the ghost of a grin. “I run a bar.”

“A fuckin’ bar?” I growl.

He nods. “A tourist bar. On an island. The island is our home; it’s been in the family for generations and it is the last thing we have. I love the bar. It’s easy work. The women?” he makes a little kissing face. “Plentiful. Bountiful. I do not care about the Drakos name, so much as I care about the pursuit of things I like. Good wine, good food, beautiful women,” he winks. “I think we have this in common, no?”

“If you talk about Marisol again, I’ll fucking kill you,” I snap.

He sighs. “Relax. Your wife is safe.”

“She’s not…”

Nico looks at me.

I look away. “Mind your fuckin’ business. What do you want from me, in all this?”

He leans in. “The million dollars your brother promised.”

“And?”

Nico assesses me. “And, for you to take the mantle of head of family. We are small. There is only you and I. A handful of enforcers, older than dirt, and some lingering business interests that involve selling tourists fake pieces of the Greek monuments. We were once… mighty. But we are no longer. I have no interest in running the ruins of our empire, or making them into palaces once again.”

Palaces.

I look over at Marisol.

She’s perfect.

My Marisol.

My woman.

My queen.

And for her, and the girls, I can only think of how good they’d look in a crown.

I turn back to Nico. “Palaces, huh?”

He nods.

I sit back in the chair. “Tell me everything.”

Nico grins, and begins to talk.