Deathless & Divided (The Chicago War #1) Read online

  Dedication

  For Eli … because you’re perfectly awesome. And you should know it.

  Table of Contents

  DEATHLESS & DIVIDED

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Chicago Map of Outfit Families

  About the Author

  Coming Soon

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Lily DeLuca felt like stone as she stared at the two-storey yellow home from where she sat across the road on the sidewalk. Immovable and cold. Someone must have resided in the house—new people—because it used to be a pale blue. A sidewalk of colorful stones now led up to the walkway of the front entrance as well.

  Time changed everything.

  Everything but Lily.

  Well, she knew she was different, of course. Older. A woman now and not a child anymore. She knew homes didn’t keep dreams and love protected and safe within their four walls, but instead, only gave the semblance of those things. She was no longer naive and stupid to the things and people around her.

  No one was deathless in their world.

  Even the innocents couldn’t be saved.

  Blowing out a puff of air, Lily tilted her head up again and blinked at the home. She swore she could still hear her older brothers’ encouragement and hollering as she finally learned to ride her bike without training wheels. At four-years-old, they got her stuck in a tree in the backyard the first time they taught her how to climb it. She kicked her oldest brother Dino in the balls just after her fifth birthday in the front driveway when he let her spider out of its jar.

  Dino and Theo DeLuca always let her tag along back then. They never acted like she was some annoying little sister out to ruin their fun.

  Lily glanced down the quiet street, wondering if anyone recognized her. Melrose Park had long been home to a large American Italian community as well as the Chicago Outfit. A lot of people in the area probably knew who she was, but if they didn’t, they would surely recognize her name.

  Maybe she shouldn’t have come here at all.

  “Miss,” the cab driver called, chomping loudly on his wad of gum. “You almost done or what?”

  “Is the meter still running?” Lily asked back, not even bothering to look at the man parked beside where she sat.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is my credit card still good?”

  “Yeah.”

  Lily shrugged. “Then no, I’m not done.”

  “Whatever, kid,” the guy muttered.

  The cell phone in Lily’s pocket rang for the fifth time since she left Dino’s place a couple of hours earlier. Dino had gave the damn thing to her and took the one she had away, saying something about burner phones.

  Lily figured that was just one more way for Dino to keep an eye on her.

  She ignored the call.

  The two-storey house, however, couldn’t be ignored at all.

  An ache stabbed in Lily’s chest, spreading outward. It only continued to grow in intensity. The longer she stared and thought about the day her so-called family took away what that house was supposed to mean and murdered the dreams it held, the more she hurt.

  Oh, she hurt all over.

  “Time to stop running, Lily.”

  The words Dino spoke to Lily when he ordered her to leave Europe and travel back to the States plagued her mind.

  He was right.

  She ran.

  Lily still wanted to. Coming back to Chicago felt like a death sentence.

  What did this place want from her?

  God knew she didn’t have much left to give.

  She could finally start college, maybe, but she didn’t even know what she wanted to study. Her brothers owned a dozen and one different businesses around Chicago to keep her busy working, but how long would that keep her interested?

  She couldn’t be just Lily DeLuca in Chicago, Illinois. She couldn’t be just anyone here. Not a tourist or a traveler, not a pretty face in a crowd of people. No, she was Lily fucking DeLuca; the daughter of a turncoat, dead father and mother; a sister to rival Capos in the Chicago Mob. And while she didn’t want to think about it, her age made her a prime target for the Outfit to look at her for other reasons, too.

  Christ, she should have fought Dino harder.

  How long would it take before the Outfit took something else away from Lily that she loved?

  “What is this place, anyway?” the cab driver called out the driver’s window. “S’not anything special to look at, girl.”

  To him, it wouldn’t be.

  To Lily …

  It didn’t even matter.

  She pushed up from the sidewalk, brushing off the legs of her skinny jeans.

  “Nothing,” Lily said. “It’s nothing.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  The weight of a debt could crush a man. It was one of those things a person knew always followed close behind. It never really left, even if it seemed like it was gone.

  Damian Rossi lived for a decade waiting to finally pay for the debt he owed. Dino DeLuca never once mentioned when Damian would be required to step up and answer for the dues he owed, but it still hung there … waiting like the anvil ready to fall.

  “Come on over. It’s time to talk about paying up, Damian.”

  Eleven words had never felt quite as heavy as those did.

  For Damian, life was dominated by the mafia. Or rather, The Chicago Outfit. Being only twenty-seven-years-old meant Damian answered to everyone else before he ever got to give himself what he wanted. It didn’t matter that he had finally received his button—his in to the family—a little over a year ago. Nobody cared that Damian was just as made as they were in the Outfit. No, because he was still a fucking young gun to them.

  If an older Capo needed an extra pair of hands and called on him, Damian had to go. If the boss wanted something from him, regardless of how seemingly unimportant it was, Damian needed to find it. It didn’t matter if he was running on four hours of sleep in three days, Damian didn’t get to make his own choices when it came to the Outfit.

  The Outfit made those goddamn choices for him.

  Always.

  Most times, Damian didn’t mind. He chose the life, and he was good at it. But he also didn’t know anything different. After his mother and father died in an automobile accident when he was five, the only thing he had left was the Outfit and the people inside who raised him when his drunk aunt and uncle couldn’t.

  “You owe me, D.”

  Debts never went away in the mafia. They could disappear for a short time but someone always came back to collect, eventually. Damian supposed it was just his time to pay up. He didn’t exactly like that Dino hadn’t given him much of a reason why now was the time or how he could pay it back, but it just was.

  That was how it worked.

  Dino DeLuca’s home rested on a large estate of thirty well-protected acres outside of the city limits. After he’d been let in through the gate and parked his car, Damian pulled out a cigarette and lit up. He still had twenty-minutes before he needed to meet the Capo, after all.

  “It’s windy for su
ch a nice day.”

  The voice came from the line of trees to Damian’s left. He turned on his heel in just enough time to see Dino emerge. The man swung a set of keys around his index finger and held a manila file with his other.

  “Shit, make some noise, Dino.”

  Dino chuckled. The sound surprised Damian considering Dino was serious in all things—business, family, and life. Lightheartedness and nonsense wasn’t in his game. Damian supposed he could understand that. He’d never been one for whims and fantasy, either.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be the ghost?” Dino asked, his teeth flashing as he grinned.

  “Wish they’d forget that name.”

  “You earned it, D.”

  Damian shrugged. “Whatever. That doesn’t mean I like it.”

  Growing up without his parents meant Damian spent a lot of time under the feet of others. He’d been a small, scrawny kid. Instantly forgettable. The only thing that made living in his aunt and uncle’s house bearable was his cousins; Tommas, Lea, and Cara. Not that they had it any better. Laurent and Serena Rossi hadn’t been made to have kids. The four kids spent more time moving from family to family than they spent actually living with their guardians.

  Yeah, easily overlooked.

  A little ghost.

  Damian ended up being raised by several people instead of the ones delegated to the task. When he should have been focusing on school, he’d been shoved knee-deep into the mafia and that lifestyle. Looking back on it all, he knew the reality was simple. He’d been groomed for the life. Numbed to violence and business. Accepting of the expectations and rules of their family and ways. He liked it, though.

  Damian supposed that worked out well for him. Being forgettable as a kid ended up carrying over to his adulthood and his career in the Outfit. Not every man was cut out to be a killer. No one ever saw him coming. They didn’t get the chance to see him leave. Rarely was he suspected when a body showed up. He simply took the call, did the job, and moved on. No questions ever got asked.

  “Figured you would be inside filling your face with food,” Damian said.

  Dino eyed his large home. “Enjoying the outside while I can.”

  “Trial is coming up, right?”

  “A little over two months,” Dino said under his breath.

  Getting in some kind of trouble was unavoidable when it came to the mafia. Dino refused to take a deal on the racketeering, laundering, and fraud charges that had been plaguing him for a couple of years. He wouldn’t plead guilty, either. The man had a damn good lawyer though, but everybody knew what he was looking at.

  Twenty years max when totaled up.

  Damian knew the bastards wanted the maximum and were going for it, too.

  “Do you ever wonder why I liked you so damned much way back when you were a kid?” Dino asked.

  Damian laughed. “No.”

  “Life hasn’t treated either one of us very fairly, I suppose. I probably saw a lot of me in you when you were just a punk-ass kid following us around.”

  “You’re not that much older than me.”

  “Five years.”

  “What is your point, Dino?”

  “You never sat around waiting for your pity party, D. When your parents died, you got shuffled around from place to place. When my parents died, we had to pretend like they didn’t even exist. You just accepted the hand dealt to you; we were forced to. So, I guess I liked that about you and the fact we had a common loss helped, too. Made me sympathetic, if anything. Rarely does someone get that from me. Hell, even Theo doesn’t get a goddamn Christmas card from me anymore. You got an invite to the dinner table.”

  Damian hid his surprise with a cough. Dino rarely spoke of his siblings. Even when Dino and his younger brother Theo needed to spend time in the same room together, the rival Capos acted like strangers instead of brothers. A five-year age gap separated the two men. Dino’s sister, on the other hand, had been MIA from the DeLuca family for a few years.

  If Damian thought about it hard enough, he was pretty sure he could remember a blonde-haired, brown-eyed girl following Dino and Theo around way back when. Apparently, the majority of the girl’s teen years were spent at a private boarding school. Dino didn’t talk much about her. An even bigger age gap separated them, as far as Damian understood.

  “Lily is your sister’s name, right?” Damian asked.

  Dino cocked a brow. “Why?”

  “Curious.”

  “It is. She’s twenty-one, almost twenty-two. Her birthday is coming right up. She spent the last three years after she graduated gallivanting across Europe. Backpacking, mostly.”

  “Kept out of trouble?”

  “Yes, which I appreciate. Well, as far as I know. Lily isn’t … fond of me. She checked in once a month. It was my only demand.”

  Damian was beginning to feel like this conversation might turn into some kind of therapy session. Nobody wanted that shit.

  “What did you need me for today, anyway?”

  Dino smirked, but it faded fast. “I wasn’t the only one who took a liking to you, was I?”

  Damian didn’t know what the hell his friend was getting at. “Pardon?”

  “Terrance.”

  The Outfit’s boss.

  “I do okay with him, if that’s what you’re dancing around,” Damian replied.

  “Just okay. Right, Damian.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t even realize it, do you?”

  Obviously not.

  Damian was too tired to play word games. “I do what the boss wants, Dino.”

  “Christ, Damian. If you spent the same amount of time paying attention to your surroundings as you do working to blend in, you would have it made.”

  “It’s not killed me yet,” Damian said, grinning.

  “Good thing.” Dino shoved his hands in his pockets. “Joel’s never gonna make it as boss, not under Terrance’s watch.”

  “He’s his grandson. It would make sense for Joel to take over when it’s time.”

  “So? Like I said, Terrance knows better. A good boss is partly made, but mostly born, Damian. Joel doesn’t have it. Terrance knows it. Hell, the Outfit knows it. What nobody really knows, is who will take it.” Dino barked out a laugh, adding, “Well, I think I know who Terrance is looking at for it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I’m looking at him.”

  Damian turned to ice in the June air. “You’re fuckin’ kidding me.”

  “Hey—”

  “That’s not even funny, Dino. I’ve never wanted that or even suggested that I did.”

  “I’m aware,” his friend murmured.

  “So what the hell?”

  “I didn’t say you did want it, Damian. That knack of yours, being invisible, wouldn’t work very well if you’re the boss.”

  “Exactly,” Damian said. “And I like being able to come and go as I please.”

  “But you don’t, not really.”

  Damian didn’t challenge Dino on that because he knew it was true.

  “Terrance has never mentioned anything of the sort to me,” Damian said, wanting to get Dino’s mind away from that.

  Whatever plans the Capo was scheming up, Damian didn’t want to be a part of them. If someone got wind of that shit, he’d be six-feet under in a makeshift grave before he even got the chance to apologize for anything.

  Damian liked being alive.

  “He wouldn’t. You’re still young to him, but he’s looking at you. He’s watching you, D. Because to him, you’ve got it. You fucking listen instead of running off at the goddamn mouth. You follow the rules, take his calls, and do what he asks. Haven’t you wondered why you don’t have a crew of your own, yet?”

  Damian avoided Dino’s heady gaze. “Sometimes.”

  “Because you’re too busy with him. Why would he give you more than you’ve already got with everybody else and the boss put together? That would mean you would have less time for his bullshit. And he likes
having you close. How many times do the guys call you for the boss, anyway?”

  “A few.”

  … times a day, Damian held back from adding.

  “You know what I heard Ben say to Riley when he called for the boss the other day?” Dino asked.

  Ben DeLuca was Dino’s older uncle and the right-hand man to Terrance. Damian didn’t particularly like the guy, but he gave him the respect he was owed.

  “What did Ben say?” Damian asked.

  Dino nodded at Damian. “Said the guy might as well call you on whatever it was first.”

  Damian shifted on his feet, uncomfortable. “So?”

  “So, Ben is Terrance’s main guy—always has been. The underboss, that’s important. Like how Riley is important as the front boss on the streets and to the feds. Terrance takes Ben and Riley to the Commission meetings, runs shit past them for a second and third voice, and all that other good nonsense.”

  “Why do I hear a but in there?”

  “But … he kind of does that with you, too, huh?”

  “I haven’t noticed,” Damian said quietly.

  “I think you have. You went along with them to the last Commission, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How was that?” Dino asked.

  Interesting and enlightening.

  Damian had done passing business with the major families in New York, including the biggest and dominating Marcello clan, but that was his first time seeing them all together. He supposed he now understood why the families talked about the Marcellos like they were untouchable. They kind of were. Damian held a great deal of respect for the Marcello family. After all, it was better to know who your biggest rival was and admire their ability to be a challenge at all.

  “Figured out Terrance isn’t fond of the Marcellos,” Damian said.

  Dino shrugged like that didn’t make a difference. “We’re big time in Chicago. They’re big time in New York. Keeping the peace is better than starting a war with another family. Terrance knows that. Nonetheless, he invited you along. You’re the first person he’s done that for aside from Ben and Riley, of course.”

  “It would make sense for Ben and Riley to go, Dino. Underboss and front boss, man.”