Where the Sun Hides (Seasons of Betrayal #1) Read online

  For Kaz. We love you, you little shit.

  WHERE THE SUN HIDES

  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

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Copyright

  There were days when Alberto Gallucci thought it would be easier to have the mind and ideals of a child. Children didn’t concern their little selves with worldly things or the issues of men. As long as their tiny hands were filled and their mouths were distracted with food or talk, the rest was unimportant.

  The small things didn’t bother children.

  Alberto couldn’t remember what that felt like.

  Except for his Violet.

  She was not like most children. She wanted to know everything—all things. Her questions never ended, and her innocent curiosity couldn’t be contained. Most times, he didn’t mind indulging his daughter with her constant chattering, or giving into her demands when she stomped her foot and pouted.

  Violet stood at her father’s side; her bob of golden curls haloing her features. She barely reached above his knees in height. Sometimes he worried that her tiny size was a sign of some health problem, as his son had stood nearly to his waist at the same age, but the doctors assured him that Violet was completely, entirely normal.

  He didn’t think she was at all—she was far too special for that.

  She grabbed a fistful of his slacks and tugged hard. “Daddy?”

  Alberto patted Violet’s head, hoping she would stay quiet for just a little while longer.

  He shouldn’t have bothered.

  “Daddy?” Violet asked again, pulling firmly on his pants.

  “Hush, topina,” Alberto murmured, running a hand over her hair.

  There was a chill in the air, the shifting colors of leaves giving way to the promise of fall. And even the rolling gray clouds, obscuring the sun on what was meant to be a clear day, were a grim reminder as to where Alberto and his daughter waited.

  Cross Hills Cemetery—the poor man’s graveyard.

  Over the years, there had been a number of meets, many of which had taken place in far worse locations than the one he was currently standing in, but Alberto would wager this was one of the most important.

  How long had they stood there already? Watching. Waiting. But above all, anticipating. His first attempt at reaching out to the man he was meeting had gone unanswered. And why wouldn’t it? They were on opposite sides, both fighting for a piece of something each wanted to possess. It wasn’t until much later, with a simple spark in the air, that both men had ultimately been brought around.

  The rules for this meet were simple. No weapons, no men, and as a show of good faith, Alberto suggested bringing along the children. No man, not even those as unstable as the Russians, would dare plan an attack at the risk of a child being hurt.

  It’d been the harming of a child that had ultimately brought them to this place …

  The familiar wave of guilt washed over Alberto, knowing the error he had made and what it nearly cost another man.

  Children were so important in la famiglia, much like wives, mothers, and grandmothers. Hurting children was unacceptable, even in the midst of a brutal, bloody street war that had no time or concern for loss of life. After all, that was the only thing street wars were really good for, in the end.

  He was regarding a tombstone to his left, a bouquet of dying roses resting in the vase beside it, when something—or someone rather—caught his attention, forcing his gaze from the stone to the man that was now entering the graveyard.

  Alberto’s hand found the fur-trimmed hood of his daughter’s coat as the other man came a bit closer to his spot. He wanted to keep Violet still for the moment. She had been bouncing and chattering away, ready to jump out of her damn shoes. She very well might bolt forward, at the presence of someone new. His daughter was open in that way. She was too young to understand that their visitors were not friends.

  Russians and Italians could never be friends.

  At the man’s side, a young boy stayed close. The boy’s hand was firmly enclosed within the man’s, and he wore a pair of black, thick-rimmed glasses with shades too dark to see beneath.

  Alberto winced internally, knowing the cause of those sunglasses on the boy, who had been just one part of his men’s mistake.

  “Daddy?” Violet asked.

  For what, the millionth time?

  Alberto touched the back of Violet’s head gently. “What is that game we always play, topina? The one when we need to be quiet, hmm?”

  Violet’s gaze drifted between her father and the newcomers. At four, she was far too perceptive for her own good. He hoped that later in life, her inquisitiveness would be a virtue, and not something liable to get her into trouble. As it were, he already knew there would be no hiding his activities from his children.

  But he would like for Violet to stay ignorant for a while longer.

  Once the newcomers were only a few feet away, the man released the boy’s hand. He bent down and muttered a few low words—Russian words—to the boy. His hand skimmed the dark, short hair of the boy, and then he patted him on the side.

  With a nod and nothing more, the boy walked a few steps off the stone pathway, his hands held out, as he couldn’t see with those sunglasses of his, and came to a stop at a cracked, weather-beaten, marble bench. The boy sat down, and stared off to the side, silent.

  “How’s his eyesight?” Alberto asked.

  The Russian man’s gaze cut to Alberto with a flash of pain. “Better, but it’s difficult when he’s outside. The brightness of the day makes his eyes hurt. Frankly, the brightness of any light hurts his eyes.”

  Alberto cleared his throat. “Your other boy, why not bring him?”

  “He’s too old. He understands much more. He favors his uncle.”

  Alberto nodded. “Your girl, then? I heard you had a daughter, Vasily.”

  The Russian’s stare dropped to the blonde, green-eyed girl at Alberto’s side.

  “She was occupied,” Vasily murmured.

  Alberto chose not to push, but he believed Vasily’s reasons for not bringing another one of his children to the meeting were different from the ones he had given. Perhaps because the sight of a ten-year-old boy wearing sunglasses to protect his damaged eyes caused by a bomb that Alberto had ordered to be set was enough to cut at even the hardest and coldest of men.

  Children should not be brought into the affairs of the mafia, if it could be helped.

  After half a decade of fighting between the Markovic Bratva and the Gallucci Cosa Nostra, a street war that killed nearly thirty men between their respective organizations, a single bomb had quieted the streets.

  But not in the way Alberto wanted it to.

  He’d intended to stop the fighting, to reclaim part of the Brooklyn streets leading into Little Odessa that had always been the Gallucci grounds. A great portion of his family’s business was tied into the warehouses and connections th
ey had made. When the Russians started to push back against the Gallucci’s demands, it had all snowballed from there.

  A shouting match led to a sit-down.

  The sit-down led to name-calling.

  Italians and Russians simply didn’t work well together. They were two entirely different criminal organizations, following codes that might have seemed similar on the surface, but were actually quite different in some ways—from family dynamics both in and out of their respective organizations, and even from the way the two conducted business. Cosa Nostra was steeped in tradition and smothered by rules. Working with other organizations outside of their systems and beliefs was practically impossible.

  Alberto brushed off his inner thoughts, knowing they weren’t important now. “Violet, what’s that game I asked about?”

  His green-eyed daughter was staring at the quiet boy twenty feet away on the marble bench.

  “Counting clouds,” Violet said in her childish, sweet voice. “We count clouds to be quiet.”

  “Why don’t you go do that for a bit, huh?” Alberto was going to tell his daughter to leave the boy alone and find her own spot to play—Violet had a knack for annoying others at times—but she was already making a beeline for the bench. “Well, at least they will be entertained.”

  Vasily’s lips curled up at the corner in what seemed to be disgust, but he quickly tampered back the reaction when his son patted the bench as Violet approached with her quiet hello.

  “Kazimir is a guarded boy … even for his age.” Vasily glanced to the side and took in his son, who was openly chatting away with Alberto’s daughter. “Or he usually is, anyway.”

  “Violet doesn’t let people have walls,” Alberto replied, chuckling. “She barrels right through them with a smile.”

  For a moment, one second of suspended time, they were just two fathers taking in the sight of their children enjoying the company of each other. It was simple. It was innocent. It was peaceful, something both had longed to provide them with.

  But in the end, the pair had come to this place with a purpose. One that Alberto could no longer put off.

  “Why were you the one to finally accept my offer of a meeting?” Alberto asked. “I expected your brother. He is the boss, isn’t he?”

  Vasily bared his teeth when he flashed a smile. A cold smile. “Gavrill has no intention of backing down against your family.”

  That was not what Alberto expected to hear. It set him on edge instantly, and he once again found himself sweeping the graveyard with his gaze, looking for something he might have missed. Had he made the wrong choice in doing this with the Russian?

  “Worry not, comrade,” Vasily said like he could read Alberto’s mind. “The graveyard was a good choice to meet up. No one would ever desecrate the final resting place of so many souls, no? And our children, of course. I wouldn’t have brought my boy along, had I thought for a second that you might hurt him.”

  Again, Alberto added silently.

  “Forgive me,” Alberto started to say, shrugging, “but we haven’t exactly been amicable in the past.”

  Vasily tipped his head to the side like he was brushing the statement off. “I accepted your offer because I believe the best thing to do is stop the fighting.”

  Alberto had to agree.

  When street wars got to the point that innocents were involved, it had already gone too far.

  “You just said—”

  “I came here without my brother’s knowledge or permission,” Vasily interrupted before Alberto could finish. “I know his intentions, and that he wishes to open the Markovic Bratva territory beyond the streets of Little Odessa. To do that, the feud between our families will have to continue. My interests are not aligned with my brother’s, but at the moment, it seems ours are, Alberto.”

  “So it seems,” Alberto echoed.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Violet point to an oak tree filled with colorful leaves that were just beginning to fall from the thick branches. The boy at her side shook his head, and Violet frowned with her pout firmly in place.

  “I assume,” Alberto said, still watching the two children, “... that if your interests are not tied in with your brother’s, then that will be a problem you’ll have to deal with. Won’t it?”

  Vasily sighed, tossing his hands into his pants pockets. “Perhaps, but I don’t want to keep fighting for possession of something that doesn’t belong to us. And if I did, at what cost will it come to me? You nearly took my son from me the last time.”

  Alberto flinched. “That was a mistake that never should have happened. The bomb was intended for your brother.”

  “A mistake that would have resulted in a war far greater than you could imagine.” Vasily’s tone never changed from one of casual indifference, but Alberto could still hear the warning behind his words. “And you call us Russians savages.”

  Alberto was on guard, waiting for the moment when the Russian would strike. The Markovic brothers were volatile by nature. It didn’t take much to set one off.

  Even so, he kept his composure as he said, “It was a mix up of cars, and certainly not intentional on my part.”

  Vasily met his gaze. “Nonetheless, you came too close.”

  He had.

  Even Alberto knew it.

  “How do you intend to fix the little issue of your brother’s interests, if they don’t fit with what you want, then?” Alberto asked. “That’s a bit of a mountain to climb over, considering he’s the boss of your operation.”

  “Pakhan,” Vasily corrected. “We call him Pakhan.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  “About the same as someone from the outside addressing you as Don, Alberto,” Vasily said.

  He wondered, if briefly, whether the Russian was intending to be offensive, or if it was just his nature. “Understood.”

  “And my brother … He seems to be a problem for us both, no?”

  Alberto took Vasily’s seemingly innocent statement in, absorbing what the man might be alluding to. Often times, discussions where business was forefront were held with a sort of vague secrecy surrounding them. A man should never come right out and say what he wanted or needed done, but rather, hint at it and let the other side draw its own conclusions.

  “He’s certainly a problem for me, if he intends to make his way any farther into Brooklyn than where he already is,” Alberto said. “As it is, he’s severely cut off some ties my Capos have to warehouses that we use for storing things needing to stay hidden for a while. I don’t like losing out on money because someone wants to play keep away with my streets.”

  Vasily chuckled. “You don’t have other storage facilities to use?”

  “None close enough to keep attention away from the fact that things are traveling,” Alberto answered, not giving away much else.

  His hand in the cocaine trade had long been a source of debate between his syndicates and other Cosa Nostra families that he sometimes did business with. Cosa Nostra liked to tote themselves as upholding standards, but also keeping away from being the moral police.

  Yet, when a Don decided to handle substances as a way to make money, someone always took issue.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” Alberto asked.

  Vasily lifted a single brow high. “About what I intend to do with my brother, you mean.”

  “Sì. About him ...”

  The Russian smiled again, in that cold way like he had earlier. “I was hoping we could work something out that would be to both of our benefits where Gavrill is concerned.”

  Alberto stood a little straighter.

  Were they actually getting somewhere now?

  “Keep going,” Alberto pressed.

  Vasily passed his son and Violet a glance before quickly turning back to Alberto, his face a mask of passive indifference. “As I see it, we really only have one option, Italian. You don’t want to keep fighting, and neither do I. Given that this is a triangle with my brother being the peak, we
have to consider him, too.”

  “He does want to keep fighting.”

  “Yes.”

  Alberto weighed his options, and the Russian’s actions. Vasily had accepted the offer to meet. He’d followed all the rules—came alone, brought his son, and was amicable.

  Even respectable, to a point.

  Vasily hadn’t needed to do any of that. His organization was slightly smaller than the Gallucci syndicate, but as both families had already proven, they were more than capable of making the streets of Brooklyn a living hell. It needed to end.

  Alberto finally found a Russian who seemed like he might be willing to do just that.

  “No problem is unfixable,” Alberto said.

  “My thoughts exactly,” Vasily agreed. “And I know, being the Sovetnik that I am to my brother and our organization, that not everyone is happy with his … choices.”

  “One more dead man might correct all of that.”

  Vasily shrugged. “It could, as long as it didn’t create problems within the Bratva.”

  “And how would that work?”

  “Don’t you already know, Don?” Vasily asked.

  That time, Alberto could hear the snideness in Vasily’s words. The man hadn’t even tried to hide it. He let it go.

  “You want me to pave your way to the top, is that it?” Alberto asked.

  Vasily grinned. “Win-win, Italian.”

  Would it be?

  The fighting would stop.

  No more dead men.

  Alberto found his daughter sitting beside Vasily’s son, ruffling the tulle layers of her pink dress under her long coat.

  He would be able to breathe when his children left his home.

  “I will still take the blame for it, despite the fact you’re asking—without really asking—me to do it,” Alberto murmured. “And that concerns me, because that leaves me open to retribution when you suddenly decide that your brother’s death needs avenging. Isn’t that how the mafia goes? An eye for an eye.”

  Vasily barked out a laugh. “You do not have very good insight into the Bratva, comrade. We are not like the Italians and sometimes the one death is enough to end it all. We don’t feel the need to keep spilling blood after it’s already stained the ground.”