An Offer You Can't Refuse by Sal Bianchi (best beach reads .txt) 📕

“Better a picciotto,” he gritted out menacingly, “than a tradiatore.”

I smirked at the weak response. It would take a lot more than being called a traitor by the likes of this idiot to rattle me. Laughing at him only enraged him further, and he reared back as if to punch me.

“Hey!” A shrill voice cut through the air, freezing us both in our tracks. “Both of you cut it out now before I knock some sense back into the pair of you!”

Despite the severity of the situation, I couldn’t help but smile as I turned around to look at Colletta on the other side of the bar. She was wearing a food-stained apron and holding a ladle up like it was a weapon. It was such a familiar and comforting sight that I immediately forgot all about the fight I’d been about to get into.

“Hey, Colletta.” I beamed at her. “You look beautiful as always.”

“You need to hush,” she hissed at me as she cast a wary glance at the other patrons in the bar. “Don’t get me wrong, Nicky, I’m always glad to see you, but what do you think you’re doing here right now?”

“I need to speak with Alessandro,” I replied calmly.

“Oh no,” the drunk red shirt from before sneered. “You’re not going to hide behind Colletta like you did last time. Come over here and fight like a man.”

“Giovanni,” Colletta snapped. “Interrupt our conversation one more time, and you’re going to wish you were never born.”

“Are you serious, Colletta?” He balked. “After what he did to Domenico, you expect me to just sit back and let him waltz in here like he owns the place?”

Colletta pursed her lips at his outburst. He made a good point. I’d beaten a member of the Family into unconsciousness, so they couldn’t just let it slide. Even Colletta wouldn’t be able to get me out of this.

“I do own this place.” I grinned. There was little point in playing nice now that Giovanni had made it clear that he intended to defend Domenico’s honor with a fight regardless of what I did or said. “Well, half of it, at least. I inherited it when my father died, remember?”

Giovanni’s face at that moment was priceless and absolutely worth the pandemonium that followed as several of the other men in the bar broke into shouts and began to approach us.

It wasn’t a lie. Even though I didn’t get any of the proceeds from the bar or do much else as far as running it, I did legally own half of it. I’d made the deliberate decision not to claim my right to it when I’d left the mafia, but I’d never bothered to take my name off of the deed completely. I was thankful for that now since it had provided me the perfect ammunition to rile Giovanni up.

Colletta was attempting to yell for silence over the noise of the crowd, and Giovanni was unleashing a string of curses on me in a mixture of Italian and English. I turned to make another attempt to push my way through the crowd and toward the stairs, but the moment I moved, I found myself facing down the barrel of a gun.

“Sergio!” Colletta screeched, loud enough that it hurt my ears and caused the rest of the bar to fall silent again. “What do you think you’re doing?”

The man holding the gun was the same one who’d stepped in earlier after I’d dodged Giovanni’s weak attempt to attack me. I’d realized right away that I needed to be wary of him, but I’d still foolishly let my guard down.

“Sorry, Colletta,” Sergio sighed. “But this little snake’s had this coming for a long time. “

“Put that down!” she screamed again. I could hear the panic and anguish in her voice, and I felt a little guilty for having let the situation escalate this far. It was too late to back down now, though.

“You’re going to shoot me?” I taunted him as I squared myself up in front of him with the gun pointed directly at my head. Honestly, I couldn’t see a good way out of this. I was surrounded on all sides by the mafia with a gun pointed at me. All my earlier bravado seemed stupid now, in hindsight. Oh well. If I was going to die, I might as well face it head-on.

I almost flinched as his finger twitched against the trigger, and Colletta screamed. Then, suddenly, my ears were assaulted by a painfully loud bang, and the gun was no longer in front of me. I blinked, and for just an instant, I wondered if I was about to drop dead, despite not feeling any pain. Then the moment passed, and I realized that Sergio was kneeling on the ground in front of me, cradling a bleeding hand to his chest while he groaned in pain. The gun he’d been holding to my head just a moment before was lying a few feet away on the ground, stained with his own blood.

“Can’t any of you go more than a day without getting into a fight?” A low, painfully nostalgic voice called from the back of the bar. Every muscle in my body went tense as I heard that voice, but I forced myself to look up toward the person who’d just spoken.

Alessandro was standing halfway up the stairs, his gun dangling lazily in his left hand. I realized with a start that my brother had just shot Sergio’s gun out of his hand from across the room. It had only been inches from my head, but he’d still managed to make the shot perfectly.

“Nick,” he called flatly. “Come see me in my office.”

He didn’t say anything else before turning and sauntering back up the stairs. I frowned, a little annoyed at the way he’d just ordered me around, and walked away without offering me a chance to respond. I had come