Dark Soul Vol. 4 by Aleksandr Voinov Page B

Augusto hadn’t made his move to become boss sooner. Maybe he’d promised. Maybe they’d had a deal going. But it seemed Augusto felt that now was the time to break his word. Cocksucker.
    “A late sixteenth century painting, actually.” Stefano gave a grim, thin-lipped, smile. “Falchi’s out, growing roses.”
    Augusto’s brown eyes met his without fear. Which could be good or bad news. Scared men turned violent. But so did men who were more determined to get their due than they were afraid of the consequences. “You don’t know what happened back when Falchi was still active. With Carbone and Spadaro and the others.”
    Paolo Spadaro, not Silvio. Even though, for a moment, Stefano’d thought it’d been Silvio. Silvio had that quality about him, like a ghost, or a demon—a revenant moving through time and space.
    Stefano scoffed. “That was in the eighties. Times have moved on since then.”
    “You can’t trust Spadaro blood. That’s all I’m sayin’, boss.”
    Stefano lifted an eyebrow, but he noted the last word and that, this time, at least, Augusto was deferring. They could play this as an underling’s justified concern. He wasn’t a tyrant. He was listening to his underboss. Especially since he didn’t have a consigliere . He was struggling to appoint a new one. There wasn’t a man in the organization he wanted in the job, so Augusto was wearing both hats. It was a lot of power for an underboss—bringing the men’s grievances to him as well as running operations and heading the capos . Too much power, really, but taking it back was difficult, and not wise while under siege from an external enemy.
    “Spadaro is strictly here as a freelancer to take some heat off.” He patted Augusto’s shoulder and squeezed it, even managed another smile. The capos relaxed, exchanged murmurs, looked around the room. Test passed. No weakness in his leadership as yet.
    But damn if he didn’t want to know what exactly had happened back in the eighties, and whether Silvio was indeed the son of a traitor as the rumors had it.
    You can’t trust Spadaro blood.
    Stefano sat on what he’d come to think off as Silvio’s couch, imagining Silvio was just in the other room. That he had, like other things of darkness, simply bled into shadows of his bungalow, and would reassemble himself and take that familiar, maddening shape when the whim struck him.
    Stefano was only stopping by to check, he told himself, even though the housekeeper had already thrown out the milk and other perishables from the fridge. Oddly, the landline was disconnected.
    The bed was made, and nothing lingered, no smell he could have picked up, no sense or taste of the man living here. Only a number of his suits hanging in the wardrobe suggested that Silvio would return at al .
    Gone off with his brother, yet another cypher. Both men in one room was almost too much, more than anybody could take.
    One of them is too much for you .
    His phone buzzed in his pocket. He fished it out. Silvio’s number.
    Speak of the devil.
    “How are you doing,” Stefano asked when he’d tapped the green button on the screen.
    “Doing good.” Silvio sounded languid, slightly breathy. “How are you?”
    “Still sleeping a lot.” Thinking of you. Wondering about you and your brother. What you’re up to over there.
    “Sleep is good, means you’re healing. Where are you?”
    “Checking in your place. The phone’s disconnected.”
    “Yeah, pulled the plug.”
    “Why?”
    “Don’t like distractions.”
    “Because so many people call you,” Stefano chided.
    “One wrong call is all it takes.” Silvio sounded a touch tense there.
    Why was that?
    Time to change the topic. “How’s Franco?”
    A breathy laugh. “He’s doing well. We’re shooting a lot of bullets, all for practice. It’s hard to distract him.”
    “Yes, he struck me as that type. Do you know what he wants in return? I don’t want to use his skills without giving anything