KILLER INSTINCT (A Mafia Bad Boy Romance Novel) (2 page)

One shot.

One kill.

That was my creed back when I was with the marines.

I watched as the target exited the car. He was short and rotund. That’s my least favorite type of target. It’s easily to misjudge a vital point and lodge a bullet in some useless piece of flab. This needed to be a headshot.

I loved a good challenge.

As a marine, I got medals for dusting the bad guys. They even called me hero for killing people half a mile away in the middle of a goddamn desert. At least with the mafia, you can kill people from an air-conditioned room.

The target was now a hundred paces from me.

The mafia doesn’t give you medals for killing people. I get cold hard cash and a pat on the head for my work. At the end of the day, they’re just the same as the military. They need someone to do their wet work for them and they’re willing to pay top dollar for it.

It’s funny how the more things change, the more things stay the same.

Eighty paces now.

I thought I’d leave the killing behind when I returned home from the war. I guess the killing itself wouldn’t leave me. No matter how much I tried to run, the killing always caught up to me. My time in the marines had made me good at killing people, breaking things, and nothing else.

It’s hard finding honest work as a civilian. The military is good at training you and pointing you in the direction of their enemies. They’re bad at making you a model citizen who can hold a regular nine-to-five job.

Seventy paces.

The mafia gave me direction that I needed. More importantly, they pay me for being a killer. It doesn’t hurt that I’m mafia royalty.

My father was a stone cold assassin. Vito ‘the knife’ Baccalieri had been killing people for the mob since he was a teenager. Unfortunately, there was a ceiling to how high he could have risen due to his mixed Italian-German heritage. You needed to be a full-blooded Italian to be a made-man.

You’d think a hitman like my father would eventually get his comeuppance. Someone would surely whack him and throw him off the harbor for all the things he had done. However, lung cancer did him in when he was in his late forties.

The only other man in my life was my maternal grandfather, the Don of the Pastore family himself. You never would have guessed that Joseph Pastore would become a feared mafia boss. The man started honest work as a dockworker in Sicily before the lure of wealth brought him to the mafia.

He took a liking to the work and had a meteoric rise. He was a ‘made man’ when he was just twenty. Soon, he immigrated with his family to America for a better life. However, his definition of the American dream was to start his own crime family. Over the years, the Pastore family became the most feared mafia family in America.

If my father started my education as a hitman, then my grandfather finished it. He taught me how to use a rifle when most teenagers were worrying the prom and acne. He molded his own flesh and blood into a deadly weapon to be aimed at his enemies.

I hated the man for what he made me into.

Sixty paces.

My mother was something else entirely. Bianca Pastore was the cherished daughter of Don Pastore but the apple couldn’t have landed further away from the tree. She was this soft yet fiery spirted woman whose Italian heritage descended from the most dangerous Don in the country. Yet, she was kind and generous. She was the only person in the world who gave a damn about me.

Bianca Pastore was the daughter of a powerful Don. My mother could’ve lived like a queen. Yet, she left her family and tried to live an honest life. The only ties she had with the mafia was the love she had for my father. I never knew what she saw in that professional killer but it led to my birth.

I never know how a fucked up killer like me could ever come from such a sweet, kind-hearted woman like her. Maybe it was in my blood. My father was a hitman after all.

My mother tried to shield me from the mafia lifestyle. Too many kids get groomed to be the ‘soldato’ of the next generation. She wanted me to live a good honest life that was far away from the violence surrounding her father. We would’ve been poor as squirrels but we’d have each other.

Then, someone from the Irish mob killed her for merely being the estranged daughter of Don Pastore. I was barely old enough to shave but I tracked down her killers. I killed those sons of a bitches with my bare hands.

Funny thing was that I liked it. It was like scratching a good itch. The only problem is that the itch is going to come back with a vengeance.

The Irish may have pulled the trigger but another hand moved them to it. It took a lot of years before I learned the truth. I got plenty good at beating people but I eventually found out that a Russian gangster set them up for it.

It was an ex-Soviet officer named Sergei Petrov. The man had lost an eye in a bar fight which had led to his dishonorable discharge from the Soviet Army. After getting kicked out for gross misconduct, the man turned his talents to crime. Eventually, he locked horns with the Pastore family. Unfortunately, my mother got caught in the crossfire.

One of these days I was going to find him and make him pay.