MOB BOSS 6: THE HEART OF RENO GABRINI (Mob Boss Series) (28 page)

But
Reno smiled that chilling smile at Tony again.
 
And spoke into the receiver.
 

“Now,”
he said and Tony, horrified, looked at the screen again.
 
A man drove into the parking lot of the
daycare, got out, and headed for the entrance.
 

“No,”
Tony cried.
 
“Those are my babies.
 
This can’t be happening.
 
You can’t let this happen, Reno!
 
They’re kids.
 
What are you doing?
 
They’re
babies!”

Tony
was on the edge of his seat as the man pulled out a gun, checked how many
rounds he had in the chambers, and then concealed it back into his pocket.
 
And then he entered the daycare.

“No!”
Tony screamed.
 
Guards held him down, but
he kept squirming and trying to break free.
 
“No!” He kept screaming.
 
He
couldn’t stop screaming.
 
“Reno, no.
 
Please make him stop.
 
Please pick up that phone and tell him to
stop! Reno, make him stop.
 
Make it
stop!”

Reno
angrily jumped from his chair and stood in front of Tony.
 
“Beg, motherfucker!” he yelled.
 
“Beg, you bastard, beg!”

And
Tony begged.
 
He begged and he begged for
the life of his children.
 
He wanted Reno
to show him the sympathy he didn’t show to Reno.
 
He wanted Reno to prove just how broken and
how soft the rumors around Vegas claimed he was.

Then
Reno, without warning, pulled out his gun and shot Tony between the eyes.
 
He shot him dead.
 
And just like that, the begging, the
squirming, the pleading stopped.
 
And
peace and quiet returned.

Reno
knew the truth.
 
He knew that the man who
entered that daycare center would soon be walking back out.
 
Without harming a flea.
 
Tony’s two small children would remain
untouched.
 
Reno knew the truth.
 
But even at the moment he took his last
breath on the face of this earth, Tony didn’t.

Reno
stared at Tony’s lifeless body.
 
He
stared at the man who had caused him so much grief.

“Now,
Tufarna,” Reno said to him, “we’re even.”

Grace
McKenzie drove onto the circular driveway of Tommy Gabrini’s Seattle home and
stopped at the steps.
 
She looked over at
her passenger and smiled.
 
“Thanks for
everything, Tree,” she said.

“You
know you’re welcome, girl,” Trina replied.
 
“We’ve got to spend a full day together again.
 
I know you’re a busy CEO now, but hey.
 
You can pamper yourself every now and then.”

“Oh,
I plan to.
 
I work entirely too
hard.
 
Tommy gets on my case about it all
the time.
 
But then he’s one to talk.”

“I’m
saying,” Trina said.
 
“I’ve been living
in his house for two months now and he’s rarely ever even in town.
 
How can you guys maintain any kind of
relationship with Tommy gone all the time like that?”

Grace
looked away from Trina and stared out of her car’s windshield.
 
“It’s been tough, I’m not even gonna tell any
stories.”
 
She looked back at Trina.
 
“It’s been hard.”

Trina’s
question was meant to be more of a rhetorical question, but she apparently had
hit a nerve.
 
“Has it been hard because
he’s always out of town, or is it because of the other thing?”

Grace
smiled.
 
Trina had a way of slicing
through the bull.
 
“The other thing,” she
said.

Trina
exhaled and looked out of the windshield too.
 
“He’s a Gabrini man, Grace.”

“And
I know what you said.
 
I know I have to
trust him.”

“You
do.
 
There’s no two ways about that.
 
You have to trust him completely.”

“I
expected drama,” Grace admitted.
 
“I
expected a woman or two to try to break us up.
 
But it’s been a constant thing.
 
And then there’s all of these new allegations.
 
Even my friends wonder if I’m being a fool
for Tommy.”

Trina
looked at her.
 
“Well are you?” she asked
her.

“No!
 
Tommy wouldn’t hurt me, I know he
wouldn’t.
 
It’s not him.
 
It’s me.
 
I’m used to dating nice looking guys, but I guess I’m just not used to
loving a man whose so in demand.”

Trina
laughed.

“You
know what I’m saying?” Grace asked.

“I
know exactly what you’re saying.
 
You
don’t wanna be that girl who loves a cheating man.
 
You don’t wanna be her.
 
I know what you’re saying.”

“I
wish I could be like you. I wish I could tell all those females to go screw
themselves and go on with my life with Tommy.”

“Hold
on there, now.
 
Don’t sing my praises too
fast.
 
I wasn’t like me, either, when I
first met my husband.
 
He was quote,
unquote, ‘in demand’ too, as you put it.
 
My so-called friends were calling me a fool too.
 
They declared I was clueless and Reno was
cheating on me right under my very nose, oh, I went through it too.
 
They just knew I was that girl.”
 
Trina looked at Grace.
 
“But I knew I wasn’t.
 
There came a time I had to decide if I was
going to listen to the echo chambers, or listen to my man.
 
I listened to my man.”

Grace
nodded.
 
Then shook
 
her head.
 
“Gabrini men,” she said and she and Trina laughed and high-fived.
 
They kept their hands clasped.

“You’ll
learn,” Trina said as the double doors to the residence opened and Tommy began
walking down the steps.
 
“We’re black
girls.
 
We don’t be trying to let these
men make fools out of us.
 
But being with
a Gabrini is different.
 
You either trust
him completely, or you shouldn’t be with him.
 
Point blank period.
 
That’s what I
had to learn.
 
And you’ll have to learn
to trust unconditionally.”

She
noticed that Grace was now looking past her and toward the steps.
 
Trina turned and looked too.
 
When she saw Tommy coming toward them, she
smiled.
 
“Especially if you plan to be
with a man as fine as Tommy.”

Grace
smiled.
 
She knew what she had.
 
That wasn’t the problem.
 
Figuring out how to keep what she had was the
problem.

Tommy
walked around to the driver side and Grace pressed down the window.
 
Tommy, as usual, was flawlessly put together
in his dark-brown polo shirt and light-brown dress pants.
 
His brownish-blond hair was perfectly groomed
in a straight-line cut.
 

“Hey,
babe,” he said to Grace and kissed her on the lips.
 
“Enjoyed yourself today?”

“Very
much,” Grace said.

“So what
do you have to show for this entire day of pampering?” He asked this as he
looked down at her sizeable breasts.

“I
have absolutely nothing to show,” she said.
 
“That was the point.”

“Oh,
no,” Tommy said jokingly.
 
“You’re
beginning to sound like Tree.
 
Don’t you
corrupt my baby,” he warned Trina.

Trina
laughed.
 
“You did that yourself when you
bothered with this sweet, innocent child.”

Tommy
and Grace both laughed.
 
“Very funny,” he
said.
 
Then he turned far more somber.

Trina
stared at him.
 
Her heart began to
pound.
 
“What is it?” she asked him.

He
didn’t know how else to say it.
 
“Reno’s
back, Tree,” he said.

Trina’s
heart dropped through her shoe.
 
She
hadn’t seen or heard from Reno in two months, when he drove his family to
Seattle, handed them to Tommy, and left.
 
He had to do what he had to do, he said at that time.
 
And she knew she couldn’t stop him.

Now
he was back.

She
got out of the car and walked deliberately slow into the house.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Trina
walked up the stairs of Tommy’s massive home and then began to walk along the
second floor corridor.
 
She stopped first
in the Nursery.
 
Dominic Gabrini, Junior
was safely in his bed and sound asleep.
 
And Reno wasn’t in there.

Then
she walked to the room beside the Nursery.
 
Jimmy Mack Gabrini was in his bed too, and asleep too, and his Nurse
looked up from a book she was reading.
 
Two months after he was shot, two months after they had at first thought
he was dead on the spot, he was still hooked up to I-Vs and Oxygen and his head
was still wrapped in bandages.
 
That
bullet caused a lot of damage, and he had a long road to recovery.
 
But thank God, Trina thought as she stared at
him, a full recovery was expected. But it was going to take time.

She
remembered what happened that day as if it happened yesterday.
 
It had been a hellish scene.
 
Tony Tufarna forced Reno to choose a family
member for execution and Reno chose his oldest child.
 
Trina was begging him, through her taped
mouth, to choose her, but Reno chose Jimmy.
 

And
when that shot was heard, when that blast sounded, Trina thought she was going
to die where she sat.
 
She cried unlike
she had ever cried before.
 
She felt the
kind of pain that should have taken her away from this world.
 
She thought it was over.
 
There was no way, no way at all, that she and
Reno could pick up the pieces after something like that.

It
wasn’t until Sal removed her tape and untied her hands did she realize how
badly they had underestimated God’s grace.
 
She pulled Jimmy into her arms just to hold his lifeless body.
 
She pulled him into her arms to comfort his
soul.
 
But then she realized, as she held
him, that she wasn’t holding a dead body.
 
There was still life in that body.
 
It was faint, and slipping fast, but it was life.

While
Sal called 911, Reno had lifted his son’s body from the sofa and was trying to
run all the way to the hospital with his son in his arms.
 
He was just that spooked.
 
They had been granted a reprieve, and he was
determined to not let this one fail.
 
But
fortunately for all of them, the ambulance came.
 
And Jimmy, to his parents eternal thanks, was
saved.

Trina
still trembled when she thought about that day.
 
And there were many times when she couldn’t pull herself to think about
it.
 
But Reno was back.
 
He always gave them strength.

She
walked to the only other room that he could be in.
 
Her room.
 
She slowly pushed open the door and looked into the room.
 
As soon as she saw him lying across her bed,
naked as a jaybird, she dropped all pretense at coolness.
 

“Reno!”
she yelled as she closed the door and ran to him.

He
lifted his head when he heard her yell, and he smiled, then he laid his head
back down.
 
And waited for the pain.

Trina
jumped on top of him as if he was a trampoline and he wrapped her into his
arms.
 
It had been two months since he
held her.
 
Two long months since he felt
her and smelled her and tasted her.
 
And
he couldn’t wait another second.