Read Online Dark Soul Vol. 5 by Aleksandr Voinov - Free Book Online Page A

by something that sounded like a chortle from the puppy. Silvio spread his fingers before its face and the animal grabbed them with both paws and its teeth again.
    Just as Stefano was planning to make his excuses and head back up to the house, Silvio spoke. “How’s Donata?”
    “She’s spending hours and hours on the phone, talking to her uncle, I think. Maybe his . . . partner, too. I don’t know. We’re currently not talking much about anything.”
    “You miss her.”
    “I’m just . . . yeah.” He rubbed his neck, then rolled his shoulders.
    “I miss her. I’m sleeping in one of the guest rooms, too, so that’s part of it. And I’d feel like an asshole if I just ran away from that. It’s just really awkward. I can’t lose her. But I can’t lose you, either.” Not after I finally found you. After all that strife and battle, I think I deserve both.
    I think. I do.
    “It would be easier for you to just tell me to get lost.”
    “I’m not interested in easy .”
    Silvio frowned, but then nodded. “Especially since you have another war on your hands.”
    “I do?”
    “Yeah. Remember Augusto Viero’s cal ?” Silvio disengaged his hand from the puppy and leaned forward, rubbing his fingers. “The dead guy? Viero told me he’d been caught by the Russians, tortured, skinned, and then dropped at that meat plant his associate owns.
    When I got there, the body was frozen solid.”
    “Why are you telling me this now ?”
    “Because it’s bullshit. The cuts were made when the guy was dead.
    He wasn’t tortured. Pretty sure he was just executed with a point-blank shot to the neck. I didn’t look that closely.”
    Do I want to know why you know this stuff?
    “Viero invented a murder so everybody would stay scared. The Russians had nothing to do with it.”
    “Okay, I follow you. So why do we have a war?”
    “He said you were weak and in that kind of situation, the family needs a decisive leader.” Silvio shrugged. “He hired me to kill you.”
    “Shit.” Stefano felt his heart pound in his chest and up to his throat. “You should have told me this sooner.”
    Silvio glanced at the puppy. “I could kill them al , you know.
    Viero and all the other traitors.”
    “How much support does he have, do you think? Who was at the meeting?”
    “Enough to play at this shit, not enough to take power outright.
    Possibly a couple capos . I’ll take them out for you, it’s no big deal.”
    Seemed he’d stumbled from one massive bloodletting into the next. For years, nothing like this had happened, and then all this shit hit in just a few weeks.
    Sell the whole thing. Sell everybody, and you’ll walk free.
    And of course Silvio would do it, and he might even get it all done without being killed in turn. Silvio could somehow wade through rivers of blood without actually getting tainted by all that red.
    “How many people have you killed so far, Silvio?”
    “Around forty, give or take a couple.” Silvio nodded. “I’ve been productive, Battista always said.”
    Adding how many to that? Ten? A dozen? Pushing the number past fifty in any case. To be honest, he didn’t give a fuck about any of those people. Nobody got hit by a sicario if he wasn’t a complete scumbag. Well, mostly. Normal people could usually be made to see reason without employing a highly-trained, highly-paid killer. Silvio could easily do it, no doubt. He was capable and ruthless. But there was always the potential that he’d get hit, too. Or that some avenging force or karma would catch up with him eventually.
    Speaking of avenging force; not with the Feds in the city. Not with all that surveillance going on. “I’ll think about it,” Stefano said eventually, and received a curious glance from Silvio. “It’s not that I’m weak, but I do need to think about this a bit longer. These are my people. I can’t just execute them on a suspicion.”
    “You have to act before Viero tells me to do it.”
    “Yeah. I will.” If