Chapter 12: Mafia Kings: Massimo: Chapter 12

I was freaking OUT.

I hadn’t seen anything like this since –

Well…

Since I was six years old.

And I was struggling to keep from having a panic attack.

I mean, I’d just watched Roderigo get blown away –

And another one of Nona’s men get shot all to hell –

All while hanging over the Mountain’s shoulder.

And now there was a dead man with a hole in his head leaking blood all over the floor of the boat.

The giant from Tuscany was not exactly sympathetic.

“SHUT UP AND SIT DOWN!” he screamed at me.

“THERE’S A DEAD BODY!” I yelled back.

“AND THERE’S GONNA BE TWO MORE IF I DON’T GET US OUT OF HERE!”

I winced as I stepped through the puddle of crimson and maneuvered to the back seats.

In her song “Bodak Yellow,” Cardi B calls Christian Louboutins ‘bloody shoes’ because of their signature red soles.

Well, my Louboutins were bloody shoes for real.

I felt the slight motion of the boat as we moved away from the pier.

I was just turning around to sit when a giant spike in acceleration threw me backwards onto my ass –

And we shot out into the Grand Canal at top speed.

“A LITTLE WARNING WOULD BE NICE, ASSHOLE!” I screamed at him.

He ignored me as he sped down the center of the waterway –

Straight for a Vaporetto, one of the ‘water buses’ that ferried dozens of people at a time through Venice.

“WATCH OUT!” I shrieked.

He jerked the wheel at the last second, and we curved out of the path of the Vaporetto –

Towards a water taxi and a couple of motorboats.

I screamed again, but he managed to avoid them as we sped down the middle of the waterway.

All the other boats hugged the sides of the canal to keep out of our way.

Massimo apparently knew how to drive a boat –

But he did not know how deal with traffic, that was for damn sure.

“Do I need to come up there and drive?!” I shouted angrily.

“No, but you need to tell me how to get to your grandmother’s!”

“The fastest way would be to take the – ”

“What?!” he yelled over the roar of the motor and the wind.

Fuck this.

I leaned forward, grabbed the passenger seat in front of me, and pulled myself onto my feet.

Then I winced as I stepped through the blood and over the corpse –

And plopped down in the seat next to Massimo.

“The fastest way is to turn around and go down the canal next to the university!” I yelled.

It was still hard to be heard over the wind, but it was a hell of a lot easier now that I was two feet away from him.

“Not happening!” he yelled as he concentrated on avoiding the other boats. “The shooter was coming out as we left!”

So that’s why he took off like a bat out of hell…

“Alright, then – see that smaller canal coming up on the right? If you take that, you’ll – ”

“No smaller canals!” he shouted. “We have to go as fast as possible, and we can’t get boxed in!”

I rolled my eyes.

If you’re not going to take my advice, then why did you fucking ask for it?

“The Grand Canal eventually dumps out into the Giudecca Canal. Keep going to the left and hug the coastline, and you’ll circle around the island.”

“Okay.”

The Grand Canal cuts through the center of Venice in a giant ‘S’ shape. It’s only about 225 feet at its widest.

The Giudecca Canal, on the other hand, is huge – about 1200 feet wide. It’s not even a canal, really – more like a waterway between Giudecca Island and the city of Venice.

We were going so fast that we reached it in less than a minute.

Massimo hung a left and started towards the southeastern tip of Venice –

When I looked behind us and saw a scary sight.

Another speedboat was approaching at top speed –

And it wasn’t a police cruiser.

“Somebody’s chasing us!” I yelled.

Massimo looked over his shoulder, cursed, and asked, “Do you know how to drive a boat?”

“I live in Venice. YES, I know how to drive a boat, you fucking chauvinist pig,” I shouted over the wind.

“I didn’t know mafia princesses drove themselves around,” he yelled back.

I think he was trying to sneer as he said it, but it kinda lost its effect when he had to shout at the top of his lungs to be heard.

“They do when they sneak out all the fuckin’ time!”

“Take the wheel and switch with me.”

“What are you gonna do?!”

“Deal with our friends,” he shouted.

I grabbed the wheel to keep it steady, waited until he moved past me, then dropped my purse on the passenger side and scooted over into the driver’s seat.

I was freaked out, yeah –

But it was a fuckin’ rush, too. I’d never driven anything this fast before.

I didn’t tell him, that, though. Would’ve undercut the whole You fuckin’ chauvinist pig part.

Massimo grabbed the dead guy’s assault rifle off the bottom of the boat. The fact that it had blood all over it didn’t seem to bother him one bit.

He maneuvered to the back row of seats…

Braced the gun on the top of a headrest…

And fired.

BLAM!

He had it on single mode because there was only one gunshot.

I glanced over my shoulder.

The boat behind us moved farther away, off to the right.

BLAM!

Pause…

BLAM!

Pause…

BLAM!

Massimo was taking his time to aim – like a sniper would.

I glanced back over my shoulder and saw the boat had fallen significantly behind us.

Good.

We were coming up around the southeastern tip of Venice, so I throttled back to make the turn.

“Why the fuck are you slowing down?!” he shouted.

“Because we’ll roll the boat if I take it any faster, you IDIOT!” I shouted back.

“…oh,” he said, then went back to watching our pursuers.

I guess they were far enough away that it wasn’t worth shooting at them, because he came back and crouched next to me in the aisle.

“Move over,” he shouted.

“Fuck you,” I shouted back. “You just keep an eye on the other boat.”

He seemed to grumble – I couldn’t actually hear it over the roaring wind – but he didn’t argue.

As we curved into the straightaway, I hit the throttle again and went back to full speed.

My hair was blowing straight out behind me, we were going so fast.

Ruined my up-do, but fuck if it wasn’t worth it.

“Why aren’t they shooting back at us?” I yelled over the wind.

“Because they don’t want to hit you.”

“Why not?”

“They want you as a bargaining piece.”

“Who are they?”

“Do you know who the Wagner Group is?”

“DUH. I read the news.”

They were the guys who had done most of the Russian fighting in Ukraine – and then nearly taken over Moscow.

“They’re probably Wagner,” he shouted.

“What the fuck do a bunch of Russian mercenaries want with me?”

“The people who ACTUALLY whacked the Agrellas sent them.”

He sounded kind of pissed off as he shouted it.

Probably because I’d yelled the same thing in a hall full of normies.

Fuck him.

He’d spanked me in public.

Asshole.

(Even though a little shiver went through me as I remembered it.)

“So your family DIDN’T whack the Agrellas?” I shouted.

“No.”

“Who did, then?”

“A guy working for my uncle.”

“Uh, HELLO – since when is your uncle not your family?”

“Since he’s trying to whack me and my brothers, too.”

“…oh.”

That must have made for an awkward family get-together.

“How’d those guys in the boat know we were coming?” I shouted.

“Either the shooter at Ca’ Foscari called them, or…” Massimo got a troubled look on his face. “Where’s your phone?”

“In my bag.”

He reached over, rummaged in my Birkin –

“Hey, I didn’t say you could GET IT!” I yelled, but he ignored me.

He pulled out my iPhone –

And then threw it over the side of the boat.

“WHAT THE FUCK, DUDE?!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.

“We were tracking you through Find My iPhone,” he shouted over the wind. “If we could do it, they were probably doing it.”

“YOU DON’T KNOW THAT!”

“A guy named Giotto betrayed your grandmother. There might be other moles.”

Shit – Giotto had been with us since I came to live with Nona…

Although that didn’t excuse throwing my phone overboard.

“You could’ve just turned it OFF!” I shouted.

“Better to be safe than sorry.”

“You IDIOT – they know we’re going back to my grandmother’s! They don’t even need to track us!”

Massimo got a look on his face like Oh shit, you’re right.

Of course, he didn’t say the ‘you’re right’ part out loud.

Prick.

“We can’t go back, then,” he shouted.

“What the fuck do you mean we can’t go back?!” I yelled. “All you wanted to do before was take me back – now you’re like, ‘Psyyyyych’?!”

“That was before I knew there was another team of mercenaries.”

I was still furious about my phone, but I had a more pressing concern. We were approaching the point where I’d either have to turn left to go to Nona’s –

Or take a completely different route and go someplace else.

“If we’re not going home, then where are we going, genius?” I shouted.

“Can you take us somewhere on the mainland? Someplace not heavily populated?”

Venice lay to the west, on our left. The island of Murano was in the distance ahead of us, and the island of Le Vignole was to the northeast.

Between the latter two were a series of smaller islands – and plenty of channels that led to the huge stretch of water between Venice and the mainland.

“Yeah, I can do that. What about the guys behind us?”

He looked. “It doesn’t seem like they’re following us. There’s probably more of them lying in wait near your grandmother’s palazzo.”

“Fuck ‘em, then,” I shouted as I steered the boat north – away from Venice.