The Name of Honor Read online

  SUSAN FANETTI

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  The Name of Honor

  ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

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  ~ Epilogue ~

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

  The Name of Honor © 2019 Susan Fanetti

  All rights reserved

  Cover design by Susan Fanetti, with images licensed from DepositPhotos and Shutterstock

  Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

  The Pagano Brothers:

  Simple Faith, Book 1

  Hidden Worthiness, Book 2

  Accidental Evils, Book 3

  The Pagano Family:

  (Complete Series)

  Footsteps, Book 1

  Touch, Book 2

  Rooted, Book 3

  Deep, Book 4

  Prayer, Book 5

  Miracle, Book 6

  Sawtooth Mountains Stories:

  Somewhere

  Someday

  Anywhere

  The Northwomen Sagas:

  (Complete Series)

  God’s Eye

  Heart’s Ease

  Soul’s Fire

  Father’s Sun

  Historical Standalones:

  Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven

  Carry the World

  The Brazen Bulls MC:

  (Complete Series)

  Crash, Book 1

  Twist, Book 2

  Slam, Book 3

  Blaze, Book 4

  Honor, Book 5

  Fight, Book 6

  Stand, Book 7

  Light, Book 7.5

  Lead, Book 8

  The Brazen Bulls Beginning:

  (Standalone Prequel)

  Wait

  THE NIGHT HORDE MC SAGA:

  The Signal Bend Series:

  (The First Complete Series)

  Move the Sun, Book 1

  Behold the Stars, Book 2

  Into the Storm, Book 3

  Alone on Earth, Book 4

  In Dark Woods, Book 4.5

  All the Sky, Book 5

  Show the Fire, Book 6

  Leave a Trail, Book 7

  The Night Horde SoCal:

  (The Second Complete Series)

  Strength & Courage, Book 1

  Shadow & Soul, Book 2

  Today & Tomorrow, Book 2.5

  Fire & Dark, Book 3

  Dream & Dare, Book 3.5

  Knife & Flesh, Book 4

  Rest & Trust, Book 5

  Calm & Storm, Book 6

  Nolan: Return to Signal Bend

  Love & Friendship

  As S.E. Fanetti:

  Aurora Terminus

  As always, I send out great thanks, deep affection, and true friendship to TeriLyn, Amy, and Kim. Without you to back me up with your hard work and keen insights, I don’t know where I’d be.

  For let the gods so speed me as I love

  The name of honour more than I fear death

  ~ William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

  Act I, Scene 2, line 89

  ~ 1 ~

  Angie felt naked without his gun.

  Slipping on his suitcoat, he missed the press of his shoulder rig—the cross of the straps over his back, the heft of his Beretta under his arm. Unlike Nick or Donnie, the don and the underboss of the Pagano Brothers, Angie didn’t regularly hobnob with the rich and famous, and he thus had no cause to be out in the world unarmed, trusting his protection to others. He was the protection. As the Pagano Brothers’ head of security and enforcement, he was rarely off the job, thus he was rarely unarmed.

  Now he was both on the job and unarmed, and he felt naked. Exposed and vulnerable.

  But not even the great Nick Pagano had enough pull to get his people on a commercial flight packing heat, so Angie straightened his cuffs and buttoned one button of his made-to-measure Armani, checked his look in the mirror of this Berlin hotel room, and picked up his two-suiter bag.

  For now, until it was time to get dirty, he wasn’t Angelo Corti, caporegime in the Pagano Brothers Family and consigliere to Don Pagano. He was Andrew Rutland, printing company executive, looking to expand his business into Eastern Europe.

  Andrew Rutland and his colleagues didn’t carry guns.

  Angelo Corti and his team were going to need several. He hoped like hell they had the allies they thought they had when they landed in Kyiv.

  ~oOo~

  Tony Cioccolanti and Trey Pagano were both waiting for him in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt Berlin. Seated and in conversation, they didn’t see Angie coming, and he slowed his step and considered those two young men as he crossed the wide, echoing space.

  His team. Were they up to this job? He thought so. He fucking hoped so. Because they would all be bloody before it was done.

  Angie was fully aware of his reputation. People saw him as a thug, with ice for blood, a stomach of iron, and a taste for cruelty. He’d earned that rep, and it served him well. If people believed you were willing and able to inflict any horror, if you’d proved that you were, then you rarely had to push them so far to get what you wanted.

  So yes, he was capable of brutality, and when it was deserved, he felt no angst in meting it out. But he was neither cold-blooded nor, he thought, naturally cruel. The capacity for violence wasn’t really what made him good at his work, anyway. The thing that made him good was his curiosity and perception. He was a natural people-watcher and innately intuitive. He saw what was not being said. He saw where there were secrets, and he found the weaknesses to exploit and bring secrets into the light.

  Since Trey Pagano had been part of the organization, Angie had studied the kid. Trey was Nick’s cousin, but the nearly forty years between their ages made them uncle and nephew—to the extent that they called each other by those terms. The very moment Nick had brought Trey in, the rumor mill had begun to churn. Though Nick hadn’t made his plans clear to anyone for years, not even his closest advisors, Angie had known almost from the start that the rumors were true: Nick wanted his young relation, should Trey prove himself worthy, to lead the family some day.

  Which would have been the obvious choice, under most circumstances. Trey was the only other man in the organization that shared Nick’s blood. Nick’s father and uncle had begun the Pagano Brothers, had been the Pagano Brothers, and of course he would want his blood to continue at the helm when his own time was over. Moreover, Trey was smart and capable, and had his head straight on
his shoulders. He’d make a good don when he was ready.

  Il sangue non mente. Blood doesn’t lie. It was the first principle of their world. You could trust your family, your heritage, your legacy. Your line.

  But Trey was not full-blooded Italian. His father’s first wife, a crazy bitch the Paganos had erased, had been some Irish-Anglo mutt. In the tradition of La Cosa Nostra—the kind of tradition that was effectively law—only full-blooded Italians could rise above associate or soldier, much less lead a family. In fact, it was deeply controversial even to make a half-blood, and those few in the world who were could never be capos.

  The rumors in the early days had cast Trey as a test case; that idea was still knocked around some. Nick had a son of his own—Lorenzo, the youngest of his four children—and it was said that Nick meant to elevate Trey in order to clear a path for Ren to walk when he was ready. Nick had married outside the blood, so his own children were half-bloods, too.

  Ren was young, barely a teenager. But he was old enough for Angie to be fairly sure about two things and absolutely certain about a third. First: Ren would never cut it in the organization. He was soft and sensitive and wouldn’t have the stomach or the spine for the work. Second: Ren wouldn’t want it. See: soft and sensitive. See also: sullen and antisocial. Maybe he’d harden as he grew up, but Angie would be surprised to see the kid change that much.

  And the third thing? Trey wasn’t a test case but the one true heir. Angie didn’t think Nick had ever had any intention of making a path for Ren to come up behind him, but even if he had once considered it, Nick knew as well as Angie did that Ren wasn’t Pagano Brothers material.

  Angie would do everything he could to keep Ren away from the dark side of his father’s world—and Nick would, too, when it came down to it. A soft, sullen king who sat on the throne for no other reason than he was born to the right man? That would destroy the Pagano Brothers.

  All you had to do was look to Boston and see what Tommy Sacco was doing to his family. That asshole had no business sitting at the head of one of the Five Families. He hadn’t even been a good capo. But people had been cleaning up his fuckups and covering up the mess from his rages for years, and they were doing it to this day—double-time since he’d taken the seat. Even with all that full-time damage control, Tommy threatened to turn the Sacco Family into a laughingstock.

  Old Gabriel had tried to leave his son with a mentor; he’d all but given Nick control of the Sacco Family in his last, waning years, so Tommy would have a strong seat to take over and a guiding hand at his side. But Tommy had taken Nick’s guidance like a petulant teenager, and iced Nick out before Gabriel Sacco’s corpse was cold.

  His father had known his son would be a bad don, but he was bound in tradition, and saw no alternative but to name his firstborn as his successor. He had only two children, and his younger child was a daughter. Even less likely than a half-blood at the helm of a family was a woman there.

  At that thought, halfway across the lobby, Angie laughed. After several years of cleaning up her brother’s messes and basically running the family, Giada Sacco had tired of the sidelines. She was preparing to make her move and take over Tommy’s seat.

  Nick wanted to put a half-blood at the Pagano seat on the New England Council, and Giada intended to put her shapely female ass in the Sacco seat.

  Their world was going to fucking burn. Nick was pouring the gasoline, and Giada was striking the match. Thinking about what was coming made Angie’s head hurt.

  But it wasn’t coming quite yet. Giada was still putting her pieces on the board. So was Nick. Neither had taken their plans out of the shadows.

  Trey wasn’t yet even made yet. After—what, five, six?—years in the family, he was still a lowly associate, though he’d been given responsibilities and perks well above his station. A few times, Angie had been prepared for the move that would turn Nick’s intentions from rumor to truth: the day Trey would be made. Those few times, Nick had put Trey in a situation to make his bones, but each time, he’d pulled him back at the last minute.

  Angie didn’t think Nick had changed his mind in those instances. He thought the don had been testing Trey, studying him. Studying his whole family, too. When he truly made his move, he wouldn’t pull back.

  The don was no fool and understood all the stakes. He knew how his actions regarding Trey would rock their world—their whole world. He was biding his time, waiting for his moment. Waiting for Trey to be ready to rise, and the family to be ready to win the fight to let him. To give Nick Pagano what he wanted.

  But when Nick had told Angie to put Trey on this job—this mission—Angie knew this was it. He would eat his boots if Trey wasn’t made when they got home. There was no other good reason for him to be on this job, and this job was no mere errand.

  Angie had been a Pagano man for more than twenty years, and he had never known a job as big as this one. Failure in the Ukraine could—likely would—destroy the family. The team here carried the weight of the whole organization on their shoulders. Three men.

  With the singular exception of Donnie Goretti, Nick’s underboss and most trusted friend, who couldn’t do this job because his appearance was too distinctive and memorable, when Nick had named the men he wanted in Kyiv, he had identified the men he trusted most in the whole family:

  Angie, of course. Donnie was Nick’s right hand, and Angie was his left.

  Tony Cioccolanti, a seasoned soldier and, after Angie, their best and most tested enforcer.

  And Trey, an unmade associate. With the exception of a half-formed understanding of the Ukrainian language, he had no particular skill or experience to recommend him for this job.

  What he had was Nick’s blood. What he had was a destiny.

  Oh yeah, Nick meant to make Trey when this was done.

  This mission to kill the pakhan of a Ukrainian bratva. In Ukraine. Like you do.

  Angie had watched Trey over the years he’d been a Pagano man. In fact, he’d watched him longer than that. Angie’s sister, Tina, was married to a Pagano—one of Trey’s true uncles—and Angie had had plenty of opportunity at various family functions over the past fifteen years or so to watch the boy become a man, and then the newbie associate become a true Pagano man.

  Trey might have come in on a golden carpet, but he was walking the walk now.

  Though Trey got a lot of flak for being the Chosen One, the Golden Boy, and not deserving it, Angie saw why the kid wanted this life, and why Nick would fight for him. Yeah, he’d had all the advantages and had not always been aware how much boost he was getting from things not his own doing, and yeah, he’d had his sullen, hormonal phase, but Angie had seen the Pagano man in the way Trey was with his father.

  Or maybe he’d just seen himself—but that was one and the same. Angie was nothing if not a Pagano man.

  He knew that conflict, that wanting, needing to get out from under a powerful father—a good father, a good man, the kind who was impossible to live up to, and who had already planned out your whole fucking life, dragging you along in his footsteps.

  Angie knew how that could fuck a boy up. It was one thing to survive a shitty father and want to be nothing like him. It was something else entirely to stand in the shadow of a paragon and know you never could be. And the guilt of being ungrateful doubled the fuckery.

  In his own case, his father hadn’t been a wealthy architect from the most influential family in the whole goddamn state. Angelo Corti Sr.—Angie and Trey even shared the burden of being named for the men they couldn’t match—had been a grocer. He’d owned Corti Market, which Angie and his siblings now owned, and his brother, Matt, ran.

  A grocer. Nothing but that, and yet everybody in town had known and loved him. He’d been a good man all the way through—adoring husband, doting father, savvy businessman, town luminary, lay leader in the Church. To all appearances, he’d been perfect. In actual fact, he’d been close.

  Angie had loved him desperately. And hated being his son.


  But Angie was forty-nine years old, and he’d gotten over that shit a long fucking time ago. Not even his father’s death had caused those demons to rise again.

  If Trey had gotten over his shit, too, and his wanting this life now came from within and not without—if he knew who he was, as his own man, a Pagano man—then he was ready to be made.

  “You ready?” Angie asked as he came up on Trey and Tony.

  They both stood. “You want to grab a bite?” Trey asked. “There’s the restaurant here, or the concierge said there’s a good place around the corner.”

  They’d been in Berlin less than a day, and all they’d seen of the city was what they’d passed on the way to the hotel—in the dark. But this wasn’t a vacation, and they weren’t sightseeing. “Let’s get to the airport,” Angie said. “This ain’t playtime, kiddos.”

  “Breakfast isn’t playtime, Ange,” Tony complained. “A man’s gotta eat.”

  “You’ll live. Let’s motor.” Angie turned and headed for the door, expecting the others to follow.

  They did.

  ~oOo~

  “Would you like another, Mr. Rutland?”

  The flight attendant in the alluringly snug blue uniform leaned in and scooped his empty glass and its cocktail napkin off his tray. Angie caught a whiff of cologne, something citrusy, as her cleavage neared.

  Oh, she was definitely working it.

  “I’m good, doll. Thanks.” It wasn’t even a three-hour flight, they were barely more than halfway through it, and she’d been serving him scotch on the rocks like she was trying to liquor him up and take advantage. That was his fourth she was clearing away, and it wasn’t noon yet. It wouldn’t do for him to land in Ukraine drunk, but how could he turn down free drinks with top-shelf scotch?

  Angie had never flown first class before. He’d flown only a few times in his life—a couple trips to Sicily, a couple to Florida or California for work of one kind or another, once to Chicago, also for work—and he’d thought he didn’t like flying. Turned out, he didn’t like flying coach. First class, he could get used to. Especially if the flight attendants all looked like this blonde beauty with the accent.

  Across the aisle, Tony was asleep, and Trey was watching some black-and-white movie on his tablet. At his side, an old woman was reading from an actual book. He’d glanced at her page once and read enough to know it was an extremely graphic and rough sex scene that blue-haired broad was reading through her trifocals. Shit he’d think twice about. Whoa.