“But you don’t get to skip out when your boss is fighting for his fucking life without any good damn reason, and then insult my woman right-the-fuck in front of me.” He stepped around the desk until nothing separated them.
“Y-your—” Adelmo’s hands shook over the stapler. “I didn’t realize—” His dark gaze shifted to Alessa again, narrowed, not quite glaring, as if his unfavorable situation were now her fault.
“You don’t fucking look at her.”
Adelmo snapped his stare forward.
“And you didn’tneedto realize,” Rocco continued. He tucked his hands into his pockets. “You could see her standing behind me, with my men. All youneededwas to know she was in the room with my blessing. Any other details were, quite frankly, none of your fucking business.”
Adelmo swallowed hard. “Sir— Don Cavallo, please—”
“No.” Rocco tipped his head, indicating the object Adelmo still held in his hands. “You’re going to deliver your own punishment, Adelmo. That’s how we make this right. I won’t lay a hand on you.”
Adelmo paled.
Rocco waited a beat, and when Adelmo said nothing, he elaborated. “You’re left-handed, correct?”
Slowly, Adelmo nodded.
“Good.” Rocco lifted his left hand and made a show of squeezing his fingers together, side-by-side, palm flat. “Press the fingers of your left hand together like this, tight as you can. Nice and flat. Yes, good. Now—and you might need to get down on the floor to put your back into this—I want you to take that stapler and very carefully staple each of your fingers together.”
Adelmo faltered, already down on one knee, and the stapler slipped from his hand. “What?”
Rocco narrowed his eyes. “No less than two staples between each knuckle joint.” He turned his own hand around and pointed for emphasis, as if the demonstration made it easier. It would do exactly the opposite, of course. “Staple the index to the middle, the middle to the ring, the ring to the pinky. I don’t care which side you start from, but connect all fucking four. No one’s leaving here until you do.”
Adelmo dropped to his knees, his eyes wide and his chest rising rapidly. “S-surely there’s some other way I can make this up to you…”
Rocco tucked his hands into his pockets. “If you’re going tobeuseless, Adelmo, then at least let me give you a good reason.”
He saw the moment Adelmo realized this punishment was about more than his slip of the tongue. Although, really, that was most of it. “D-Don Cavallo, please, have mercy…”
“Do you need to be held in place? Ignazio was awfully restless, stuck in that hospital for two days. I can call him in.”
Silence held between them as Adelmo worked on catching his breath. With shaking hands, Adelmo lifted the stapler off the ground. He fumbled it, stared at it, blew off some imaginary dust as though doing so might minimize the risk of infection, and finally extended his left hand the way Rocco had demanded. He clenched his jaw so tight Rocco thought he could hear the grinding molars from several feet away, but he leaned forward, rested the stapler properly on the nice, solid surface of the floor, and angled his hand pinky-side first beneath the mouth.
No one spoke, or moved to interrupt, as Adelmo leaned up over the stapler and dropped his entire bodyweight over the top of it. No one moved as a half-scream ripped from Adelmo’s mouth before he could bite it back.
By the time he seemed to be finishing up stapling the middle and ring fingers, blood was visibly pooling around the base of the stapler. Adelmo’s breathing was ragged at best. It was unlikely Adelmo would finish his assigned task before he passed out.
“Adelmo,” Rocco called, interrupting the man’s robotically stilted movement with the intention of tossing a bit more fuel onto the flame. “Before you black out, I do need to know why the hell you were MIA yesterday.”
A rush of air, like a strained, aggravated huff, escaped the panting man on the floor. “Yesterday,” he said, stammering over the word. The stapler went down again and blood dribbled past his lips as he bit down on something to contain the automatic response. Then he shifted back, adjusting again for last remaining seam. He turned his head and spit the blood onto the floor. “Yesterday … I was getting laid.”
The smile that lifted Rocco’s lips felt cruel even by his own estimation. “You were having a good day, then?”
“Yeah,” Adelmo said. He tucked his fingers into place beneath the blooded maw of the stapler and his shoulders heaved with a hard breath. “Couple o’ college sluts dancin’ their way through Vegas for the summer.” He pushed up to his knees, leaning over his blood-soaked hand, and his breathing wavered as his shoulders tensed. He squeezed his eyes shut and dropped again. Another half-shout rang out.
Rocco waited until he had one staple left, until Adelmo’s entire body was shaking from the pain and the effort to stay conscious, then he strode forward. Closer. He crouched down, drawing Adelmo’s half-delirious attention, and spoke in a hard, unfriendly tone. “Well, I’m so glad you were enjoying a threesome with another family’s strippers while my father was being resuscitated on the operating table.” And in case his sarcasm missed its mark, Rocco stood and swiftly dropped his foot down on the stapler. It skidded a bit in the ever-growing puddle of blood even as the metal teeth sank into whatever was caught in the mouth.
This time, Adelmo screamed with his whole chest.
Rocco stepped back, watching wordlessly as Adelmo dropped onto his ass, crushed and bloodied hand raised to his chest. Behind them, the office door flung open. Ignazio, Ugo, and Guiseppi raced into the room. Enzo and Vin were hot on their heels.
Adelmo rolled to his side and vomited on the floor.
Rocco grunted. “This fucker’s been demoted. We’ll find something I might trust him to do once the thought of him doesn’t make me want to smother him in raw meat and drop him in the lion’s cage at the nearest zoo.” He looked up. “Congratulations. The three of you just gained a bunch more men. I expect you to split them amicably.”
His remaining Capos nodded sharply.
