Dante: A Dark High School Bully Romance (Mafia Academy Book 2), page 1
Dante
Mafia Academy
Holly S Roberts
Wicked Story Telling
Copyright © 2022 Holly S. Roberts
All rights reserved
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Printed in the United States of America
This book is for Laura Randazzo because without her in my life, I'd never have come up with the Mafia Academy idea. She's my amica and I love her.
Glossary
Bacha ma culo – kiss my ass
Bastardo - bastard
Cagacazzo – lame ass dumb
Capeesh – understood
Cazzo – dick, like Americans use the word fuck
Che palle – what balls Maria’s favorite phrase
Che te pozzino ammazza – you shall be butchered
Chi non va non vede, chi non vede non sa e chi non sa se lo prende sempre in culo - if you don’t go you won’t see, if you don’t see you won’t know, if you don’t know you’ll take it in the ass every time
Cretino – idiot
Cuando l’amico chiede, non v’è domani - when a friend asks, there is no tomorrow
Cuore Mio – my heart
Dio cane – goddammit
Dio santo – oh my God
Il mio tesoro – my treasure
Ma' Don - surprise
Manache – oh hell
Mannaggia tua – shit damn
Mia figlia – my daughter
Mi amica – my sister
Mi raccomando – listen to me
Mi stai uccidendo – you are killing me
Piccola – little one
Porca troia – fucking hell
Puttana – whore
Vita mia – My life
Chapter One
Dante
It was finally the great promised land called senior year. I never thought I would live this long. Sophomore year was a free-for-all with too many entities trying to establish themselves. Last year had a challenge every month with little time for the bruises to heal. I didn’t mind the pain but grew tired of the dumb shits who thought they could take what was mine.
Some people didn’t like my management style and needed to test my abilities. I guarantee they didn’t like the outcome. Some tangled with my entire crew. It didn’t end well for them either.
This year would be worse.
I intertwined my fingers, popped my knuckles, and scanned the rotunda. The senior welcome party was in full swing and it was the last place I wanted to be.
Two girls stopped in front of me. Their clothes showed enough tit to keep half the guys in this room happy. Maybe they were nice-looking but the face paint didn’t do it for me. Add their combined perfume and you had exactly what I wasn’t interested in this evening. Their indecision was laughable. They wanted to say something. They giggled a bit. I stared, no smile, no invite. What the fuck were they doing? I approached a girl if I was interested, not the other way around.
My expression matched my thoughts.
They made the right decision and moved on. One wobbled on her ridiculous heels and I figured they were drunk. Not a surprise. It was the first party night of the season.
From across the room, I saw Caine, my best friend, roommate, and the guy who had my back. He was holding up the wall much like me, keeping an eye on the surroundings and trying not to yawn over whatever the receps were saying to him. He might hook up tonight. He might not. Caine was strange that way. Pussy did not make him tick. He took it when he wanted and walked away when he didn’t. He was eighteen, going on eighty, and did not have a teenage bone in his body and I’ll include boner with that.
Usually, I would be the one getting my dick worked on. With simply a look and a nod to the nearest dark corner, it would happen. I wasn’t feeling the call of pussy tonight. I’d rarely felt it all summer. If my crew got wind, they’d spike my drinks with Viagra. I’d keep that 411 to myself and not put up with their endless shit.
I continued surveillance and spotted the rest of my crew. They were having a good time. They should. We’d earned this night by rite of passage. Senior year came with a toolbox of opportunity and me and my crew were at the top of our game.
Crews were our safety net here at Rochester. They tended to be small groups with six to ten members. The guys at my back earned their spots freshman year through loyalty. It was a rough time and we were all scrambling but the guys stood their ground and we came out on top.
We were the ragtag crew of misfits. We came to Rochester with only our names. We knew no one. I got lucky when Caine was assigned as my roommate. I wasn’t sure about him in the beginning. I soon discovered that Caine and I did not have the same ambitions. He preferred playing in the background, subtly controlling his world while I wanted it all. Power, money, and pussy. It took a very short time before I knew Caine was not someone you fucked with. He became the first on my crew, though he still had never officially accepted. That was Caine.
Kids at Rochester teamed up into crews for different reasons. I only had one. I was not raised to take a back seat to anyone. Caine enjoyed the background, deciphering the bigger picture. He saw clarity where others saw chaos. His instincts were killer and I’d learned to listen to him and put up with his shit when he was right which was most of the time. Caine could fight. He’d proved himself decisively freshman year after three guys jumped me. As far as I know he took on all three and they didn’t simply walk away. Three ambulances rolled onto campus and Caine was almost booted from Rochester. It all happened while I was laid up with cracked ribs. He hadn’t said a word and I only discovered the truth when I went back to class. Again, that was Caine.
Many students had prebuilt loyalties when they arrived as freshmen. The fact my crew came with none made us hungrier. I planned to take the top spot freshman year and didn’t think anything or anyone would stop me. Caine was the sane one and yes, that was an oxymoron. He said wait, watch, and learn. I might not have liked it, but he was right. I wasn’t ready to handle Brambilla even though my youthful cockiness said otherwise. Sanity prevailed and I did exactly as Caine advised. It put us in the best position to take on several seniors the following year. We established ourselves as the academy powerhouse and we were keeping it until we left.
I’d had no idea how much fucking shit I would put up with once my crew was last man standing. From bullshit complaints because someone looked at someone cross-eyed to someone getting their shoulder bumped in the hall, the petty shit never ended. Right now, I was struggling with there being anything good about being on top.
Oh yeah, all the pussy I wanted.
I’d mentally put the pieces together last year about Rochester. The academy was run by a joint family entity few knew anything about other than it worked. If it didn’t work, what went on here made no sense. The academy gave us connections the families had lost through years of internal fighting. RICCO, the foulest word used in any Mafia family, handled the rest. Our way of life was in serious jeopardy and Rochester held the key to our survival. I think it was set up exactly for what we faced now.
My father never consciously spoke of his time here. He, however, rambled when the pain was bad and his nurse dosed him with meds. I still struggled to put together the pieces from the infrequent outbursts. He had something going on at Rochester back in his day. At the time my father attended, my grandfather was not a high-ranked man within the families. After my father graduated, things began looking up. When he finally took over, the Laterzas became a family to fear. A lot of what I knew didn’t add up.
Take Caine for instance. His father wasn’t loyal to mine or mine to his. We established our partnership in our first weeks as roommates. Strange how we were paired to begin with. When it came to smarts, Caine topped everyone I knew. He was a computer genius and quasi hacker. He’d managed to breach a teacher’s final our first year and the entire test had to be redone. He wasn’t caught but told me they had some freaky scary shit for security going on. If it impressed Caine, I took him at his word and knew it was freaky scary shit.
What Rochester Academy had given us was a lifelong connection that would make our families stronger once we left.
I glanced around at the senior girls, hoping one would spike my dick. Their made-up faces and giggly smiles didn’t do it for me tonight. Screw it. With Caine occupied, I’d slip out. Going it alone wasn’t something I did often. The campus might present itself as safe but we knew the true risks. Right now, the thought of someone at my back made me feel trapped and I had to escape.
I exited through a side door of the rotunda, slipping past a few of my crew who were having too much fun to pay attention. The outside door closed with a solid thud and locked behind me. The campus was well lit but there were dark areas that I knew intimately per the number of blow jobs I’d enjoyed in those shadows. Even the thought didn’t make my dick twitch tonight.
I walked along the main building. Fallen leaves crushed softly in the dampness beneath my feet in the cooling air. Summer was over and fall was a short season here.
My old man was going downhill fast. The most he could handle was a few hours a day from his home office. If people knew how poor his health was, they would circle the waters for the first drop of blood and attack.
If I were at his side, I could hold the jackals back and be ready to take my rightful place when my father was gone. It was hard to imagine such a man going down but I’d had to face it this past summer. The doctors had done everything they could. He hid his oxygen in his room with only his closest staff knowing about it.
Even with his poor health, my father was a smart man. Never show weakness was his motto. The weight of his health and our family rested on my shoulders. Rochester was not where I was needed.
I’d had a huge blowup with my father before I returned to the academy. He needed me at his side but wouldn’t admit it. He’d sent me back to Rochester with the lame-ass excuse that I had to have a diploma.
What the literal fuck?
A high school diploma would never hang from a wall of any office I occupied. It was a fucking piece of paper. My father had finally given me the Laterza stare and I knew I’d lost the battle and here the fuck I was in the last place I wanted to be.
I couldn’t even interest my dick in a recep or princess.
The receps were the girls without the powerful last names. They lived in our world and had a place in the families if they wanted it. Many would stay through loyalty because it’s what their families had always done. The receps, short for receptacles and I have no fucking idea who came up with that term, were also here for our dicks. Willingly, of course, and most were more than willing. The holier-than-thou princesses were another story. They were off-limits. Too bad they liked dick as much as the receps. If a princess left Rochester with her V-card intact, she most likely spent four years on her knees in the campus church. More power to her.
I was sick of it all.
I did not want to be here. I stepped around the second dorm and a faint sound caught my attention. Purely out of curiosity, I headed through the shadows in that direction.
A girl’s voice became clear as my eyes adjusted to the faint light where they stood.
“Your bitch ass is done.”
A group of five surrounded one. I recognized Stella Berlusconi as the girl doing the talking. She was a large girl who liked to flex her muscle and ran her crew with fists. I was never sure what to think of them. None were princesses but all carried the heavy bitch vibe. The girl they cornered was about to get her ass beat.
“Do it, dickface, you need four girls at your back to handle me, then just fucking do it.”
I didn’t know the voice but it stunned me that anyone facing those odds would stand up to Stella. Calling her a dickface would only make the beatdown worse. The fact it was semi-accurate didn’t help her cause. Until now, I hadn’t heard anyone with enough balls to say it out loud.
This had taken too much of my time. I didn’t have interest in a girl fight and almost turned away.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” Stella demanded.
I was wondering about that too. I didn’t recognize the girl’s voice and her face came in and out of the light and was hard to get a read on. There wasn’t a student on campus I didn’t recognize and I couldn’t place her.
I stuck around to watch. It was better than going back to the party. I stood about twenty feet away but moved into another grouping of closer shadows. The crew’s attention was on the girl standing in the center of them.
I watched her fists pump at her sides, telling me she was ready to attack. The crew fanned out around her, giving themselves room. They had the numbers and this girl didn’t have a chance.
“Your dumb ass isn’t walking away,” Stella said harshly.
“I won’t bow down to a dog so go ahead and kick my ass. You’re nothing but a chickenshit bully with a dickface. I got the memo yesterday when I arrived on campus. They didn’t have a picture because it would have broken the camera.”
I wanted to laugh. She sounded like a kindergartener. Someone needed to work on her smack talk.
“Bitch,” Stella shouted and shoved crazy girl.
She stumbled back but immediately righted herself. She was shoved at her back by one of the other girls.
“Grab her,” Stella shouted at her crew.
The crew moved in. Crazy girl got in a few punches before they got her to the ground and Stella stepped over her.
“Remember you had this coming. If I tell you to do something, you fucking do it.”
Stella slipped something from her pocket. When she opened the pocketknife, the light caught the blade.
What the actual fuck?
Rochester toughened you or broke you. I let a lot of crew shit slide. If a crew aligned with mine, they had more freedom to carry on with their own shit. Stella’s crew was one of the few that aligned with no one that I’d heard about. She knew the academy rules though, and I couldn’t believe she would actually cut the girl.
Stella grabbed her shirt and split the material with the knife. Crazy girl stopped fighting after her shirt was pulled aside.
“You better kill me because you will pay for this.” Her voice was low and I believed she meant what she said.
Stella placed the knife to the skin directly above her breast. Crazy girl grimaced and I realized this wasn’t a scare tactic. Stella had drawn blood.
“I didn’t know the real party was out here,” I said loudly, stepping from the shadows.
They jumped which was rather funny and all eyes, huge in the light, turned my way. They weren’t as smart as they thought they were. Someone should have been watching their backs. Poor planning on Stella’s part.
“This doesn’t concern you,” Stella snarled seconds after she recovered from seeing me.
“The knife in your hand concerns me. That shit won’t fly and you fucking know it.”
“I said this does not concern you.” Stella stood and faced me.
I took a step forward. Two of Stella’s crew released crazy girl and also turned in my direction.
Well, well, well.
“You girls really want to tangle with me?”
I stood casually, giving nothing away. They looked back and forth between me and Stella.
Crazy girl decided to make a move on the ground and rolled while kicking her feet and caught one of the girls in the leg. She scrambled upright and faced Stella, the sides of her shirt hanging open.
“You want to do this, Stella?” I asked calmly and slowed my breathing even more. Neither my hands nor my expression showed signs I was ready to tear someone’s head off.
“You stepped into something you had no business in. You fucked up.” Stella took a step back and her crew did the same.
“I think you forgot who runs this school, dickface.” Yeah, crazy girl’s topper had a nice ring to it.
“You only think you run the school. Enjoy it while it lasts.” She signaled her girls and they slunk off into the shadows.
I watched them fade into the dark and made sure they were gone before turning to crazy girl. A heavy mass of light-brown curly hair covered part of her face. She rubbed it impatiently from her eyes and looked up. She couldn’t be more than five feet tall. The light caught her skin and the flash of her eyes, though I couldn’t tell their color. Her face stunned me with its unique beauty. She wasn’t full-blooded Italian; that was for sure. She hadn’t pulled the shirt together and though I wanted nothing more than to stare at her breasts, a trail of blood stopped me.
“Are you okay?” I asked even though her expression wasn’t the relief I expected.
Her back went straighter and she looked ready to take me on this time. I did my best not to laugh. One-on-one with Stella would be impossible for her. She had no chance with me.
“I can fight my own damn battles and didn’t need your interference.”
I had no idea who she was. I’d swear I’d never seen her before. New students only came here freshman year. Was she an incoming freshman? If so, she was stacked. I noticed the size of her tits at the same time I noticed the blood.
