While Ennis was writing his MAX imprint Punisher ongoing series, he also wrote an assortment of one-shots and mini-series. The Cell takes place at an undefined point in Frank's story, where he surrenders himself to get into a prison with five particular mob guys, who are finally all together after many years.
Most of the story is spent on Frank engineering circumstances so he can get time with the five of them. Which involves manipulating the sadistic head guard - not difficult, the man's both aggressive and aggressively stupid - and igniting a race war among the prison population. The reveal at the end - coming after Ennis writes a bit where 4 of the 5 admit to something awful they each did, even by their standards, in the idea they need to confess to atone, but really feels like Ennis either going for shock value or to really sell us on the notion Frank should kill these guys - is these 5 are responsible for killing Frank's family. The consiglieri tried to whack the don, there was a lot of shooting without regard for anyone else in the vicinity by the hitman and the two bodyguards, people died.
The five die, although even in a MAX book, the violence is kept largely off-panel. Frank kills the brothers that were the don's bodyguards by beating them with a nightstick, but LaRosa just shows us the nightstick rising and falling as blood flies. He also continues to use Eastwood as a visual reference for Frank (and Danny Trejo for one of the bodyguards.) The don chokes out his consiglieri himself, but has a heart attack in the process. As he dies, Frank tells him that he can escape the prison whenever he wants, and go right back to killing criminals, until there's none left. Which is in conflict with what he told himself in The Slavers arc, that he knew he couldn't stop them, any more than he can the drug trade. He knows there's always going to be more of these guys.
Also, the don strikes me as a person that wouldn't really care what happens after he dies, but whatever. Frank's having a ball, I guess. "Look what you unleashed on your people, old man."
But it makes for a interesting tie to Punisher: The End, which Ennis did with Richard Corben. I don't own it, but I read it when it came out. Basically, some point much further down the line, the world is dying. Nukes, I think. Frank's been locked up a long time, but with everything falling apart, another convict helps him escape, hoping Frank will protect him long enough to find an underground bunker the wealthy have somewhere in the city.
Frank ultimately kills the people in the bunker, I think because they helped engineer all this. Even when they plead they've heard nothing from the other bunkers, meaning they might be the last of the human race. That done (and the convict who led him there also killed) Frank, dying of radiation exposure from the journey, heads back onto the surface, to spend his remaining time killing any other criminals he finds. There's no such thing as extenuating circumstances, no reprieve or possibility of redemption. That's something he told Micro in the first MAX arc, after Micro helped the CIA catch Frank to try and sell him on working for them. Frank ended up blowing Micro's head off.
At least in that sense, Frank does keep his promise. He keeps killing until all the men like that godfather are dead. Unfortunately, it's possible everyone else is dead, too. If so, to him, that just means there's no one left who requires punishing. The mission is complete, or he's dead. Which, in a sense, is also a way of completing the mission. Frank might not see it that way, but he almost certainly meets his own definition of needing punishing. During The Cell, he doesn't acknowledge that someone could be incarcerated and actually be innocent. He kills one guy simply because the man is a cellmate of the guy Frank wants to kill to ratchet tensions in the prison. Doesn't even know the guy's name, just kills him because he's in the way and in prison, so he must be guilty.
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