“Don’t keep telling her shit,” Vince says. “She doesn’t need to know all this.”
“She does, though,” Ezra says. “Dad wants her to.”
Vince rolls his eyes, then spits on the ground.
Ezra ignores him. “Leanna, this shit is dangerous. Our reach is wide, and we’re in a strong position, but we’re not the only game here in Chicago, and we’re not the only game beyond Chicago. We have good relationships with the cartels in Central and South America, but the Russians are not happy when we’re in their territory.”
“Funny, since those Ruski bastards aren’t afraid to be in our business here, huh?” Vince comments.
“They’re not,” Ezra agrees. “And it’s likely to start a war.”
“And this has what to do with me?” I ask.
Vince scoffs and grabs my arm again.
I yelp, which pisses me off and delights him. He pulls me down an aisle, stacked two stories high with boxes and shelving.
We walk and walk and walk, all the way to a cold storage unit. Vince throws open the door and shoves me inside, where I come face to face with a frozen, lifeless corpse.
I want to cry out, but I would rather bite off my own tongue than give Vince that satisfaction.
I just stare.
The woman is nearly blue from the cold, her body in full rigor mortis, stiff, eyes wide, a tiny bullet hole in her forehead.
“This is Christina Petrella,” Vince says. “Remember her?”
“I do,” I manage to choke out as I try not to cry.
Christina was just a couple of years older than I am, and we went to the same high school. I always thought she was so cool. Like,I’d find her smoking cigarettes outside of our Catholic church, or sneaking off with boys after school.
Vince has some weird, almost pleased look on his face.
I don’t like it.
And I don’t think my brother Ezra likes it, either. Even though I’m certain he’s seen plenty of dead bodies, and he’s probably already seen this one, he makes the sign of the cross.
“She got married last year to Val Bucci,” Ezra says.
“Really?” I ask.
I’ll have to unpack that later. Christina was only in her mid-twenties, and Val is probably at least forty. And I never saw Christina as someone who would accept some arranged match to a man almost twice her age.
“So…what happened?” I ask. I can barely find my voice.
“Val is in charge of the jewel transfer in and out of Russia and Ukraine. He took Christina on what was supposed to be a diplomatic venture, an effort to work out a deal that wouldn’t upset the Bratva too much. He left her back in the hotel for the first meeting. When he came back to get her for dinner, she was missing.”
“We got her back the other day, folded into a box of uncut rubies,” Vince says.
I feel like I might be sick, and I don’t know if it’s the temperature in here or the story they just told me, but I can’t stop the full-body tremor that makes its way from the top of my head to the soles of my feet.
I look away from the dead woman, toward my brothers. “What’s this got to do with me?”
Vince is there in an instant, grabbing my chin, forcing me to look at him. “You think you’re above all of this. You think you’re so smart, the college girl, flitting around like some clueless idiot with no cares in the world. Well, it’s time for you to get real. You’re in this, whether you like it or not. You can’t be half in and half out, little sister. You have to pick a side, and when our women are being kidnapped and sent back to us in boxes, it seems pretty obvious where you need to put your loyalty.”
Ezra reaches out and removes Vince’s fingers from my chin, allowing me to back away a tiny bit. “Dad wanted you to see this, Lea,” he says, gentler than Vince. “He wanted you to know what’s happening, the danger that’s out there. It’s not a joke when he says he’s worried about your safety.”
“I just want…” I start. “I don’t want any of this. Not this part of things. I just want a normal life.”
