“That’s not nearly as sensational. I say we stick with the first meaning.”
“Works for me,farfalla.”
“Dahlia for a girl or Dante for a boy. We seem to prefer D names,” I mused.
“Apparently,” he said, shutting his eyes again and sounding sleepy.
I became quiet then to allow my husband to rest, my mind swirling with the names Dante, Dahlia, and Emilia Rose.
26
Romeo
That next morning as I got up to get dressed, I studied my wife as she slumbered in our bed. A beam of sunlight illuminated a stripe along her bare chest and belly, which were currently partially covered by a white sheet. I realised I could make out the slightest of curves there, the rising bulge of our child. Lucia’s fragrant black hair lay mussed and spread out over her pillow like a halo, and her olive complexion glowed as she reclined there in repose. Sometimes, like now, I couldn’t believe just how much I loved this woman. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her, and I knew I’d spend the rest of my life proving that.
Brushing my lips to her forehead, I left without waking her.
When I proceeded into our headquarters, I found my father on a rampage.
“Two million dollars’ worth,” he spat at Marcello, who stood there taking my father’s barrage with his typical silent stoicism. I might’ve been tempted to backtrack out the door, but then, Angelo caught sight of me. “Why haven’t you been monitoring the deliveries more closely?”
“What happened?”
My father grabbed Marcello’s coffee mug out of his hand and flung it across the room, shattering it on the far wall. “Our drugs were confiscated by DEA agents in California. That’s what happened.”
Immediately, I sat at the computer console and pulled up the delivery schedules for our outgoing packages. While most packages showed finalized deliveries, the twenty separate shipments going out in the middle of the night the previous evening had apparently been intercepted. Considering we shipped much of our product using the good old United Postal Service, such an interception should be statistically unlikely if not impossible.
“Someone must’ve tipped the agents off. It’s the only rational explanation,” Marcello said in his deep voice. I agreed.
“Who?”
My father strutted up between my brother and me. “Fucking find out who,” he shouted into my face. He’d done it so vehemently, that I had to wipe his spittle from my face. Automatically, my hands clenched into fists. I’d never responded well to aggression, and it took everything I had to keep from punching my father right in his face. Kicking a rolling office chair on his way out, Angelo departed from the room.
“That was impressive,” Marcello commented, keeping his voice low.
“What was?” I imagined my blood pressure going through the roof.
“How you kept from cleaning his clock. The old coot deserved it, too. He knows it couldn’t have been your fault.”
“Since when has that ever stopped him,” I said, having been on the receiving end of Angelo’s temper too many times to count. He was the only one in the world I hadn’t retaliated against, and that was only because I’d learned early on antagonizing the patriarch wasn’t worth it. Savio chose that moment to skitter in, his youthful clean-shaven face a little pale. “You get an earful, too?”
“What bug crawled up his butt?”
“Two million dollars’ worth of bugs. A bunch of our shipments were taken by the DEA.”
“Seriously?”
I nodded, already tracing the locations of the packages to see the exact locations where the shipments were halted. Then, I ran the software program we used to hack into the DEA’s mainframe undetected. I didn’t like using it because there was always a risk, but we needed to know if we had a mole in our organization. Since such a thing couldn’t very well be an accident, we must.
I ran the program, waiting on tenterhooks to discover the results. In the meantime, I listened with one ear as Savio put forth one name after another as possible culprits.
“Diego?”
“He was raised in our household, and we’ve taken good care of him and his father. Why would he go turncoat?” Marcello, ever the voice of reason, asked our little brother.
“Okay, how about LeBrazio?”
“Our mechanic?” Marcello sounded incredulous. “He doesn’t know anything about the operation.
