Desire is the greatest tool to measure distance—isn’t that what she’d said to me, or something close to it? She made sure I’d always remember the desire—the distance between us.
It made me feel possessive. Primal.
We broke the fucking headboard. It was real wood, not the cheap fake shit. We glanced up at it when we lay next to each other, our arms and legs tangled. I’d come so hard, my balls felt empty.
“We’ll have to fix that,” she said, and then she fell asleep on my chest.
Careful not to wake her, I sat up and moved to the side of the bed. I glanced back at my wife to make sure she was still deep asleep. Air buzzed through her nose, sounding like a little flying thing. I grinned.
I dressed in all black and made my way to the office. It was full of monitors that brightened the otherwise dark room. I had access to every inch of this place. Other places, too. Places that we kept tabs on. Even ones we didn’t. All I had to do was type in the address or a code, zoom in, and I could go inside without stepping foot in the place.
The docks included. Vincenzo and some of his men had placed the equipment where we needed it. We had dates from Lev, but we also knew the vessels that would be delivering them and the mark of the shipments coming in. Dates change. I wanted to be sure that everything they had went up in flames at my hands—all in honor of my wife.
They fucked with her. They fucked with my heart.
The monitor to my left lit up with different vantage points from the dock. Soon enough, before the sun fully dawned, longshoremen would be lining up to unload the ships. Some of them were already there, loitering around.
The monitor to my right showed footage from a four-block radius.
The monitor in front of me showed twelve different images, all real-time footage of what was happening on the other side of the house. If a body entered a room that wasn’t being monitored, it would take the place of an empty room. No matter how dark, I could see with night vision.
There were more, enough for an entire team, but I was the team. My old man would join me later, and possibly my sister and brothers, too. We were what my uncle, Corrado, liked to call Gangster nerds.
Asshole.I grinned.
Seconds ticked, turning into two hours. I needed coffee and should have put a pot on before I started surveillance. I checked my watch. About an hour before my parents and Mia’s arrived.
My eyes narrowed on some activity. One of our men crept around. He was monitoring a hallway in almost complete darkness, keeping a death grip on the front of his pants. This particular man looked a lot like Oscar the Grouch. His old man, Nino, was the spitting image of him, too. When Nino was younger, it was hard to keep the men from daring him to do stuff that would get him stuffed into a trash can. Same deal with his son.
Nino never got the joke and named his son…Oscar.
Oscar was speed-walking, trying to keep his legs tight. He kept looking behind, like he didn’t want to get caught or stopped. He was going for a real can.
Settling more comfortably in my chair, I crossed my arms over my chest, a grin that was going to send me straight to hell on my face.
Vincenzo slipped into the dark hallway. Oscar must have felt it and stopped. The grip on his pants was even tighter.
Oscar took a step.
Vincenzo took a step.
Oscar whirled, saying, “Who is THERE?”
Vincenzo stepped into a room while Oscar moved his arms around wildly, expecting to connect with a body. When none came, he turned around, moving again.
Vincenzo was right behind him.
It was like watching a cat hunt a mouse, but I knew how this was going to end.
As Oscar fumbled for the door handle to the bathroom, Vincenzo tapped him on the shoulder.
“SCRAM!”
The shout didn’t come from a man, but my wife, who stood behind me, a cup of coffee in her hand. It mingled with the sound of my laughter.
Which faded as soon as I realized she was looking over my shoulder.
Maybe at the look on my face,shestarted laughing so hard her tits jiggled underneath the thin cotton shirt. My shirt. It was like a dress on her, landing past her thighs. I switched out the room on the monitor. Even though Oscar was a pain in the ass, I didn’t want her to see the piss staining the front of his pants.
