Santino flashed her a smile, switched his phone to his other hand, and swiped to connect the call as he laid his free hand overtop of hers. He’d pull her flush against him, but with literal family out for one or both of their heads, he’d insisted on proper use of seatbelts. Damnable things.
With the phone at his ear, he forced a smile into his voice despite knowing it wouldn’t last, and said, “Nonno, it’s unlike you to call. I hope everything’s—”
“Drop the act with me, boy,” his grandfather snapped, the raspy tone carrying through the line as perfectly as the agitation. “Who do you think you are, telling me I can’t see my own daughter?”
Santino let his expression fall to match his mood and curled his fingers around Reiko’s without thought. “Who do I think I am?” He repeated the words slowly and clearly, not because heexpected his ailing grandfather to take them back, but because he wanted to be as clear about the issue on the table. When Nonno failed to respond, Santino kept talking. “I think the better question is, who do you thinkyouare that you can defy orders over something as trivial as one lost afternoon?”
Nonno sucked in a ragged breath. “How dare you speak to me that way, Santino.”
“No.” Santino cast his gaze out the scenery as it passed through the tinted window. “You’re the one out of line. It was you who taught me that, above all, the Boss rules.” He paused again. “Iam the Boss now, Nonno. That meansIrule.You, especially, are expected to shut the fuck up and be the goddamn pinnacle of compliance, becauseyoufucking chose me.”
“Exactly!” Nonno exclaimed, nearly shouting into the line. Santino pictured spittle flying from his mouth and his arm shaking as he held the phone to his ear. “I chose you! Don’t you think for an instant I can’t change my mind!”
Santino scoffed. “Nonno, who are you fooling? I’m down one capo and damn near a third of my men, and that may not be the whole of it. If those traitors wanted to follow you, they’d have pitched you.”
“The fuck are you prattling about?” Nonno wheezed with a hard breath. “My LoLo is dying, Santino. You can’t refuse to let me see her.”
“I can,” Santino snapped. “The same way you can sit there and claim to be ignorant of the shit I’ve been dealing with for the past—”
“She’ll straighten all this confusion up with Danilo,” Nonno continued, as if Santino weren’t talking at all. “Why don’tyoustay home for the day. I’ll call you when I have the whole story.” The line clicked.
Santino pulled his phone from his ear and blinked at it once as if the last thirty seconds might change in his memory if he gave them the opportunity.
Reiko twisted her wrist until she was squeezing his hand. “Santino? Is your grandfather okay?”
His chest tightened, her concern somehow jarring loose an understanding he did not want to have. “No,” he said, too quietly. “No. That old fucker’s more senile than anyone realized.” He’d regret the disrespectful language when his mood improved. Maybe. Until then, he navigated quickly to the familial tracking programs he’d had installed on both his mother’s and grandfather’s smart devices. All of them, of course, though his grandfather only had the one.
His mother’s were all over the place, which was a predictable annoyance.
Nonno’s was not at his home. Or even at Mamma’s, not that it should have been.
As Santino watched, Nonno’s signal pulled onto Lorenza’s street. His mother’s cellular signal overlapped it, indicating she—or at least her phone—was in the vehicle with him. “Fuck.”
Reiko squeezed his hand again.
“Boss?”
Santino squeezed back and projected his voice. “Drive faster.” He didn’t have tracking information handily available for any of the Segretis. A small annoyance turned crushing problem. But there was very little reason for Adele to think she’d been made, and therefore very little reason to hope she wouldn’t be right where she always was—at her mother’s side.
He blew out a breath and met Reiko’s concerned frown. “Sorry, beautiful. Looks like you’re about to meet the whole rest of the family in one swoop.” He’d been looking forward to introducing her, despite his mild concerns about his mother’s reaction, but this was not the way he’d wanted to do it.
Her eyes widened. “They’re…?”
“Yeah.”
She chewed her lip for just long enough to catch his eye. “Will the men behind us be enough?”
He managed a smile. “They’ll have to be.”
Chapter twenty-two
Contentious Cousins
Santino knew it wasa longshot, but as they neared his aunt’s residence, he fired off a quick text anyway. He would take any chance he could get to walk into that scene with hard proof and avoid just one portion of the inevitable blowup.
Don’t suppose that video’s been restored yet? Or you’ve found traceable evidence linking to someone named Segreti?
Reiko’s abductor had shot up the security station at the front gate, but it seemed the woman Santino believed to be Adele had tried shooting as she drove because she’d missed the most critical bits. Fortunately for them. The damage to the overall machine meant extracting the file wasn’t as easy as it should have been, but Mikey had been confident they could clean or restore enough of the relevant footage to make it useful. That was all Santino cared about.
