“Then how do you know?” I demanded.
“Recognized the face. He wasn’t one of our moles. Some other Family’s. Either way, we’ll know when my contact comes through. She should also be able to explain what they have on us.”
“You lied to me,” I said baldly, ignoring everything else. He might have been ready to move on, but I wasn’t. “I don’t like it.”
Angelo stretched his arms up and put them behind his head, flexing his shoulders back. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Bax? I’m the bad guy. I’m not sure how you keep managing to forget it.” He got up, sighing, and rolled his head back and forth on his neck a few times. “Let it go.”
“The hell I will,” I said, glaring at him. “We dug into the task force. The obvious next step is to look intoyourside. How about it, Messina? Are you prepared to turn the light onto those closest to you? Or are they a blind spot for you?”
“Everyone in the Morelli family is clean. I run checks on them all. And not this surface level shit, either.” For the first time since we’d started looking at the records, his voice had an edge to it.
And I was still too mad to let it go. “What about Frank D’Amato?”
Angelo looked taken aback. “What about him?”
“The Boss’s brother, right? Hanson told me he was in line to be Underboss, but you got the job instead. How’d that happen? You got something on the new Boss, something that means he wants to keep you close? Maybe the one we should be looking at here isyou.”
“I don’t know what Hanson told you, but he had no idea about Morelli business, just like the rest of you fools. There’s no way Frank D’Amato is running around Central Park shooting people. For one thing, he’s—” He broke off, looking pissed off at himself.
“For one thing, he’s what?” I asked softly. “Dead? There was a point when he just disappeared along with his wife and kid. My boss, Villiers, wondered if he’d finally been put down. He was always a liability. But is Luca D’Amato really cold enough to off his own brother?”
“You tell me,” Angelo said stiffly. “You’re the profiler.”
The way his jaw clenched rhythmically told me I’d struck a nerve. “Is that how it went? You whacked him on orders from the top, and as a rewardyougot the job?”
He moved so fast I barely had time to yelp. He grabbed my shirtfront and pulled me up out of my chair so that I stood nose to nose with him. Fear thrilled through me, raising the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck, but it was quickly followed by something else. Something different. The same effervescent feeling I still hadn’t been able to put a name to, the feeling that only Messina seemed to provoke in me.
I was afraid, but I was also electrified. And I was hard, pulsing, my dick pressing against the confines of my underwear as Angelo’s beautiful, furious face filled my view. Anxious laughter frothed in my belly, and I stuck my tongue to the roof of my mouth to prevent it escaping.
I wondered if this was how Giorgio Benetti had felt right before Messina’s blade had opened his throat.
Angelo’s eyes gleamed. “I take offense at the suggestion that I might have done something like that,” he hissed, “but I takemoreoffense at the idea that I didn’t earn my way into my position fair and square.”
“You mean your position as Underboss?”
He paused. Collected himself. Let go of my clothes and took a step back, shaking out his hands like he’d clenched them so hard that they hurt. “One of the other rules we had, Flynn, was that you wouldn’t ask questions about my business. You keep breaking that rule. So now we have a problem.”
I was acutely aware of my heartbeat, of the vein throbbing in my neck, a tempting target for a man like Angelo—but I wanted to see how much further I could push him. “You want me to follow your rules, when you just made me hand over intel aboutmybusiness?”
I couldn’t shake him any further, though. He backed away and picked up his keys. “I’m going to take some time to clear my head. You’ll stay here.”
I raised my chin. “The hell I will.”
“You don’t have much say in the matter.”
Chapter Sixteen
Angelo
As I locked the only door into the safe house on him, I reflected that Baxter Flynn was beginning to be more trouble than he was worth.
For one thing, I still hadn’t told the Boss about him. I’d meant to, but going off-grid had stymied any chance of dropping around to Luca’s Fifth Avenue townhouse, and I didn’t feel a call or email was going to work well. I needed to let him see my face when I told him about Bax, explain with all the powers of persuasion I had, including body language. Because no matter how much Bax had forced himself on me, involving a Fed in my investigations still meant I was going expressly against orders.
For another thing, he was the only law enforcement officer who had ever been able to get me to lose my cool. I’d underestimated him. It wasn’t as though other LEOs hadn’t tried exactly the same tactics: insults, insinuations. But somehow that kid downstairs was battering away at my armor where others had only ever taken a swing and a miss.
He was smart and quick, and he was too attractive for his own good. Formyown good. I needed to bring the kid back under control, and fast.
I’d left him locked in the safe house below as I wandered through the empty box factory above. I could only hope he wouldn’t do something stupid like try to break out. Or start a fire. Either seemed not impossible, given his impulsive nature. I really did need to clear my head from him; he was like a heavy fug of smoke, making it hard to breathe, to see, to get my head straight.
