“Go on.”
“He claimed that Benicio wasn’t working alone. That his obsession was sparked from someone else,” she says.
“There’s someone above him? Someone else was pulling his strings?”
She nods.
“Who?”
“I’m not sure. He said it was another mafia family.”
“Do you think this meal of yours lied to save his skin, Vittoria?” I ask.
“No.”
“I’ll ask you again, as my closest ally, my friend, my trusted second, and as your master, do you think he lied?”
She’s silent for too long. And then she hisses, “Yes, okay, yes. But he mightnothave.”
“Here’s what I think,” I say and rise to my feet. Aggravation is building, and all I want to do is check on Elliot again, not bat around speculations and hypotheticals. “Whether the human was lying or not, it isn’t something worth my time. De Santis is dead. His empire is about to collapse, but there’ll always be someone else trying to take me out. Immortal or mortal. You know this.”
“But—”
“I’m not afraid. Never have been. We’ve always handled what’s been thrown at us. We’ve survived and we’ve thrived,” I say.
She snorts. “Of course I’m not afraid. But if we destroy everyone, take out all links in the chain, then it’ll show them what we are?—”
“Then we have a war we don’t want. We possibly expose what we are to the world, which will only make things harder, bloodier.” I look at her. “Which isnotwhat we want.”
She rolls her eyes.
“Right?” I press.
“Yes, Lucian,” she mutters. “Sure. And what about the warehouse?”
I wave a hand. “We’ll give the cops something.”
Her mouth turns up in a smirk. “Like what? An invitation to a ball?”
I smooth a hand over my bloodstained suit. It’s so like Vittoria not to see the bigger picture. “We direct the narrative.”
She wants revenge. Not just because; she wants it for me. It’s almost sweet.
“And the de Santis compound?” she asks.
“We hit that. Make it look like a de Santis uprising and power grab gone horribly wrong.”
“So that’s how you’ll give the cops their mafia investigation.” Her slight smile tells me she likes it, but she does ask something else. “But if thereisanother threat, and they come looking for us, what do we do then?”
“Then we’ve flushed them out.” I go behind my desk.
“We need an enemy for de Santis.”
I laugh. In the mafia world, like the supernatural, enemies abound. Power grabs abound.
It’s all in choosing the right one.
I’m not going anywhere tonight. I’ll need more blood later, just to hit my pre-draining self. But I have discipline. I thrive on it. And in the bedroom, it gets me off. This isn’t far from that, this self-torture game of control.
