He’s angry, his accent thicker than usual. “You’re calling me to tell me my man is dead by someone else’s hand? That’s not how this happens! He is mine to deal with!” He pauses, and I remain silent. “Do we know who did this?”
“No. We don’t know for sure if it’s him yet. That’s the first—”
“We need that flash drive! We need it before it falls into the wrong hands!”
I say nothing, my silence equaling agreement, a soldier waiting for orders. This is our usual. He rants; I wait for the bits of information that are useful. Right now, the status quo serves me. If I speak, it won’t take long before Giovanna’s name falls out of my mouth, and I ruin my chances of getting back on the Demonio estate where I can force answers out of him.
“I can go down there if you like. Check it out myself. Get ID one way or the other, and if it’s him, I can sift through the wreckage until we find the flash drive.”
This is a gamble. Offering to leave NY when Giovanna is missing signals that I’m not invested in finding her, that I’m not losing sleep and torturing myself every minute that she’s gone. If he takes me up on it—
“No. You will not go. You are my best strategist. I need you here helping me figure out who took Mikey out, if it was him. Irish mafia? The head of their family, and I don’t always see eye to eye, but I doubt he’d do this. The Albanians? We had a falling out over a drug deal that went bad in our territory; they may be looking to retaliate.
“Franco is already down there somewhere, or he should be. We could send him.”
“Lei è un’idiota.”
We can agree on that at least: Franco is an idiot. He’s a crooked cop who likes to play mafia, but he’s from an old school mafia family, the Bellamortes, so my father took him in. One of the dumbest things he ever did was keeping him around, but then the stupid choices my father makes are stacking up so fast, it’s hard to keep count.
Aurelio continues. “I will send Matteo. He has the patience to sort through rubble. When he figures out who did this, Vincenzo will be responsible for going to war.”
And there it is: all three of us back in the fold, like the wedding didn’t happen, like Giovanna wasn’t kidnapped. Because it serves his purpose, not because it’s the smart thing to do.
I grit my teeth, gripping the phone to the point of breaking it at the thought of losing Matti and possibly Vin to this bullshit of Aurelio’s when Giovanna is missing. But I only say, “Understood. I’ll make myself available.”
Aurelio is launching into a cavalcade of threats in Italian and English, cursing whoever thought it was a good idea to take outa Demonio associate without permission when a text comes in from my hacker.
Tommy, pulled this off a
Tesla in the parking
lot of the church.
Attached is a video, and the second I hit play, my world outside the screen evaporates.
It’s Giovanna, my girl, bursting out a side door of the church wearing only a white corset and panties. Her heel catches on the steps, and she crashes down just as a man slides underneath her, catching her before she hits the pavement.
When he cold cocks her in the face, my lungs seize. She crumples, knocked out, as a van screeches in front of them, blocking the camera’s view. With Giovanna over his shoulder, he comes around the van as the side door slides open. He tosses her inside like she’s nothing and slaps her ass, laughing.
The door slides shut, and he gets into the passenger seat as the van peels off.
I rewind back to the frame of him laughing and slide my fingers to expand the frame. I’d know that bitch anywhere: fucking Franco.
Boiling rage floods my chest, molten and suffocating. I want to scream into the phone that I know he fucking has my girl, that he sicked hisidiotadog on her, that I’ll slice all of them up and watch them bleed for weeks before I let them die.
Aurelio is still raging in my ear about the plane. I hit replay on the video over and over, my voice steady. “Don’t waste time worrying about it yet, sir. I’ll come to you now, and we’ll put a plan in place.”
I end the call and forward the video to Matti and Vin, then call both to update them on my conversation as I head out the door.
Matti sounds concerned. “I can tell him ‘no’ if you need my help.”
“You’re in no condition to be around Aurelio right now,” Vin growls. “You’re gonna snap and fuck everything up.”
I inhale sharply. “Matti, getting more intel in South Carolina will keep Aurelio busy and away from Giovanna, so it helps. If you track down Franco, even better. Vin, I have to—”
“Don’t bother. You’re going to do what you want to do. I don’t need a reason,” Vin grumbles. “Just be careful. We’re at war, even if Aurelio finds it convenient to forget when it suits him. Don’t remind him.”
5
