Fucking hell, I was the one in charge, and if everyone could accept that, we might make some headway into the Petrovproblem. It was time to stop being so diplomatic and start bashing heads if they couldn’t get it together.
“Sorry, we’re late,” Luigi said, sliding his oversized gut behind the bar and pouring himself a glass of whiskey.
The female bartender tried to scuttle out of his reach, but I saw the swift motion of his hand as he grabbed the poor woman’s ass, laughing his head off.
I mean, the weather was also great in Milan, but I wasn’t a quitter. If I had to arrange for Luigi to end up taking a midnight swim with some weights tied around his ankles, then so be it. For now, he actually commanded the bulk of Santino’s remaining men, and I didn’t need an all-out mutiny by two-thirds of the organization.
Luigi’s main lackey, who went by the charming nickname Meathead, slammed his overly muscled body into the chair across from me, scowling.
“I’m going to send you an article about steroid abuse,” I said. “Read it.”
His brows knitted together, then he realized I was giving him shit and scowled harder.
“Leave him alone, he serves his purpose,” Luigi said, sitting across from me. Now that he’d harassed the bartender and had downed a shot, he could manage a smile. “You’re going to love what I’ve got planned for this weekend,” he said.
Instead of a golf game, he outlined some incredibly stupid attacks on a few of the Petrovs’ minor holdings. Setting a convenience store on fire, robbing their latest weapons shipment, vandalizing a construction site. Seriously?
“Did your fourteen-year-old come up with those plans?” I asked. “Probably not, because even Gianni would have cringed at how weak they are.”
“And what are your plans?” he snapped, turning red with embarrassment when the kid whose name I didn’t know snickered at my assessment. Definitely getting a punishment later. “Let me guess,” Luigi continued, sputtering. “Do nothing. The same as you’ve been advocating since—”
I cut him off with a hard slap on the scarred wooden table. “Since we lost a valuable operative and had to shut down a lucrative operation because of your inability to sit still for five minutes, like a toddler?”
“I told you there was no need to dismantle Axon,” he said, referring to the accounting firm we had been funneling millions of dollars through to clean them up.
“Sure,” I said sarcastically. “We only had to get rid of at least another dozen people in order to keep the operation working. Including any of the feds who looked into what my agent was up to before he got killed. You went too far on that one, and you know it.”
“Dead people can’t talk,” he rumbled, reiterating that the people I paid off would come back to bite me in the ass eventually.
Once again, we were arguing in circles about things that didn’t matter, the real problem going unsolved. I slammed my hand down on the table again and got up, sick of it, my head feeling like an overzealous drummer was crashing cymbals repeatedly against my skull.
“Call off your attacks,” I said. “Everything for the foreseeable future. We have enough to deal with right now without starting a war we can’t win.”
“That you don’t want to win,” Meathead muttered. He might have had more to say, but I smashed my fist into his face, sending blood flying from his nose.
“How about you?” I asked Luigi, wiping Meathead’s blood on a napkin and tossing it onto the middle of the table. “Any more arguments?”
He shrugged, looking sullen. It was the closest I would get to an outright agreement, but my point was made. We’d lay off the petty attacks that did nothing but lose us men, when the Petrovs retaliated.
“You come with me,” I said to the kid whose name still eluded me.
He seemed grateful not have to take the brunt of Luigi’s impotent rage now that I had laid down the law. He sat in silence as I drove back to the apartment I kept when I had to deal with my insubordinate underlings in the city. There was no way I would let anyone I couldn’t be absolutely sure of know about my real sanctuary in the hills.
Once at the apartment, I turned him over to my head of security, a man I actually trusted, and told him to give him some training while keeping an eye on him. The more people I had on my side, the better.
The weekend passed without any of the ridiculous attacks, and I was able to breathe a little easier. Luigi had apparently taken my threats seriously and was listening to me for once.
But for how long? I had a bad feeling that I’d reached a breaking point, and I wasn’t going to be able to hold it together. In fact, I was starting to wonder if I needed to be the one to tear it all down while I was still in charge.
Chapter 3 - Lilia
“Are you excited?” Katie asked, dusting her hands on her apron. After she put the pastries she had just finished rolling into the oven, she turned and beamed at me.
I should have felt that way about my first pottery class, but instead, I was anxious as I waited for the guard to be ready to drive me to the studio. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to learn something new; I loved that. And I had no trouble leaving the house for something fun if someone I knew and trusted went with me. Now my stomach felt like it was twisting into knots at the prospect of having to do something on my own.
Which only proved I did need to get out more, because it didn’t seem normal to me at all to be borderline freaking out about doing something fun. While pottery did sound enjoyable to me, all I really wanted to do was curl up with a book. Was that so wrong?
“Maybe I’ll join you if you end up keeping up with it,” Katie continued, starting with a fresh batch of dough, rolling it out, and curling it into crescents.
