Her trademark combination of a sigh-chuckle came through the speakerphone. I had declined the video call as usual. “Don’t sound too excited. I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
A bitter smile twisted my lips, and I picked up my coffee mug for a long, satisfying sip. My other hand was busy clicking through my emails as part of my normal morning routine. “It’s eight twenty-four in the morning here. You know I’m already working.”
“Yeah, that’s nothing new.”
The sharp edge in her otherwise lilting voice had me grinding my teeth. As it was, I had to restrain myself from saying what I really wanted to. I didn’t need another lecture from Reggie about being disrespectful to my foster mom. Things like ‘I owed them for the ten years they cared for me’, ‘don’t be ungrateful for what we gave up’, etcetera, etcetera. I’m not quite sure why Felicity even kept up the pretense of keeping in touch. She got what she wanted with a whopping seven kids, all born after I was out of the house. Once Reggie gave me over as his replacement in service to the Lupi Selvaggi, she was able to have the huge family she always wanted.
“Is there something you need?” I tried to ask politely. “Otherwise, I have a lot on my plate I need to take care of. Meetings and whatnot, I’m sure you understand.” Mainly, making sure I proved myself useful after last night’s spectacle of a failed auction. I was definitely in the dog house now, and it was fucking cold out here.
I knew it hurt, keeping this distance and coldness toward a woman who considered herself my mother for ten years. She and Reggie had, according to her own accounts, been good friends with my parents when they had been alive. I had no evidence otherwise, unless seances could give answers. My memories of them were fuzzy at best; I had been eight when our compact car slid on a patch of ice in a brutal Washington winter, and sent it crashing into an unmovable red cedar with me in the back seat. The next time I remembered waking up, I was alone in a hospitalwith severe head trauma and multiple lacerations. Memory loss was a natural side effect from those injuries.
And that was the end of Gentry and Denice Romano. Their will had instructed that I would be taken care of by Reggie and Felicity Black, and with no other living relatives to argue my placement, I joined their semi-transient wolf pack. Reggie never went into detail how he knew my parents. From his association with the Lupi Selvaggi at the time, it didn't seem too far of a stretch my parents had their own dark pasts with the ruthless mob. Maybe he was trying to preserve what little memories I had of them that were good and innocent. Maybe my parents made him promise not to tell me anything if they died prematurely. Regardless, it wasn’t until I learned of Reggie’s deal with Andrea that I began to grow suspicious ofwhymy parents left me in their care at all. But now, at twenty-six and wrapped too tightly in his control, the likelihood of me living to retirement age was slim at best. The past was the past and I couldn't change it, no matter how much I craved a different life.
“… Are you even listening to me?” Felicity sounded well and truly put out. “I swear, it’s like you never want to chat anymore. Can I not check in on you? Is it that much of a chore?”
Honestly, yes.I had to bite my tongue to keep the honest answer silent. “Sorry, I just have a lot going on right now. Can I call you another time when I’m not so busy?”
Not that it would matter much, but I doubted Felicity wanted to know the details of what I did for a living. She wouldn’t want to hear how I single-handedly ran the bidding system for the largest skin trading auctions in the country. Felicity and Reggie would rather bury their heads in the sand than admit to themselves that I’d likely end up in a shallow grave by forty. I’ve made my peace with it—the lucrative pay softened the blow a little—and had no qualms about keeping my foster family atarm’s length for the purpose of simplicity. The less they knew, the better.
“Bye, Felicity.” I wasn’t paying attention to whether or not she was still talking, and cut the call while taking another slow sip of coffee.
Ending Up in Vegas
Grant
“I’m not pleased with the last auction’s outcome.”
Andrea leaned casually against the edge of his desk, a tumbler of amber liquor swirling in the crystal before he broughtit to his lips. I wasn’t stupid, though. He was more than pissed. Probably enough to have me hauled off to the basement for some good old-fashioned torture if I didn’t plead my case. That I managed to survive the arduous car ride home with Andrea after the auction was a testament to how much he still needed me alive.
I leaned back in the leather chair and rested my right ankle on the opposite knee. “The system was infallible. Whoever it was that hacked in already had an invitation to the auction, and therefore had a code to log in with. I was not the one who vetted the attendees.”
You were, I wanted to add. But I bit my tongue, knowing the accusation would cut this conversation extremely short. Unpleasantly so.
Andrea scoffed and spat something in Italian. It was probably for the best that I didn’t speak the language. “You said the username was what? Cyber_Fox?” He scoffed. “I know who that is.Figlio di puttana!She was the one responsible for all the fucking problems going on backstage, too. Someone smuggled a tire iron in and gave it to one of the auction pieces, and it caused a distraction. We lost three of them.”
My brain was still hung up on Andrea’s previous admission. “Pardon, you said youknowCyber_Fox? Care to elaborate?” Even within the hacking community, they were legendary. For someone like Andrea, a mob boss who talked more with bullets than tact, to have any idea who Cyber_Fox was seemed impossible to me. “How do you even know that’s who they say they are? We can’t trust that hacker is the real Cyber_Fox, much less a singular person! I need to take some time to research, possibly try to track down any recent activity on the boards and–”
He threw back the rest of his drink and slammed the glass on his desktop. One hand rose as if he was about to run it throughhis thick black hair he had gelled back, but stopped at the last second. Beyond the slight greying at his temples, no one would suspect Andrea was almost ninety years old. The deep olive skin of his face was smooth and unwrinkled, stretching over a solid jaw and tall nose paired with a defined cupid's bow over full lips. And when he wasn't scowling—like he was at me right now—Andrea had no trouble charming men and women alike.
“Book a flight to Vegas. Make sure your affairs are in order to stay for a while, at least a month if not more. She already broke our agreement, coming into Chicago like she had any right to be here. I’m sure she expects me to come sniveling at her feet, begging for forgiveness or some bullshit!” Andrea snarled another curse in Italian. He didn’t get worked up like this very often. “This time I’m nailing that bitch’s coffin shut myself!”
He was acting extremely irrational, and I didn’t like it. It felt like I was about to walk into a shitstorm of epic proportions. How the hell did Andrea know who to go after immediately? It was almost like… he expected this to happen. Or he’d had a run-in with the elusive hacker before. This was only the third auction I’d managed myself, and there was no indication that he had been a target for malicious attacks before. I assumed he brought me on as a safeguard to make sure the payments flowed. Not once did he mention he’d made enemies with the likes of Cyber Fox.
I didn’t like how this was playing out.
My mouth opened to argue, but the cutting glare Andrea shot at me had it snapping shut, only to grind my molars painfully. He seemed to take my silence as acknowledgement that I was nothing more than his dog following commands. It was never easy to guess what a shifter’s primal was without transforming, but I was fairly good at guessing if they were predator or prey. There was something about the confidence that carried over from their animal form, that knowledge that they were higher upin the food chain than others. Andrea was a wolf—he didn’t keep it a secret—and made it a point to act like a predator as often as possible. I assumed a submissive position and lowered my head slightly, even as I kept my eyes set on his. His brown eyes narrowed in a final press of will, and I snatched the glasses from where they perched on my nose and pretended to clean them to break my gaze.
“Go find the leader of the Red Riot mob. I shouldn’t have to tell you, but donotmention any direct affiliation to me. You will be acting under Frank DeNiro, pretending to renegotiate terms on behalf of the Lupi.”
“Does Cyber_Fox have mafia connections? How do your terms with the Riot have anything to do with a hacker?” If that was the case, this situation was going to turn messy fast. “If they’re protecting someone who attacked your business, wouldn’t that be something to take to the Assembly? I’m confused about why we have to do undercover maneuvers to take care of something like this.”
Bringing issues to the quarterly Assembly meeting between bosses was not ideal, but it seemed like the most rational action. The underworld of organized crime policed itself to a terrifying degree, even more so for the shifter-run mobs. But getting the other mobs involved showed weakness. The next Assembly was coming up at the end of September in Italy, and it would be a bad look for Andrea to drag an issue like this into a meeting held in his home country of all places. If the Red Riot were a shifter mob, I’d expect their leader to attend as well. To not show his face to the other bosses would equate to weakness and risk the others conspiring against the absentee.
“I don’t have to elaborate shit for you, Grant. Go to Vegas or start writing your own obituary, along with that feral pack you call a family.”
The not-so-subtle threat had me clenching my hands into fists so tight that my knuckles whitened. My adopted family had nothing to do with his dirty business. Not anymore. Reggie Black got out of Andrea’s shifter mob, the Lupi Salvaggi, when he met Felicity, and never looked back. The terms of that deal were to send his oldest son in his place. But they never had children in the eighteen years Andrea stipulated, so I was a sort of consolation prize. I never complained; the Blacks made sure I was fed and clothed and given some semblance of education with homeschooling. Most of my knowledge was self-taught from spotty internet connections we got in the Cascade Range of Washington.
It wasn’t until after I was practically bargained off to Andrea that Reggie and Felicity birthed their first set of wolf twins, not even ten months after my eighteenth birthday. The fact that they had waited so long, when mates were notoriously prolific, was a clear enough message. They had been waiting to fulfill their deal with the devil to make sure no one of their own blood ended up in Lupi Selvaggi. Andrea put me through college at the University of Chicago for computer science, and since then, my life has belonged to him. I even managed to convince him to let me get my master's in business in an attempt to avoid my sentence a little longer.
