Paolo’s Mercedes is already there.
I park across from him and kill the engine. Sit for a second with my hands on the wheel, running through what I’m going to say. Nothing lands. Nothing ever lands with him because the man can smell bullshit through concrete.
He’s leaning against his car when I walk over. Arms folded. Face unreadable. He looks like he’s been waiting exactly long enough to be annoyed about it.
“You brought her to Vegas.”
Not a question. Not a greeting. Just the fact, laid out flat like a card he’s been holding.
“Anna, her caretaker, broke her hip. Natalia needed to get here fast. It was the right call.”
“The right call.” Paolo’s pauses. “I got you the plane so you could move quickly if you needed to. Instead, you flew the target to thecity where her father runs the Bratva and where your own father runs half the casinos on the Strip. And you’re standing here telling me that was theright call.”
When he puts it like that, it sounds about as smart as juggling grenades.
“Nobody saw us.”
“You don’t know that.” He closes the distance between us. The silence down here is oppressive, just his shoes on concrete and the dull thud of my own pulse. “I stuck my neck out for you. I told you one week. It’s been two days and instead of more intel or a resolution, you show up back here with her. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“I’m working on it.”
“Working on what, Luca? What is the plan?”
The goddamn plan. I open my mouth and nothing comes out because there is no plan. There’s just Natalia and the way she looked at Anna in that hospital room and the Colombian alliance I still haven’t fully mapped and the growing, sickening certainty that I’m never going to do what they sent me there to do.
“The Colombian angle is real,” I say. “Full cartel merger. Her marriage is the seal on it. If I can get all the details, that’s worth more to the family than one body.”
“You said that two days ago. Where are the names?”
“I’m close.”
“You’re close,” he repeats. Same tone he used on the beach. The verdict tone. “You were close two days ago. Before that, youwere close for three weeks. I’m starting to think ‘close’ means something different to you than it does to me.”
I can’t hold his stare. Look at the pillar behind his shoulder instead, at the raw concrete and the rebar poking through like a broken bone.
“Luca.” His voice drops a register. “I need you to hear me right now. Not as your uncle. As the underboss of this family.”
The title lands like a slap. He never pulls rank with me. Never needs to.
“I have not told Lorenzo that I found you in North Carolina. I have not told him that I think you might be compromised. I have not told him you’re in Vegas right now with the girl.” He lets that hang. “Do you understand what that means?”
I understand. My throat tightens around it.
He continues, gaining steam. “It means if he finds out, not just what you’ve done, but that I knew, it’s not only your neck. It’s mine. And I am willing to carry that weight because you are my nephew. But you’re making it very, very difficult to keep carrying it.”
There it is. The thing that guts me worse than anger. Paolo choosing me over protocol and me giving him nothing to justify the choice.
Paolo carrying weight that should be mine. Paolo stepping in for me again.
It started when I was sixteen and stupid enough to think running with a bunch of degenerates who broke into houses for fun meant I finally belonged somewhere. Then we picked the wrong house. Blanco’s. Blew out more than a window that night. Costthe family money, damaged a business relationship my father actually needed, and turned me into the son everybody kept one eye on after that.
The one who needed watching. The one who needed handling.
I told myself this mission would end all of it. One job, done clean, and maybe I stop being the guy somebody else has to explain. Maybe Lorenzo finally looks at me and sees someone worth trusting.
Instead I’m standing in a parking garage, watching the one man who always defended me run out of reasons to keep doing it.
“What do you want me to do?” I run a hand through my hair, frustrated.
