“I’m sure everything’s fine.”
“You seemed worried that they’re here.”
“No, not worried. Just surprised,” I say as I kiss her forehead.
“You’d tell me if there was something wrong, right?”
“Of course I would. I’ll be back at the end of your shift.”
She nods as I lean down and kiss her.
I make my way to my office and find all the guys standing around.
“We don’t all fit in there.” Sebastiano laughs.
I chuckle. “Let’s go to the conference room. It should be big enough.”
We walk past Amélie and Noëlle’s offices and they come running out to hug everyone. Hunter is behind them, smiling.
“You should both come with us,” Enea says to them.
“Is everything okay?” Amélie asks.
“Not really,” Luciana Bastianini answers.
Noëlle frowns as we all sit around the table.
“So Sebastiano and I dug into Julian’s background. He has a brother named Randall and they’re both deputies with the Larimar county sheriff’s department. Their parents died in a home invasion five years ago. The brothers were out that night and that’s supposedly how they survived,” Francesco Bastianini says.
“You said ‘supposedly.’ You don’t believe their story?” I ask.
“Honestly? No. They both have a record of being aggressive cops. They’ve both been written up several times, and they’ve both been on paid leave for incidents that have occurred. They worked at five different sheriff’s departments before landing at Larimar. Five departments in eight years.”
“That seems kind of excessive.” Amélie frowns.
“Has Genevieve said anything about the brothers being violent?”
“She said Julian was never physically violent. But he has a bad temper. We all saw that side of him. He did grab her, but she never said if that was normal for him. Why are you asking if the brothers were violent? I didn’t know about his brother, so I never asked,” I tell everyone.
“There’s some weird things in their files. I had Salvatore check on them both since they’re cops.”
Salvatore Mancini is the sheriff of Lake Renegade. We met him a few months ago when he helped Hunter take down the Crimson Royals.
“Why do I feel like he found out something bad?”
“Well, we don’t know if it’s what we think it is. But there were disappearances surrounding them. And people being killed under sketchy circumstances.”
“What do you mean ‘sketchy’?” Hunter asks.
“Remember how we said they’ve worked for the different departments? Well, Sal’s working on getting more information. But what we do know is that by each time they left, there were around ten separate deaths while they were there. Okay, I know, that doesn’t seem that weird. But this does. Both their names were on every one of those reports. From the first report to the last report,” Sebastiano says as he looks at each of us.
“Are you saying they killed people?” I ask.
“We don’t know. But it sounds like it, doesn’t it? And this is why I didn’t want to talk in front of Genevieve. We didn’t want to scare her, and we also wanted to know how you feel about her,” Enea says.
I know what Enea’s getting at. Because he’s the head of the Chicago Mafia, he wants to know if she’s my woman. That I plan on having a future with her. Otherwise, she won’t be told things that are going on or that they’re mafia.
“I plan on marrying her,” I say as Enea nods.
