Page 32 of Tailored for You

A soft, hesitant touch of a finger ran down my arm, catching on the tip of my pinkie. I closed my eyes, a small shiver running through me.

“I have to go,” Enzo whispered. “I’ll be back to show you the rest of the house.” There was a glint in his eye that I didn’t know him well enough to read. “And convince you to stay, if I still need to.”

With a lingering look, he left.

With a deep breath, I tried to distract myself by finding a movie.

The Godfather, for research purposes, or something more kid-friendly?

“Mommy, come!” Harper yelled as she launched herself into the room. She grabbed my arm and pulled me out of the room. She chattered so fast that I couldn’t keep up as she dragged me down to the other side of the house.

“Ta-da,” she sang as she threw her hands out and wiggled her fingers. In the biggest living room I’d ever been in was a pillow fort. Big chairs held blankets; there were fairy lights, and a bed of pillows.

There were more pillows on the floor than I owned.

“Wow.” I took another step into the room.

Harper ran and Superman-ed onto the pillows. Rolling onto her back, she put her hands behind her head, crossed her legs, and sighed, “This is the life.”

Twin chuckles sounded behind me. I spun to find two guys carrying more pillows, bags of chips and chocolate, and more lights.

“There is a movie theater down the hall,” I said.

“Nothing beats a pillow fort,” one of them, Donovan, I think, said.

CHAPTER 11

Enzo

“Tell me how you found them again?” I asked Donovan as he turned into the warehouse, glided into the building, and cut the engine. It had been almost three days of searching, but we finally got the men we’d been looking for.

“Like I said, I put out some feelers in the neighborhood. Some friends I’d made while I was a busboy called and said they heard two guys bragging about a break-in, but they didn’t finish, so they didn’t know if they’d get paid the full amount or something like that. Angelo and I popped in while they were still there. We asked them some questions, and we knew it was them.” Donovan recalled this story for the second time.

Angelo and Donovan were almost disturbingly efficient. One night of hunting and they’d found the two missing men that no one else had managed to locate in two days.

We had captured one, but there were two others that had escaped.

I’d let one get away from me, my attention on getting to Serena and Harper. He had run into Angelo, knocking him off the man he had pinned down. He escaped, too. It wasn’t ideal, but we had the manpower to search every nook and cranny in this city to find them.

And we did.

“Good.” I got out of the car, and Donovan followed. Angelo stood at a door on the opposite side of the room, waiting.

Angelo opened the door when I was close. The next room was less a room and more a wall separating one side of the building from the other. It had once been a food warehouse, leaving nearly half the space as a massive freezer I’d put to good use.

The three men were blindfolded and tied to their metal chairs in the middle of the space. Frost coated their clothing from their time in the freezer. A few other men who wanted to witness the show stood in the back.

I jerked my chin, and one of the men came over and undid the blindfolds. Grabbing one of the many empty chairs, I placed it in front of the stronzos and sat.

“Do you know why you’re here?” I asked. Silence answered me.

That was fine. Eventually, they would tell me everything they knew.

“Two days ago, you broke into the apartment of someone under the protection of Cosa Nostra. Someone under my protection.” I let the words hang in the air, watching as they slowly penetrated their thick skulls.

Satisfaction rolled through me as I witnessed each of them grasping the pile of merda they’d gotten themselves into.

“Why?” I asked.