Page 48 of Blood & Heartache

“As Hound said, the mayor didn’t make it through surgery. They haven’t announced anything yet as the mayor’s wife isn’t back in town. It gives us a little time to sort things out on our end but not much,” Luca shared then looked at Hound. “Have you managed to figure out if Melony shared information with anyone else regarding the Caprioni Family?”

“Working without a direct link to the computer or phone makes it a little challenging to be one hundred percent certain.” He held up a hand to stop me from interrupting and continued, “However, I’m ninety percent sure that things were kept between herself, Gunner, and the mayor. I want to check the other assistant’s computer, Grant, I think is what we said his name was before I can give the all-clear.”

“If we can get you her phone and computer, would that help?” I asked.

Hound shrugged. “I mean, the more I have to work with, the better our odds of me tracking down every possible angle she could have exchanged information. If we have access to them, I’d happily take a fine-tooth comb to them.”

“Luca?” I asked since he was the last person to see Melony.

“Phone won’t be a problem, but she didn’t have her computer at the house. At least, I don’t think so. I didn’t take the time to look while trying to get in and out without being caught. Dealing with two people who don’t want to be taken isn’t the easiest thing to manage, but her phone was on her, so I do have that,” Luca offered. “I’ll need leave to grab it unless you’d prefer to keep this off property?”

He made a good point, but it wasn’t a question I could answer. “What are the chances of them tracing it back to us if you do the work here, Hound?”

“Personally, I think it’s best to keep all things attached to this event away from you and the estate as much as possible. We don’t want to give them any reason to look into anything pertaining to the Caprioni Family or business,” he reasoned.

“That settles it. Luca, you go with Hound and watch his back. If there is anything else you need access to, Hound, do it while you’re out,” I ordered. “As you pointed out, we want to keep all of this away from the house, and I’m getting the feeling not everyone here can be trusted.”

Both men nodded, and Hound pressed a kiss to my cheek. “Don’t work too hard, Luna. We’ll call if we find anything you need to be aware of.”

“All right, Jace and Atticus, I want to know who our deputy mayor is and all there is to know about them,” I instructed. “This person is already the one calling the shots, so we need to know who and what we’re up against. Ryker, I want you to look into my uncles and dig up all you can on what they’ve been up to. It’s clear they’ve been left to their own devices for far too long, and I want to know what damage they might have caused under my father’s nose. Braxton, reach out to your people and find out anyone who might have a connection to my dear stepmother. I know for a fact that Athos can’t be the only person she’s spending quality time with. That woman is working an angle, and I’m really fucking tired of underestimating her.”

With orders given, the men dispersed to tackle their assigned tasks, leaving me alone with Liu.

“You and I are going to roll up our sleeves and dive into the people attached to the Caprioni Family. I want to know who says they’re loyal to us and if it’s really fucking true. Something tells me that there are a few who are spies, and I’m going to root them out and cut them off at the knees,” I shared, clapping my hands together and rubbing them in anticipation. “Heads are gonna roll tonight, and we need to know who can keep a secret.”

Chapter 22

Trigger Warning Suicide

It had been an hour since Astin gave me the order to look into her uncles. So far, it looked like Mathis was clean when it came to his interactions with Flora and Harvey. I’d looked under every rock and trick I could think of to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Part of me was glad that he hadn’t turned his back on Astin—those two had been closer and built a tighter bond than with Athos. I still planned to talk to the man face-to-face. I needed to know what the fuck he was thinking. How could he even dare to make a move against the boss’s daughter, his own niece?

Moving on to Athos, I could tell right away he’d been trying to hide things. Files were missing, deleted records were scrubbed, and there was a partition on his hard drive that I was having trouble cracking. I kept at it, though, because there wasn’t a fucking chance I was going to ask Hound for more help. Never in a million years would I have expected for them to one, know each other, and two, for him to be in fucking love with my woman. The bastard was cocky and a loose cannon that Astin didn’t have time to deal with. She’d learn that the man she thinks she knows isn’t at all who he really is. In my opinion, Hound was a player and worse than Braxton because he used people. He used them for sex, information, and to get what he wanted if there was any opposition at all.

Braxton liked sex and liked to sleep with whoever struck his fancy, but he never let people believe it was anything other than a romp in the sheets. Granted, this was all from observations I’d seen at bars and clubs and hearing him talk about it afterward. The man was one of my best friends, and I felt like I’d have noticed if there had been an angry mob of people coming after him for lying about his intentions.

Hound, however, I have witnessed a few people come up and lose their shit over being used, lied to, and dropped like a hot potato. There was no fucking way I was going to let Astin become one of those people. She wanted more actions than words, fan-fucking-tastic, and I was happy to give her whatever she asked of me. Right now, that was figuring out what the fuck her uncle was up to.

Shoving away from my desk in the security office, I opened the safe tucked away in a fake drawer of a filing cabinet and pulled out a few things. The fastest way I’d get the information I wanted was from the horse’s mouth. This might not be what Astin had intended when she asked me to do this, but let’s just say I’m taking the initiative. Having what I needed in hand, I headed down to the basement through the back entrance so I wouldn’t draw attention from others in the house. With the knowledge that Flora might still have someone in the house acting as her eyes and ears, I wasn’t going to take chances.

“Master Ryker,” greeted the man I ordered to guard the door to Athos.

Gunner and Mathis were down here too, but I made sure they weren’t close to each other. If there was a plan to break them out or kill them before they could talk, I wasn’t going to make it easy. The basement level was fucking huge, spanning the entire length and width of the house. Each of the men was in a different section, off the main halls, so you had to know where you were going to find them.

“I’m going in. No one else is to know I’m here unless it's Mistress Astin or one of her men,” I ordered. The last thing I wanted was to have someone trying to find me and figure out we had the late boss’s brothers in holding.

“Understood, sir,” Charles answered.

Clapping him on the shoulder, I entered the key code and waited for the door to buzz that it was unlocked. Shoving the heavy door open, I stepped into the small room that resembled what cops used for interrogations. Only ours didn’t have an observation window or anything else recording what happened in here. The methods we used weren’t something we needed to have video evidence of.

“Thank fuck you’re here, Ryker,” Athos blurted when he spotted me. “Please tell me that Astin has calmed down enough to be reasonable?”

“Sorry, man, I’m not here to let you out,” I said, leaning back against the door. “You need to help me understand what’s going on so I can help you because, right now, nothing you’re saying is making much sense.”

Athos frowned at me. “How can it not make sense? The position of Boss needs to go to a male, one who’s related by blood to the previous Boss or married to the heiress. This bullshit of having a woman run things is ridiculous. Hell, we don’t even let women run the country, so why would we let them run something so vital to our survival as head of the Family?”

“Okay, but you realize that even if we follow that rule, it won’t be you. It would be Mathis. He’s a full-blooded relative and older than you,” I reasoned. “He’s saying that the one making moves to take the role is you.”

“The rules don’t state that it has to be the older brother or a fully related person. I’m his half-brother through our father, and that has more weight to it, seeing as it’s what gives me the family name,” Athos argued.