But now she realized that the best thing she could do for Bryan, for herself, was admit that it wasn’t fair to either one of them to pretend she could handle both her duties at Bona Dea and the Venuto family without jeopardizing one or the other. And while pulling out of the company she had built up with Bryan from scratch would put incredible stress on him, to not do so wouldn’t be right, either.
He finished what he was doing and looked at her again, waiting for an answer.
She merely smiled at him sadly.
Bryan groaned and hugged her.
“Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry if I sound like the biggest of all bitches. It’s just that I miss you around here.”
“I know. I miss you, too,” she murmured.
He nodded as he pulled back. “I think I believe you.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It looks like the title Lady Boss might fit you a little too well.” He looked over her all-black ensemble. “I didn’t want to say this, Gia, but you’ve changed.”
She swallowed hard. “But you still love me, right?”
His grin was automatic and all encompassing. “I’ll always love you, dear. You’re the only woman who ever made me wonder what it might be like to swing the other way.”
Gia laughed and hugged him again, thinking of all the struggles they’d had over the past five years, all the triumphs. From working out of a musty old warehouse downtown, to opening their first boutique on Fifth Avenue, they’d been through a lot together.
But she had the cheerless sensation that this was where their road together ended and where they would now have to continue on alone.
An image of Luca slid through her mind and she clutched Bryan even closer. If only she could ask her friend’s advice about the mysterious man who had invaded her heart once again.
But to talk about it would only make it that much more real.
Bryan seemed to catch sight of something over her shoulder. “God, can’t you make those guys dress any better? They look like gravediggers.”
Gia glanced toward the door where the one gunman had been joined by another. The first one opened the door without knocking.
“Miss Gia, your presence is required at the estate.”
She looked at Bryan, who raised a brow at the stilted speech. “Your presence is required at the estate,” he repeated.
She kissed him soundly. “So it would seem.”
She started to turn from him and then hesitated.
He waved her away. “Go on. I’ll be fine. Bitchy as all hell, but fine.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Now go before a gunfight or something breaks out and blood gets all over our spring line.”
* * *
Gia had certainly been in taxis before, and even rented a limo every now and again for fashion events, but she wasn’t used to being driven everywhere she went. While it did give her more time to get work done in the New York stop-and-go traffic, she didn’t feel comfortable knowing that the driver heard every word she spoke on her cell phone, and knew exactly where she went and why.
She understood it was for safety’s sake, but the practice still bothered her.
Yet when they finally pulled through her father’s gated driveway entrance to find three NYPD cruisers parked at odd angles in front of the house, and two unmarked vehicles parked before them, she wanted to ask the driver how good he was at car chases, because she wanted to go everywhere but inside.
“What’s going on?” she asked the driver.
“Sorry, Miss Gia, but I couldn’t say.”
Couldn’t say or wouldn’t say, Gia found it didn’t matter. She’d find out soon enough.
The car came to a halt and she climbed out of the back.
“Miss Trainello, I was wondering if I might have a moment,” a man in a suit asked, coming to stand in front of her.
“And you might be?”
“Detective Sudowski.”
“In which division?”
“Homicide.”
The ground slanted under Gia’s feet.
“On the advice of her attorney, Miss Trainello has nothing to say.”
Gia heard Luca’s voice before she saw him. And she’d never been so relieved to see anyone in her life.
He circled the detective, staring at her meaningfully and offering his arm for her to take. He began to lead her to the front doors of the house.
“Miss Trainello, Miss Trainello!” a reporter she recognized from the funeral called out. “What do you have to say about Joseph Guarino’s death and the suspected arson that killed him?”
“Oh, God,” Gia whispered.
Luca’s arm went around her waist, half supporting her, half pressing her onward into the house.
* * *
Luca stood back, watching the chaos unfold around him. Gia’s office was filled with people offering up differing opinions on what had happened. The only silent ones were Gia and him.
Gia, herself, sat behind the desk looking like someone had poisoned her breakfast. Her already pale skin was ten shades whiter and she absently rubbed her stomach as if afraid she might throw up.
“All right, I think it’s time for everyone to leave and let Miss Gia consider everything that’s been said.”
She looked at him at first in surprise, then in gratitude. Then she stood.
“Everyone but Vito.”
The older man nodded and sat back down.
Within moments, the room emptied out, leaving just the three of them. Lucas closed the door.
Gia rounded the desk and leaned against it, gripping the edges as if the wood was the only thing keeping her steady. “What happened, Vito?”
The older man shrugged. “I don’t know, Gia. My men said the place was empty before they torched it. Joey must have found a way inside without them seeing him between the time they checked and the wick was lit, so to speak.”
Lucas stepped forward. “The fire was supposed to be contained in the kitchen.”
“Jesus.” Gia crossed her right arm under her breasts and rubbed her brow with her other hand. “How could this have happened? I wanted them warned. I didn’t want one of them killed.”
The room went silent.
Vito cleared his throat. “While Joey’s death certainly wasn’t planned, it may end by working out better in the long run.”
Gia and Lucas stared at him.
He shrugged again. “The other debtors who’ve refused to pay you what your father was owed will think twice before refusing again.”
“We’re talking about a man’s death, Vito.”
“As luck would have it, I’ve already heard from Gino Guarino. Our guys are picking up the full amount due from him this morning.”
Gia closed her eyes as if concentrating on keeping her breakfast down.
Lucas stepped forward. “The hows and whys aren’t what’s important now, Gia. What is important is that you have half the NYPD parked in your driveway and every five minutes another television crew arrives.”
She looked at him as if wishing him to make it all go away. And, for the life of him, he wanted to make it happen.
“What do you think I should do?” she asked.
“I’d suggest making a statement to the media. Something along the lines of you and your family mourn the loss of a close friend and send your condolences to his family.”
Vito grunted. “Your father wouldn’t have done any such thing.”
“What would he have done?” Gia asked him.
“He would have had his men chase the media off and stonewalled the cops until they went away.”
She looked at Lucas.
He grimaced. “It could work.”
She rounded the desk and took a pad from the middle drawer. “I’m going to make a statement and offer to speak to the police.”
Lucas nodded.
“What in the hell will you say?” Vito demanded.
“That from all we know, Joey’s death was a terrible accident, and beyo
nd that we know nothing.”
Chapter 11
That afternoon, after Gia had addressed the media and had spoken briefly to the police, Lucas stood near the front windows considering the empty driveway, when his cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his inside jacket pocket and looked at it. “Unknown Caller,” the display read.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure no one could hear him.
“Hello,” he said normally.
“I need to talk to you. As soon as possible,” his FBI handler said.
Lucas disconnected and put the phone back in his pocket.
Damn. He didn’t want to leave Gia alone. Not now when she finally appeared to be depending on him, in however limited a capacity.
But to ignore his handler’s request would be akin to breaking his own cover. The next step in the communication process would be to send someone in undercover, either as a package or pizza deliveryman, to get the word to him that his presence was required now. He didn’t want to risk that.
He grasped the arm of a guard as he walked by. “I’ve got to go out for a few minutes. Tell Miss Gia I’ll be back soon if she’s looking for me.”
* * *
“It’s Tamburo and the damn Peluso family. I know it is,” Vito was saying to Gia in the library. “They’ve been trying to get their greedy hands on the family assets for years now.”
Gia paced back and forth, feeling as if she was a “boo” away from jumping out of her skin.
What had made her think she was cut out for this? That she was emotionally and physically capable of carrying out a vendetta against those responsible for her father’s death?
“I say we strike back.”
Gia froze in the middle of the room and slowly turned to stare at Vito.
“Certainly you’re not suggesting that they were watching our men and purposely torched the entire restaurant with Joey in it after our guys left?”
He shrugged as if to say it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
Gia thought it was too convenient and was reluctant to buy into the angry assumption.
Vito Cimino was old guard. He went way back with her father and had been instrumental in keeping them together after the first Venutos had established the family and through the four men who’d headed it since.
But being part of the old guard meant that he knew only the old ways.
There had to be a more effective means of dealing with matters of this nature.
“I say we need a meeting of the families.”
Vito looked at her as if she’d lost a few biscotti during her pacing and that perhaps it wasn’t too late to go back and pick them up. “There hasn’t been a group meeting between the families in over a decade. It’s too dangerous. The feds watch everything. Bringing the families together would give them the ammunition they need to prove we work together in some capacity. One goes down, we all go down.”
“Well, then, I think a meeting is long overdue.”
She tried to work the details out in her mind.
How quickly her plans had changed. First, she’d been interested in only bringing her father’s killers to justice. Then she had gotten sucked into seeing to the family’s day-to-day activities. Now she was proposing that she act in that leadership capacity in a full meeting with the other families.
Oh, she’d seen each of the family heads individually. But she needed to see them now, together, when everything was happening, to try to sort out who might have been behind the hit. Try to bait the guilty party into tipping his hand.
“Where’s Luca?” she asked.
Vito shrugged and crossed his arms. “I don’t know. One of the men said he left about an hour or so ago.”
Where would Luca have had to go so suddenly?
No matter. She had work to do. Either with or without him.
* * *
Lucas made it back to the estate at around sunset. His handler hadn’t wanted only to speak to him, he’d wanted a one-on-one, and those were harder to arrange than his sneaking out to his apartment for a telephone conversation.
So there they’d been, on New Jersey’s east shore, watching boats and strolling with fishing gear as if they were factory workers out to bait a couple of hooks instead of agents trading information.
“Why didn’t you send all the tapes?” his handler had asked.
He’d been told his name was John Smith. But since Lucas suspected that was an alias, he refused to get used to referring to him as such.
Smith was African-American and at least twice Lucas’s age, his face bespeaking many years on the job. His eyes telling him that he knew something was up.
Lucas had pretended the question didn’t surprise him. And it didn’t. Not really.
He’d known there would be inquiries into his change in behavior. He just hadn’t known they’d come so soon and so directly.
“I had problems with my wire,” he lied.
“Sporadic problems? The missing tapes aren’t in one stretch but rather random, over a period of days.”
“Trust me, you got everything that was important.”
“Well, that’s not for you to decide, is it? You’re to send in everything you record.”
“I did.”
“That means you switched off the wire then. Why?”
He hadn’t switched off the wire. Rather, he’d discarded the tapes that had included anything of importance he’d discussed with Gia. Anything that might incriminate her.
So far as Smith knew, there was no acting head of the Venuto crime family. With Lorenzo out of commission, and Giovanni dead, the FBI believed the family was in a chaotic sort of limbo waiting for the other shoe to drop. They might have their suspicions that Gia had taken over the reins. But he wasn’t going to provide the proof that she had.
And he hoped he would never have to.
But in order to make that happen, he’d have to convince her to give up those same reins.
And judging by the other man across from him, and the escalating interest in his own activities, he wouldn’t have long to do that.
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with the past between you and Giovanna Trainello, would it?”
Lucas’s movements slowed at the blatant question. He rarely heard Gia’s given name used. It seemed to reveal her in an unflattering light, if only because the name was so similar to her father’s.
“Didn’t think we knew about that, did you?” Smith shook his head. “We know about a lot more than you’ll ever suspect, Paretti. Why do you think we agreed to give you this undercover when you asked to be assigned to it? You used to be an insider, one of them.”
Lucas turned his fishing pole as if to recast it. Yes, he used to be one of them. He’d never forget that. It had cost him his brother’s life.
“But you’re not now. Don’t kid yourself into thinking otherwise. All they have to do is catch a whiff of your association with the FBI and you’ll join the list of other agents that share the same fate you will. Dead agents.”
Lucas stared at him. “Are you threatening to expose me?”
“No, Paretti,” he said as he pulled his own line in. “I’m promising I will if you don’t do the job you were hired to do.”
Now, as Lucas sat in his car in front of the Trainello house, he wondered what difference there was between the New York crime families and the bureau assigned to investigate them. The threat Smith had issued didn’t sound all that different than a death warrant taken out by one of the families.
In fact, he was beginning to believe that gangs were gangs, no matter which way you sliced them. The mafia was a gang comprising Italian families connected to the homeland and their religion and their loyalty to each other. The FBI and NYPD and other agencies like them were gangs formed through training, but were no less formidable and ruthless when they wanted to be.
It seemed he had left one crime family to become a member of another.
But now it was Gia’s life on the line.
* * *
Gia curled up in her bed, a sketch pad open in her lap. She’d barely done more than scribble, but it was comforting somehow lying there, the scent of paper filling her nose along with the graphite from the pencil she held, the one lamp on the bedside table casting a golden glow about the dark room. The act of holding the pad lent an air of normalcy to her life that was sorely missing.
But if only for a few precious moments she wanted to forget about the armed men milling about the estate, her brother across the hall in a state of voluntary stupor, the details of the impending meeting with the other family heads.
And Luca.
She curved her bare feet more tightly under her. Or, rather, maybe she’d carved out the free time to give herself free sway to think about him.
Whenever she’d needed help in the past week, he’d been there, offering without being asked, lending her a hand up when she’d barely been aware she had fallen.
She saw herself reflected in his big, blue eyes, and every time she began to feel dirty, somehow contaminated by the activities happening around her, the decisions she made, one look into his eyes and she saw that perhaps she couldn’t be too bad. Not if he could still see her as something special, someone worth helping.
Perhaps even someone worth loving…again.
She gave up on her sketching and slapped the pad closed, the whoosh sounding loud in the quiet room. She put it on the nightstand next to the lamp and pushed the light covers off so she could get up. She stepped to the window overlooking the expansive backyard, remembering nights as a teenager when she would do the same thing. She barely registered the armed men walking around because they had been there when she was young, as well.
Could she and Luca still have a chance? Could the years that had gone between not be enough to cool embers that had burned too deep, too strong?
Could new love be enough to heal the scars that marred the old love?
Of course, she was no longer that lovestruck teen, but a grown woman not only capable of making her own decisions, but making weighty ones on which lives depended.
And him? To be sure, he was no longer the lanky twenty-four-year-old whose hair forever dipped over his right brow. And now experience and knowledge and wisdom loomed in his face.
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