Dangerous

by Carrington, Tori

  But his words still echoed in her mind.

  In fact, they were the only words she could seem to concentrate on.

  “I hate to tell you this, Gia, but Lucas Paretti is FBI.”

  She winced as if hearing Vito say the words for the first time all over again.

  Her knee-jerk reaction to his statement was to deny that it could be true. She began to defend Luca, tell Vito that she knew him and that never in a million years would he betray her. Not again.

  She stopped speaking. In that one moment, she’d held in her hand the final piece of the puzzle she’d been seeking. Where Luca had gone when he’d left the family so long ago. Why not even his parents had appeared capable of contacting him.

  And then there was his sudden reappearance and his offer to work for her father a year ago.

  Gia’s heart beat thickly in her chest as she sat staring at nothing, incapable of movement.

  Luca was FBI.

  She slowly reviewed everything she’d said to him, everything she’d done with him, in the past two weeks. Considered what he’d uncovered about the family over the past year.

  And wished the floor would open up and swallow her whole so she wouldn’t have to deal with the complicated questions streaming through her mind.

  There was a knock at the door. She ignored it.

  “Miss Gia? It’s Frankie. I have your coffee. Sorry it took so long, but one of Mr. Cimino’s men sent me on an errand and I just got back.”

  Gia forced herself to get up and go to the door to open it.

  Frankie balanced a tray that bore not only coffee, cream and sugar, but also a plate of biscotti.

  “Shall I put it on the table?” he asked.

  “Yes. Thanks, Frankie.”

  Gia ordered herself to get her wits together. Too much was going on to give herself over to emotional distress just now. The estate was being locked down and she wasn’t sure what all that entailed. Images of metal shutters being closed over the windows and barbed wire being laid out on top of the perimeter fence came to mind.

  Then there was the fact that she’d so wholeheartedly believed that Tamburo and the Peluso family had been behind the hit on her father.

  But now that Tamburo had been killed…

  “Mr. Lorenzo says he’d like to talk to you when you have a minute.”

  “Yes, well, tell him I don’t have a minute. And probably won’t until sometime tomorrow,” she said absently.

  But halfway around the desk she stopped.

  “Actually, Frankie, don’t worry about it. I’m going to go up and speak to Lorenzo right now.”

  Chapter 17

  Gia stood outside her mother’s old room. One of the nurses had left the door ajar. She listened as he berated someone, cursing them and demanding that they provide the medication he needed, that he was in pain.

  Gia moved into the room next to her brother’s, fingered through the syringes there and then picked up one marked Vitamin B12.

  “Sounds like we’re not feeling any better than we did this morning,” she said upon entering her brother’s room.

  “That’s because we are in extreme pain and our sister has convinced the goddamn doctor that I don’t need meds anymore.”

  She motioned for the harried nurse to leave the room. Gia closed the door after her, her fingers curved around the syringe in her pocket.

  “Tamburo’s been hit,” she said.

  “I don’t give a shit if the president himself was assassinated. Give me my drugs.”

  Gia shook her head and leaned against the door with her arms crossed over her chest. “So you don’t care that that bullet came during a meeting of all the families? Or that it could have had my name on it?”

  Lorenzo looked as if he wanted to shoot her himself. “If it had your name on it, you wouldn’t be in here right now torturing me. And I’d have my drugs.”

  Gia considered what he’d said. During her conversation earlier with his attending physician, she’d learned the symptoms of addiction, all of which Lorenzo displayed. And he’d recommended a course of action. The first of which was to prescribe him the bare minimum of the medications Lorenzo craved. The next was to check him into a facility equipped to handle just such cases.

  She didn’t want to send Lorenzo away. To do so would be to admit defeat. And would include others in what was essentially a family matter. He was the only true family she had left, but she was ill equipped to see to his needs now, no matter how much she would like to. And he needed to be weaned off the drugs that had turned him into little more than a prescription junkie.

  “What happened that day, Lorenzo?” she asked quietly.

  He fell instantly quiet and dropped his gaze to stare at the neatly folded sheet and blanket over his stomach. The black silk pajamas he wore made him appear surprisingly normal, as if he was just a regular guy waking in the morning.

  The problem lay in that the bedcovers were a little too neatly folded and it was seven o’clock at night.

  Gia stepped nearer the bed, realizing with a start that she had yet to press him for details surrounding his injuries…the same events that had resulted in the deaths of Mario and their father. In the beginning, she was just glad he was still alive and figured that the rest would work itself out in its own time.

  Once he was well enough, he’d share anything that might help in finding the hit men, and by extension, the person who had hired them.

  “I already told you, I don’t remember nothing.”

  “Anything,” she automatically corrected, the reminder that she’d always challenged her brothers on their atrocious grammar, stabbing her with nostalgia for times past. “And I don’t believe you.”

  Lorenzo looked at her in surprise, and then the familiar annoyance furrowed his brow. “What else is new? You don’t believe that I’m in pain and need my drugs.

  You don’t believe that I can’t see to the physical therapy because it hurts too much. You don’t believe that I’m capable of making my own decisions about my life.”

  “That’s because if it were left up to you, you’d probably be dead.” The comment was a careless, throwaway one. She hadn’t meant it.

  But his resigned expression told her that she wasn’t that far from the mark.

  She moved to a chair, suddenly incapable of supporting herself. “Is that what you really wanted? To take your own life?”

  “Why the past tense?”

  “Tell me those are just words.”

  Lorenzo didn’t respond for a long moment. “You’ve always been a know-it-all, haven’t you? Papa always called you his little miss princess in training for the crown. Before you could talk you would rush into situations battle commander ready to send the troops into action.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t born with that, you know?” He glanced at her. “Papa said I lacked focus. That women and clubs were all that I had on my mind. He said he kept waiting for me to grow out of it. Fall in love. Marry the right woman. Settle down so I could take more of an interest in the family business. Eventually take over as head of the family one day.”

  He didn’t have to tell Gia the latter. Everyone knew her father had been grooming Lorenzo to take over for him. She hadn’t known, however, that her father had had a negative view of Lorenzo’s lifestyle or questioned his leadership abilities.

  “How did you respond to that?” she asked quietly. “His telling you that you lacked focus?”

  Lorenzo stared at her. “How do you think I responded?”

  “I don’t know or else I wouldn’t have asked.”

  He fell silent again.

  Gia determined to wait him out. But after a few minutes, she noticed the way sweat dotted his brow and how he grimaced in pain, and she wondered after a while if he even remembered the original question.

  “What happened that day, Lorenzo?” she asked again.

  His agitation returned. “Get out of here, Gia. I don’t need you passing judgment on me. From what I hear, you haven’t been exactly a
n upright citizen lately.”

  Her throat tightened. With whom had he been talking about the family’s goings-on?

  Then she remembered that Vito visited with her brother at least twice a day, sometimes more.

  She’d never considered that maybe they talked about business. Mostly because Lorenzo hadn’t appeared capable of carrying on a normal conversation.

  At least not with her.

  “Why would you think I’m passing judgment on you?” she asked.

  “Why else would you be in here asking me about something that happened a month and a half ago if you didn’t think that I had done something to cause it?”

  Gia raised her brows in surprise. “I’ve never said one thing to give you that impression. I’m merely interested in finding our brother and father’s killers and bringing them to justice.”

  His face darkened.

  “Lorenzo? Is there something here I’m missing? Because I’m having a hard time connecting the dots.”

  His hands began trembling as he fussed with his top blanket. But whether it was because of the scaling back on his pain medication or their conversation, she couldn’t be sure.

  “Lorenzo?” She got up from the chair and moved closer to his bed, a trembling of her own beginning to shake her from the inside out.

  “You just think you know it all, don’t you? Me. Papa. The family.” His eyes were accusing, bruised with a pain she suspected surpassed his physical injuries.

  “You don’t know anything, Gia. You don’t know anything.”

  “Then tell me. I want to know, Lorenzo. I need to know.” She fought to keep her breathing normal, even. “My life lately has been consumed with finding justice for the loss of our family. I’ve given up Bona Dea, closed my apartment and moved back out here, tried to take care of a business I had no knowledge of until I was forced to handle it in your stead.”

  “You really don’t have any idea, do you?”

  His words were said so softly that she had to lean in closer to hear them.

  “Any idea about what?”

  He grabbed her arm and she gasped, taken aback by the quick and hard move. “That Tamburo wasn’t responsible for the hit against our father.”

  “Then who was?”

  She desperately searched his face for the answer, wanting to shake him in the hopes that it would force it out.

  Then the truth struck her. One of the possible truths.

  She tried to pull her hand away and he jerked it closer, holding tighter, bruising her skin.

  “Ah, now she’s beginning to understand.”

  She watched as his big dark eyes filled with tears, as if all the pain in the world resided there, just beyond their glassy depths.

  “Two months ago, Papa gave me a deadline. Told me that I had to shape up and prove myself worthy to play a significant role in the family. And if at the end of that time, I didn’t perform to his satisfaction, he was going to look to Mario.”

  Gia felt the sudden, inexplicable urge to get away, run from the room, to prevent herself from hearing what she feared he was about to say.

  “You know what my response was?”

  She didn’t say anything as hot tears of her own rushed to blur her vision.

  “I asked if you know what my response was?” he said louder, jerking her wrist again.

  Gia winced and shook her head.

  “I said, ‘yes, Papa.’ Just like every other time he tried to fill my head with advice and guidance, pushing me in a direction I didn’t want to go.”

  “Where did you want to go?” she whispered.

  “I wanted to be a painter. Did you know that, Gia? Did anyone in the family know that I have a studio downtown? That a local gallery had just offered to spotlight my work? Had set the date for my first official showing?”

  Gia blinked, remembering that he had liked to draw when they were younger, and that he used to make off with her sketch pads from time to time. She’d thought that it was because he’d liked to torment her. Normal sibling-rivalry stuff.

  She’d never expected that he’d actually used the pads.

  “I told Papa, and you know what he did? He gave me the ultimatum. Told me art was for gays and that I’d better get my act together or he’d cut me off from the family.”

  The trembling in Gia’s stomach moved outward so that her knees felt suddenly weak.

  “So I did the only thing I knew how to do. The only thing he’d taught me.”

  Gia began shaking her head, trying to ward off the coming words.

  “I conspired to get rid of him.”

  “No!” She thought she’d screamed the word, but instead it came out as a barely hushed whisper.

  “Yes, Gia. I helped kill our own father. I mapped out the route we would take out that day to meet with the Guarino brothers. Scheduled down to the minute exactly where we would be, and when. So when the gunmen pulled up on either side of our car, the only one who wasn’t surprised was me.”

  Gia tried to jerk her wrist from his grasp again. “Let me go!” she demanded.

  “Goddamn it, release me.”

  “Why? So you can do what I’ve wanted to do since that day? Since the moment I watched our father take that first bullet in the arm?” He squeezed his eyes shut and his grip tightened. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget his face. The way he looked at me. I don’t know how he knew, but…he did. He stared at me in shock, as if the last thing he would have expected was for me to want him dead.”

  “Stop it! I don’t want to hear any more.”

  He hauled her closer. “Then give me the goddamn drugs, Gia,” he said viciously.

  “Let me end this terrible…suffering. Let me kill myself and stop the pain.”

  * * *

  The sun was hanging low on the horizon as Lucas sped up the curving driveway to the Trainello house. His every nerve ending was on alert. His every instinct told him that something was going horribly wrong.

  He climbed from the car, his rushed steps slowing as he realized that there were no other cars to be seen. No armed men.

  He hurried up to the door and opened it, surprised to find it unlocked and with no one in the foyer.

  “Gia?” he called out.

  His own voice echoed back at him.

  Jesus. What was going on?

  He covered the first floor in ten seconds flat, finding no one there. Not in the library, Gia’s office, the kitchen. The place was completely empty.

  He took the steps upwards two at a time, his heart racing in his chest. What was going on? Where had everyone gone? Where were Vito and his men? Why wasn’t the place being guarded?

  Where was Gia?

  He threw open the door to her bedroom and stood staring inside. Relief flushed through his system. Gia was curled up on top of her bed in a fetal position, ignorant to the world.

  The next emotion he knew was fear…

  Chapter 18

  Gia vaguely heard Luca’s voice calling out for her, but she was unable to respond, incapable of even the simplest movement. She lay on her bed, longing to close her eyes, but even that small relief was denied her because every time she blinked, a series of unwanted images branded the back of her eyelids.

  Vito’s face when he’d told her that Luca was an FBI agent…

  Lorenzo’s brutal grip on her hand as he confessed to having killed their father and brother…

  The imagined expression on her father’s face when he realized his own son was responsible for killing him…

  She heard her bedroom door open and crash against the inside wall.

  “Gia.”

  The one word was said in relief, and almost immediately she felt Luca’s weight on the bed beside her.

  She finally found the strength to move. Away from him.

  “Don’t,” she whispered, rolling over and sitting on the opposite side of the bed, her back to him.

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, warmth spreading through her blouse and over her skin. She didn’t shrug
him off.

  “What’s is it, Gia? What’s the matter?”

  Where did she start? With the fact that her entire life over the past six weeks had been a lie? Beginning with her desire to make some stranger pay for the loss of two members of her family only to discover that her last remaining family member, her blood, had been the one who had virtually pulled the trigger?

  And ending with Luca’s ultimate betrayal?

  “Tell me what in the hell is going on.” Luca grasped her shoulders and forced her to face him in the middle of the bed. She glared at him as if she’d like nothing more but to see him dead.

  He blinked in the face of her nonverbal confrontation. Then his hands slowly dropped onto the mattress and his shoulders slumped.

  “You know,” he said simply.

  Gia swallowed past the Long Island-size lump in her throat. She nodded. She knew.

  In fact, she was afraid that she knew too much. Her brain hurt from the infusion of so much unwanted information.

  Her heart felt as if it was about to explode in her chest.

  “Gia, I…”

  She finally looked up into his face, wanting, needing so badly to hear something that might give her the tiniest bit of hope.

  “I know there’s no way I can possibly make this up to you. Just know that this…my assignment…had nothing to do with you.”

  “But it had to do with my father.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and then he nodded. “Yes, it did.”

  “Why? What did my father ever do to you that he deserved your spite? Your hate?”

  His eyes shot blue flames. “He killed my brother.”

  She blinked at him, his words stealing the breath from her lungs.

  “Not directly. He didn’t pull the trigger. But he created the environment that made Angelo a victim of a violent crime that wouldn’t have existed had there been no mob.”

  “Your brother was mugged,” she whispered.

  “By rival family members who were competing against Angelo for the same numbers business.”

  Frustrated rage filled her from toe to head. “Guns don’t kill people, Luca.