by Naomi West
I pulled away from him just enough so that I could look up into his eyes. He had to know that I absolutely meant what I was about to say. “You really think you have to ask me that? I can’t ask you to kill him for me. Trust me, I thought about it once I’d had a few days to get comfortable here and I knew what you were capable of. But that wouldn’t have been right of me. If you’re offering it, though, I’m more than happy to agree. He’ll never back off on his own, and it’s the only way I can be free of him.” That heavy load on my shoulders lightened ever so slightly.
“That’s the plan, then,” he said with a nod. “Dino will be dead by the end of the week, and we’ll be back to having only Matteo to worry about.” He kissed my forehead once again and pulled me in close. His grip was tight, but I didn’t mind.
My body was still racked with sobs. I had told him everything, and Lorenzo hadn’t blamed me for any of it. He hadn’t turned me away as though I was nothing more than dirty garbage. I couldn’t explain why I felt that he should, but it was as though my time with Dino had sullied me in some intrinsic way that I couldn’t wash off my skin.
But it would all be over with soon. Dino would finally get what he deserved.
Chapter Sixteen
Lorenzo
“You sure you’re ready?” Alexis asked me from the doorway.
I checked my magazine and tucked it into its holster next to my gun. I knew without looking that everything was in working order, but I always checked anyway. “It’s nothing more dangerous or exciting than any other hit I’ve done. I’ll actually have a little bit of an advantage, since he’s expecting me.”
“But he’s expecting me as well, isn’t he?” Her fingers twisted in the hem of her shirt. “Won’t he think something is up when he sees that I’m not with you?” Her teeth dug into her bottom lip.
I grabbed her hands to keep her from fretting so much. “First of all, I never told him I was bringing you. I only said I wanted to arrange a meeting. For all he knows, I’m telling him where he can pick you up. He should know better, dealing with a hitman, but he’ll figure it out soon enough.” I’d had the same thoughts, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.
“I’m sorry. I’m not trying to tell you what to do or upset you. I’m just worried about this whole thing.”
Her apology made me crumble a little around the edges. “No, you’re fine. I just think you’re worrying about it too much. Besides, if anything goes awry, you know what to do.” I had shown her two hiding spots in the apartment where I had stashed loaded guns and a third that held a good amount of cash. “But you won’t need to know. Trust me.”
“Okay.” She put her arms around my waist and pressed her lips to my cheek. I turned so that she kissed my lips instead. “Just be careful.”
“I will.”
* * *
The wharf was quiet, save for a few seagulls who hadn’t bothered bedding down. A few distant ships slipped silently past the mouth of the harbor, their lights flashing. My shoes echoed only slightly against the boards of the dock. During the day, this was a busy place, with shipments being unloaded at every port. Sailors and merchants were everywhere. But it was practically abandoned now, just the way I liked it.
Dino was already waiting for me, leaning against a pier and looking confident. “I’m surprised to see you here alone,” he said as I approached. He straightened up and turned to face me. “I was quite certain a man like you would make the right decision.”
“Who says I haven’t?” I said with a shrug. “I thought about it a lot, you know. It was tempting to go against your plans just to irritate you. I can be like that. But Alexis is getting to be a bit of a pain in my ass, anyway, so I figured it was just as well I let you have her.” I spoke the words as though I meant them, but they made my guts twist around on themselves.
“All right.” He looked over my shoulders. “So where is she?”
I let out a soft laugh. “You didn’t think I would just hand her over without some assurance you would keep your word, did you? Rest assured, I have her in a safe location until we’ve worked out our deal.” Maybe it would have been better not to toy with him. After all, the more time I spent here, the more likely it was to have some associate of his pop out from behind a shipping container. I could have just shot him as soon as I got to the wharf, but it wasn’t as much fun. And he deserved to be led along on a string for a bit.
“I already told you, as long as I have Alexis, I’m good. I don’t want to get into your business any more than I have to.” Dino shifted his weight from foot to foot, eager to get his hands on the woman he felt belonged to him.
“And if you do? Then what? You’ve got her and you’ve got the upper hand on me.”
Dino shrugged, a slow smile coming over his thin face. “You’re the hitman. I think you could probably figure something out.”
“That’s a good start. But I think maybe we should sign a little contract while we’re at it?” I reached into my jacket pocket as I waited for his response.
“Fine by me, if it’ll ease your mind.”
He never saw it coming. I had the gun out and the muzzle to his head before he could even take a step backwards. He fell down and into water with splash. Somebody might find him the next day, alerted by the numerous fish and birds feeding on his body as he floated to the surface. But once they identified the body, nobody would really care. He was just another scumbag, and the police wouldn’t do any more work on the case than they had to. The job was done. I went home to tell Alexis.
Chapter Seventeen
Marco
My heart thudded as I stepped out of the cab and approached the front door of The Downtown Room. I’d never been important enough to make it into a place like this, but now I had the right connection. I could only hope that it would continue to be a good one for me. Even though the walls of the building, I could hear the music thumping. A long line strung down the sidewalk and around the corner, numerous beautiful people waiting for their chance to get in. I cut straight to the front of the line.
I heard about Dino’s death the same way everybody else did: the newspaper. I should have known there was a reason he hadn’t called to check on Alexis and Lorenzo. I’d been tailing those two for weeks, and Dino had been relentless about getting updates. Still, I knew it was going to come to an end sometime, and for all I knew he was avoiding me to try to get out of his last payment.
But he was dead, and I had the information I’d never been able to pass on. Lorenzo had killed him; I knew that much without even reading the small bit in the police section of the newspaper. He was a fool to try to trick a man like that in the first place.
“You on the list?” The big bouncer was more than a head taller than me, and I’m not exactly short. His shoulders were so wide I doubted he fit into a normal car. Probably had to have a truck.
“Yes, sir. Marco Rossi.” My nerves were on fire. This was a big shot for me.
He pulled out a tablet and scrolled his finger down the screen. “You sure? I don’t see you on here.”
“I’m a special guest of Piero Moretti. He’s expecting me.” My heart thudded a little harder, worried that Piero had either forgotten about our meeting or decided that he no longer cared what I had to say. But he had seemed so eager over the phone …
“Oh, yeah. Right down here. Just added a few hours ago.” He thumbed over his shoulder at the door. “You can go in. You’ll probably find Piero on the balcony in the far-right corner. But behave yourself; you don’t want to get booted out of this place.” He unclipped the velvet rope that kept the crowd from surging in.
“No problem.” I had no doubt that Piero and the rest of the Moretti family had plenty of manpower, should they decide I wasn’t worth the trouble. But I knew he would want to hear what I had to say.
It was difficult to work my way through the throng, but I found Piero right where the bouncer promised he would be. He saw me coming as soon as I stepped onto the balcony and waved me over. “You’re the
man I talked to on the phone?” He was a dark-haired man with thin lips and narrow shoulders. There were men all around him, probably other members of the mob. They largely ignored me, but I knew they were ready to take me out should they feel the need.
“I am. Is this a good place to talk?”
He smiled. It was a wicked smile, one that made his eyes glimmer with malice. “I wouldn’t have invited you here if it wasn’t. You say you have some interesting information.”
I nodded. “I do. I think you’ll want to hear—”
“Hold on, hold on,” Piero interrupted. “I just want you to understand first that one of my pet peeves is wasting time. If you’re wasting my time, you won’t like how I repay you.”
“No worries there. You see, I’ve spent the last ten years as a private investigator. I know a lot of things about a lot of people and I’m good at my job. Sometimes it’s boring. I get hired to find cheating wives and husbands or guys who try to skip out on their debts to loan sharks. But sometimes I run across some little gems and I tuck them away for a rainy day.” I had honed my skills as a P.I. in order to make money, but once Dino got me involved in this whole thing with Lorenzo and the Moretti family, I saw a brand new opportunity for myself. Piero could mean regular work for me, or maybe some other position within the family. No more waiting for the next client to show up.
“Okay, then. But it better be good. I’ve got plenty on my plate right now without having to deal with you.”
A bubble of excitement rose up in my throat. “Oh, trust me. You’ll want to deal with me.”
“Spit it out already.” His voice was a warning as he sipped his beer.
“I’ve been following this girl for a client. It’s a pretty typical case of a jealous ex-boyfriend, and it wasn’t anything too notable. But this girl has hooked up with a guy you work very closely with, by the name of Lorenzo.”
Piero leaned forward, his drink suddenly forgotten. “Lorenzo Rizzo?”
“That’s the one,” I replied with a grin. I had him. It only took that name and he was hooked. I knew he would be. I’d done a little bit of detective work on my own once I knew I was getting tangled with the mafia, and it didn’t take much to figure out there was no love lost between Matteo Moretti’s son and his adopted hitman.
He shook his head suddenly. “No, that’s not really that exciting. I already know about his girlfriend and that she’s running from some nut job. She said that much herself and so did Lorenzo.”
“Did he tell you that she was working as a stripper?”
Piero shrugged. Strippers and whores were probably a normal part of his life.
“Or that she has a connection to the Calzoni family?”
“What?” The rest of the club might as well have faded into nothingness around us. His focus was entirely on me now. “What did you say?”
“She was working at this place out on the edge of the town called The Corral. That’s nothing significant, but I found an email exchange between her and a guy who worked for Calzoni, named Vick. It’s not hard to hack an email address if you know what you’re doing. Turns out, he booked her for Frank’s birthday party and she was working at his mansion on the same night Lorenzo took Calzoni out.”
Piero rubbed his lips together like a lizard about to eat its breakfast. “How do you know all this? I mean, I get that you watch people and hack emails, but some of this seems too good to be true.”
I spread my fingers wide in a helpless gesture. “Like I said, I’ve been doing this for a long time. I don’t go anywhere without paying attention to the actions and conversations around me, even if I’m nowhere near one of my targets. I could tell things were getting good, and I just kept digging.”
Moretti’s fingers tapped against the edge of the table. “So what you’re telling me is that Alexis was there when Lorenzo killed Calzoni, and he’s—what? Safeguarding her from the family?”
“That’s how it appears.”
“Hmm.” He thought for a moment, his eyes distant. “Tell me something, Rossi. If you knew I would be interested in this, then why haven’t you asked for anything in return? What’s your agenda here?”
I wanted to laugh. Of course I wanted something. “I wouldn’t mind if you and your relations kept me in mind for any future needs.” I flipped my business card onto the table in front of him. “If nothing else, sometimes it just pleases me to stir the pot a little.”
Piero tucked the card away into his jacket pocket. “You’re an odd character, Rossi, but a handy one. You’ll be hearing from me soon, I’m sure.”
Chapter Eighteen
Lorenzo
Dino was dead. Alexis and I were safe for the moment. It should have been a time for relaxing, but my muscles were constantly tensed, ready to react. In my career, I had developed some instincts for knowing when things were going bad. It was like smelling a coming storm on the wind. Something was definitely brewing.
There had been surprisingly little activity from Matteo lately. It disturbed me. I tried to find ways to justify it. Maybe he just wanted to bide his time. Maybe he was getting old and tired. Or maybe there was something else bothering him. I had stopped by his mansion that morning just to check in, but he’d had little to say and I hadn’t pushed. Matteo wasn’t the kind of man you pushed.
It was time. Alexis and I were going to have to leave. I would tell her as soon as I got back. We would pack only the bare essentials and get the hell out of town. It didn’t matter where we went. My original plan had been to send her away once things seemed safe, but I knew now that I could never do that. If she was going away, then I was going with her. We’d head to another country if we had to.
I pulled into the parking garage and made my way to my apartment as quickly as I could, eager to ask her where she’d like to go. A girl like her surely had some unfulfilled dreams. We’d head to Mexico, Ireland, Greece—whereever she wanted. But as I stepped off the elevator, I sensed something was wrong. The door was open a crack.
“Alexis?” I pushed it open and stepped inside. The place was intact. Nobody had dumped out drawers or gone through closets, so this was no burglary. Had she left without asking and just been careless? That wasn’t like her. I could smell men’s cologne as I went through the unoccupied living room and took a left down the hall.
They were on me too fast. Everything went dark, and a heavy weight shoved me to the ground. I reached for my gun, but someone grabbed my wrist and yanked my arm around behind my back. Kicking with my heels, I made contact hard enough to elicit a grunt of pain from one of my assailants, but it wasn’t enough to stop them. As I struggled against the bonds that were quickly being tied around my hands and feet, I heard a familiar voice.
“Just get him out and get him into the van!”
A heavy thud sounded against the back of my skull, and I fell into a deep black tunnel.
* * *
My vision swam and my head throbbed as I came to. The burlap sack I’d been blinded with back at my apartment was whisked off my head, and I found myself in a warehouse of some sort. The metal walls had streaks of rust that pointed downward to the few scattered boxes and crates in the building, and hot wind blew threw a broken window. My eyes threatened to close again, to submit to the darkness that had overtaken me, but I forced them back open.
“Stay with us, Lorenzo. We have a lot to talk about.”
I blinked rapidly as though fighting off sleep and focused on the figure in front of me. Piero, his thin lips twisted into a wicked grin, stood with his men arranged behind him. “I should have known it was you, you bastard.”
“Now, now. I don’t think that’s any way to talk to me. Not when your life is in my hands.” He walked in a slow circle around the rickety wooden chair I was bound to, reminding me that he was on every perimeter of my life at that moment. “You have an awful lot of explaining to do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I spat. “I’ve served your family faithfully for over a decade and this is how
you repay me?”
Piero nodded. “Yes, you served faithfully for years, but what about now? I understand that little treasure you keep in your bed actually belonged to Calzoni.”
Despite the pain it caused, I snapped my eyes up to meet his. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Don’t play coy with me, Lorenzo. Like a parent with his errant child, I already know the answer before I ask you the question. I know Alexis is not just some out-of-work secretary. She’s nothing more than a trashy stripper, and one that you seem to think belongs to you now. I don’t think my father would be too pleased to discover that she was a witness to Calzoni’s death and by all rights should be dead herself.” He looked so proud of himself, his hands in his pockets and his stance wide as he looked down at me.