by Bella Rose
Antonin could see that the possibilities were only just beginning to form in Mikhail’s mind. His father might be prone to paranoia, but he wasn’t an unintelligent man.
“Surely you see that you’ve just given the Cagliones a reason to hate us. Do you really think that they will just hand over their territory? Do you believe that men who have followed a capo, bled for the organization, sacrificed their safety, and put all of their time and resources into a business or an enterprise will simply walk away? You said you left a capo alive. Was it Giovanni Corleon?”
“Josef said he was useless,” Mikhail answered dully. “He had made treaties with Josef before. Giovanni agreed that they would cede the territory.”
“Giovanni lied,” Antonin snarled. “He has plans to marry the remaining Caglione and claim her inheritance. After the boss was removed, who do you believe controls all of the Caglione property? This is not Russia. The US has laws that protect property. You might think you own that territory,” Antonin said mockingly, “but if she still holds the deeds, then you’re going to be nothing more than a trespasser at best.”
“Josef planned this,” Mikhail said hoarsely. “He planned it all.”
Antonin didn’t bother with the “I told you so.” It would have been worse than pointless anyway.
Chapter Nineteen
JULIET HAD ONLY just opened the kitchen door to let Mr. Luciano out the side entrance when she saw Giovanni striding across the driveway in her direction. The floodlights over the garage doors threw a sickly orange glow over his features. The man did not look happy. Juliet swallowed back a case of nervousness and tried to decide what she should say.
Mr. Luciano nodded his head to Giovanni. “Mr. Corleon, it’s nice to see you.”
“What are you doing here?” Giovanni snapped. “Can’t the vultures wait until the bodies are cold before you dig around for treasure?”
Juliet gaped. She could not imagine what would cause Giovanni to be so rude and for no apparent reason. “Giovanni! Mr. Luciano was here at my request because of my grandfather’s estate. I’m so sorry, sir. You have a pleasant evening.”
Luciano gave Giovanni an appraising sort of look before turning and offering Juliet a pleasant smile. “Of course. I’ll have those papers finalized for you within twenty-four hours.”
“Thank you.”
Luciano turned to leave, but Giovanni apparently wasn’t done discussing his presence in the house. Giovanni stomped into the kitchen and slammed the door. He practically had to shove Juliet out of his way in order to lock the door behind him. Marching to the cabinet, he pulled out a bottle of Scotch and a glass. Then he poured himself a drink.
The man looked positively haggard. Juliet could only wonder at the state of things if Giovanni looked this upset. If things with the Bratva had gone as planned, Giovanni would have been ecstatic, right? So this behavior suggested it wasn’t good at all. Juliet was starting to be very glad that she had just made arrangements to keep her child and her inheritance out of Giovanni’s hands. For the first time in her life she really wasn’t certain she could trust him to look after her best interests.
“What was that bottom feeder doing here?” Giovanni finally demanded.
The intense look he leveled at her from across the kitchen counter wasn’t just disrespectful. He was acting as though he was the new boss. Perhaps it was time to remind him that he wasn’t. Especially if he had just made a disaster out of this thing with the Bratva.
“I asked Mr. Luciano to come because I needed to make sure that I wasn’t going to lose this house and the businesses to the feds after Papa’s death.” She kept her voice reasonable and mild. Going to the refrigerator, she pulled out a container of juice and poured herself a glass.
“What do you mean lose the house and businesses?” Giovanni barked. “They’re Caglione property.”
“That is true,” she agreed. “Although because I am the last remaining Caglione, they are my property.”
“What?” Giovanni slammed his glass down so hard on the countertop that it shattered. “Yours? How are they yours?”
“Who else would own them?” she wanted to know. “Have you completely lost your mind? Of course they’re mine. I was my grandfather’s heir.”
Giovanni glanced at his watch. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The priest will be here in less than half an hour.”
“Excuse me?” She was sure she’d heard him wrong. She had to have heard him wrong.
“We’re getting married so that I will have control of the Caglione property.” He made it sound like a done deal.
“You must be joking.”
The way he looked at her made her skin crawl. “No. No joke.”
“What happened with the Bratva?” She tried to think about something else. Surely this bullshit marriage that was never going to happen wasn’t the most important thing going on right now.
“We were slaughtered,” Giovanni said quietly. He slumped onto a barstool and put his head in his hands. “We lost all of the capos. Reggie and his crew went first before we even realized what was happening.”
“Where did this happen?” She was aghast at the knowledge that such violence had taken place in what seemed like obscurity. Had nobody noticed or called the police to stop it?
“One of the big warehouses downtown. Where we did the deal with the Armenians.” Giovanni shrugged. Then he picked up the bottle of Scotch and started drinking. He took several swallows before continuing to talk. “It was a complete load of bullshit! Bullshit!”
“Okay.” She tried to remain calm. “Are some of our men in the hospital? Where are the bodies, Giovanni? You cannot tell me you just left them all out there?”
“The police were coming. I heard sirens.” He sounded almost shell-shocked or something. His voice was quiet, and it seemed as if he was having difficulty tracking what he was saying. It was all very confusing. “They were just lying there.”
“They could have been hurt, not dead!” She reached across the counter and snatched the bottle out of his hand. “What kind of man leaves his friends out there to die and just takes off?”
Giovanni didn’t comment. He didn’t move. He just stared blankly at the tabletop. That was when she began to realize something. He didn’t really know what had happened because Giovanni Corleon had done the cowardly thing—he had run away.
“You left them there and you fled,” she said darkly. “Oh my God, you just left them there!” The enormity of the situation made her sick to her stomach. “Did anyone come back with you?”
He shrugged, his expression dumb. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Juliet covered her mouth with her hands. “How can you not know? If you drove back to the house alone, then you were alone, Giovanni. It’s pretty simple.”
“I couldn’t help them.” He said it as though it were some kind of excuse. Or maybe he was just saying that because he felt as if he should have done something and he was disgusted with himself. Either way, she was disgusted with him.
“Get out of my house,” she told him coldly. “Get out and don’t come back.”
He finally lifted his gaze from the counter. There was something crazed about his expression that sent a chill down her spine. “You can’t make me go. You’re going to be my wife. That means this is my house.”
***
TRYING TO FIND Josef in all the chaos leftover after the skirmish with the Cagliones proved to be fruitless. Nobody had seen him. Nobody knew where he was. Half of the men didn’t even know who he was.
In the back of his mind, Antonin wondered how Juliet had fared in all of this mess. It was likely that a good number of her men hadn’t made it back to the house. There was no telling what had happened to Giovanni. Would Juliet be all right in all of this?
He had to content himself with the knowledge that she was a resourceful woman and a leader in her own right. Surely she would be fine. Bratva soldiers consumed his entire focus for the moment. They were trickling in a few me
n at a time. His father was still upstairs in his office trying to reconcile the fact that his trusted friend had screwed him over. Antonin was supposedly in charge of finding Josef and putting him in a place where he couldn’t cause any more trouble until the council could judge him.
Dimitri found Antonin in one of the garages trying to help a man get his wounded comrade out of a car. Dimitri grabbed one of the injured man’s legs and hoisted him into the air. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
“I’m hunting Josef. I just keep getting interrupted,” Antonin explained. “Did you see him at this ridiculous bloodbath?”
“He didn’t come back.” Dimitri hauled the injured man off the ground and finally flung him over one broad shoulder. “He got into another vehicle and left the scene. I didn’t recognize the car. It was a late-model sports car though.”
“So you think he split?” Antonin’s mood soured as he considered the idea that the bastard might have slipped through their fingers.
“You ever get the feeling that this rivalry with the Cagliones was more of a distraction than anything else?” Dimitri gestured to the carnage and the still-chaotic results of one good brawl. It was certainly going to take months for all of their men to recuperate. To say nothing of the pain in the ass this was going to cause with law enforcement.
“Actually, I’ve been thinking more and more that you’re exactly right,” Antonin said irritably. “Josef has been pulling our strings all along. I don’t think any of us know what his end game really was. I mean”—Antonin gestured to the mess—“look at this! Not only would we be completely unprepared if someone came after us, but we’ve called a lot of attention to ourselves too.”
“Yeah,” Dimitri agreed. They finally deposited the injured man into the arms of his friends, and he was carried into the house for treatment. “There are sirens going all over the city. Laying low has always worked for us in the past, but at the moment we’ve got a high profile and probably top some of the city’s most-wanted lists.”
“Okay, so obviously Josef’s game was to cripple us,” Antonin reasoned. “To what effect?”
“He wants to take over, right?” Dimitri mused. “So why not make a completely separate deal that would hit us when we’re weak?”
“He needs my father out of the way,” Antonin reasoned.
Dimitri snorted and slumped against the exterior garage wall. He was obviously tired. “You’ve been in his way from the beginning when it comes to hurting your father. You don’t buy Josef’s bullshit. You never did. He always managed to manipulate your father, but you never bought into his crap.”
“It was all sleight of hand and sweet talk,” Antonin grumbled. “Of course I didn’t buy it. He kept stirring up crap and making it worse, then fixing it to make my father think that he was doing him a favor. It was all a hoax.”
“But if he wants your father’s position,” Dimitri prodded, “what’s the best way to get through you?”
Antonin spine stiffened until he stood ramrod straight. There was only one surefire way to cripple him, and it involved Juliet. “No,” Antonin whispered. “That fucking bastard wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t dare what?”
“Juliet is pregnant with my daughter,” Antonin said quickly. “She’s alone and vulnerable now that the Bratva have completely decimated the Caglione ranks.”
Dimitri whistled. “I’m not even going to get pissed at you right now that I have no idea who Juliet is. I’m just going to skip ahead to the part where you realize that Josef has probably found some way to get at her.”
“How?” Antonin began pacing back and forth across the driveway. Around him were the sounds of men laughing and moaning as they helped each other and celebrated their “victory” in their own ways. Antonin considered all of Giovanni’s failed attempts to gain control of Juliet via some kind of romantic entanglement. Even her grandfather had been uncertain about what to do with Juliet. Then marrying Giovanni had been regarded as a good way to consolidate the Caglione power base. How much more would they need to do that now?
“I have to get to the Caglione mansion,” he snarled. “That bastard Giovanni is going to try to hand her over to Josef!”
Dimitri flipped him a set of keys. “I still have no clue who exactly we are talking about. I’m going to hope that at some point you’re going to tell me what’s going on. In the meantime, my car is parked on the other side of that mess littering the driveway.” Then Dimitri smirked. He slapped Antonin on the back. “You never seem to want me along, though I can never say why exactly. I suppose you prefer to kick ass on your own. But as always, if you break it you buy it.”
Chapter Twenty
A KNOCK AT the front door shattered the uncomfortable and extremely tense silence that had fallen in the kitchen. Juliet went to answer the door. She was trying to decide exactly how to deal with a delusional man who seemed to truly believe that she was going to marry him and somehow—magically—make all of his problems go away.
She took hold of the handle and let the big front door swing wide open. To her horror, Father Barelli was standing on the doorstep. He offered her a smile, but she could hardly even respond.
“Father,” she finally managed to stammer. “I think you’re in the wrong place.”
“No.” A frown creased his forehead. “Giovanni told me to meet him here.” The priest’s expression grew sympathetic. “I was so sorry to hear of your loss, my dear girl. Your grandfather had been one of my parishioners from the time he was a very young boy.”
The Italian mafia’s relationship with the church had always rather mystified Juliet. How or why would God sanction some of the things that her father and grandfather had ordered to be done to other men? How could crimes be forgiven every single week when there was no intention to change? But now was definitely not the time for a discussion about dogma or theology.
“I appreciate your condolences,” Juliet began.
Suddenly Giovanni appeared. He looked more than a little manic in Juliet’s opinion. His dark eyes were wide and crazed. “Father Barelli! Come in! Come in! Did you bring the special license?”
“Yes.” The father looked a bit confused. He stepped into the house, and Giovanni slammed the door closed behind him. Father Barelli looked from Giovanni to Juliet. “Are you so very certain this has to be done now?”
“It’s a legal thing,” Giovanni said quickly. “The lawyer was just here to confirm everything.”
“Giovanni, no.” Juliet planted her feet on the foyer’s shiny wood floor. “This is insane.”
Now Father Barelli frowned. “I thought you said that Juliet was the one who wanted the marriage to happen immediately.”
“Yeah, he’s lying,” she told the priest. “He wants the marriage so that he can control my family’s property.”
“She’s the last Caglione!” Giovanni said. His voice was more than desperate. He sounded just a bit insane. “The leadership of the family can’t be handled by a woman!”
“Leadership of what?” Juliet turned toward Giovanni and shoved him away from her. “You sent them all to be killed or arrested! I still have to get that sorted out, and now you want to try and make me marry you? Right now? You have got to be kidding! I’m not letting you anywhere near my family’s businesses and financial holdings.”
Father Barelli’s face was grim. He turned toward Giovanni, a look of censure on his face. “Young man, I thought better of you than this.”
“Yeah?” Giovanni’s voice rose an octave as he pulled out a 9mm. He pulled the slide and aimed the gun at the priest. “Well, it doesn’t really matter what you think. You’ll do as you’re told or I’ve got no use for you!”
***
CAGLIONE SECURITY HAD always been a little on the lax side, but Antonin had never seen the estate look this deserted. It was as if there were literally no more Caglione men left to patrol the perimeter of their property. He drove right through the front gate because it was wide open, and then he parked behind
a dark sedan in the driveway.
Antonin got out of his vehicle, still expecting someone to at least challenge his approach. There was nothing. The wind was blowing through the trees, and in the darkness it was all a little eerie. His instincts were screaming at him that this was very bad, and he knew that he was very likely walking into a mess.
He crept quickly to the windows that offered a view of the interior of the living room. There was a light on, and he at least expected to see Juliet. It was quite late, but after everything that had happened he didn’t think she would be in bed just yet. The voices became discernible before he had even bothered to conceal himself in the shrubbery outside the diamond-paned windows.
“I’m not doing it! I don’t care what you do with your gun!” That was from Juliet.
A sinking sensation filled Antonin’s gut with lead as he raised his head just far enough to get a view of the interior of the house. He saw three figures. Juliet was standing facing the windows. There were also two men. Both had their back to Antonin, but he could see that only one of them was armed. The other one appeared to be—a priest?
“Oh!” Juliet shrieked. She was pointing emphatically at a man Antonin knew instantly was Giovanni. “So you’re going to murder a priest because I refuse to marry you? You do realize in some portion of your crazed brain that this marriage would never be legal. Ever!”
Antonin realized something that Juliet did not. Once the priest blessed the marriage and the license was signed and filed, and if Juliet died before she could lodge a protest and a subsequent investigation, it wouldn’t matter if she’d been coerced because nobody would know.
“Shit,” Antonin muttered.
He had to get in there. Unfortunately, the front door was looking like the best option at the moment. He could use the surprise to somehow get Juliet out of the living room alive. That was all that mattered.
Extracting himself from the bushes, Antonin marched right up to the front door. He tried the handle and found that it was unlocked. Sucking in a deep breath, he walked right in and let the door slam closed behind him.