The angle of the gunfire that was concentrated on one side of the table meant that at least one — and maybe both — of the other men were with Anastos behind the stage.
“I’m making a move for the stage.” Damian spoke quietly. “I think one of the guys is near the back of the room by Cole. Can you take him on my cue, Derek?”
There was a pause while Derek assessed his position.
“Yeah,” he said. “I got him.”
“Cole, I need you to approach the stage from your position and cover me with Anastos’ men. I’ll flank him from the other side.”
“Waiting for your cue,” Cole said.
Damian double-checked the magazine in his weapon. “Now.”
He was only dimly aware of the gunfire erupting around him. He couldn’t afford to think about whether it would hit him as he bent low and headed for the stage.
This was it: their chance to get Anastos out of the way.
There might not be another.
Cole came into his line of sight as he approached the stage from the opposite direction.
Let it be him, Damian thought as he peppered the area with bullets, saw the carpet explode around him as shots were fired in his direction.
Time seemed to slow down, the distance between him and the stage stretching as if he were walking through quicksand.
By the time he came around the corner of the stage, the shooting behind him had quieted and Cole was rushing forward with his gun drawn.
Anastos was there, his back against the wall, blood leaking from his stomach. Two men were slumped over next to him, one bleeding from his head, the other from his chest.
An eerie smile played on Anastos’ lips. If Damian didn’t know better, he would have thought the other man was happy to see him.
“You couldn’t protect her,” Anastos choked out, still smiling. “You couldn’t save her.”
The words were like shards of glass in Damian’s skin.
“Maybe not,” Damian said. “But I can avenge her.”
Damian squeezed the trigger, emptying the magazine into Anastos’ body until he slumped over, blood spattering the wall behind him.
“We clear?” Cole called out.
“Clear,” Derek said behind them.
Damian lowered his weapon and turned around, surveying the carnage around them. Derek was helping the mascara-stained dancer up from the floor and handing her his jacket to cover up when Locke sauntered into the room.
“Figures,” he said, surveying the mayhem. “We pull a sting on a strip club, and all I got was an eyeful in the dressing room.”
Nineteen
Aria did one last search around the living room and then headed to the terrace to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything. She paused for a second at the edge, taking in the sea extending into the distance like a brilliant blue carpet.
Any melancholy she felt was attributed to her leaving. She owed Locke for that.
She’d expected Greece to be fraught with psychological danger. Had expected to experience at least some residual PTSD from her imprisonment in Athens.
Instead, Kythnos had been a peaceful and healing refuge, so different from the apartment where she’d been held in Athens that she hadn’t experienced a moment of fear or sorrow.
The weeks when she’d been separated from Damian, when she’d wondered if she would ever see him again, felt a lifetime away, separated by more than the water between the mainland and the island that had been their home for the past week.
She’d spent hours on the terrace working on the computer, taking breaks to lift her face to the ocean breeze. She’d grown used to the sun, the calm waters of the Mediterranean caressing her body when she swam. It had been what she needed — and not just because Damian had killed Stefano Anastos.
“Got everything?”
She turned to find Nora walking out onto the patio, her black bikini visible through a sheer cover-up.
“I think so,” Aria said. “When will Braden get here?”
They’d gotten word the night before that Braden had finished his mission in Algeria. Locke had insisted he make a stop in Greece while Nora was there so they could take advantage of the empty house on Kythnos.
Nora hadn’t put up a fight. Her face had taken on a whole new level of luminescence since she’d gotten the news that Braden was on his way.
“Later today, I think,” Nora said.
Aria grinned. “Have fun.”
“Oh, I intend to,” Nora said. She stepped closer to Aria. “I’m really going to miss you.”
“I’m going to miss you, too.”
Aria realized how much she meant it as Nora wrapped her in a warm embrace. She would miss Nora’s straight talk and wit, the strength that emanated from her like an electromagnetic field.
Nora pulled back to look at her. “You’re going to be okay.”
For the first time in a while, Aria believed it.
She drew in a breath. “I know. Thank you.”
Nora met her gaze. “Tell him.”
Aria nodded, thinking about the baby growing inside her. “I will.”
But not yet.
Nora laughed. “And then text me or something to let me know how it goes.”
Aria smiled. “You’ll be the first to know.”
“Good,” Nora said. “And if you ever get tired of dirt and noise, come to La Jolla.”
Aria scoffed. “If you ever get tired of smog and tofu, come to New York.”
They both laughed.
Nora was yet another new person in her orbit, another welcome and unexpected consequence of her love for Damian and his association with the Syndicate.
She was only now beginning to realize how isolated she’d been with Primo. It would be easy to blame it on him, on his business, but she had slowly started to see the ways she’d kept people at bay, too. She’d built up walls around herself to avoid being hurt, to avoid being vulnerable.
It had worked, but it had come at a price. Being hurt and vulnerable weren’t the only things she’d protected herself against — she’d braced herself against love and friendship too.
It was scary to care about people. To let them care about you.
It meant you worried about them. You were invested in them.
But they worried about you, too. They were invested in you, too.
She now had a handful of people she called friends: Jenna in Tuscany, Charlotte in Paris, Nora in California. She hadn’t spent as much time with Angel in Rome, but Aria had a feeling that when they met again, Nico’s kind, green-eyed wife would also welcome her with open arms.
How strange.
She caught motion out of the corner of her eye and turned to find Damian standing in the doorway to the terrace.
“Ready? The boat’s waiting.”
Aria nodded. “Ready.”
She was ready — to go back to New York and to find Malcolm. She would miss Greece, but New York was her town.
Damian — and their unborn child — was her future.
She gave Nora one last hug and turned toward Damian.
It was time to close the book on her past, on Malcolm, once and for all.
Twenty
Damian paced the floor of his office in Manhattan as Cole sat silently by. The room was dark, four grainy images of Malcolm Gatti projected on the screen behind Damian’s desk.
“I wouldn’t have thought that fucker was smart enough to pull this shit,” he muttered.
“Same,” Cole said.
They’d picked up a handful of images of Gatti in the city by running street and security cams against a facial recognition program used by the NSA. Damian had been hopeful when he’d heard — until they ran them all and realized the bastard hadn’t been spotted in the same place twice.
The images had been captured in a wide range of locations around the city, from Brooklyn to the Financial District to Queens to the Bronx.
They even had one shot of him entering a bar in fucking Hoboken.
“And there’s still no activity on any of his former accounts?” Damian asked.
“Not since he went underground,” Cole said.
It was hardly surprising. Primo had been late to the party on the benefits of criminal cyber applications. Most of his business had been run on a cash basis. If Gatti had any sense — and all evidence pointed to the probability that he had at least a modicum of it — he had stashes around the city and beyond.
The realization sparked an idea, and Damian stopped pacing, looking out over the city through the window in his office, teasing the kernel until it materialized more fully.
He turned to Cole. “We have to assume he has cash stashed around the city.”
Cole nodded.
“Wherever it is, he has to go there in person — or send someone for it — in order to stay off-grid,” Damian said.
“Also safe to assume,” Cole said.
Damian walked to his desk and tapped at his computer until a list of locations appeared. He sent it to the screen behind him so Cole could see it.
“These are the targets Aria came up with while we were working in Greece,” Damian said. “They’re places Gatti liked to frequent, places he has some kind of connection with.”
“We checked the available cams on those sites, remember?” Cole asked him. “Came up empty.”
“Right,” Damian said, “but what we didn’t do is cross-reference the footage from all the locations looking for someone other than Gatti.”
Cole sat back in his chair, his eyes on the screen. “If Gatti has a flunky picking up his money — which makes sense if he doesn’t want to be seen in the same place twice — that person or persons would probably show up at more than one of the places where Gatti has stashed money.”
“That’s the idea,” Damian said.
“What if he hasn’t used any of these locations as hiding places for his cash?” Cole asked.
“Then we’re fucked,” Damian said.
“I’ll have the lab run the cams near these sites, see if we can identify one of his errand boys,” Cole suggested
They reviewed the operations they’d taken over from the Fiore organization after Primo’s death and looked over the financials. Even with the percentage that went to the Syndicate, there was a lot more money than Damian had anticipated.
He understood now why the Syndicate had brought him in to take out Primo. He hadn’t been on Damian’s radar because he’d been old school, holing up at Velvet and pushing around a ton of cash through strip clubs, bookmaking operations, and protection rackets.
But he’d ben doing surprisingly well given his lack of vision.
When Damian had seen the numbers, he’d immediately set up a separate fund for Aria. Damian didn’t need Primo’s money.
Didn’t want it.
Aria had suffered and sacrificed for Primo, and while Damian had every intention of treating her like a queen for as long she would allow it, she deserved financial autonomy.
Having her own money would assure her independence, allow her to spend money without feeling the need to consult him.
He’d given her all the security information to access the accounts, instructing her to change the passcodes and PINS as she saw fit.
At first, she hadn’t said anything, and he’d worried that it was too soon. That she wasn’t ready to think about Primo’s money, about the fact that she’d been an unwitting participant in the aspects of the business that sickened her, now shut down by Damian.
But then she’d looked up with tears in her eyes and thrown her arms around him.
“Thank you,” she’d said against his chest.
He’d pulled back to look at her. “For what? It’s your money.”
“Maybe, but no one’s ever wanted me to be independent before. No one’s ever trusted me to be independent before.”
“I trust you,” he said. “And I want you in my life because you want to be here, not because you don’t have any way out.”
He hadn’t mentioned the money since, had no intention of keeping track of what she did with it. She was a grown woman.
A smart, strong woman.
She didn’t need him to babysit her — which didn’t mean he wouldn’t protect her with his life.
He looked at his phone, then closed his computer and started gathering the things he would need to work at home after dinner. It was after six p.m., almost ten hours since he’d seen Aria, since he’d held her.
In other words, too long.
He closed his office door and made his way down the hall, already anticipating the night ahead. He would stop and get takeout on the way home. He would start a fire in the study — one of the last of the season probably — and he and Aria would eat at the table in the kitchen.
Afterward they would read for a bit. Aria would probably grow sleepy in his arms as she did most nights, tired from her long days in the greenhouse, the hours she still spent at the firing range.
He would carry her to bed, tuck the covers around her, make love to her if she wasn’t too tired. Only when she was sound asleep would he slip out to finish his work.
He was waiting for the elevator when he heard the voice of his assistant call out behind him.
“Mr. Cavallo!”
He turned with a sigh. “Yes?”
“I just had a few things I wanted to ask you about it…”
“Are any of them urgent?” he asked.
“Well, no, not really,” she said, her cheeks flushed.
“Then it will wait until tomorrow, Miss Sherman.”
He stepped into the elevator. Aria was waiting.
Twenty-One
Aria watched the numbers descend on the elevator, wishing she could blurt out her secret to one of the strangers standing next to her.
She scanned them surreptitiously, wondering which one she would choose.
The guy in bike shorts and a helmet, probably a messenger, given the clipboard in his hand?
The young woman in a crisp skirt and jacket, studiously tapping at her phone?
The older gentleman in a fedora with a faraway gaze?
The elevator dinged as they reached the ground floor, the doors sliding open. A moment later, she exited with everyone else, joining the throng passing through the spacious marble lobby.
It didn’t matter. There was only one person she wanted to tell anyway.
It was warmer than usual outside, spring a promise whispered on the breeze. She put her hands in her coat pockets, touching the slip of paper inside as she joined the crowd hurrying over the pavement in Midtown Manhattan. She’d only walked a few steps before she spotted the SUV that was part of her new security detail.
The driver — a man named Enzo — jumped out of the car.
“Actually, Enzo, I’m going to walk for a bit, stretch my legs,” she said before he could open the door.
He scowled and she could almost see the wheels turning in his brain, could almost hear him reliving a conversation in which Damian told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was not to leave Aria alone for even a minute in the city.
“You can follow me if you like,” she said. “Or you can have Andre tail me if you need to stay with the car.”
She bent down a little to wave at the man in the passenger seat.
“I won’t be long.”
She smiled at Enzo and started walking, not wanting to give him time to argue. If she was going to agree to the detail, they would work not just for Damian, but for her. She appreciated their protection, especially while Malcolm was still on the loose, but she wouldn’t have her movements limited because she didn’t want to inconvenience them.
She headed down the street, knowing Enzo and Andre were probably scrambling to follow her and forcing herself not to feel guilty. She didn’t check to make sure they were there.
They were there.
Damian wouldn’t have entrusted her safety to men incapable of trailing a woman walking at a normal pace though the streets of the city.
She hadn’t realized she was heading for Greenacre Park until she got there. A tiny green space nestled between Midtown’s skyscrapers, the park was like a hidden cove in the middle of the metropolis. A waterfall gurgled down a series of stone steps, and the gardens were already beginning to come to life. Several people sat at the bistro tables near the water, some of them reading, others chatting or sitting quietly.
She took a seat at one of the empty tables near the water and removed the slip of paper from her pocket.
Their baby looked like a little peanut, although she could clearly make out the sphere of its head, the tapered body and tiny limbs. She could hardly breathe looking at it, could hardly move knowing it was growing inside her.
She’d put off going to the doctor because she hadn’t known how to do it in secret without any money. Her credit cards — the ones paid for by Primo — had been canceled long ago, and she didn’t have any other money.
Then Damian had told her about the money distributed in various accounts, an insurance policy for her independence and her future. She almost hadn’t heard the rest — that he was talking to his lawyer about having her named the beneficiary of every asset he owned.
She didn’t want to think about Damian not being with her, and anyway, it was the gift of independence that was the most staggering of all.
Primo would never have dreamed of giving her a private account. He’d been generous with money, rarely questioning her about her purchases, but she’d known he had access to them, had known he looked at the credit card and bank statements.
It meant nothing was really private. She’d thought about it even when she’d purchased personal items, trying to hide them in the midst of other large purchases at the grocery or drugstore for no other reason than that she was trying to hold apart some small part of herself.
Now she had access to money — and a lot of it — with no strings attached. Damian had even instructed her to change the passwords and PINS. She hadn’t done it, but the fact that he’d so openly suggested she do it spoke volumes about his faith in her, in the love they shared.
Through the Fire (New York Syndicate Book 3) Page 9