It was six a.m. when I pulled into the penthouse. Fucking hell. Luca found Natalya. She had amnesia, so she couldn’t tell him who was behind her kidnapping yet. Our minds were reeling with this turn of events. After more than two years of obsessively searching for her, he’d finally brought her home. Emotions of grief mixed with hope were a palpable ache in my chest. Grief for the lost years, not only for Luca but for their son, Elias. Hope because I would finally see my uncle happy instead of barely existing for the sake of his son.
But the challenges were only beginning.
And it seemed I had another challenge awaiting me at the penthouse.
She texted me earlier.
Only close family had access to my residence.
Lucy was one of them.
She was waiting in the living room, watching Manhattan wake up.
She spun around when I walked into the foyer.
“Is it true?” she asked. “Zio Luca found Natalya?”
“Yes. Who told you?”
The Archers and De Luccis agreed to keep this information on a tight leash, and I was glad I went to Sloane before we all met at The Underground. And I lucked out that Sloane needed space from me. It would give me more breathing room to deal with the family.
“Mamma.” Lucy never outgrew the way my mother insisted on being called, and despite how my sister despised my mother’s dream of marrying us off to suitable families with noble bloodlines, the Italian word for mother stuck for my sister.
“You can’t share this with anyone, Lucy.” I shrugged out of my suit jacket and sprawled on the couch, drained.
“Don’t you think I know that?” she snapped and sat in the armchair across from me. I quirked a brow at her. She was in an oversized Georgetown sweatshirt over jeans. Her hair was in a ponytail, not the fancy twisted knot I usually saw her sporting.
“Are you staying?” I asked.
“Depends.”
I vented an irritated breath. “Out with it. I’m fucking tired.”
“I think I’m in trouble.”
“What trouble?” Lucy reminded me of Sloane. Aggravatingly independent. She finished law school but never took the bar exams. Instead, she mingled with the DC crowd and had her own friends in high places. Being a De Lucci opened many doors, but her friends were the fucking elitists I steered clear of. Lucy hated the violence that was associated with the mafia. She was on Pop’s side when I announced I was joining the crime family. She blamed our mother’s method of guilt-tripping for my choices. What my sister didn’t understand was I wouldn’t thrive like Matteo and Nico in the world of real estate and finance. I preferred backroom deals and blood oaths…okay, maybe not blood oaths. I liked making money. And I preferred if the government stayed the fuck out of it.
“A friend of mine, a lawyer, got killed last night.”
I leaned forward, my annoyance at my sister swiftly changing to concern. I trusted my instincts and Lucy’s. She handled her problems with her “I know a guy” routine. She knew that I knew that she was the go-to for the power players in DC for her ability to get information and dirt on people. A fixer’s fixer. We just didn’t talk about it. I had security on her and Lucy was aware of this. She just didn’t want them tailing her like the Secret Service.
“When you say got killed…”
“He was shot as he was coming out of his law office and the cops already classified it as a mugging and it’s not.”
“Okay, why do you think it’s not?”
“I just know.”
“Lucy, I need more than ‘I just know.’ Jesus, you’re a lawyer—”
“Technically, I’m not.”
I jumped to my feet and sighed. “Come on. I think I’ll need caffeine for this.”
As we settled in the kitchen with our espressos, I asked her to continue.
“Wade was working on gathering evidence against Congressman Tomlin.”
“Lucy,” I groaned. “Of all the problems you bring to me—”
“He’s corrupt, Dom.”
“Most politicians are, especially the powerful ones. We have a couple of them who work for us too. And weren’t you supposed to be a fixer, not the one to start a scandal?”
“Sometimes you fight fire with fire. My client wants to discredit Tomlin because of a bill they wanted to pass in congress, but it led me to Wade. He gave an interesting seminar about corporate corruption at Georgetown and we’d been friends ever since.”
Fascinating that my sister was interested in corporate corruption when that was the lifeblood of the modern mafia. Sometimes I wondered if she was actively trying to put me out of business. I should pay attention to what she was doing. I’d always considered her crusade against the “mafia way” harmless, but she wasn’t an idealistic college student anymore.
We were eyeing each other like a game of chicken. She was trying to get a confession out of me whether Tomlin was one of ours and I was just bluffing. He might not be one of ours, but he was definitely Grigori’s guy and the Zahkarov bratva had bankrolled the congressman’s campaign through one of their shell companies.
“So, are you worried that whoever killed Wade is coming after you? Is it because you’re simply associated with Wade?”
“I have the evidence.”
“Jesus fucking hell.” I slid off my perch on the barstool before I gave in to the urge to throttle my sister, which reminded me of Sloane. I received a text that her bodyguard was in place. Just a temporary guy. She would need to be watched twenty-four seven.
“Where is it?”
“It’s a who.” She rounded the counter and stood before me with pleading eyes I hadn’t seen since she was a child. “His witness has the evidence. I need you to keep her safe.”
Sloane
Billy was back.
It had been two weeks since I ended it with Dom. Following our confrontation, the De Luccis had closed ranks, and the Rossis had closed ranks with them. I wasn’t self-absorbed enough to think it was about me because I’d heard chatter about something big going down. I’d never felt more alone in my life and I was depressed enough that I welcomed my brother’s company.
It seemed Anton had informed Grigori about my defiance at the hospital and found new ways to torture me. I was exhausted enough after my ER shifts, but Grigori seemed to have me back on his on-call rotation. And it was not only cleaning. A few jobs were assisting their mob doctor in surgery. I couldn’t say I hated the work, but I was wary of what they had in store for me.
Especially since Grigori actually handed me money. It happened after one of those surgeries. Billy was helping me clean up all the blood in the basement when Grigori entered. Anton was with him.
“How’s school?” he asked.
I stopped mopping and looked at him, startled by his question. He raised a brow.
“It’s going well.”
“You’ve been an asset to the organization, Sloane, and I think it’s time we talk about your future in it.” At this, Anton scowled, but quickly straightened his face. It appeared he wasn’t on board with Grigori’s plan.
“What exactly are we talking about?”
Grigori nodded. “We have connections in the New Jersey hospital system. Be a nurse practitioner? A nurse anesthesiologist. Be involved in bespoke healthcare with select membership?”
He looked around him. “You don’t have to clean anymore.”
My body went cold. I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to leave. I forced myself to keep my face neutral.
“You get to enjoy what you want to do.” Grigori looked paler than normal. He had dark circles under his eyes. Stress? But I always wondered if he had a blood disorder. He certainly showed the signs of anemia. “Save lives.” He glanced over at Anton. “Yes, he told me what you said. It was admirable really, and I think I’ve found the right person to be on my team.”
Team. He meant criminal organization. One of his crew. Billy continued scrubbing as if he already knew about it.
I laughed nervously. “I have graduation to think about. And the NCLEX.”
“Yes, yes.” He waved his hand in an offhand manner. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
“I want to pass it legally and on my own merits.”
“Ah, Sloane. Just think about it.” He tossed an envelope on the table, motioned to Anton, and they left the room.
Billy approached the envelope.
“Don’t you dare touch that!”
“What?” He smirked. “Afraid of blood money?” He gave a low whistle. “This looks like twenty grand.” If there was one thing he was good at, it was flipping through cash to check denominations and then weigh it in his hand to tell how much it was. He was like a human money counter. Probably why Grigori liked using him in his casinos.
“What do you say, sis? Where are we going for dinner?”
Two thousand miles away from here. I snatched the envelope out of his hand. “Let’s finish cleaning.” It took us another hour before we could pack up and leave. We were on a side street when my stomach heaved. Seeing an alley, I yanked the van over, causing Billy to curse and hold on to the handle.
“What the fuck?”
I didn’t even shut off the engine. I jumped out of the van and ran over to the side and retched, narrowly missing my work boots.
Billy’s shoes appeared in my peripheral vision. “Are you pregnant?”
I laughed at the absurdity of the question. Dom always used a condom, and I was vigilant about taking my pills, but because of how hungry we were for each other, we always ended up having frenzied sex. Dom would remember gloving up after already thrusting inside me. There were several bouts of shower sex where the condom safety was in question. Shit. Shit. The last thing I needed was to bring a child into the fucked-up world I was trying to escape.
“No, I’m not.”
Billy popped a can of Coke and handed it to me. I straightened from bending over, but I was still feeling queasy. “Do you mind driving?”
“Not at all.”
When we were back on the road, I asked, “Would you come with me if I wanted to start over somewhere else?”
He hesitated before answering. “That’s gonna be hard.”
“You have to stop owing Grigori money. Do you still?”
“Nope. I was doing well in Florida, so I’m surprised he called me back. So yeah, I’m getting tired of this fuckery. It’s like damned if I do, damned if I don’t.”
My stomach roiled again but for a different reason. It was looking more and more that Grigori was using Billy, deliberately making him fuck up so I would owe them. I was the target.
“Are you still using?”
He cast me an annoyed glance. “I’ve been sleeping on your couch for over a week. Have you seen me using or needing to use?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What’s up with you anyway, sis?” He was staring straight ahead. “You seem…subdued.”
“I’m about to become a nurse, yet I work for the mob.”
“Feeling like a hypocrite?”
“It’s just a weight inside me.” But the weight wasn’t only my moral compass. I missed Dom with an ache hollowing my rib cage and I wondered if my stubborn independence finally made him see the light that I wasn’t worth the trouble. Would it be so bad to be kept safe while he needed to do what he needed to do for his family? I went over this in my head with the time-out we’d given each other. It wasn’t just my independence. If I were honest with myself, I was starting to want more. I was starting to resent him when he took other women to events. Events I had no desire to be at.
Resentment was a poisonous thing, so I pushed him away instead. The thing was, it was the same as cutting my nose off to spite my face. Maybe I should give in a bit more. Total silence from him after five months of daily texting and regular, fiery hookups was like cutting out an essential organ to live. Our stolen moments were frequently cathartic. A respite from my busy and tension-filled life. He was a bad habit. He wasn’t good for me because I was using him as a crutch.
But the sex-only affair was a lie. Feelings for him slithered under my skin and it was too late to expunge them.
I missed Dom in two weeks more than I missed my brother in four months.
I gripped Billy’s arm and pointed to the turn. “Make a right here.”
“That leads to Manhattan.”
“There’s something I need to check out.”
“You’re the boss.”
After another twenty minutes, I told Billy to slow down in front of the Venezia Tower. My eyes bugged out. It wasn’t a new building but had the charm of the New Georgian architecture, typical of the 1940s. I couldn’t imagine parking my clunker of a van inside that building. I couldn’t imagine walking through the entrance that had a doorman in my coveralls or scrubs.
Okay, maybe scrubs wouldn’t be so bad. The residents might think I was a doctor.
“Is that Dominic De Lucci?”
Startled by my brother’s question and as though my imagination had conjured him up, Dom suddenly appeared at the side of the building. He was stalking after a tall, drop-dead-gorgeous woman with voluminous blonde hair wearing a hot-pink spring coat that probably cost ten times the rent of my apartment.
“I think so,” I croaked.
“Looks like he’s in the doghouse,” Billy commented, idly amused and unaware that my heart had iced over before shattering inside my chest. Shards that shredded my vocal cords, making it difficult to respond.
I could only watch the incoming train wreck in agonizing slow motion.
Dom caught up with the mystery woman and gripped her shoulders, gritting words into her face. I found myself raising my phone and taking several pictures of the fighting couple. Then the woman freed herself from his hold and ran into the building, leaving him standing there frustrated.
I was so familiar with the set of his shoulders when he was out of patience.
I was more familiar with the way he raked his hand over his face.
The familiar deep exhale that followed.
Then he pursued her into the building.
“What are you doing?” Billy asked.
“Taking pictures for Bianca. She said Dom’s been secretive about a woman.” Not exactly a lie, although Bianca was too wrapped up in Sandro’s problems to worry.
“You’re done? Should we go home?”
Home. What a joke. I lived with my brother and a cat.
“Hey, how about we pick up dinner and pay Harriet a visit?” Billy suggested.
That lifted my spirits a little. “Shawarma?”
“Sounds good.”
After placing the order, I couldn’t leave well enough alone. I had to know where I stood with Dom, so I texted him.
Me
Can we talk?
I waited for a couple of minutes. When there was no response, I pocketed the phone in my coveralls’ thigh pocket.
Later, Billy and I were in the assisted living home, having a comfortable dinner with Harriet. It reminded me of old times after Mom died and she was the one who looked out for us. Still, I couldn’t help feeling edgy with Dom’s lack of response.
He finally texted me two hours later.
Dom
Now is not a good time.
I waited for him to elaborate. He did not.
“What’s wrong?” Harriet asked with her probing eyes.
Billy was oblivious, his attention on a game Harriet and I had no interest in watching.
“Shift change,” I lied.
She smiled and patted my hand. “You’re almost done.”
Somehow, the sympathy on her face only made me want to dissolve into tears.
I exhaled a shuddering breath.
I should move on, because clearly, Dom had.
