Taking Charlotte (Vicious Kings Mafia #2)

Chapter 1 Claudio

Chapter One: Claudio

The armory is the only room in this compound that makes sense to me.

Concrete floor, big lights, no windows. Weapons racked by caliber on the south wall.

Ammunition crates stacked in the corner, counted and logged every seventy-two hours because I'm the one who counts and logs them.

The workbench is mine. Scarred oak, bolted to the floor, stained with grease and old blood that won't come out no matter how many times I scrub it.

I don't mind the stains. They remind me where I am.

It's four in the morning and I've got my Beretta in pieces on the bench. Third time tonight. The gun doesn't need cleaning. I need my hands doing something that isn't wrapping around someone's throat.

Six hours.

That's how long it took for a professional hit team to show up at Charlotte Richardson's apartment after we flagged her in our system.

Four men. Suppressed MP5s. Breaching charges on the front door like they were raiding a fucking cartel compound, not a legal assistant's studio apartment with a cat and a dying fern.

I intercepted them in the stairwell. Two went down before the other two figured out they weren't the most dangerous thing in the building.

The third caught a round through his kneecap and screamed loud enough to wake three floors.

The fourth ran. I found him in the parking garage trying to hotwire a sedan.

He was still trying when I put him on the concrete.

I didn't kill that one. He's in the basement now, and Carmelo's been having conversations with him that involve less and less of his fingers.

The point isn't the hit team. Hit teams I can handle.

I've been handling violence since I was fifteen and Aurelio put a gun in my hand and told me to earn my keep.

The point is the six hours. You don't mobilize a crew like that in six hours unless someone picked up the phone the second Charlotte's name hit our intake log.

Which means someone inside this compound made a call.

We killed Renzo. Cut that rat out of the operation and buried him where the dogs won't dig. But the leak didn't stop. It got worse. Faster. Whoever's left is embedded deeper than Renzo was, and they're smart enough to have let him take the fall while they kept feeding.

I slot the barrel back into the slide. The click is the only relaxing sound I've heard all day.

The door opens. I don't look up. Leone walks the way he always walks. Left side heavy, favoring the ribs he won't admit still hurt from that round he caught through his vest. Big man, bigger ego about pain. He'll cover it up until it heals and deny it every time someone asks.

He drops into the chair across from me. Scrapes it on the concrete. I grit my teeth but don't say anything.

"You sleep at all?" he asks.

"No."

"You planning to?"

"No."

He rubs a hand over his face. He looks like shit.

Alexandra's been running him ragged with whatever she's found in the financial data, and the war on top of it is grinding everyone down.

I've seen Leone tired before. This is past tired.

This is a man operating on caffeine and the stubbornness of someone who refuses to drop a weight he picked up voluntarily.

"Aurelio wants a shift," he says. "No more brute force. He wants the quiet work. Assassin type shit. Your kind of shit."

"About time."

"Don't be smug. It doesn't suit you."

"Everything suits me."

Leone almost smiles. He won't give me the full thing. Never does. "Alexandra found a connection. Apex Meridian, the shell corporations, the offshore accounts. All of it traces back to Westpoint. Old money, political dynasties, some kind of secret society. The Silent."

I set the Beretta down. "The academy you were sent to protect Dahlia in."

"Yeah, well. Now it's got a paper trail. And the woman upstairs is helping Alexandra connect the pieces."

The woman upstairs. Charlotte.

I met her forty-eight hours ago when I dragged her out of that apartment and into the back of an SUV while her neighbors called the cops and her cat hid under the bathtub.

She didn't scream. Didn't cry. Didn't beg, plead, bargain, or do any of the things civilians usually do when a man twice their size throws them over his shoulder and carries them down three flights of stairs.

She bit me.

Left a bruise on my forearm shaped like a crescent moon. I'd been almost impressed if it hadn't hurt like a motherfucker.

In the interrogation room, she sat with her ankles crossed and her spine so straight you could've used it as a level.

I asked her what she knew about the financial ledgers she'd accessed at Marchetti Holdings.

She looked at me the way you'd look at a stain on a restaurant menu. Mildly annoyed. Slightly disgusted.

"I know they're fake," she'd said. "I know someone's laundering money, and I know whoever built that architecture is more competent than anyone in this room. Including you."

Including me.

I'd wanted to laugh. I didn't. But I'd wanted to, and that was new enough to bother me.

"The hit team," I say to Leone. "The response time doesn't work."

"I know."

"Someone inside picked up the phone. Someone with access to our intake system."

"I know that too."

"So we've still got a rat."

Leone nods. His mouth is tight, teeth grinding down. He accepted Renzo like one of the brothers right up until the moment he realized the truth, and the betrayal left a wound that hasn't scabbed over. Finding out there's a second one is salt in a cut that's still raw.

"Instead of holing yourself up in here, I need you on two things," he says. "The woman, and the mole. Figure out what she knows, what she saw inside Marchetti, what makes her valuable enough to send contractors after. And find whoever made that call."

"In that order?"

"In whatever order keeps everyone breathing." He stands. Pauses at the door. "Claudio."

"What."

"Don't be an asshole to her. She's been through enough."

I look at him. "When am I ever an asshole?"

He stares at me for a long second, then leaves without answering. Which is, in itself, an answer.

The corridor to the east wing is cold at this hour. The compound bleeds heat through its concrete like a wound that won't close. I walk it with my hands in my pockets and my collar turned up because fuck this building and its Soviet-era insulation.

Two guards at the east wing entrance. They see me coming and straighten like someone shoved a rod up their spines. I nod once and keep moving.

Her door is at the end of the hall. Nice suite. Aurelio's orders. Good sheets, private bathroom, meals from the kitchen instead of whatever slop the grunts eat. The accommodations say "guest." The keypad says otherwise.

I knock. Count to three. Swipe the keycard.

She's sitting cross-legged on the bed with a three-day-old newspaper spread across her lap. The clothes we gave her fit well because I had someone take her measurements while she was in medical getting checked over. Dark slacks, white blouse, flats. She wears them like she’s going to some fucking business meeting.

Every button done up, every crease sharp, like the clothes are a uniform for a war only she knows she's fighting.

She doesn't look up.

"If you're here to stare at me, you could at least bring coffee."

I lean against the doorframe. "Black or cream?"

Now she looks up. Blue eyes. Not warm blue.

Not sky blue. The cold blue of deep water where the light doesn't reach.

Her face gives me nothing. No fear, no gratitude that I'm asking instead of demanding.

Just a woman processing a question and running it through whatever mental filing system she uses to sort the world into ‘good men’ and ‘bad men’.

"Black. One sugar. Leave the spoon in the cup."

I almost smile. Specific. Demanding. And completely unbothered by the fact that she's making requests of a man who could snap her neck without breaking a sweat.

"Noted, principessa."

Her eyes narrow. Just a fraction. The nickname lands exactly where I aimed it. She doesn't like it. I hold back the chuckle that threatens to escape.

"My name is Charlotte."

"I know what your name is." I push off the doorframe and step into the room.

Not far. Just enough to claim the space.

"I also know you've been sitting in this room for two days reading old news and pretending you're not terrified, when what you should be doing is telling me what you saw at Marchetti Holdings that was worth sending four armed men to put you in the ground. "

Her chin lifts. "I already told you what I saw. The ledgers."

"You told me about the ledgers. You didn't tell me everything."

Her fingers tighten on the newspaper. Barely. A millimeter of pressure that most people would miss.

I don't miss shit.

"There's nothing else," she says.

"You're lying."

"I'm not."

"Principessa." I crouch in front of the bed so we're eye level.

This close, I can smell the compound's soap on her skin, cheap and floral, the kind they stock in bulk.

Underneath it, something warmer. Her. "I've been reading liars since I could walk.

My mother was the best liar I ever knew, and she taught me every tell in the book.

Your left hand just tightened on that newspaper.

Your breathing shifted up about four beats per minute.

And your pupils dilated when I said 'Marchetti Holdings.

'" I let that sit. "You saw something. Not on a screen.

Not in a file. You saw something with your own eyes, and you haven't told anyone because you think keeping it to yourself is what's keeping you alive. "

She holds my gaze. I'll give her that. Most men in this compound can't hold my gaze for longer than a few seconds before they find somewhere else to look. Charlotte stares right back at me like she's daring me to blink first.

"And if I did see something?" she says. "What happens when I tell you?"

"Then I deal with it."

"Deal with it how?"

I stand. Look down at her. She's pretty in a way that's inconvenient. Sharp jaw, sharp cheekbones, sharp eyes. Everything about her is icy, and I've got a feeling she knows exactly how to use every edge.

"The way I deal with everything," I say. "Quietly."

She folds the newspaper. Sets it on the nightstand. Every movement controlled, economical, like she's rationing energy for something she hasn't told me about yet.

"I'll think about it," she says.

"Don't think too long. The people who sent that hit team aren't patient, and I'm not either."

"You seem plenty patient to me. You've been standing in that doorway for four minutes without saying anything useful."

The laugh escapes before I can strangle it. Short, rough, more air than sound. Her eyes widen for a half second before the mask slams back down.

"Goodnight, principessa."

"Don't call me that."

I pull the door shut behind me and stand in the hallway with my hand on the keycard and a grin I can't get rid of.

The way her mouth moves, animated yet guarded, her eyes alight with mischief and somehow walled… it makes me want to dig inside her head and scoop her out. Figure out exactly who she is before putting her back together the right way.

She’s fucking dynamite and the way my pants tented and I had to hide it tells me that she is going to be fucking trouble.

And yet, first things first.

She's lying. She saw something at Marchetti that goes beyond ledgers and laundering, and she's holding it like a grenade with the pin half out. Smart. Dangerous. The kind of move that keeps you alive in the short term and gets you killed in the long.

I pull out my phone and call Emilio.

He picks up on the second ring. There's music in the background. A woman laughing. My brother is allergic to silence and solitude.

"Brother," he says. "It's four-thirty in the fucking morning."

"I know what time it is."

"Do you also know I'm busy?"

"I don't care."

He sighs. The music cuts out. I hear a door close, and then it's just his breathing and mine, synced the way they've been synced since the womb.

"Leone's got me on the Richardson woman," I say.

"The pretty one Carmelo dragged in?"

"I dragged her in."

"Right, right. The one who bit you." He's grinning. I can hear it. "So what's the problem?"

"She's hiding something. Not the financial data. Something else. Something she saw."

"So shake it out of her."

"She's not the type you shake."

Emilio goes quiet. That's rare enough that I notice. "Claudio," he says slowly. "You sound weird."

"I sound the same as I always sound."

"No, you sound like a man who's trying to figure out a woman instead of a problem, and those are two very different things." A pause. "Is she pretty?"

"That's irrelevant."

"That's a yes."

"Goodnight, Emilio."

"You like her."

"I'm hanging up."

"You like her and you've known her two days and you're calling me at four in the morning because you can't sleep and it's not because of the mole, it's because she's in your head."

I hang up.

The phone buzzes immediately. A text.

You're fucked, brother. Claudio and Charlotte sitting in a tree…

I shove the phone in my pocket and walk back to the armory. Sit at the bench. Pull the Beretta apart for the fourth time. Oil. Cloth. Reassemble.

My hands know the rhythm. My hands are fine.

The rest of me is a problem I don't have a protocol for.

She is spicy and funny and she doesn’t give a fuck about pretenses and she called me useless to my face. I can still feel the bruise where she bit my arm two days ago.

Principessa.

The word sits in my mouth like cotton.

I rack the slide and tell myself it means nothing.