24. Vanessa
24
VANESSA
I’m moisturized, teeth flossed, in my pajamas and almost ready to drift into the only place where nobody bothers me when my phone shrills. Mary. I sit up in bed to answer it.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Lockdown shit.” Mary sighs, code for something we don’t usually deal with but now have come to deal with. “Miller warehouse. Get down here.”
I dress quickly in black slacks, a turtleneck, and heeled boots. I don’t have time to put on makeup, but I swipe red lipstick on before going downstairs where Leo is already in the garage waiting for me.
“What do we know?” I ask as he drives us out of the estate and towards the warehouse on Miller.
“Mary and I got the alert that cameras went down, and she rushed over. By the time she got there, a bunch of shit was stolen. Five bodies. Slit throats.”
“Garza?” I ask. That fucking cartel has been salty with us since we gained the mayor’s favor last fall, but our relationship has been cordial enough. A room of slit throats is their calling card, though.
“Or someone who wants us to think it was the Garzas. What would they need with enough explosives to bring down a shopping mall? They never hurt for weapons.” Leo blows through one empty red light and then another.
“Dabbling in domestic terrorism?” I ask, sarcasm hiding the way the thought roils my stomach. “Did you call your guy?”
“Not yet. Wanted to get a good look first.” Leo’s grip tightens on the steering wheel, and we drive in silence for a few minutes.
Of all my family members, Leo is the chummiest with other crime families. He’s easy to get along with and has a lot of friends, Santiago Garza being the closest of these. It doesn’t hurt that Santi is the youngest brother of the head of the Garza Cartel. Something has been going on between Leo and Santi for years, but Leo assures me it’s nothing serious.
There’s a reason Leo doesn’t date, and I have a feeling it has less to do with his busy schedule and more to do with that youngest Garza boy.
I’ve expressed my support if he wants to date a man—though, I’m sure the old heads would really have something to say about this—and offered to talk about his dating woes, but he won’t budge on the topic. Until he does, it’s none of my business.
When we arrive, Mary and Willa’s cars are already parked in the lot.
It’s more of a sideshow than I expected, and I breathe steadily through my nose, as to not get queasy at the sight. There’s blood everywhere, splattered on the walls, pooled on the floor, and marring tipped over shelves of product. We don’t usually have to be at big scenes like this, where the vile parts of our work are so blatantly on display in front of us. It’s nauseating.
Willa stands with a clipboard scribbling notes as she counts product and Mary has dragged each of the dead bodies into a bloody row in the middle of the warehouse. Five of our men.
They were killed in various ways, bullet wounds, blunt force, but all were given the same slit-throat treatment afterwards.
“It’s not the Garza’s handiwork,” Mary mutters when I crouch down to look closer. “Too jagged.”
I look over my shoulder to where Leo is waiting, his fists clenched at his sides, and nod. He was right.
He relaxes barely before retreating to make a call.
“What did they take?” I call to Willa. She’s in a matching bright pink sweatsuit, JUICY across her ass, and her hair is pushed out of her face with a big cloth headband. I’d guess she was doing her skincare routine when she got the call.
“The rest of the little bombs. A couple of the big. Cameras, too, and some sensors.” Willa consults her clipboard. “Any guesses why they would need so much security equipment?”
“Probably to resell it,” a male voice responds from the backdoor. We all turn to see Cillian who is already rolling up his sleeves as he approaches. “Garzas aren’t smart enough to know how to use them.”
He hadn’t heard Mary’s verdict. I wonder if he’ll see right away what Mary has, the shoddy craftsmanship of the copycats.
“You sound racist again,” Mary calls out.
Cillian holds his middle finger up in Mary’s direction. “This has nothing to do with race. The Garzas could be Irish and I’d still think they were stupid.”
He stops at my side and tsks as he looks down at the bodies. It’s four from the Morellis and one of his. The Donovanns don’t usually work warehouse shifts, it’s unfortunate that there had to be deaths from both of our families tonight.
“Fucking Garzas.” He spits the name. “Nothing but trash on the city’s streets.”
I meet Mary’s eyes, both of us noting his lack of notice. Cillian needs little prompting to go off about the Garzas—he hates them as much as his father did and is a total prick when it comes to them.
The Garzas have a say in most drug movement in this city and they expand to other states too. It’s a big fish operation, and Cillian hates to think there are fish bigger than him.
“What are you wearing?” Cillian asks Mary, who glares at him. I hadn’t noticed her black mini skirt and cropped tank. And her hair is down instead of pinned or braided out of her face like it typically is. She looks hot. Is this how she goes out when she sneaks out at night? “You have a date or something?”
“None of your business, asshole.” Mary flips Cillian off before stomping off to follow Willa around the warehouse as she counts materials.
“What I love most about Mary is her charm,” Cillian says. He crouches down next to one of his men and does the sign of the cross. The corpse is a young guy, probably in his early twenties. I can’t remember his name.
“When do we attack, then?” Cillian asks.
“We don’t,” I say. He stands too quickly to his feet, a whole head taller than me, and I already know he’s about to fight me. “Listen, we have no proof, and now is not the time to start a turf war.”
“What more proof do you need?” Cillian waves an arm at the bodies.
“It wasn’t them,” Leo says, reentering from the office. Cillian puffs up his chest and fumes, ready to tell my cousin just how wrong he is.
I place a hand on Cillian’s forearm. “Look at the cuts.”
Cillian closes his mouth and does as I say, walking in a circle around the men. His eyes turn to slits as he glares down at them.
“A hack job,” Cillian agrees.
At his side, I see his thumb playing with one of his rings, circling the metal around his finger, one of his thinking ticks. Ever the calm man, Cillian paces away from me and flips a table, the contents on top clattering and rolling with the loud bang of the metal table hitting the concrete floor.
I sigh and wait for his tantrum to be over.
“We can’t do nothing,” Cillian says. He kicks a water bottle that rolls towards him after his display.
“I know that, but whoever did this wants us to retaliate. They want us to start burning the city down, making enemies in the process,” I say. Cillian jerks his head towards me and studies me with those icy eyes, there’s such ire there that I think they just might ignite. “We need to be deliberate about this.”
“You look like a coward.”
I don’t flinch at his words, but I feel a muscle in my jaw jump. “Going up against the Garzas when it’s clear they didn’t do this will make us look like trigger happy fools. Which would you prefer?”
Cillian props his hands on his hips. “What do you suggest then?”
“The Mayor’s Gala—” Cillian dramatically throws his head back with a groan before I can finish. “You have to be there, Cillian. Everyone does.”
“I hate that fucking party,” he spits.
One might think that Cillian would take any chance to show off his expensive clothes, shiny shoes, and diamond watches, but if it means rubbing elbows with the city’s more. . . conventionally rich and powerful, he wants nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, though, that’s not how this business works.
“You’re going. Stop acting like a baby,” I say. “You know we don’t get to have the life we do without some level of cooperation. We’re all going to show up, make small talk, and try to sniff out whatever rat has been getting into places it doesn’t belong.”
Cillian knows he has to go, he just hates the reminder. We get away with literal murder in this city because those people he terribly resents want the same things we do: power, security, stability, and protection. We provide all of that for them for what I consider to be a small cost (idealist Nate might call that cost their souls, I call it their attention). They look the other way, open doors that we don’t have keys to, and in return, we keep them on a list.
Practically part of the family.
The Mayor’s Gala is the one night of the year when everyone plays nice. It doesn’t matter which family you’re a part of nor which business you’re in, you show up, you pretend your empire is above board, you drink fancy wine and dance to the live band. It is what it is.
“Someone will talk if we ask the right questions,” I say, more confident than I feel.
He stares hard at my face for a moment, a battle of wills, but I haven’t once backed down to Cillian Donovann since my father died, and I don’t plan on starting now. It’s what keeps us on common ground.
He jerks a nod and then paces away from me, probably looking for another table to flip over.
“Quite the temper on that one,” Leo murmurs next to me.
I reset my shoulders and look decidedly away from Cillian’s retreating back. “What’d your guy say?” I ask.
“He’ll ask around, but they aren’t interested in disrupting the peace we have going. Garza knows how valuable our ties with the mayor and the port inspector are. They didn’t do this.”
“I know they didn’t.” I watch my sisters counting and conferring quietly together, dread coursing through my body at the undeniable truth that my control is slipping through my fingers, and when it’s gone, I won’t be able to protect anybody.
“Let’s get this shit cleaned up,” Leo says.