Chapter 11 #2
When he finally joined her in bed, freshly showered, she could smell the faint trace of whisky beneath his toothpaste.
“You’ve been out?” she whispered once the light had been extinguished and he’d settled down on his side, his back to her.
“Yes.”
She bit into her bottom lip. “What happened today?”
“Nothing I wish to discuss with you.”
“Who am I going to tell?” She laughed sadly. “I’m probably the safest person in the world for you to confide in.”
“Gabba, you despise my world, and you despise me.”
Her heart pounding, she chose her words carefully. “You’re my husband. You’re all I’ve got.”
She had no one else. If not for Tommaso, she would be dead.
It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic that she’d never felt as alive as she had since giving her life to him.
The silence that followed lasted so long she didn’t think he was going to say anything else.
“Gino Vicario is plotting a takeover.”
“Of the shadowed world?”
“Yes. One of our men defected to him today. He escaped before we could confront him and get more information from him.”
“Can that man cause damage?”
“Not as much as the others we suspect are working against our interests.”
“Are there many?”
“There are enough. Alfredo was being tracked. That he knew to ditch his car and the shoes and jacket he was wearing suggests he was tipped off about the tracking, so now we are on the hunt for the mole.” He expelled a long, tired sigh.
“My father’s death has left what some believe to be a vacuum.
We have to fill that vacuum before any of the snakes or sharks circling us can.
We are fighting a war on several fronts, internal and external. ”
“It must be hard to fight a war when you don’t know who you can trust,” she observed softly.
An edge came into his voice. “Not as hard as it is when someone you would have sworn on a bible was loyal betrays you.”
He meant her.
Closing her eyes, she said in a low voice, “Your father betrayed my father in the worst way possible. I know you don’t want to believe it, but it’s true.
All my father wanted was to walk away with my mother and raise me without the danger of the shadowed world.
He would never have sold your father out. ”
“How can you expect me to believe that, Gabba?” he asked starkly. “I believe that you believe it, but you’re expecting me to put the words of a woman whose cancer had spread to her brain over the words of my own father.”
“I don’t expect anything. He was your father.
You loved him, and he loved you. Nothing can change that.
But I never met mine because his life was taken before I was born.
I don’t know if I’m imagining this memory, but when we were driving back from Gino’s, you asked what hold I had over your father.
I think the hold was his fear that my mother might have told me the truth before she died – that’s why he kept me so close but wouldn’t let me touch the shadows of your world.
Check my apartment out. You’ll find it’s bugged.
Who else would have bugged it but your father?
My Vespa has a tracker, too. The only place he couldn’t bug was the hospital. ”
“My father wasn’t afraid of anything. If he suspected you knew, he would have dealt with you, not kept you close.”
Gabriella shivered at this euphemism for killing her.
“He had no proof that my mother knew. She played her part perfectly for sixteen years, and your father did too. In his mind, he’d got away with it, but what he did was so monstrous that I can only assume he experienced a form of paranoia about anyone learning the truth. ”
This time, the silence lasted until the morning.
“How did you find all those documents?” Tommaso asked three days later when they were alone in his office.
Gabriella, who’d just started a game of either solitaire or chess on her internet-less computer, looked up from the screen.
Today, she’d tied her glorious hair into a high ponytail, a style that accentuated her high, rounded cheekbones and allowed him to see the entirety of her beautiful face in one glance.
Neither of them had mentioned the documents since the day of Lorenzo’s funeral when Tommaso had found them, but she didn’t need him to tell her what he was referring to. “You’ve been through them?”
“Not yet.” Skimming them and seeing the sheer amount of incriminating information she’d stolen from them, physical evidence that her work to destroy them had been going on for years, had brought the red mist out in him so swiftly and completely that he’d not trusted himself to dive any deeper into them.
He was ready to talk about it now. He needed to talk about it; needed to remind himself that Gabriella wasn’t the beautiful woman he woke to every morning but the treacherous rat whose life he’d spared.
He kept dreaming about her. Not the sexual dreams of old but of their confrontation in her apartment.
In his dreams, his finger always slipped on the trigger, and he wrenched himself out of them with ice in his heart and his skin drenched in cold perspiration, fighting through the roar in his ears for the sound of her rhythmic breaths of sleep.
He should never have kissed her. That fleeting fusion of their mouths had short-circuited something in him. Hell, he’d come within a breath of hitting his brother for one derogatory comment about her.
Three days on, and he was still trying to restore himself to primary circuit settings.
He’d woken that morning to find he’d spooned himself to her.
It had taken more strength than he’d known he possessed to turn away.
He watched her eat and wondered if her taste buds zinged at the same things as his did, watched her drink her coffee and wondered if she got a hit of that bitter coffee taste or if the sugar and cream she paired it with drowned it out on her tongue.
He watched her dress and wondered what the material of her clothes felt like on her skin.
When they’d been in Milan the day before to see how the filming of the Christmas commercials for their main social media site was going – it never failed to astound him that many festive adverts were filmed before summer had fully started – he’d seen her smile at the young, hip director and seen the young, hip director smile back, and had wanted to knock the young, hip director’s young, hip teeth out.
“How did you find them?” he repeated evenly.
His brother, Mattia, was a master at controlling his emotions, and it was a control Tommaso now sought.
He’d never cared about controlling any aspect of his personality before, had never done anything in half measures.
He liked to feel life as well as live it.
With Gabriella, though, he felt too damn much.
Sitting in his office with her, fully attuned to her every tiny movement, her every breath…
It had to stop. The ache to possess her, all of her, had to stop. He had to stop feeding it. He had to kill it, and that meant going cold turkey. He hadn’t touched her in three days and wouldn’t touch her again until his primary circuit had been restored.
There was wariness in her stare and tone when she eventually replied. “A combination of observation, detective work and hacking.”
“You’re a hacker?” He could have been confirming her star sign.
“I did computer science at school.”
“They taught you the science of hacking?”
“One of the boys in my class did.” She could have been confirming her star sign.
“I’m not a master hacker, but I know my way around a computer – once I’m in, I can find all kinds of things, but it wasn’t my computer skills that got me into your shadowed world.
It was learning the coded language you all speak in it. ”
“How did you do that?” He could be asking how she’d passed her driving test.
“Your father kept me nearly as close to him as you do. I suppose it must be like someone being continuously exposed to a foreign language – eventually, they pick it up through osmosis. I wanted to learn the language. Any time I thought I could get away with it, I recorded it on my phone.” She could be explaining how she’d learned to reverse park.
“It took a few years, but once I understood it, I knew what to look for. I never got evidence of the big stuff; no drugs or arms or anything like that, but money laundering and bribes, all that kind of stuff, it leaves a paper trail if you know where the trail starts.”
“And you learned to find the start of the trails?”
Her shrug was so nonchalant that he could fool himself into believing she found the subject they were discussing boring, but he knew Gabriella too well to be fooled. He knew damned well it was just a facade and that her heart was beating as hard as his was.
“Things that look innocent in isolation…put them in context with other documentation, and a picture starts to emerge,” she explained.
“I got lucky a few times – your father left a flight manifest on his desk that had nothing to do with the legitimate business, so I took a picture of it. Lots of little things like that.” She swallowed.
The slightest of tremors came into her voice.
“I transferred files off your phone once.”
His jaw clenching of its own accord, he raised an eyebrow in silent question.
“Last summer. You had a meeting with that politician who turned up early. I’d been discussing something with Rico.
” Rico’s office was next to Tommaso’s. “I left his office, and you were heading to the conference room. You’d left your door open.
I had a file to give you, so I put it on your desk.
There was a burner phone on it. You must have just been using it as it was unlocked.
I paired my phone to it and transferred all your stored docs via Bluetooth. ”
Now it felt like everything inside him had clenched, even the roots of his hair. Tommaso had multiple burner phones, some more important than others. “How did you know it was a burner phone?”
“Your normal phone has a dark blue case around it. This one had a black case.”
His heart thumping too hard to speak, he took a moment to gather himself. “You always pay that much attention to people’s phone cases?”
Cheeks flaming with colour, her eyes pulsed. There was the tiniest of hesitations before she shook her head.
His mouth ran so dry he had to clear it to say, “That was risky.”
“Very.” Of all the risks Gabriella had taken, that had been the most foolhardy.
It was also the one she remembered the most vividly.
Always she’d believed the vividness of the memory was because of the danger she’d put herself in – how could she have explained away what she was doing?
– and the fact that it had been her first foray over the threshold of Tommaso’s office.
It was an office he rarely used but she’d felt his mark as indelibly as if he’d been standing in it with her caressing her skin.
It was a risk she would never have taken with any of the other Espositos, she realised with a heart that managed to sink and inflate in one churning motion.
“How did you print all the documents off?” he asked after another long pause. “There was no printer in your apartment.”
She had to swallow to speak. “Your father was bugging my apartment – whoever was tasked with listening to me would have recognised the sound of a printer being used and flagged it.”
“So?”
“So I used my office printer.”
“Very risky.”
She tried to shrug, but the fake nonchalance that had been carrying her through this conversation was seeping out of her like a deflating balloon. “Smuggling the documents out was the riskiest part. If I’d had a blood pressure monitor attached to me, it would have given me away in seconds.”
There was no movement on his features other than his lips. The hard obsidian in his eyes had become a permanent feature these past few days. Since their kiss. “If there’s someone else in the business working against us, how would I know? How would I make it harder for them to do what you’ve done?”
“I don’t know how you’d know. If you want to make it harder for them to act, introduce coded printers so that everything printed off is attributed and documented.
Ban working from home so there’s no excuse for staff to take documents out of the building.
” Suddenly desperate to see him smile, she added, “Don’t leave burner phones unattended and unlocked. ”
There was no crack in the obsidian. “The documents you stole from my phone – how incriminating were they?”
She gave another shrug to mask the unmistakable sense of panic suddenly nibbling at her chest. “Probably not as incriminating as anything I’d have found on one of your father’s burner phones.”
The obsidian…how she missed the terrifying wildness that had always been there before…studied her so intently and for so long she gripped her wrist to stop herself from trembling.
“I have a project for you.”
“Oh?”
“I want you to use your extensive experience to identify the weaknesses in the legitimate business that jeopardises the shadowed world.”
Stunned, it took a moment to gather her thoughts. “You want me to help you with your company’s security?”
“You set a thief to catch a thief. In this case, I’m setting a rat to catch a rat.”
She tried not to flinch. If she never heard the word rat again, it would be too soon. “But why would you trust me to do that?”
“I will never trust you, but I trust your instincts for self-preservation.” He finally smiled. It didn’t meet his eyes. “You’re married to an Esposito now, Gabriella. If I go down, I’ll make damned sure you go down with me.”