24. Chapter Twenty-Four—Rome
Chapter Twenty-Four—Rome
“She just walked by the club, boss.”
Detangling myself from Cass’s octopus like arms, I sit bolt upright on the couch. “Which way was she headed?”
Pausing the movie we’d been watching, Cass sits up too, a frown about his pretty features as he gestures to the phone pressed tightly to my ear.
I shake my head at him, batting away his hand. “What did you say, Mike?”
“She took a left. Looked like she was heading for the subway.”
“Okay.” I clench my jaw tightly. It makes my skin itch to think about Carlotta walking around at night, in the dark, alone. Heading to the subway, alone. “Thanks for letting me know.”
I hear the distinctive soft whistle of Mike dragging on his synthetic fruit flavored vape and then blowing it out. “Just doing my job, boss. See ya.”
Pulling the cell phone from my ear, I resist the urge to throw the damn thing across the floor.
“What’s wrong?”
“Carlotta,” I grit, glancing at Cass’s concerned face. “I told Mike to call me if he saw her.”
He frowns again, twin creases forming in between his brows. “Mike from—She’s gone to the club?”
I shake my head, inhaling and exhaling angrily through my nose.
My blood runs poker hot; elevating my body temperature and my fucking blood pressure.
“No. She walked past. Took a left. He thinks she got on the subway. What the fuck is she doing walking alone in the dark? The club isn’t anywhere near MacVelly’s. What the hell is she playing at?”
Grabbing his own phone, Cassiel peers at the time. “I don’t know, Ro. I asked her to call me when she finished work. She should have clocked out at least forty-five minutes ago.”
“Call her. Now.”
Cassiel doesn’t need to be told twice.
I give him a modicum of privacy, knowing he’ll tell me everything anyway, leaving the two of them to talk while I grab Cass’s laptop and a glass of whiskey for the two of us.
Catching a tail end of their conversation, I sit back on our California king bed, raising my thumb in an upward motion and then a downward motion.
Yes or no?
Cass flattens his palm, shaking it back and forth in the universal sign for so-so.
Something is definitely off with Carlotta, then.
Vaguely listening to Cass talk about his day—nothing much to report, we’ve been together all day, unless Red wants to know about me choking him with my cock and making him cum all over his own stomach and thighs—I take a sip of whiskey and crack open his laptop.
When I first met Cassiel Angelo, the only thing he was interested in was fighting.
Fighting for his life, fighting for his food, fighting to calm the beast inside of him.
He knew nothing other than to solve things with his fists; unsurprising with his troubled upbringing. Anybody who’d bounced from foster home to foster home, leaving his sister behind, only to be thrust into houses full of violence and drugs, would do the same.
How else was he supposed to protect himself?
Cass had told me on more than one occasion that I’d saved his life.
But he’d saved mine too.
We’d been two very broken young men, molded and shaped into being what others wanted us to be.
Neither of us had ever had a say in who we wanted to be.
It hurt to admit, but it was the truth. A truth that I could accept myself, but Cassiel deserved more.
We moved in together at just twenty years old—our first apartment.
It was half falling apart, mold growing the in bathroom and most of the fixtures didn’t work unless you kicked them, but it was ours.
I had bought it from an older Russian man in exchange for five years of my servitude to him.
Five long years in which I killed and betrayed and learned intel by playing copious amounts of poker for a man I hardly knew a thing about.
But it didn’t matter to me.
I couldn’t stay at my family home a second longer and my father swore he wouldn’t pay my way. As soon as I reached the tender age of sixteen, I was to earn my own keep within the Folonari family business.
Not only that, but I wanted more for Cassiel.
He deserved more.
So, I worked overtime for the Russians until my debt was paid off—leaving me with a large sum of money, enough to find us a second, better apartment, a new skill of speaking the Russian language fluently and the prideful knowledge that Cass no longer had to go out and fight just to feed our bellies.
Don’t get me wrong, he still liked to fight. Although, this time, he kept it in the ring.
But when he wasn’t acting as my personal bodyguard and picking up tricks of the Mafia trade along the way, he turned his attention to hacking.
The sea of codes on the face of his computer meant absolutely nothing to me, but his skill came in handy more than once or twice, after my father died from a heart attack and I, at just twenty one, stepped up to take over as leader of The Thirteen .
Especially, when we needed data or intel on somebody underground.
And now, Cassiel’s ability to hack systems, rigging them up his own liking, is coming in extremely useful as I slowly type in his personal password—the day we said wedding vows to one another in the safety of our bed, just the two of us—and bring up the four cameras hidden within Carlotta’s apartment.
I right click camera three, zooming in until the live picture of Carlotta fills the screen.
Cass had the foresight to hide the cameras in places Carlotta hardly notices; this one, being hidden within the depths of her TV cabinet and positioned forward, gives me a prime shot of her sitting on her couch, feet tucked up under her, a forkful of what appears to be microwave pasta hovering in front of her lips.
God, where are her greens. Her vegetables? She needs to be looking after herself more.
The skin under her eyes looks too dark, too hollow. I think she’s thinner too, I can see it in the gauntness of her face. Cassiel told me she isn’t sleeping well—a plague of nightmares following her. But isn’t she eating properly, either?
I take another mouthful of whiskey, swigging the malt taste over my tastebuds and swallowing hard. Part of it is my fault. I know the nightmares that haunt her are a mixture of her brother’s death and mental replays of what I made her do down in the basement…
“Oh. Yeah, of course, Princess.” I turn at the sound of disappointment dripping from Cassiel’s tone. He’s got it bad for Carlotta. Not that I don’t either, but… “Do you want me to come around and—”
I watch Carlotta shake her head on the screen. Without the sound on, I can’t hear her exact words, but I can see her sweet lips moving before she jams her thumb into the end call button.
“What did she say?”
Taking the whiskey tumbler from me, Cass takes a sip, grimacing at the sharp taste and then answers. “She said she was exhausted. She was going to take a warm shower and have an early night.”
I crook a brow. “Do you believe her?”
“I believe she’s tired. She’s not sleeping well, remember?”
I close my eyes, only to open them a heartbeat later. I can’t bear to take my sight away from Carlotta Bellucci for a second longer, not when she’s as close to me as she has been in weeks.
God, I miss her.
I miss her voice and her laughter, that sweet smile I know was directed at the masked man giving her pleasure, but that I could pretend was actually all for me. The real me. The man she knew to be behind the mask.
I miss the feel of her under my fingertips and I don’t just mean when we’re sleeping together; driving myself inside of her with a tight grip on her thick hips.
No, I miss the feel of her soft skin beside me.
The rise and fall of her heartbeat, reminding me she is alive and solid and within reach.
The sweet sound of her breath as it puffed from her parted lips while she slept soundly, without a care in the world, because she was safe, because she had gotten out of our world.
Cristiano and I had gotten her out. Safely.
And now here I am dragging her back into it because I’m a selfish bastard who has been in love with Carlotta Bellucci for longer than I care to admit.
“What’s in her lap?”
I squint, trying to make out the papers sitting in Carlotta’s lap, but everything just blurs like paint strokes on a canvas.
“Here.” Cass presses my reading glasses into my palm and snatches his laptop from me. “Put them on and I’ll turn the sound on and zoom in.”
Scowling, I slide the dark, tortoiseshell frames onto my nose, glowering even further when the pixilated computer screen twists into perfect definition.
“I don’t even fucking need glasses,” I mutter beneath my breath.
Cass raises his head to smirk at me. “Reading glasses. Sure, you don’t. That’s why you frown every time you have to look at something close up. You just wasted two hundred dollars on those Tom Ford knockoffs.”
“Shut up,” I snarl, pushing the nose piece back up my face as it slides down. “I’m wearing them, aren’t I, and yet I still can’t find your dick.”
His smirk crawls further across his plush lips. My balls fucking ache again, drawing up tight, remembering how he took me between those lips, sucking me hard until I blew with a whimper.
“That’s a lie and you fucking know it.”
I glance down at the half hard bulge pressing against the jersey-like material of Cass’s sweats, feeling my stomach swoop when he reaches down to squeeze himself.
I do fucking know it; there’s nothing little about Cassiel Angelo at all.
I’m distracted by the rushing sound of Carlotta’s breath leaving her lungs—reminding me we’re not the only two in the room, anymore—as I watch her flick through the papers she’s holding.
“Can you zoom in any further?”
Cass’s thick digits fly over the keypad, while I press my shoulder to his to get as close as I physically can to the live feed of our girl.
“There. That’s as far as it’ll go.”
I have no real clue what we’re looking at, but I focus my attention on the emotions flitting through Carlotta’s face. Whatever she’s looking at… it can’t be good.
Beside me, Cass mutters softly to himself. The corners of his eyes crease, lips flattened into a straight line as he grabs a hold of the screen and stares. “Is that…?”
“What? Is that what?”
He doesn’t answer straight away, mouth still moving so quietly I can barely hear him, until he shoves the laptop back onto my knees.
“That’s Cristiano’s autopsy report. That’s what she’s reading.”
My heart drops past my stomach, past my kidneys and my intestines, landing somewhere at the very base of my being with a sudden thump.
“She shouldn’t be looking at that,” I spit, my anxiety spiking. “I thought we removed it.”
Cass shakes his head. “I couldn’t remove it from the system completely—it would have looked too suspicious. But I threatened the main guy on the investigation team. After he pissed himself with fright, he promised me he wouldn’t tell her anything if she came by asking.”
“So, who the fuck—”
“I don’t know, Ro. I don’t fucking know.”
Anger bursts over my skin like sharp pinpricks.
Cassiel and I swore to protect Carlotta.
We swore it to her and to one another. Whatever it took; we would do it.
Without a single thought. It was a no brainer to threaten the staff working on the investigation of Cristi’s death, to make sure they didn’t tell a certain redhead a single thing—if she came looking, that was.
It would only upset her. We decided she didn’t need to see, in detail, the goings on of her brother’s death.
I thought that would be the end of it.
But apparently fucking not, because some incompetent little shit has taken it upon himself to give Carlotta the gory details…
“There’s photographs as well.”
I squeeze my eyes shut tight and bite back the urge to punch something.
Some little fuckface, sitting in his high and mighty office, thinks it okay to go against our wishes. To allow Carlotta the details—all of them—of Cristiano’s death.
I glance back at the screen, watching her tip her head back, staring at nothing on her apartment ceiling as if it holds all the answers to the universe.
Some bastard has upset my girl. On purpose. And now…
Now he must pay for it.
“What are we going to do?” Cassiel murmurs, flicking the cameras to follow Carlotta as she checks the lock on her apartment door and pads down her small hallway to her bedroom, switching the lights off as she goes.
“I’m gonna pay him a visit,” I say. “Friday. While you take care of our girl.”
Cass nods in agreement before the two of us lapse into silence, watching Lottie crawl into bed and burrow under the covers, her small shoulder shaking as she cries.