5. Elio
5
ELIO
Now
I left Naples a few hours after Renato’s orders. Since keeping a low profile was important, considering that we didn’t know what force the Ravelli family had sent to capture the prosecutor’s daughter, I flew commercial.
Without exception, being in a crowded airport and stuffed into too small a space with other people meant I was tense. I also had to leave my favorite guns on Renato’s jet to make the return flight to New Jersey.
My hands itched without my means to defend myself.
In the stifling Naples airport, I set up my laptop at a coffee shop and downloaded the file my sister had sent me only minutes before.
I drank three espressos while waiting for the damn airport Wi-Fi to download the large file.
Georgia Conti.
And there it was, suddenly sitting on my desktop.
There had once been another with the same name, long since deleted. I’d asked my sister for it when I’d left the Col Moschin, Italy’s very own Special Forces unit. Finally a civilian once more, my debts all paid and left behind, I’d been prepared to find her. I’d find her and she’d answer for the past. It was all I’d thought about for years while in active service. The thought of being face-to-face once more had kept me warm many a night, sleeping outside in the rain and cold. It had lulled me to sleep while in active conflict zones and soothed my brow when I’d lain in medical for weeks at a time, my body injured once again.
Then, the day I’d walked free, I’d sat in a coffee shop, just like the one I was in now, and opened the file for an excruciating couple of seconds before closing it and deleting the entire thing.
The first image that had popped up was Georgia, holding her husband’s hand, beaming at the camera.
In the military, I’d learned how to control myself. I hadn’t thought anything could crack that calm, until I saw that photograph.
In seconds, my blood pressure had risen, and anger like nothing I’d ever felt had flooded me. It tasted like blood and ashes on my tongue. I’d slammed the laptop closed and then picked the entire thing up and smacked it against the table.
When that hadn’t worked, I’d bent the entire fucking thing in half.
As the stunned coffee shop had gone silent and everyone stared at me, I’d sat there feeling like a landmine. Lethal, unpredictable. Unacceptable.
“Dude, if you’ve got a virus, just restarting usually works.”
I could still hear the exact perplexed timbre of the guy working at the table next to me. Normal people didn’t carry rage like that inside them. Normal people didn’t feel like they could light the sky up just by looking at a photograph.
If you’ve got a virus. It was a very fitting way of thinking about the woman who’d destroyed me so completely. Wiped me clean. The military had been a clean slate. A total reboot. I couldn’t afford to be reinfected with Georgia’s poison.
I’d finally wiped the virus from my OS. I couldn’t go back.
That was when I’d realized that it was too dangerous for me to search for Georgia. I had my freedom from the Col Moschin, and Renato De Sanctis waiting for me to take up the role of sottocapo in his Cosa Nostra. I’d learned how to live emotionlessly, in the eye of the storm, where nothing hurt.
I wasn’t giving that up for anyone.
Especially not her.
Now, fate, and my capo, had brought her back into my life, and I had no choice but to see her or defy orders.
I opened the folder, and there she was.
This time, the picture wasn’t anything glamorous. Black-and-white CCTV footage of her arriving at a dressmaking studio. Giada, my sister, was a tech genius. If there was a camera within a viable radius of her target, she’d find them.
She had Georgia walking to the supermarket and returning home with heavy bags. Georgia checking the prices of every single item she bought. Georgia taking the bus. Georgia waiting for the bus. Georgia in a coffee shop, sketching on a pad, lost in her own thoughts. Georgia and her friend leaving a bar late at night.
I forgot my coffee and the crowd as I stared at her. The footage wasn’t perfect, but it was clear enough to make out the strong line of her jaw and the same sharp little chin I remembered so well. It had fit in my grip just right.
With a discipline honed over nearly two decades, I closed the photos and scanned the information.
Widowed, employed at a dressmaking atelier, her address. No hobbies listed. She didn’t seem to leave her apartment much except for going to work. No mention of any family other than her recently deceased husband.
Good.
It would be just me and Georgia, alone… Just like old times.
When I arrived in LA, I went straight to her apartment. Breaking in was child’s play. She was out, as I’d expected her to be at that time in the morning. A momentary fiddling with the door admitted me to her private space.
The apartment wasn’t what I was expecting, not at all.
When I’d known Georgia, she’d been the over-indulged, spoiled little princess of one of the most well-known men in town. Her boyfriend, Tommaso Conti, who she went on to marry, had been the son of a local millionaire.
Fourteen years later, and his widow was living in a tiny apartment that didn’t have air-conditioning for the LA heat, peeling paint, and the sound of a loud argument from the upstairs neighbors. How the mighty had fallen.
I glanced around her kitchen, finding only instant noodles and one cucumber to eat, and then moved through the tiny space. I didn’t touch anything. Georgia was my virus, after all, and even curiosity about her situation was unacceptable.
Instead of poking around, I set up small cameras, one in the corner of each room. I needed eyes on her, and anyone who might be looking for her, like the Ravellis. I was also pretty sure that her father had sent his collateral to his only daughter. He had no one else he could trust. When you’d fucked over as many people as Prosecutor Bellisario had, allies were few and far between.
He’d sent the collateral to Georgia, or instructions on how to access it. I was sure.
If I could find that… this whole ordeal and the arranged marriage was unnecessary. We could just have the good prosecutor killed in prison, before he sang on Salvatore. Easy, mess-free.
If she had the evidence, there would be some sign of it, and considering how often she stayed in, I was betting the cameras in her house would be very illuminating.
She’d lead me to my collateral sooner or later, and I’d be waiting…
And watching.