13. Obi
OBI
I t took hours to get close to New York City again.
A long, tense ride. Leona had drifted in and out of sleep. The other women had holed up in the staterooms to rest and clean up. Leona visited a few times, but always returned a few minutes later to curl up next to Caspian and Ciel.
Volpe hadn’t moved from his spot in the main salon. He’d sat in a lounge chair near the windows and watched us all. Ryuji had, in turn, sat at the bar and watched him while cleaning his knives and his guns.
When we could see the coast again, Edward slowed the yacht and radioed for directions.
I snapped my fingers, and Ryuji leapt up, repositioning himself in front of Leona while he raised his handgun toward Volpe. The entire salon was silent. The rescued women were still in the staterooms, and I hoped they’d stay put so they wouldn’t witness any more violence.
Volpe needed to be dealt with.
“Edward, let us handle this,” I said to the boat man via earpiece radio as he cut the engines from the bridge. “Stay in the bridge and don’t interfere. ”
His words were careful. “Just let me know where to go when you’re ready. Or if we need to drop a body off the side of the boat, I’ll move us to deeper water.”
“Fine.”
I exhaled through my nose, watching as Leona looked at Max with an emotion I couldn’t decipher. Caspian kept her tucked under his arm with Ciel on her other side, but she didn’t hide from Volpe’s gaze either.
My control was the only reason we hadn’t killed him yet. My control and the pained look in her eye when she glanced between Ryuji’s gun and Volpe’s passive face.
I pulled my pistol from its holster. He stood from the lounge chair.
“Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you,” I said. I kept my voice level. Calm. We were the ones in charge here, despite his upturned chin and dominant stance.
If he was still wearing his suit jacket—which looked to be tied around Leona’s body—he might have straightened it. Since he wasn’t, he straightened his spine and looked me head on.
“Take me to the city and I’ll be on my way.”
I shook my head. “I won’t hesitate to end you right here, right now. We are not proceeding until we get answers.”
“Obi,” Leona said from beside Caspian. She stood, drawing Caspian to stand beside her. He angled his body in front of her. “I made him a deal. If he helped me in… there , we’d get him off the ship.”
I leveled my glare back at Volpe. “Is that true?”
The man nodded. “The agreement was to take me back to New York.”
“Fuck that,” Caspian growled. “Kill him now and let’s be done with it.”
“Cas, no.” Leona placed one hand on Caspian’s chest.
“Why were you on that boat?” I asked.
“The Albanians kidnapped me, just the same as her. ”
“Bullshit,” Caspian interjected. “You’re working with them. I would have let the sharks eat the skin from your bones while you sank to the bottom of the ocean.”
Volpe rolled his eyes. “Thanks for your input, Cas.”
“Please stop,” Leona said. Ciel gripped her other hand, pulling her back against him should Caspian decide he wanted to take Volpe’s life into his own hands.
“No.” My words sliced through the air, giving everyone pause. “Tell us the truth, Volpe. All of it. The Vokshi Clan took you both. Why?”
His eyes widened at the name, but he tried to play it off by crossing his arms over his chest and sighing heavily. “There’s nothing else to tell. They got the jump on me, and clearly you four couldn’t keep her safe, so they snagged her, too.”
The rest of the guys instantly talked over one another in protest, but I lifted my pistol and pressed it to his chest. “Tell me the situation with the Albanians. They wouldn’t go after people like the two of you—powerful leaders—without reason.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” he hissed, eyes narrowed. His chest pressed against the barrel of my weapon, unafraid. “Leona and I made an agreement. Live up to your side of the bargain, like I lived up to mine. Take me back to the city.”
My voice went low. “She might have made an agreement, but I’ve done no such thing.”
“The Albanians said there was war,” Leona interjected. “The Camorra and the Albanians are at war. They took Max to be a hostage. They took me to make up for the money they’d lost since he killed my father.”
War? My mind turned over all the explanations, all the possibilities.
The Camorra had owned Europe, though they’d been at odds with the Albanians for generations.
When I lived with them, they thought of the Albanians as annoyances at most. The Clans weren’t powerful enough to present a genuine threat to the Camorra. Unless …
“The Vokshi Clan. You know them,” I said to Volpe.
His unflinching gaze confirmed my statement.
No clans. Just Vokshi .
“Have the Albanian Clans consolidated power?” I asked him. “Is that how they’ve threatened the Camorra?”
His nostrils flared, then he sighed. “Yes.”
“How are you involved?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I will not answer.”
I cocked my pistol. “Now.”
“Obi,” Leona said. I turned, and tears wet her eyes. “I just want to go home.”
My heart churned inside my chest alongside the lava that threatened to erupt. Not at her, never at her. At the damage inflicted upon her. At the fact that Volpe had answers he was keeping from us.
I turned my back on Volpe, trusting my brothers would watch it, while I stood in front of her and ducked my head to whisper in her ear. “Please, ifunanya’m . We need to understand. Only a little longer.”
Her bottom lip wobbled, and my heart broke inside my chest before she closed her eyes and exhaled a long breath. I watched her steel herself. Her eyes went hard. Her shoulders went tight. She stepped around me and stared at Max herself.
“I know you’re working with the Camorra, or else the Albanians wouldn’t have interrogated you about their plans or how to hurt them,” she said.
I gripped the back of her neck to steady her.
“You wouldn’t be a valuable hostage unless you were valuable to them.
You refused to tell me on the boat. Tell us now, or we won’t take you back. ”
She was right. They wouldn’t have kidnapped him and held him for so long unless they expected the Camorra to react to his absence. They wouldn’t expect him to have answers unless they had reason to believe he had them .
What had Max Volpe been doing with the Camorra underneath our noses?
He huffed a breath. “I didn’t expect you to go back on your word.”
“If you remember, I only ever agreed to get you off the ship,” she countered. Volpe frowned, opened his mouth, and then closed it. I withheld a smile. She’d done the same trick to Ryuji once. “You’ll realize that meant I could have kicked you off this yacht, but I didn’t.”
“I should have,” Ryu muttered darkly. He’d quietly repositioned himself on Volpe’s other side.
Volpe’s face turned mocking, ignoring Ryu behind him. “And then you threatened me, piccola , that I’d face the queen’s wrath when I returned. Is that what I’m facing now?”
She grabbed the pistol from my hand and pointed it at him. Anger twisted her face. “Tell us about the Albanians and the Camorra. What are we caught in the middle of?”
He clenched his jaw, glancing at Ryuji—still with his gun targeting Volpe’s back—and then over to Caspian. He took a deep breath, jaw clenching, as he realized his defeat.
“The Albanians have been pushing into New York for years, courtesy of Luciano Vero.”
“That’s what you left in my father’s study for me to find,” Leona said. “We know that.”
“I’ve been trying to push them out of the city, but they’ve had a surge in power.
The Clans agreed to unite under the Vokshi.
It’s taken all our effort to quell their numbers.
Lucia was helping us stay one step ahead, and we had made tremendous progress to push them down to Pennsylvania and New Jersey instead, but since you took her away, they’ve gotten even worse.
Without her intel, they’re flooding into the city and all down the Eastern seaboard.
They’ve already tried to kidnap me twice. ”
“Why? What use are you to the Camorra?” I asked.
In my years with them, they’d taken a careful yet reserved approach to their American counterparts. Business partners and distant cousins, perhaps, but not close enough to intervene in each other’s business unless it was necessary.
“What use are you to the Camorra?” I repeated.
He narrowed his eyes and said nothing while his fingers clenched his crossed arms.
Leona stepped forward, raising her gun again. “Why, Max?”
He pushed the words through gritted teeth like it pained him. “I’ve made an alliance with them.”
Shit.
Leona frowned up at me. This was news indeed. The Camorra and the Italian mafia in the US had operated separately from one another for close to forty years. While the US mafia relied on the Camorra for guns, and the Camorra used the Italians for business, they’d been individual operations.
“Why? To what end?” I asked. The Camorra were, and had always been, vastly more powerful than the US mafia. There was no way he could have given them an alliance that was mutually beneficial unless he offered them something extreme. “What did you give them in exchange?”
“That has nothing to do with the Albanians and therefore is out of the boundaries of this conversation.”
Leona rolled her eyes. “The Camorra have always minded their business in Italy, and let our Five Families manage the US. We make money for them, but they let us act as we want. Have they changed their minds?”
“We’re not discussing this, Leona.”
“You said you’re fighting a war on all sides,” she shot back. “What did that mean?”
A war on all sides?
“Just stay out of it, and it won’t concern you. Mind your little business with your little army of men and with the Russians, and let me do my job.”
Ryu pressed the barrel of his gun into Volpe’s back, eliciting a hiss of pain. My brother’s voice was dark and low. “You’ll tell us the truth or I’ll blow apart your kidney.”