23. Salvatore
23
Salvatore
The call comes late. Almost midnight. Vera, of all people. I didn’t think she would still have my number, but maybe she kept it for the express purpose of giving me bad news. I know it’s bad when even she verges on panicking.
No one has seen Contessa in about 12 hours.
I am forty minutes from the house when the call comes in. I make the drive in twenty.
I tear through every room, throwing open doors and closets, upending furniture. The girl is playing with me again. She has to be. She’s punishing me for leaving her, that’s all. But I’ll find her. I will find her.
Time crawls by without her, with no sign. I run out of places to look—so I start the search again.
From scratch. I missed something. A room. A closet. The back of all the cars in the garage.
She’s curled up somewhere, sleeping, dreaming her vindictive little dreams about getting back at me, waiting for me to come put her in her place under me—
Marcel catches me on my way downstairs, his expression hollow.
“Noctus found this at the wall,” he says, holding onto a woman’s slip-on shoe. “Is it one of hers?”
I wouldn’t know. I never paid attention to what Ava brought back or what Tessa bought for herself.
It was just whatever she wanted. Whatever she wanted. How could it still not be enough?
I brush past him, locked onto the desperate certainty that she is here .
“I don’t understand,” Marcel says, trailing me. “You locked her in her room, didn’t you?”
I ignore him. Tessa didn’t need to be in her room. We were past that. She wouldn’t have left.
Anyone I would have worried about being a threat to her was with me out in the city. She’s here.
She has to be here; we’re just not looking hard enough.
“Sal,” Marcel urges, as I go through the sunroom again, retracing steps. I feel manic. The slightest thing out of place is like a clue, a hint, some kind of universal sign. Maybe the garden.
Maybe she went back there, like the first time—
I head outside again, where I have already been.
“Sal!” Marcel grabs me by the shoulder, ripping me around to face him, the damning evidence still in hand. “Was she or was she not in her room?”
“No,” I finally snap at him, pushing his hands off me.
He looks at me as though I’ve lost my damn mind.
“…Why not?”
Because I trusted her.
“Where the fuck would she go?” I say instead, refusing to face the truth. “How would she leave?
There are patrols walking this property day and night now! Everyone is too fucking paranoid or too fucking traumatized for sleep! So how the fuck does a grown woman just disappear under those conditions ? Past two check points! Watch towers! Patrols! She’s here, she’s just—”
“She’s not here. Sal,” he grabs me when I try to head back outside for a second time.
“Contessa’s gone. If she wasn’t locked in her room, then she’s gone.”
He says it like it’s the simplest math problem in the world: I let a prisoner wander free, and the prisoner escaped. It sounds so goddamn simple , like anyone could have predicted it.
But Contessa wasn’t just a prisoner, was she?
The truth circles me as if looking for a moment to strike, to take me out at the knees and buckle all of my strength. All her gentle looks and reassuring smiles. Her engagement ring on her finger. Her body pressed against mine, full of delicate trust. Did Tessa play me, just long enough? Has she been planning it all along? Did she sit on my lap, soaking up all my secrets like a sponge, just to slip off into the night? Or did she only decide last night, handing back her ring, that I was not what she wanted?
Shame tightens in the back of my throat.
I played right into her hand. Ate up those first scraps of affection like a starving man, just because I’d never tasted it before.
Betrayal happens in this business. You learn to anticipate it, to guard against it. I’ve never taken it personally. But this—this is more personal than anything I’ve ever felt in my life. A blade across the jugular, no way to stop the bleeding.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“How did she convince you to let her out of her room?” Marcel asks, still bewildered.
When I don’t answer, he finally sees to the heart it. His expression breaks. “Well, fuck,” he breathes, running his hand through his hair, “You cared about her.”
“No,” I say immediately, denying it like a reflex. “I just—I didn’t think she could get out.”
Neither one of us buys into that lie, but he doesn’t press me on it.
“What do we do now?” he asks instead.
As if that’s even a question.
I almost laugh. The man thinks so highly of me, as if I am not the simplest, most selfish creature in the world.
It doesn’t matter how Tessa escaped. Not really. The solution is the same, no matter the equation.
“I take her back.”
The dread quietly washes over his face, darkening his expression. I am already on thin ice with the family. Losing Contessa Lovera and going on the full offensive to get her back—it’s the kind of move that makes you end up with two to the back of the head, your death ruled a suicide.
If it goes poorly, I will have a slab down there in the freezer, right next to Vinny, as they wait to figure out how to bury me without too many questions being asked.
I don’t care.
Contessa will never be the woman I deluded myself into wanting—but goddammit, she’ll still be mine. If it takes this house. If it takes every dollar I have to my name. If I takes blood or tears, I’ll spill them all; I don’t give a damn whose they are.
Contessa will never be free of me. She belongs to me and me alone.
And this time, she will never forget it.
***
Two days crawl by. My temper is a short fuse, and I am suspicious of everyone and everything. I feel Tessa’s absence in every long afternoon, in every restless night. I interrogate members of my own family. No one is exempt.
I tear people from their posts, switch up security, and revoke weapon clearances and salaries. The ranks shift fast, promotions and demotions knocking along like dominos, a ripple effect felt through every rank. They were supposed to be watching that night—they should have never let this happen.
Near midnight, there is an update on one of Tessa’s pages.
In the picture, she smiles in the arms of a man I’ve never seen before. I try to read the caption, but my eyes keep wandering to his face—his smug fucking smirk, and the genuine joy in her expression as she beams at the camera.
She never looked at me like that. I would have remembered it. Would have carried that look inside me for the rest of my life.
The caption draws my gaze and my ire: ‘From friend to fiancé. Happy to be home from our last #adventure before we settle down for good!’
The post reeks of damage control. In two sentences, they explain away Tessa’s mysterious disappearance—a spontaneous trip that has resulted in a proposal. And now she’s going to be married? I stare into the picture of her so-called fiancé.
This isn’t her choice, no more than I was.
Maybe a more reasonable man would leave her with him. Just another ending that she doesn’t want. But the thought of someone else, anyone else being with her—it makes me want to snap the fucking phone in half.
I storm toward the office. I find Marcel already staring into the laptop on the desk.
“James Serra,” he says, with no introduction, spinning the laptop around to show the mysterious man in Tessa’s picture. It takes me by surprise.
“Why are you staying on top of this?”
“Because I’ve never seen you react like this,” he admits. “Not to anything. You don’t even look like yourself.”
The observation crawls under my skin. No one should be able to see that, not even Marcel, who knows me better than anyone.
“Don’t get involved in this, Marcel. It’s better if you wash your hands of it. I made this mess and I’ll clean it up—”
“No, you won’t. Not alone. Now come look at what I’ve found.”
I join him behind the desk.
There’s a handful of personal information on James Serra, including an address. My instincts tell me to go kick in his door, even though I know better. He’ll be in some hotel, probably, with an armed man and a tripwire waiting for me in his legally registered address. I still know the game, even if I’m too goddamn angry to want to play it.
“There’s some sort of purpose to this,” Marcel says. “I’m just not sure what it is yet. This isn’t an engagement announcement photo. I mean, where’s the ring? The photoshoot? This is just a selfie. It could have been taken any time.”
“It’s not her post. They’re selling her off. Damaged goods.” When Marcel continues to stare at me, not quite comprehending the damage , I add, “She’s not a virgin anymore.”
His cursor drifts over the digital clock in the corner of the screen, bringing up the year, as if he’d started to doubt what century we were living in.
“Gio’s a fossil,” I sigh. “He does things the old way. And as long as there’s money tied up in it, people in our business will keep playing along. Serra will have some kind of connection, we just don’t know what it is yet. Gio’s getting something out of it.”
By the end of the week, rumors of Tessa’s engagement are being muttered through the underground. We keep an ear on them, while my every waking hour is spent on tormenting Gio in every way I can. Caution is in the wind. There’s only punishment. I’m not like him—I don’t hesitate.
An official celebration for Tessa’s engagement is announced. Publicly. A black-tie gala hosted by the Lovera family in celebration of their daughter and their soon-to-be son-in-law. It’s touted as the first formally hosted family event in decades.
“…They could have just written ‘trap’ on the invitations, in big bold letters,” Marcel points out, studying the announcement on his phone. I hold my silence. “We do agree that this is a trap, yes?” he presses.
“We agree.”
“Meaning you’re not going to fall for it.”
I hold my silence again. Marcel gawks.
“Sal. They could put Tessa under a box being held up by a stick, and it wouldn’t be as much of a trap as this is,” he says.
“If you know it’s a trap, then you can circumvent the trigger—”
“ Sal —”
“I might not get another chance!”
The fury in my voice silences him.
I have done nothing except think about this moment, hungering for it. Even the quiet moments—eating, sleeping, following my strict, merciless routines—they have all been functional. Just something to get out of the way, to keep me primed and ready for this moment.
This one chance.
I get Tessa back or I die trying. If Marcel knows me at all, then he knows that’s always been the way this ends.
“Call a meeting. Elders. Lieutenants. Everybody, right now.”
“At this hour—”
“I said everybody!”
Marcel doesn’t question it again.
One by one, the members of the family shuffle in to join me in the foyer. I don’t bother taking them into the office, like we’re all going to have a nice little sit down around cookies and coffee. I need the space. I can’t stop pacing. I am filled with pointless desperation, a missile with no target just looking for something to strike. Her picture is seared inside my head; I see it so clearly if my eyes settle on any one spot for too long.
The family members arrive, some of them half-awake and pajama clad. Cecilia is wheeled in by her nurse. She is the only one fully dressed, as if she had been briefed on this meeting thirty minutes before I even knew I was calling it
Everyone is assembled, coming out of various stages of sleep.
“We’re going after Contessa Lovera,” I tell them, my tone not inviting opinions or suggestions. “We have a location, somewhere she might be on Saturday evening. We’re doing this on Gio’s turf and on his terms. We’ll be expected, and we’ll meet resistance. We have until almost a week to decide on a plan and make sure the conflict goes in our favor.”
“Where she might be at,” one of the men echoes slowly. Trepidation stretches the moment thin.
People are digging in their feet, exchanging heavy glances. When we talked about getting revenge for Vinny and Lance, we talked about getting it on our terms. Not Gio’s. Not walking into a slaughter on some half-chance that Contessa might be there.
In a whisper at the back of my thoughts, I hear her despairing voice over and over, the blood running out of her hair. Why did he send them to die? I didn’t want this.
My eyes scrub over the lieutenants gathered, wondering if she would shed those same tears over them and ask those same questions about me. It’s infuriating that her opinion still matters so goddamn much to me. Contessa left, and she’s still pulling my strings from miles and miles away.
“Let me rephrase,” I say. “ I am going after Contessa Lovera. But I need a plan. Whether it involves any of you or not, I don’t really give a damn. I need your expertise. I need every angle on this, every insight.”
“Salvatore, it’s suicide,” someone scoffs.
“I said a plan , not an opinion.”
“It’s not opinion, it’s fact . If you want a plan, how about we start with cutting our losses? The girl’s not worth losing you, Sal—”
“The girl is worth what I say she’s worth!”
My voice bounces off the high ceilings overhead. An uneasiness settles in the room.
“And I thought women bickered amongst themselves,” interrupts the suddenly dry, unimpressed tone of Cecilia. She looks around the room at each of the men there, her thumb tapping against her knuckles, jaw set.
“In my day, it would have been shameful for men to question their orders. To wring their hands over how they can’t do this or that, rather than buckle down and figure it out as they’re asked. Some of you lived in those days as well as I did, but maybe you’ve forgotten. From the start, you all agreed that losing his daughter made Gio weaker. Now, her loss makes us weaker.”
She says us , but I wonder if she doesn’t really just mean me.
It’s the truth either way.
“I agree with Salvatore,” she continues, “In the interest of the stability of this family, Miss Lovera is worth fighting for, whatever risks that may involve.”
Of all the people to take my side in this, Cecilia is the last one that I expected.
We exchange a look. I try to read her, but those half-blind eyes give me nothing.
“Maybe it’s true that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” one of the elders says, stepping up, “but I sure as hell still remember my old tricks. If you need bodies to throw at this thing, then count me in. Never wanted to die in a hospital bed anyway.”
The sentiment begins to spread among the elders who are still able and capable. Recklessness catches like a flame among them at the thought of one last dangerous hurrah.
Embarrassed silence spreads among the young lieutenants as they watch it all unfold. Someone asks about the location, and Marcel begins to pull up what he can about the building. Slowly, a plan is put into motion.
Over the bowed heads and bickering opinions, I glance to Cecilia again, and I wonder why—why would she choose my side in this?
When she meets my gaze, I see in her face the only priority she has ever claimed to have: the good of the family.