Chapter 32
MASSIMO
“I want it found,” Nico barks as he stares at Dante, Caesar, and Davide. “Leave nothing unturned. Tear the fucking place apart if you have to.”
I glance at Alessio and Lazaro who are watching Nico with amusement. “What’s up his ass?” I ask softly.
“He’s pissed about the traitors,” Alessio mutters. “Normally I’d use this moment to needle him, but he’s liable to shoot me.”
“Yes, I fucking am,” Nico snaps over his shoulder, glaring at Alessio.
Wrong thing to say to Alessio. Lazaro and I share a look. Yeah, we might need to be ready to handle a bullet wound.
Alessio gives Nico a slow smile. “Ah, now, Boo Bear, you know that you don’t mean that,” he croons.
“You weren’t saying that earlier when—” He ducks and Lazaro and I jump out of the way fast when Nico pulls his gun and fires a bullet above Alessio’s head.
We all look at the hole and then back at Nico, whose eyes are full of temper.
“Alessio, get to work on searching,” Papa orders in exasperation. “Nico, you too. We don’t know what’s behind these walls and if you damage something and we can’t find it because of it, it’ll be me shooting you.” Then he walks into one of the many rooms on the floor, ignoring Nico’s furious glare.
Nico storms off, Dante following him with a cool expression.
Davide and Caesar stare at Alessio like he’s lost his mind.
Alessio shrugs and gets to his feet. “He’s touchy when I remind him how much he loves me.
” Then he whistles as he heads into another one of the rooms, unfazed when Nico calls out a curse at him.
“He’s going to leave here with a hole in him somewhere,” Lazaro snickers. “I almost feel bad for him.”
“Is Amara coming up to help with this?”
“She’s still down in the salon with the girls. They’re going over things and making notes. They’re really getting into it.” He arches a brow at me. “You were with Lucy?”
I nod. I guess everyone has picked up on my interest. “Soren was hungry and she’s reading her mother’s journal.”
“She find anything?”
I shake my head. “Only that she was a selfish woman and she was also suffering at the hands of Leonardo and her sons. She says she can understand the pain as a mother, but the rest of it, she hates her for it.”
“Yeah. Amara hasn’t started her mother’s journal yet, but I don’t like that it could upset her. What if her mother was like the others? I mean, they were both forced into marriages that they didn’t want.”
“Amara is strong. So is Lucy. They’ll get through anything they find as long as we’re with them.”
Lazaro nods, but he still doesn’t look one hundred percent convinced. Instead, he says, “I’m going to take the room at the far end of the hall. Let me know if you find anything.” He heads off, and I take the room across from him.
It’s identical to the one that we found the fucker in earlier, but inverted and with a different type of fireplace. Maybe that’s the first place to look.
I don’t know how long I look, moving, pushing, and inspecting things, but I come up empty.
Hell, I even yank the mattress off the bed to see if there’s anything under it.
Nothing. I look at the room as a whole one more time, but again, I see nothing.
Nothing that stands out, nothing that even looks out of place. It’s all completely normal.
I check out the adjoining bath, but with it being so small, it takes little time at all to realize that there is nothing in here either.
It’s a few hours before we all finally gather in the hallway. “Anything?” Nico demands.
“Nothing.” It’s a common echo from everyone, and the frustration is clear.
“The guy did say that it might not be in this wing but another one,” I remind them.
“But this is the one part of the house that no one would be around as often,” Dante reasons. “The other one is right in the middle of everything.”
“So was her office, though. Wouldn’t it make sense that her exit would be near there?”
“Would she really want to risk being spotted leaving from there?” Lazaro argues.
“I mean, if I’m trying to sneak the hell out of somewhere, I’m not going to want to walk outside into the middle of the guards and everyone.
The north end of the house faces the back end of the property, right?
It probably wasn’t as heavily patrolled, and all she had to do was go through the maze or the trees. ”
“Are we sure that she’s not talking about the passages we’re already using?
” Alessio wonders. “I mean, they all come out to hidden doors and exits, and we already know one of them goes into the maze, and out the side so she could have just used one of them. And they wouldn’t have had cameras then, right? ”
“They were always full of cameras. Not great ones at the time, but enough that I don’t think she could have gotten through the tunnels unspotted. Unless she knew the precise moments the guards weren’t watching the feeds.”
“She could have paid them off.”
“My father’s men would never have taken money from her.
They were too loyal to him and too scared of him.
It’s more likely that when they had the house built, she bribed the builders to create these exits and hidden rooms and told him to leave it off the plans.
It’s exactly why I kept the passages a secret after I found out about them and only Dante and I, and now Davide and Caesar, know about them and have access.
I don’t want to chance my men using them and doing shit behind my back. ”
“Jesus Christ, this is doing my head in,” Caesar mutters. “Who does this kind of shit? It’s complicated, and far too elaborate.”
“She managed to run an entire network and empire on her own for the majority of her marriage,” I remind him. “Networks that went through other territories and with alliances that normally don’t work well together.”
“Yeah, but this is a little much, don’t you think?
” Caesar argues. “I mean, I know she was smart, but the more things like this that you put into place, the more chances that someone will discover it, even by accident.” He looks around the hallway critically.
“The passageways run along the exterior walls for the most part, right?”
“Yes.”
“Wouldn’t it make more sense that if she was going to make a secret way in and out, that she would do it so that no one might question any extra space?
Build it along one of the other passages?
Just borrow a small bit of space that no one would probably really catch if they were looking at the house or the blueprints. ”
“Or she went underground like it does to the bunker,” Davide agrees.
“Underground would make more sense, but I doubt she would have been able to hide a giant tunnel during the excavation,” Papa points out. “That would have raised suspicions immediately.”
We all go quiet, thinking. I’m getting really tired of all this secret bullshit.
“We really should have gotten Amara to come up here,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. “She’d have found the exit in a heartbeat.”
Lazaro smirks. “I’ve already texted one of the guards to ask her to come up and have a look. Better to have her help than all of us wasting time.”
“I’m not some sort of miracle worker,” Amara’s voice declares loudly from down the hall. We all turn to see her and Sienna walking toward us.
She’s only been here a week, and Amara has seamlessly slid into this life so perfectly.
She slides into Lazaro, dwarfed by his giant size, while Sienna moves to stand with Alessio. Alessio quickly steals a kiss, while Amara looks up at Lazaro and says, “If you all looked at everything, I want to try something different.” Then she grins at him and adds, “Time to air jail me, baby.”
“Air jail?” I repeat, confused.
“Yeah,” Amara grins. “I need him to pick me up and keep me up so I can look around. It’s like those naughty dogs that you see on social media that get picked up and carried around everywhere when they’re bad?
I’m not bad, of course, but Lazaro has a habit of picking me up to argue with me so we’re on equal ground, so to speak.
” She snickers, and Lazaro grins at her.
I share a look with the others. Yeah, it’s weird as shit, but whatever works for them.
We watch as Lazaro kneels down and Amara clambers up to sit on the top of his shoulders, his arms gripping her shins to keep her in place. Good fucking thing this place has such high ceilings with her being twelve feet up off the ground.
“I really want a piggyback ride like that now,” Sienna laughs. “Damn, that looks fun.”
“All you have to do is ask, coniglietta,” Alessio laughs.
“It’s not the same. Those extra inches count, you know,” she teases with a wicked grin at him. The innuendo is not lost on us, and we all snicker. Sienna always knows what buttons to press. Alessio’s expression darkens, and his eyes narrow.
Before Alessio can reply to her statement, Amara calls out, “I already see something interesting.”
We hurry over to one of the rooms on the right side. It’s directly in the middle of the hallways. “What do you see, colombina?” Lazaro asks, looking around the room in confusion.
I take it in. It’s a simple room, with a queen-sized bed, fireplace, desk, and an ugly painting of some kind of old-looking European figure, and the large window and seat that take up most of the outer wall.
I see nothing different, and I’m pretty sure that Nico and Dante were the ones to search this room.
“Well, you said all the other rooms are identical up here, right?” Amara asks. “Well, this one isn’t. This is the only one with a window seat and a desk.”
Wait, she’s right, my blood buzzing with excitement.
“We already searched everything in here and found nothing,” Nico reminds her tightly. Lazaro gives him a warning look, but Amara doesn’t look like she’s upset.
Instead, her head continually looks around the room. “Are you sure that every room has a picture in it?”