Chapter Fifteen Raffa #2
Where Renzo had left him two weeks ago, after I had killed him myself in the basement of Trattoria Umberto. He was the last of the scuttling bottom-feeders in the clan who had escaped Pucci’s police net and whom I had had to put in the ground myself.
“So not the Grecos,” Drita allowed. “But still someone under the power of this Venetian and the Pietras. After I killed Alessio, they reached out about meeting face to face.”
“Why?”
“To take over operations in Livorno and the rest of the north from you.”
Fury burned like banked coals in my belly. “I am still capo dei capi.”
“Yes, but”—Drita’s grin was wicked—“you have to admit, their plan is good. After all, do you know where your woman is at this very moment? They know what you were willing to sacrifice to save your mother and sisters from certain death. It is fair to surmise you might do something drastic like give up your kingdom for a girl. Obviously, they do not know you as well as I do. You wouldn’t give up a penny to save some zuske. ”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as electric panic sparked through my blood. “What do you know, Drita?”
“Nothing,” she said with a little shrug, but her gaze slid to Carmine, who was watching her with something like mounting dread. “Maybe next time you think to dip your wick in another woman, Carmine, you will remember today.”
“Call Philippe,” I said calmly to Martina even though my blood was acidic with rage.
When I addressed Drita, it was through a smile like a knife wound cut into my face.
“You know, Drita, we have always had an amicable, mutually beneficial relationship. I would hate to see that change over a lover’s tiff. ”
“There’s no reason it should,” she agreed. “You understand, they might not even have her yet. I gave you a heads-up. Which, I think you’ll find, means that I conformed to our agreement.”
“Philippe isn’t answering,” Martina murmured. “Guinevere isn’t either.”
I raised a brow at the Albanian gangster. “Not enough of one, it seems. A shame. Carmine always complimented you on your legs.”
“Wha—”
The gun I held against my thigh under the table recoiled hard into my grip, spitting the bullet directly across from me and into Drita’s thigh.
She screamed, hitting her head against the table as she bent down over her ruined leg.
The room erupted into activity, Renzo throwing his huge body over the table to slam Dren against the floor, Dren’s gun flying out of his fist to clang against the wall.
Martina was on the man who had stepped forward with the tablet, someone twice her size she latched on to like a spider monkey, strong thighs clamping his arms to his sides while she slid a small stiletto blade into his neck.
Arterial blood splashed vibrantly across her white dress shirt and face, but she held on until he bled out.
It only took seconds. Carmine grappled with the last man, a short, burly, hairy man who had my soldato by the throat until Carm elbowed him in the balls and then knocked him out with a sharp elbow to the temple.
Meanwhile, I stood slowly and rounded the table to Drita’s side.
Through her pain, she had managed to find her own weapon, and she swung it wide to take aim at me.
I sidestepped her first clumsy attempt, lunging forward before she could try again and seizing her arm, breaking the bone with a clean snap so the gun clattered to the floor.
She cried out, eyes squeezed shut in pain.
“Listen to me carefully,” I told her in my passable Albanian so there would be no misunderstandings.
“I will not kill you, because you did not know, perhaps, that this woman is not just any other woman to me. She is the woman. The one I breathe for. If I find she has been killed because of your pathetic power play, I will hunt you down and skin you alive before I hang you upside down by the ceiling to bleed to death drop by slow drop. You will beg me to end your agony, and I will not, because you will have instigated mine the second Guinevere died. If she is, by some fucking miracle, alive when I find her, I will consider you in my debt, Drita. I think an increase to a forty percent cut might ease the sting for a while. What do you say?”
She hissed at me as I clasped her broken arm a little too tightly.
“I did not hear you,” I said pleasantly.
“Yes,” she snapped, eyes blazing like sunlight on ice. “Fuck you, Romano. Yes, fine.”
“Where are they taking her?”
She glowered at me, but Renzo had the good grace to drag Dren’s knocked-out carcass in front of us, his gun pressed to Dren’s temple.
“Well?” I asked.
Her breath shuddered out of her. “They were meant to take her from the train. Someone told them you would be on the eight o’clock.”
There were exactly ten people who knew which train we were taking back home.
My mother and my sisters Stacci and Carlotta.
Renzo, Carmine, Martina, Leo, and myself.
Guinevere.
And Philippe.
There was a chance any of them could have told someone else, but it was marginal. The most obvious answers were frequently the correct ones.
Which meant that Philippe was our turncoat.
“Where are they taking her?” I demanded, twisting Drita’s arm slightly like the valve release on some of the anger steaming up my throat.
“Fuck!” she screamed. “I do not know. It didn’t matter to me.”
“Kill them,” I said to the brothers.
Carmine locked eyes with Drita as he lifted the heavy gangster onto the table with his head hanging over the edge. Only then did he leverage his weight against the man’s head in a savage blow that resulted in a crackling crunch as his neck broke.
Less dramatic than his brother, Renzo immediately drilled a bullet into Dren’s head.
Drita shouted through her tears, but I ignored what she was saying to lean in very close, my mouth a whisper against her cheek.
“They call me the Gentleman not because I believe in mercy, Drita,” I explained, “but because I always follow through on my word. If you ever keep important information from me again, I will kill you. If you ever even so much as speak Guinevere’s name, I will cut out your tongue and asphyxiate you with it.
And if you ever think to turn on me, I will hunt down and destroy everyone in your clan, just like I have with the Grecos. Is that understood?”
Her mouth trembled as she pressed it into a tight line and nodded.
“Molto bene,” I said, dropping her arm to the table so she cried out again. “Andiamo. We have to find my huntress.”
And I had to hope that was what she would be if they had her.
Not la mia cerbiatta, but the cacciatrice I had seen peeking through those doe eyes.