Chapter Twenty-Seven Raffa
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Raffa
Ludo tracked the car with the drone as far as distance would allow, which gave us just enough time to jump into our own car and gun after him.
I did not want to leave Guinevere or the rest of my family, not when my fiancée and nephew were being treated for smoke inhalation, not when the house was uninhabitable because of lingering smoke as the firefighters put out the raging olive grove fire.
But these were the choices I was faced with as capo dei capi.
Their safety came before their comfort, as much as I would have loved to be there to tend to them.
As long as Leo remained at large, he would come for me and mine.
And that was unacceptable.
We stopped just long enough to visit the armory in the barn, thankfully on the other side of the fire. Equipped with guns, ammo, bulletproof vests, a smoke bomb, and a handful of grenades, Renzo, Carmine, and I went after the man who had once been one of us.
Three cars followed in a procession behind us, unmarked black SUVs filled with loyal soldati. Burette had sent his men down from Florence to fortify the villa while we were absent.
I trusted the man because he had proven himself again and again to me, even when I had publicly set down his daughter at the fundraiser in Firenze in the summer. He was a seasoned capo who would guard my family like a dragon its treasure hoard.
Leo had headed north, which was no surprise. I had already alerted Damiano, the capo dei capi in the south, to be on the lookout for Leo, and the region was filled with many more camorristi than the north.
We found his car abandoned in Pistoia, the doors open, a fire crackling in the interior where it was parked in a narrow alley on the outskirts of town. Dawn was starting to turn everything from black to grayscale.
“Ludo, can you check surveillance in the area? I have to believe he headed this way for a reason. Even if he stole a new car, his center of operations has to be somewhere here in the north.”
“Yes,” Ludo said, his computer in his lap, fingers flying. “But it will take me a minute.”
I did not tell him we did not have a minute to spare. Instead, I drove us down the street to an all-night café where we could regroup. As Carmine ordered us coffees and Renzo argued with Ludo about which intersections to check out first, I tried to think about what I knew of my best friend.
His parents had died when he was just a baby, leaving him in Tonio’s care, but I thought they might have lived somewhere close.
I pulled out my phone to search the shared family album Mamma had made a few years ago, filled with old, scanned photos, until I came across what I was looking for.
“Maria, Cristo, and Leo Rizzo,” it read on the bottom of the yellowed photograph that depicted the couple smiling in front of a tiny house.
“Can you run a search on that house?” I asked Ludo, sliding my phone across the counter to him.
He nodded, mouth tight as his fingers worked and his eyes swept the screen.
“Leo stole a car near the train station,” he said a moment later. “But he started heading east, not north.”
“Toward Venice, maybe?” Carmine suggested, setting the coffees down for us. “Donatella’s people might harbor him.”
I moved over Ludo’s shoulder to watch in real time as he ran a search for the little house from the photograph. Images opened and collapsed across an open map until finally it pinged somewhere on the edge of Tuscany and Umbria.
Right near Fattoria Casa Luna.
I thought of running into Leo at Imelda’s winery even though he had no reason to be there, of the break-in they’d experienced in the summer.
“Do you think Imelda’s involved?” Carmine asked, shocked.
“No.” Of that I had little doubt. Imelda was one of the women who had benefited most from my takeover after Aldo, who had notoriously felt a woman’s place was in the kitchen or the bedroom. “But call her. Tell her we are on the way and to look out for Leo.”
She was waiting outside the main building of the vineyard when we arrived, arms crossed and brow furrowed.
“He hasn’t been here,” she said as soon as I alighted from the car. “But I checked the security tapes, and he’s been visiting a few times a month for the past year. Sometimes he meets with Wyatt.”
The British stronzo who had not noticed we were being defrauded by the Chinese import company. Not noticed or, more likely now, colluded with them to steal from me to fill Leo’s pockets.
“No one lives in the house,” she told us as we walked en masse around the building to the back garden and the path that led around the outside of the vines to the little yellow house fifteen minutes from the main cluster of buildings.
“Cristo and my husband were cousins, so we gave them the house when Tonio cast Maria out for marrying beneath her.”
“Tonio kicked her out?” I frowned because I had never known that. “He always told Leo about how much he loved his sister.”
Imelda scoffed. “That old fart is cold as ice. He told Maria he wouldn’t support her if she went through with marrying a common vintner.”
It was not uncommon for the patriarch to use his unmarried family to strengthen ties with other clans and mafiosi, but I had not known Tonio had tried to do that.
“He wanted her to marry Alfonso Greco,” Imelda added.
Alfonso Greco.
The man who had banded together with the Venetian to come after me. That history explained why Leo might have thought to join forces behind my back.
As we came up on the house, I pressed a hand to Imelda’s hip. “Wait here. Do you need a gun?”
She quirked a dark eyebrow and pulled out a pistol.
I nodded, then directed Carmine, Renzo, and my other soldati to surround the house and close in.
As I approached the front door through the vines, I noticed a man patrolling outside, his dark clothes blending in with the shadows.
I lifted my gun and popped off two quick shots, the silencer muffling the sound of each bullet.
I crept forward and bent to check his pulse to ensure he was dead, then approached the front door, pausing beside it to listen for any noises inside the house.
There was a low murmur of voices, but not many.
I peeked through the gap in the curtains of the front window and glimpsed three men around a dining room table, playing cards. They wore gun holsters at their sides and radios hooked over their ears.
What could they possibly be there to protect?
“Andiamo,” I whispered into my own comm, and then shot out the mechanism on the front door before kicking it in.
The men were scrambling when I went inside, cards spiraling through the air as they fumbled to pull out their weapons.
Pop. Pop.
More shots fired from the back of the house.
I squeezed off three more myself, hitting the closest man in the neck and chest, taking him down for the count. The other two dove behind the table, overturning it to hide behind the marble top.
Renzo appeared at the other end of the kitchen, moving toward me quietly.
I let my foot crack over a splinter of wood so they would be focused on my approach. One of them lifted his head to fire at me.
I ducked just as Renzo took aim at that raised head and splattered it across the back wall with a bullet.
On another day, when I did not feel emotionally flayed alive, Renzo and I might have competed for who could get the last man standing.
The man surprised me by shooting the mirror to my left, distracting me for long enough to jump over the table and hurl himself at me.
We fell to the floor, my gun skittering from my hold.
I used his leftover momentum to flip him onto his back, sliding a knife from its sheath at his waist as I evaded a left hook and then reared up to slash the blade across his neck.
He ducked my swing, snapping a big hand up to grip my neck in a vise that had me seeing stars.
But I still had the blade in my hand, so I switched grips and slid the sharp edge from the end of his forearm to his wrist on the arm grasping my throat.
Warm blood sluiced over us both as if poured from a basin.
A moment later, his hand dropped dully to the carpet, and he focused on breathing through the wet gurgle of blood filling his throat.
I climbed off him and retrieved my gun to find Carmine had joined Renzo.
“All clear up here. No sign of Leo,” he told me. “But the basement is locked tight and coded with a high-tech alarm. Ludo’s working on it now.”
“What the hell could they have been hiding here?” I questioned. “And why the hell go to so much trouble? I cannot image Leo hiding behind a locked door.”
I rounded the corner and moved through the handful of men waiting for Ludo to hack into the alarm panel.
“It’s top tier,” he grunted, two sharp tools in his mouth and another in his hands as he parted various wires behind the panel. “Digital access wasn’t cutting it.”
“Do you know which wire to cut?” Carm asked doubtfully.
“I should.”
“Wow, that instills confidence,” Carmine muttered.
I ignored their banter to go down the hallway, checking each door until I found what I was looking for in the back of a closet. A moment later, the lights flickered and went dead.
Thankfully the sun was cresting over the hills, spilling pale, honeyed light through the windows so we could see some of what we were doing.
“What did you do?” Carm asked as I returned.
“I cut the power,” I muttered, grabbing the bolt cutters from my backpack to snip the lock on the door to the basement.
When the door still would not budge, I told everyone to stand back and fired at the opposite side of the panel, aiming for the hinges. After a round of bullets, the wood creaked and split apart.
I pushed it open so powerfully, it banged against the opposite wall.
“Let me go first,” Renzo insisted, but I was already going down the wood treads, the smell of piss and damp cellar rising in my nostrils.
Nothing shot at my feet as I descended, and I had no idea what I might find waiting for me in the basement.
But nothing could have prepared me for the sight of an emaciated girl tied to a chair and gagged with a stained rag. There was a Colombina Venetian mask over the upper half of her face.
“Che cazzo?” I muttered as I moved to her, Renzo and Carmine checking the rest of the basement as I approached, the other soldiers at my back.
She was young, her matted, unwashed blond hair hanging in her face where it was slumped against her shoulder. Even though she was clearly captive and bound, there was no other sign of injury.
I had tipped her face up to further examine her when her eyes popped open.
They were not the same rich brown of freshly tilled earth like my Vera’s, but the shape was the same, doe eyes topped with delicately arched brows in a heart-shaped face.
“Gemma?” I whispered, recognizing her from the photo I had seen in Guinevere’s apartment.
She jerked against the ties, shouting something behind her gag.
“Boss!” Carmine yelled.
I deftly untied the back of the gag so Gemma could speak to me, the fabric falling away at the same time Carmine called, “There’s a fucking bomb down here.”
“Get out!” Gemma screamed in English, voice hoarse, eyes rolling wildly in her head like those of a feral horse. “H-he called ahead and knew you were coming. It’s a trap.”
A moment later, the first explosive detonated.