Chapter Twenty-Eight Guinevere #3
“I was taught by the best,” I quipped. “Now, pull up a chair and help me determine exactly where the money he’s been siphoning from the Romano Group and stealing from Lupo Nero’s companies is going.”
We worked in silence for an hour, long after Martina had brought in steaming mugs of coffee and curled up in the chair across from the desk with another laptop to help us in our mission. She wasn’t as familiar with financial forensics, but she provided invaluable context.
Still, I could not find any evidence that the money Leo had been channeling away from Raffa’s enterprises was going into Leo’s own pockets.
Until I decided to stop looking for it in Leo’s coffers and just follow the trail of money.
My mind snagged on a pattern I vaguely recognized from having gone through the shipping manifests when Raffa was trying to figure out who was smuggling the Albanians’ drugs through Livorno.
A bastardized anagram, but this time with an affine cipher instead of a Caesar.
It took Dad and me a long time to work out the mathematical equations for the businesses in the Romano Group’s holdings, but eventually I used frequency analysis of all the company names to come up with the numbers needed to solve the simultaneous equation.
And thereby crack the code of where exactly Leo had hidden the money.
Only, the main holding company that was the pot of gold at the end of a very long rainbow, Nobiliaire, was not owned by Leonardo di Conte.
It was in a trust for a Maria Rizzo, his deceased mother, held by Antonio di Conte.
I was familiar enough with trust law to know that only the holder of the account could access the funds, and after a quick internet search, I found the same was true in Italy. So why would Leo funnel all his hard-won dirty money into an account he could not access?
Unless Leo was not the puppeteer but, instead, the puppet pulled by someone else’s hands.
The account holder: Antonio di Conte.
Uncle Tonio.
I blinked at the financial records, wondering if my sleep-deprived brain was imagining things.
We had not been suspicious of Tonio at all.
He was a seventy-year-old man, for one thing, and the Venetian was said to be a tall, fit young man.
But if Leo was working with him, then perhaps Leo had been the one to don the mask and do Tonio’s more aggressive legwork.
For another, he was already head of the Romano Group, with what had to be an incredible salary and a lot of sway in Florentine society as its CEO.
So why?
Why would he and Leo decide to cut off the hand that fed them and go after the whole enterprise for themselves?
Why would Tonio go to such lengths—getting Leo to shoot him!—to make us believe he was free of guilt? What did he need before he got rid of the Romano family entirely?
“Where is Tonio?” I whispered.
Martina straightened out of her slump at my tone. “He was taken to the hospital for his injuries. Why?”
“Are there any soldati with him?”
“Just his usual bodyguards, Ernesto and Michele.”
I blinked slowly as the name Michele swam up from the depths of my memories.
“Michele and Philippe were brothers, right?”
“No, just friends. They grew up in the same village, and Tonio practically fostered them. Michele’s father was a drunk, and Philippe had to take care of his single mother. She was very sickly. Aldo gave them work.”
Not Aldo, I corrected mentally, but Tonio.
The grumpy but sweet older man who was known for taking in strays like Leo.
Only, he had been doing it not out of the goodness of his own heart but out of greed, in order to build his own internal army to take control of the outfit from Aldo—or Raffa—one day.
Had he been working against the family for that long?
Was his problem with the Romanos about the sins of the father and not the son?
“It was Tonio,” I said. “Tonio was the one pulling all the strings. Leo might have helped him, but they did it together.”
“You’re saying Tonio shot himself and stayed in the burning olive grove by choice?” Martina asked, but she wasn’t skeptical, just working it out aloud.
“It would be clever,” Dad said darkly.
Martina was already on her phone, fingers flying as she shot off texts.
“Leo could have been the one to shoot him,” I allowed. “But it was a setup to take suspicion off him and put it firmly onto Leo, who we already suspected. This way Tonio could stay close.”
“But why not just kill Raffa and be done with it? I’m sure being so close to the family, to Raffa, he would have had the opportunity,” Dad noted.
“Not really,” Martina said. “Raffa is rarely truly alone. Either Renzo, Carm, Ludo, or me is always with him or in the vicinity. If he’d killed Raffa outright, we would have taken him down.”
“Exactly.” Adrenaline transformed my blood to battery acid. “Whereas if the Grecos or Pietras were the ones to kill Raffa, Tonio could step in like the hero to take over and then wipe out his accomplices in the name of revenge.”
“Bravo, Guinevere,” someone said from the doorway.
I looked up just in time to see Tonio, dressed impeccably in a three-piece suit, looking every inch the strong, deadly mafioso even with his recent gunshot wound, lift his gun and fire.
The scream that tore from my smoke-ravished throat tasted like blood.
Because the bullet had been meant not for me but for Martina, who didn’t even have time to fully turn toward the threat before the shot punctured through the back of her chair straight into her torso.
I watched as her eyes went wide and breath punched out of her lungs.
Clasping a hand over the blood bubbling up behind her shirt, she tried to stand up only for her legs to give out, falling back into the chair with a shuddering moan.
“Stay there, Pietra scum,” Tonio coolly ordered my father, who had stood to go to Martina. “Do not even blink, or I will shoot you too.”
Dad opened his palms innocently and remained where he stood.
“On the other hand,” Tonio mused, cocking his head to consider my dad. “I do not have any need of you.”
“Wait,” I demanded, stepping in front of Dad. “If you need me, you need him. I won’t do anything for you if you kill my father.”
Tonio sighed as if I were a particularly petulant child. “You are hardly in a position to make demands.”
“Raffa will eviscerate you for this,” I said, hoping that dragging him into conversation might give some of the soldati on the property the opportunity to come looking for us, especially if Martina had had time to text Raffa or any of the others about our revelations.
Tonio moved farther into the room, and I realized he was holding his torso stiffly, so the gunshot must have been bothering him, even if he was trying to hide it.
I filed that away for future use.
“Raffa won’t be doing anything any longer,” Tonio told me with a kind, almost grandfatherly smile that nonetheless froze the blood in my veins. “He’s dead.”
For a moment, everything stopped.
Sound fell into silence; colors faded to white static.
My heart ceased beating.
And then the pain rushed in, as if Tonio had shot me straight through the chest instead of Martina, who sat slumped over and unconscious in her chair, slowly bleeding out.
It was as if Tonio had declared my own death too.
Because if Raffa was truly gone . . .
“How?” I asked, surprised by the vicious strength of my tone when I felt my internal organs shutting down.
“You like patterns, don’t you?” he mused as he walked over to Martina and callously shoved her out of the chair.
She fell to the floor limply with a sickening thump.
Tonio sat in the empty, bloodstained seat with his gun resting on one thigh, trained at Dad and me.
Maybe, if it had only been me at risk, I would have hazarded an attempt to attack him. After all, he was an elderly man, and I was young, with some degree of training. If I could just get close enough with the element of surprise, I had no doubt I could disarm him.
And if Raffa was dead . . .
Then no one was coming to save us.
Before I went to pieces, I had to get Dad out of this situation.
“Well, you are all unbearably predictable,” Tonio continued, adjusting his tie so it lay flat down his chest. “Of course Raffa would never suspect his old uncle, left bleeding in the grove, of being complicit in his demise. Of course my stronzo of a ‘son’ would take the first opportunity I was compromised to go after his girlfriend, and certo, Raffa and his band of unmerry men would follow. It was just a matter of setting up a neat little trap to take them all out in one fell swoop.”
“Why would you want to kill your own son?” my dad asked, slowly trying to tug me back so he could step in front of me.
When I did not move, he sighed and stepped up shoulder to shoulder. The weight and warmth of him beside me provided me safe harbor in the maelstrom of horror, despair, and panic wreaking havoc within me.
“Leo was always such a good little soldier,” he said, reminiscing like we were old friends around a coffee table and not in a quasi hostage situation.
“He had to be, as the only child I decided to adopt for my own. There were always other boys that could have taken his position whom I found over the years and groomed into service of the Romano empire. He knew if he was not exemplary, another could fill his very coveted shoes. But then he met your daughter.” His pleasant face twisted into an awful sneer, a gold filling winking in the brightening morning light.
“It seems the Pietra girls have the ability to corrupt good men from their true path.”
My laugh was coarse like tearing fabric. “That’s rich, coming from you.”
He leveled me with a flat look, adjusting the barrel of the gun so it was clearly aimed at my father. The threat was obvious yet clever. I was much more likely to be obedient if Dad was in danger rather than me.
Especially if Raffa was gone.