48. Lorenzo
CHAPTER 48
Lorenzo
I nearly put my fist through my office wall. “You should have called me immediately,” I told my cousin, ready to launch myself at him.
“I had it under control,” Elio said. He was calm and sure, and I had never wanted to break his jaw more.
“You don’t get to decide that, cugino .”
“But I do,” Elio argued.
“Isabella is carrying my child.” I stepped into Elio’s space, and surprisingly, he didn’t back down.
“Amalia is my wife,” he snarled. “Do you think that I would put her in danger for even a moment? I’ve watched you mourn for years; I would never put myself in that position.”
Had it not been for Damian yanking Elio back, I would have broken his jaw. “Enough,” Damian barked. “We have bigger things to worry about right now.”
He was right, but that didn’t make me want to punch Elio any less. Later , I told myself. Once we dealt with the Russians—who else would tail Elio, Amalia, and Isabella?—I would teach my cousin some manners.
“Call Yuri,” I said, eyes still on a scowling Elio. Likely, he knew what fate awaited him. “I want to know where Artem Volkov is right now.”
“Are you sure?” Damian asked. Yuri Popov was a…friend of sorts. He was Bratva, but he didn’t have a sense of loyalty to any of the families. Instead, Yuri was out for only himself, and he wasn’t above selling out his associates for the right price.
He and Damian had something of a friendly relationship, and we’d called for Yuri’s services from time to time. But never for something like this; it would be the last time that we could call on him.
“How do you know it was the Volkovs?” Elio asked. “I didn’t see a wolf tattoo anywhere on the guy following us.”
I gave Elio a flat look. “Who else would it be?” I asked. “There are one too many coincidences in a row for it to be anyone else, and it needs to stop. Now.”
Damian nodded, and he went to make the phone call. Within fifteen minutes, they’d transferred a hefty sum to Yuri, and he pointed us to a small, invite-only nightclub. “How are we getting in?” Damian asked. “Yuri doesn’t have a high enough rank to get through the front door.”
“We aren’t ‘getting in,’” I said. “I’m not going for a fucking conversation.”
Elio and Damian understood. “Who do we need?”
“I want it small,” I said. “I don’t want Artem to see us coming.”
We agreed to take two additional men, Samuel and Renaldo, who acted as security for the estate. They were reliable and good at what they did, and I knew that Amalia would feel more at ease if we took more firepower, even if she would never say it.
Even from the outside, the nightclub looked decrepit. It wasn’t one of the premier clubs that the Bratva ran, that was for sure. “Yuri gave us good intel?” I looked at Damian, who was eyeing the building just as skeptically.
“He’s never been wrong before.”
“He’s not loyal to his own people,” Renaldo said from the backseat. His voice was a low rumble. “How do you know he fed you good information?”
“Money,” Damian replied without looking back.
“And?” I had forgotten that Renaldo, for as good as he could be, had a problem with my vicecapo . Damian wasn’t a Vitali, and he was younger; it caused friction at times.
But his attitude didn’t ruffle Damian at all, which was partly why he was good at his job. “The pain of a slow death.”
Renaldo harrumphed. “The building looks empty, vicecapo .”
I looked back at him. “So, you won’t mind doing a sweep, right?”
The older man scowled, but he nodded. “Of course, Don Vitali.”
After waiting a moment to make sure the way was clear, Renaldo opened the door and slipped into the night air. I watched him as he crept closer and closer to the building. There weren’t any windows at the front, and Renaldo wasn’t going to walk in through the front door, so he had to go around the back.
When he disappeared from sight, I started an internal clock in my head. If he was gone for more than two minutes, we would go after him. As much as Renaldo was a pain in the ass, he was still one of my men.
Before those two minutes were up, Renaldo came back around the building and half jogged back to the car. “There’s no windows,” he said. “But there’s a door that would be easy enough to get into.”
“Any security?”
“None.”
My lips thinned into a line. The chance of Volkov being here was slim: he wouldn’t go anywhere without some kind of security detail. “What do you want to do, cugino ?” Elio asked.
“We need to make sure that he’s not here,” I said. “If he is, we’ll handle him.”
“And if he’s not?” Samuel asked. He had been quiet the whole time; his sole focus was on the task at hand. “It’ll get back to him that we were here.”
“I want him to know.”
With that, we got out of the SUV and, sticking to the darkening shadows as best we could, we made our way around the building to the back door of the club, which looked entirely too flimsy. “It doesn’t seem worth breaking out the lock-pick,” Samuel muttered as he took the tools out of his back pocket. “We could just kick it in.”
“I’d rather not get shot immediately, thanks,” Elio muttered. He and Damian were standing with their backs to us, keeping their eyes peeled for movement.
Samuel grumbled under his breath as he began to click each tumbler into place. It took all of twenty seconds, and he finished with an annoyed scoff. “This is just laziness,” he muttered. “Can’t be damned to put in a good lock.”
Elio snorted. “Did you want them to make it harder?”
Samuel looked at my cousin, glaring. “It’s the principle of the thing,” he said. “It’s sheer arrogance to assume that no one would ever do this.”
I stilled. Artem was arrogant, especially with how sloppy he had become recently, but what if it wasn’t just that? What if whatever he had planned was coming to fruition? “Keep your eyes open,” I barked as Samuel climbed to his feet. “We won’t be caught off-guard.”
Stepping to the side of the door, I eased it open. The room beyond was pitch black, and it smelled of dust and mildew. No one had been here in a long while. “I don’t like this, boss,” Renaldo said, and I agreed with him.
Something wasn’t right here. “Let’s burn it,” I said.
“Why bother?” Elio asked. They had all relaxed when it became obvious that there was no one inside, but I couldn’t. “Artem doesn’t care about this place.”
“Yuri sent us here for a reason,” I said. “This wasn’t just bad intel: this place isn’t unpopular, it’s fucking abandoned.” They wasted my time, and I would not let it stand. “Burn it to the ground.”
We had brought the materials to light a fire from the weapons cache at home. We could make it look natural, but I wanted Artem to know what I had done. We dumped accelerant outside of the building; it would be better if we got it inside as well, to make sure that it would burn, but I wasn’t sending any of my men in. Just in case.
We stood back and watched as the flames caught hold, growing bigger and bigger. The fire had swallowed one wall of the building when two men came running out of the front. I felt a nasty smile spread across my face.
Just like I thought.