4. Matti
Matti
I pace the living room floor, tension radiating from every muscle, my eyes glued to the feed from the hidden cameras I installed at the Victim Advocacy Center three weeks ago. Very fucking unhappy with what I’m seeing.
Siena is wearing tight jeans that hug her ass, and the guy she’s talking to can’t stop staring. Every time she gets up, his eyes track her. When she leans over the desk to review paperwork, he pretends to pay attention, but his focus is locked on her tits.
For weeks, I’ve been watching her—watching her work, watching men flirt with her, watching her go home alone every night to heat leftovers for dinner and watch TV.
I even watch every keystroke and tap she makes on the phone I had Olivia give her, including delete my fucking number the first time she opened it.
I’ve resisted the urge to put it back remotely—barely. I can’t risk her realizing I’m tracking every Google search, every text, every email.
Franco is still at the Edge, and Aurelio’s men haven’t found her yet. As far as I know, they don’t know where she works or lives, but I’m not taking any chances. I keep my eyes on her constantly, and Grit, my head of security, spends his days and nights following her from a distance.
Siena is keeping her life simple these days: work, home, and lunch with friends.
But that won’t last forever, and I still don’t have a solid plan to eliminate Aurelio.
I’m so agitated that there’s no end date on this fucking thing, no date that I know for sure that I’ll have her back in my arms, that I can barely focus on anything else.
Fuck! The guy Siena is talking to just touched her. He fucking caught her when she lost her balance trying to reach something on a high shelf.
He’s not letting go. Fuck! He turns her around, plants a hand on the shelf on either side of her, boxing her in. My heart pounds, and I grab my shoes, fixated on the screen. He leans in. He’s fucking trying to kiss her. I can feel myself coming unglued.
There’s a sharp knock on the front door to my penthouse before it opens and Vin strolls in.
He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. “Hey! Saw the construction you’re doing.
Are you adding steel reinforcements to the floor of the penthouse?
Looks like it’s coming along nicely.” When I don’t answer, he notices me putting my shoes on. “You going somewhere?”
I jerk my hand up to silence him and crank up the volume on my phone while tying my shoes.
“I’m sorry,” Siena’s voice is tinny coming out of my phone speaker. “I can’t. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. ”
Vin moves behind me, peering over my shoulder.
“I thought you didn’t have a boyfriend,” the guy says, still too close, still blocking her in.
Move, asshole! She told you fucking ‘no!’
Vin exhales sharply. “Jesus. Please tell me this hasn’t been your entire day.”
I growl in response, staring at the screen. It’s not just been my entire day. It’s been my entire day every day for the past twenty-six days.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Siena says firmly. “And I don’t want one.” She ducks under his arm and puts her desk between them.
Relief washes over me, but it’s short-lived. The guy leans forward, undeterred. If he touches her one more time, he’s a dead man.
“Maybe I could just take you to dinner. Nothing serious.”
“No, thank you.”
“Just once? C’mon. I know you feel this.” He gestures between them, then grabs her hand. When she recoils, I nearly lose it. “I know I feel it. We can feel a lot more if you come out with me.”
“That’s it.” I’m already up when Vin grabs my arm.
“Hold on,” he says.
On the screen, Siena’s voice turns cold. “Mr. Cruze, your case is being reassigned effective immediately, and this meeting is over. Thank you for coming in.”
“But—”
Amelia steps into view and ushers him out. “Thank you, Mr. Cruze.”
I glare at the screen, fists clenched. “Fuck.”
“She’s got it, bro,” Vin says, releasing my arm. “You’ll only fuck everything up by busting in there. You don’t want her to find out you’re watching her. You’ll wreck your whole… whatever this is, I don’t even fucking know.”
I hurl the glass on the coffee table at the wall. It shatters, shards raining down, but it does little to ease the tension coiled inside me. Dropping onto the couch, I grip my hair with both hands. “I can’t fucking keep doing this.”
“No, you can’t,” Vin says drily, sitting beside me. “You look like shit. Do you even sleep?”
“I can’t sleep,” I mumble. “I can’t do shit. I can’t take my eyes off the screen. The last time I took my eyes off her, Aurelio attacked.”
Vin nods. “About that.”
“About what?”
“The old man,” Vin says, his tone shifting. “We’ve been sitting on the Luminous job for months because we’re missing the codes we need to get into the safe, but apparently he’s changed up the program. He decided he’s going to make his move and go for it. We can’t let that happen.”
I go back to staring at my phone. I could give a fuck about the Luminous job. My focus is on Siena. Always Siena.
Vin keeps going, undeterred. “If Aurelio pulls the job, he gets the diamonds, the money, and the leverage to come at us strong when we start a war. And Giovanna Marino? She dies. If that happens, Lorenzo Marino goes looking for blood, and now we’re fighting this thing on two fronts.”
Siena’s no longer in the frame. I flip through the different camera views. When I don’t find her, I open another app.
“You won’t be able to hold Tommy back, either,” I grunt.
Vin nods. “Tommy’s been looking for her for weeks. Basically hijacked our best hacker trying to track her down, but he’s found nothing. He’s more fucked up than you are.”
I tap my screen frantically. Why isn’t this fucking app working?
Vin frowns at me. “Well, just as fucked up as you are. Wait, is that—” Vin snatches my phone away from me and stares at the screen. “Is this a tracking app? Holy shit, did you put a tracker on Siena?”
I grab the phone back from him. “Not on, in. I had Dr. Rossi put a tracker in her shoulder when he stitched her up. But it’s not fucking working—wait. There it is.” She’s at her usual lunch spot, a chicken place around the corner from her work. She’s probably there with Blake and Amelia like usual.
“Jesus Christ,” Vin closes his eyes briefly. “Listen to me. If we do the job, we find Giovanna. With Giovanna back, Tommy will join us in finally taking down the old man for good. When that happens—are you fucking listening to me? When that happens, Siena stops being a target .”
That gets my attention. “What about the flash drive?”
Vin sighs. “Aurelio only wants the flash drive for the information on it related to the Luminous job. Once the job is done, he won’t give a fuck who has it.”
I frown. “He doesn’t know that it has videos of him—”
“He doesn’t know. All he knows is that it has all the information we need for the Luminous job: codes, maps, contacts, everything.”
I squint at Vin. What game is he playing, making these videos of Aurelio? I’m about to ask him, when a sound from my phone grabs my attention.
Vin sighs again. “Fuck. I know you’re trying to keep her safe, but you don’t have to stare at her on a screen 24 hours a day. Put some of your guys on it. ”
“Grit and his team are never more than 20 yards away from her at any given time,” I grumble.
I decide not to tell him that I also stand across the street from where she works just to watch her leave at the end of the day.
That I’ve stood near the chicken place she goes to for lunch, wishing she would brush past me on her way in or out.
That I routinely park on her street at night, usually driving one of his cars, long after she’s turned out the lights.
“Listen, man, I need you to get your shit together. Tommy is off the fucking reservation, and once we pull this job, we are investing everything we get into going to fucking war. Men, weapons, buildings. Do you hear me?”
Something inside me wakes up, a flicker of my old self stirring. This is what we’ve been working toward for years, me and Vin: taking out Aurelio and taking over the family.
I nod. “We don’t need the information from the flash drive?”
Vin shrugs. “I don’t know how he plans to pull this off without it, but we can’t let him try. If he can figure it out, so can we.”
I stand abruptly and walk to my desk. From the top drawer, I pull out the flash drive that I found in Siena’s jacket and toss it to Vin.
His face flushes red when he sees it. “This isn’t what I think it is, is it?”
“It’s corrupted. Mostly. But there’s enough to get started.”
Before I can move, Vin leaps up from the couch and tackles me to the ground. My instincts kick in and I’m about to grab him around the throat and choke him out, but I hear him laughing.
“Holy shit! You fucking asshole! You’ve had this the whole fucking time, haven’t you?
Oh my God!” He belts a few punches into my gut before getting off me and punching the air happily.
“This is fucking amazing. I’m not fucking happy you kept it from me, don’t get me wrong, but God damn! This is fucking ON!”
Shaking my head, I take his offered hand as he jumps up and helps me up off the floor. That wasn’t the reaction I expected, but I’ll take it. “Most of the files on there are corrupted. We’ll need to get Bennett’s hacker on it if we want to be thorough.”
Vin shakes his head. “Tommy’s had her busting her ass to find Giovanna. No way he’s going to let her go.”
“Fuck, that means—”
“Valentina,” he says, rolling his eyes.
“Fuck me,” I mutter.
“She’ll do that, too, if you want,” he laughs. “She’s fucking crazy, but she’s a good fuck. As you know.”
Sneering, I return my attention to my phone. Siena’s dot is moving back toward the center. “Three minutes of bending Valentina over in a club in front of you and coming on her ass over a decade ago hardly ranks as a good fuck. It was less interesting than my hand.”
“Speaking of.” Vin’s voice is serious, and I look up.
He’s watching me, concerned. “I’ll deal with Valentina.
But in the meantime, you need to go out.
Get drunk. Get laid. Spend some time with the brothers.
Seriously, you and Tommy both. You guys have let women fuck you in the head.
You need to shake that shit off, especially now that we have a job coming up. You need your head clear.”
I shake my head. “Hard pass.”
I have a hard enough time staying away from Siena when I’m sober.
If I’m drunk and watching her put on her little tank top and panties before bed, knowing she’s going to wake up and touch herself before she goes to work like she does most mornings—I won’t be able to stop myself from going over there.
Vin covers my screen with his hand. “One night. I’m serious. Have Olivia put together a pop-up club in the lobby downstairs. Don’t worry, I won’t let you do anything stupid. It’s just one night. Have a good time, relax, and then we’ll go set the fucking world on fire.”
When I don’t respond, he lowers his voice. “It’s been a month of this, man. You can’t keep this up.”
“Twenty-six days,” I mumble.
Vin sighs. “Fair enough. Twenty-six days. Give me one night?”
I nod. If nothing else, a drink should help me sleep. As long as Franco stays at the Edge, Tommy keeps the hacker busy so Aurelio can’t find Siena, and Vin stops me from going and hunting her down once I start drinking. I need to relax before I implode.