33. Dominic
33
DOMINIC
When I walk into Matteo’s place an hour later, the apartment is quiet. Rosalia is busy in the kitchen prepping a continental breakfast with coffee and pastries. I wave at her in greeting but head straight to Matteo’s office from where I hear my brothers’ voices.
I walk inside, and as I close the door, sweep my gaze over the vast room. Matteo, behind his desk. Luca and Benedict in the seating area, coffee cups still steaming with fresh brew. Benedict is on his laptop, Luca on his phone. Matteo is playing with a pen as if he needs to hide a nervous tic. I’m not sure what he’s told the others, but this thing with Gabriella needs to get out sooner rather than later.
“They know,” Matteo says, as if he read my mind.
“Good.” This type of secret isn’t one we should keep.
Benedict glances up from where he’s typing away at speed. “Whatever info I can scrape, we’ll have, and we’ll put this puzzle together.”
I nod as Matteo stands and comes around his desk. We both sit down with the others, Benedict puts his laptop to the side, and Luca shoves his phone into his pocket.
“I feel like we’re under an attack of sorts, and I can’t fucking pinpoint the source.” As soon as I know the origins, I’ll know how to protect my brothers—and their wives. We need to get this situation under control pronto . “Steph?” I ask, just making sure we’re keeping our brother in the loop.
“He’s with Gigi and not coming in,” Luca replies. “I’ve already asked him to probe her about anything she could possibly know. It would seem the Trapanis had no idea about Gabriella. There’s no reason why Gigi would lie, and as she’s the eldest, we’ll leave it at that for now. She’s offered to ask Don Trapani once they’re back in Italy, but it will only be later this week.”
“Good. And fair enough. She’s Team Scalera now.” Matteo turns to me. “The question is, really, what do we do with Ariana Morelli.”
“If that’s even her real name,” Luca says.
“Yeah,” I say, knowing I’ll have to share the basics of what she’s told me in private with my brothers. She’ll never need to know, and keeping everything I’ve learned from them only opens us up to risks. I want to limit those as far as possible. “I didn’t get the feeling she was lying about anything she’s told me so far, but we need to double-check every detail.”
“And what has she told you?” Matteo asks, inching forward in his seat.
“Franco has some type of hold on her, but she hasn’t told me yet what it is, or was. She thinks people in Italy are at risk, and she prefers to stay missing in action for now.”
“With what she knows of us, she can’t go back to Italy,” Matteo says.
“Yeah, she’s pretty fucked, isn’t she,” Luca says. “Landed right in the middle of it.”
I sigh. Even if Ariana seemed unconscious during the shootout, she’s in too deep now, what with trying to escape.
“What else did she tell you?” Matteo asks, and I wish I didn’t have to expose the secret she’s been keeping tight for more than a decade.
“She grew up with Franco, and he…he…brutally—” Fuck it. The mere idea of it makes my stomach clench tight, heat curve around my neck in anger, and my heart rate speed up. The words are stuck in my throat, but they’ll have to come out. “Brutally violated her when she was fifteen.”
It grows eerily quiet in the room as my brothers digest my words.
Here’s the thing: if you grew up like we did, with a mom who let us only know love, despite everything she went through, then you become protective like we are. There are reasons why we all had this rule—the one Matteo and Steph have already broken—that marriage isn’t for us. On the one side, there’s the gnawing notion we might turn out to be like our dad, a violent abuser, cruel beyond words. On the other side, even if we were better than the old Don, we need to fight for dominance in our world all the time. If I can’t protect a woman, it would be my ultimate failure. I don’t even want to go there.
“Well, fuck,” Luca says eventually. “If Franco weren’t dead already?—”
Matteo and Benedict grunt in agreement, and I slump back in my chair. Whatever Ariana is to us, she’s just been adopted by the Scalera brothers. Except she has this happy knack of wanting to escape and to put a hole in my heart. I’m not telling them about that. Or about what happened after, and how I got to learn about this in the first place. They need to know the basics. They don’t need to know everything.
“She just told you?” Luca asks, getting right to the freaking point I want to avoid. “Opened up like that?”
I grind my jaw. “We talked and…well?—”
“Well?” Benedict prompts.
A knock on the door makes me pause, and when Rosalia peeks in a few seconds later, I huff out a quiet breath in relief. Saved by a fucking platter of pastries. We wait for her in silence as she carries in the food, but Matteo searches my face as he nods with a quiet thank you. By the time Rosalia has left the office, the atmosphere has shifted.
“Doesn’t matter how he gets information out of Ariana,” Matteo says, now studying me intently with a glint in his eyes I’ve never seen before. “Let’s just call it Nicky’s magic…wand.”
What. The. Fuck.
A round of smirks circles the room, and I feel even hotter around my fucking collar. “Bro? Really?”
“Come on, Nicky, take it like the big man you are,” Luca says, a grin still eating his shitface. “When it’s your turn, it’s your turn.”
I reach for a croissant with a shrug. Let them razz me, I don’t care. I’m going to call order to this meeting. As my brothers reach for their own croissants, I have a moment of reprieve to organize my thoughts. We need to discuss Igor Petrov and my little fuckup.
“I’m thinking—” Benedict says between two bites, “—if you can get me her fingerprints, I can dig and get my contacts to see what they find on the Italian databases. If she’s lying about anything, it will eventually show.”
I’ve been brewing the same idea. I don’t relish going behind her back to get information on her, not with this newfound trust between us, but it’s for her own safety—and ours. “Okay, I’ll make a plan.”
“This idea Nicky has about us being under attack,” Matteo starts as he reaches for a napkin and puts his plate on the coffee table. “It all started with Randazzo. It got worse with the Don’s death. The question really is whether this is normal with a power change, or is someone fucking with us on purpose?”
“They’re fucking with us, Matty,” I say, suddenly tired to my bones. “The Borises admitted that Franco had promised to help them take over our ports once he got Gigi’s money.”
“But why would Igor Petrov send his nephew to contest agreements in such a way? Blood agreements that were made decades ago?” Matteo asks. “Why stir up shit if you don’t have to?”
Benedict clears his throat, raises his hand to pause all talking as he takes a leisurely sip of coffee. “Igor Petrov retired earlier this year. Might be that his successor has the need to prove himself.”
“What? Retired?” Matteo says. “How?”
“How the fuck do you get to retire out of the Bratva?” Luca echoes, putting the words there for me.
“His son took over. Ivan Petrov,” Benedict says. “It all happened while we were focusing on this Randazzo business and not paying attention. And here we are.”
“Ivan Petrov?” Luca repeats, a bit stunned.
Matteo shakes his head, holding his hand up. “So what the fuck is Igor Petrov doing in his retirement ?”
His tone gives it all away: what a joke, and maybe he’s a bit jealous.
“Bought a mansion in Maui and plays golf the whole day,” Benedict fills us in with a small smile. “It works out for some, you know.”
Instead of keeping an eye on whoever now rules the Bratva and making sure old agreements are honored, Igor Petrov gets to catch a tan and lose golf balls in the links.
“Well, fuck me. What do we know of Ivan Petrov?” I ask, homing in on the obvious adversary here. The new player I need to protect my brothers—and their wives—from.
“Hmmm…uh…” Luca starts. “I might have done a job for him a few months ago.”
“What?” Matteo barks. “A job ?”
“Chill, dude, it was just a cyber scrub and Ivan Petrov wouldn’t know it was me…us—” Luca glances at Benedict, but Benedict only cocks his brows at him. “Yes, okay, it was my turn for one of those and only I got involved. Petrov contacted us via the dark web to scrub some videos and images of his mistress off the web, but I didn’t link him to Igor Petrov. Fuck, I thought it was all coming from Russia as everything I swiped originated from there. How many Ivan Petrovs are there on the planet anyway? Both names are the most common ones in use in a motherfucking giant land like Russia.”
“Fuck if I know, but this one’s looking to become a fucking huge pain in my ass. So he can’t trace that back to us?” Matteo asks, still rigid. “Because this type of shit comes home to roost.”
“No. Fuck, Benny, back me here,” Luca says.
“Our security is top tier, Matty,” Benedict says, slightly offended. “We routinely do a fucking deep cleanse, so?—"
"And I bet you the reason Petrov got a third party on the dark web to do the dirty work for him is because he doesn’t have the know-how in house.” Luca reaches for his coffee again, argument closed.
“That sums it up,” Benedict says with a nod. “Relax, Matty, this isn’t about whatever job Luca did. In any case, it’s not the first time one of us have been asked to do this type of shit, so just because it’s Petrov doesn’t mean he’s after Il Consiglio .”
It’s tense for a moment as we all digest this news.
“What else do you know,” Matteo sighs. “I bet you have all the info already?”
“Yep. Not just a pretty face here,” Benedict jokes as he puts his coffee cup back on the table. “Late thirties, wife’s dead, and he’s blessed with two young daughters.”
Blessed, indeed. With a fucking migraine from hell. If Ivan Petrov took over from his dad, he is now the king of the Petrov Bratva in New York and New Jersey and however far their operations stretch. But with two young daughters…blessed isn’t how I’d describe it. I’m already freaked out with wives in the mix…but kids? Girls ? It’s this whole situation with Ariana and Gabriella that’s eating at me and how girls become women, and from Day One, they’re basically at risk of being hurt or being used as pawns.
“How did his wife die?” I ask.
Benedict shrugs. “Apparently, it was suicide.”
Fuck. I quirk a brow as we all shoot each other glances. When last was a death in the Bratva really suicide?
Matteo drags in a deep breath, shifting our thoughts. “Is he looking for a new wife? A mother for his girls?”
“Don’t even fucking go there, Matty,” I say, my blood heating up. “Ariana isn’t going to be your pawn in this mess I made.”
Matteo stands, and I have to crane my neck to look up at him as he’s standing next to me. “Don’t be fucking delusional that Ivan or Igor, whichever Petrov we get to fucking deal with, isn’t going to want retribution for his dead nephew, cousin, whatever. We have a woman on our hands who knows too much. You know what that means, Dominic.”
I stand, too, eye to eye with him. I know what it means. She’s either contained, or she’s dead.
“I won’t let her get married to some Russian fucker who we don’t know from a fucking bar of soap who will use her—” I break off, my voice strained as I inch back a bit, somewhat taken by surprise at my own intense feelings.
Ariana.
What the actual fuck? I need to pull back here, but Ariana… Fuck .
She’s gotten under my skin. In the time we’ve spent together, she’s actually managed to get to me, to my core. To the part I’ve been protecting like a dragon its treasure. I drag in a slow breath, battling for control in front of my brothers.
“I will not let her go to any man who is going to abuse her like Franco did.” Time to say it like it is—like it was. How we witnessed it. Lived it. “To be abused like Mom was.”
A strained silence swamps the room. Matteo’s gaze doesn’t break away from mine as everyone digests my words. Comparing Ariana’s situation with Mom’s isn’t a low blow, it’s a reality. And my trump card.
With the smallest of shrugs, Matteo concedes my point and makes his way back to the chair behind his desk. This is no longer my brother, but the Don of Il Consiglio who is going to overrule me when he wants. And what the fuck do I do then?
“Before we get ahead of ourselves here,” he says as he sits down, “let’s make sure this Boris you killed is really Petrov’s cousin, nephew, whatever. Once we know for sure, we’ll know what to do.” Matteo sits, and his chair creaks with his weight as he leans back and looks me right in the eye. “Until then, nothing is off the cards.”