55. Dominic
55
DOMINIC
I never closed the cabin windows, and we’ve flown into the night. Ariana is curled up against me, and for a last minute, I treasure the feel of her soft body against mine, the sweet scent of sex still clinging to her skin, begging me to lick it off her inch by inch. I could do all of that again, but I best check in on the time as I’ve lost track completely.
I get up and go dig in my jacket pocket for my cellphone. We’ve less than two hours of flight time left, and I’m freaking hungry. Several missed calls and messages from both Matteo and Benedict, but I’m not going to read and reply to them now. The knowledge that Matteo is Randazzo’s son weighs on me, but it doesn’t feel like something I want to throw into the void via an email. It doesn’t change anything between us brothers, but it changes everything for Ariana.
I dress in a robe, quietly open the door, and slip out to where I’ve left my laptop earlier. I indicate to the hostess we’re ready to eat, and with my laptop in hand, retreat back to the bedroom. I want to spend as much time with Ariana as possible. I can’t shed this ticking time-bomb feeling in my stomach, which is weird since most of the issues I thought we had have been ironed out. It’s this situation with Gabriella which is working on me subconsciously.
We’re heading for Lamezia Terme, a smaller international airport in the south of Italy, closest to where Ariana told me she grew up in Calabria. Once we land, we’ll have vehicles to take us to the small town and from there to the farmhouse where Franco’s uncle still hides out. We’ll arrive at the crack of dawn, and for Antonio Mancuso’s sake, I hope he’s a morning person.
It’s good we had a nap. This day is still going to be a motherfucker. There’s been one too many of those lately, and I’d be happy to have this whole mess sorted out.
I settle back on the bed and flip open my laptop screen, go through the security checks with my thumbprint and codes, and finally, the home screen opens. I give it a minute to connect again to the WiFi, relieved Ariana has her back to me and won’t be disturbed by the laptop’s screen.
Once I’m connected, I open my email, my eyes by habit skipping over all the weeds in my inbox, homing in on the important ones. Benedict. Fingerprints.
I open the email and read the short message.
By the time I’ve read the last line, my heart thumps in my chest, and my stomach is twisted into a fist. I fucking knew it. Deep down in me, I fucking sensed it, but I was too blindsided to see what I knew was in front of me.
I read the message again and again, getting to grips with this reality slap in the face.
Nicky,
I had to dig and get others to dig even deeper. And then dig some more. Ariana Morelli is buried deep, but my team likes a challenge, especially when money and bets get involved.
The bad news:
Ariana Morelli is a DIA agent, working for the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia. It’s a police force tasked with combating organized crime in Italy. She’s an undercover agent, which explains some of her arrival in the US. If Franco Fiore knew she was working undercover, he’d have no scruples in using and offing her.
Franco had no scruples to begin with. I read the rest of the message again, my fist clenching.
The good news:
The DIA already thinks she’s dead. She’s been declared missing on their files, presumed dead, and this dates back to the time of Randazzo’s death. Not sure how this all connects, but don’t cradle that one too close. She’s dangerous and has seen too much on our side of the pond. Matteo will have more instructions for you.
Fuck. Benedict has copied Matteo in on this message, but our new Don already made his instructions clear. I bet if he knew this about Ariana, he would never have let her leave the US in the first place, where she’d be less of a liability to us.
If I knew about this, I wouldn’t have let her leave the fucking Don’s house. I would have kept her locked up, where she’s safe.
In the old Don’s Il Consiglio , Ariana would have been an automatic execution. No questions asked. Not with what she’s seen, witnessing Franco’s death at our hands, irrespective of whether he deserved it or not. Plus she’s ready to identify us all in a fucking line-up. My fingers quiver over the laptop keys as my chest tightens at the mere thought of the Don and Ariana. Together. Face to face.
A tsunami of emotions unleashes in me, and I have to remind myself again and again that the Don is dead and he can’t hurt her. Not like he hurt mom while I was too weak to protect her. I swallow down the painful pebble in my throat and groan. We have a new Don, and he might be her brother, but Matteo hasn’t been tested. He could use Ariana if things get desperate enough.
Once she’s back in Boston, she’ll be deemed an Il Consiglio asset, and right now, this could mean being fobbed off to an asshole like Ivan Petrov. For all I know, he’s the type who’ll have no qualms using her, raping her, and then offering her to his men for their fucking pleasure.
I’m trembling so much, I grip the laptop screen and breathe through it as my gaze drags over the lines of Benedict’s message again. Eventually, my fear is crushed under anger and desperation.
I’m fucking pissed off that I’d been so slow to catch on with all her tells, but now this idea of her suffering at the old Don’s hand—now Matteo’s hand and maybe even Petrov’s hand—evokes something else in me. A protective demon I didn’t even know existed. I’m a fallen angel who only wants to wrap her in my charred wings and keep her close, hide and protect her from this sick world we live in.
A world she’s as much part of, even if she’s chosen to step out of the herd and become a hunter.
My skin crawls with strands of information I can’t tie together, with all the knowledge and secrets we keep to ourselves. I already see the connection Benedict and Matteo can’t see because I haven’t told them Ariana is Matteo’s half-sister. Randazzo’s daughter. A Mafia princess. Working for the Italian police. As a fucking undercover agent.
I reach for her and ghost my trembling fingers over her hair. She is so delicate, beautiful, so treasured that I can’t find it in me to wake her and shatter this moment and drag her into this new reality, her final secret exposed. She’s still asleep, but she stirs as if she could feel my caress.
Fuck. I can’t let her walk free ever again. We all know she knows too much about Il Consiglio , but now her insider knowledge’s value has multiplied thousand-fold. She could hang us all. She could also be immensely useful. She’ll have insights into how some things work in Europe and knowledge is power.
I glance down at her, a delicate, fragile woman who doesn’t give off the robust, gun-wielding, no-bullshit type usually associated with women in the police force. It works. I bet if it weren’t for her beauty, she’d almost go unnoticed. What the fuck was she doing, undercover, to such an extent Franco knew where she was?
And then my stomach turns. ‘ Franco always knew where she was.’ Vincenzo said so in his own words.
I just breathe for a minute, all the ramifications of Vincenzo’s words sinking in, and then she stirs, rolling over onto her back and blinking into the night. I switch on the lights by the side of the bed, and she moans in protest, but this party is fucking over. She needs to talk, now .
Our gazes meet, and she sits up straight in a daze. “Dominic, what’s wrong?”
“A fucking cop, Ariana?”I hiss. “You’re a fucking sbirro and fuck knows I should have seen it, but—” I break off, waving at her in general. “Freaking distraction.”
“God, I’m not,” she says, clawing the bedding to her chest to cover up.
My lips pull into a thin line, and I get that look on my face—the one that hints of the devil in me. “Don’t you fucking dare?—”
“I’m still waking up, Dom?—”
“Wake up faster, sweetheart.”
Several beats of silence pass as we just stare at each other. Her mind’s racing. She’s doing the math and can come to only one conclusion: she’s fucked and at my mercy. Who are we kidding here? She’s been at my mercy from the moment I saw her crumbling to the floor in that warehouse. At any point, I could’ve crushed her. Except, I didn’t.
She doesn’t cower away from my death stare, though, and I’ve had grown men crumble, so I’ll give her this.
When she closes her eyes, I have to restrain myself from reaching out to her because whatever else she is, she is also the woman I made love to earlier. The woman who found the only bridge to my soul and bravely crossed it—to be with me and meet me where I’m at, despite everything she went through.
“How do you know?”
“You’re not denying it, then?”
“Clearly, there’s no point in denying it. How do you know?”
“It doesn’t matter how I know.”
I push my closed laptop to the side and get off the bed, needing to distance myself from her. I’m a fucking wreck. I pace the room as I find my clothes scattered all over and toss hers to the bed in passing. Fuck. If only I can rewind the clock and be on an infinite flight with her, in this room, just as we were hours ago, but we can never go back there.
“We’re landing in two hours. That’s the amount of time you have to tell me exactly how the fuck you ended up in the DIA, then with Franco, and then—” And then in my fucking arms. “Go shower and get dressed.”
She reaches for her T-shirt where it droops over the edge of the bed, and for a blessed second, I have a last visual of this perfect woman I’ve crashed into love with. Already, my every resolve when it comes to her has started to oscillate between dragging her back to the US and locking her up where she’ll be safe forever, forgoing this hunt for Gabriella, and doing what my trained instincts instruct me to do: kill her. The dead can’t identify my brothers in a line-up.
The DIA already thinks she’s dead.
There are many reasons we Scalera boys don’t get to love. Women make us weak. Ariana is a walking, breathing personification of my weakness, and I’ll be damned if a woman drags me— us — down.
But then I look at her, and I know I’d never be able to hurt her, never mind kill her. It’s the cop in her, the part that’s deceived me, that I want to cut out like rot, but I can’t do it, not without killing the whole.
Bottom line: Ariana is my Achille’s Heel.