19. Darragh
Chapter 19
Darragh
I t’s been three days since I saw Valentina at the club. Three days of replaying the feeling of cool damp silk beneath my fingers and hot wet silk against my tongue. Three days with her image fixed in my mind – curling black hair, soaked white dress, molten fucking eyes. Three days of getting nothing done. Three days of the wound on my lip splitting open and bleeding every time I speak or smile.
Three nights of no fucking sleep.
The sleep thing I can usually conquer. A good fight in the ring, or a really good fuck, almost always does the trick.
Only problem is, I’ve been boxing every night since then, and it hasn’t worked.
I’ve killed four men since I saw her last, and that hasn’t worked either.
I haven’t even bothered fucking anyone. I know it won’t do shit. Unless the pussy I bury myself in is attached to a hissing, biting, scratching Sicilian girl who hates my fucking guts, I’m not even convinced I’ll be able to get my dick hard at this point.
Which is fucking alarming, to say the least.
By the fourth day, I’ve resorted to stalking her online presence, raking my gaze over old, published photographs of her from various public events from the last year. I stare at her big, perfect smile and wonder if she’s let anyone else see her cry the way I did at the beginning of August. If anyone else knows what she looks like when she’s falling the fuck apart. Or if anyone else knows what her tits feel like when she’s driving them desperately into your hands, like a needy little slut, the second before she makes you bleed.
Probably not.
If she has any personal social media, I can’t find it, and that puts me in a far fouler mood than I want to acknowledge.
By the fourth night, I admit defeat, which is something that does not come naturally to me. The last time I had to admit defeat, it was to her cousin Elio when I gave up my vendetta against his wife Deirdre.
This time it feels so much worse.
These fucking Titones, always fucking up my plans.
This one particular Titone, fucking up every single aspect of my life.
But there doesn’t seem to be any escaping it. Two in the morning and I’m pulling myself up to her balcony. One glimpse is all I need. Just one look. And then maybe I’ll be able to get some bloody sleep.
But my pretty little pet is not in her bed.
I stare at the empty room beyond the glass. My teeth clamp down on each other so hard my jaw cracks. There’s a feeling of deadness in the darkness. Like no one’s breathed the air in this room for days. There’s no light shining in from the adjoining bathroom. There’s no phone charging on the nightstand. Not a wrinkle in the perfect pink bedspread.
She isn’t here. She hasn’t been here.
An absurd thought sends my guts tightening with rage. The thought that she’s fled from me, specifically from me. Or that someone’s tried to take her from me.
But good little mafia girls like Valentina can’t just fly away whenever they want to. Their wings are clipped the second that they’re fucking born.
So what, then? Her da? Pretty sure if Vincenzo Titone knew how much contact I’d had with his daughter he wouldn’t just be whisking her to some safe house somewhere. He’d be putting a bullet in my brain.
I dig my teeth into the wound on my lip, tasting the blood and remembering what it was like when it was her teeth there.
But she’s still not here. And I am wasting my fucking time.
I leave the property, and as soon as I’m driving away, I get Rowan on the phone. It takes a few rings for him to answer, because, unlike me, he was actually asleep.
“I need you to find someone for me,” I snap by way of greeting.
“You got it.” There’s creaking, like he’s hoisting his mountain of a body out of a bed that can barely support him. “Who’s the guy?”
“Girl,” I correct him, taking a turn just a little too fast, wheels spinning. “Valentina Titone.”
Dead silence.
Then, slow and stunned, “ The Valentina Titone?”
“There another Valentina Titone in this town I need to worry about?”
“Not that I know of…”
“Good. So you know what to do, then.”
“Boss…”
“Just do it,” I command through clenched teeth. “Don’t fucking show your face in front of me again until you’ve found her.”
* * *
Rowan shows his face the next afternoon. He comes to me in my office in the basement of my pub The Briar and Boar. In his big hands he holds a file.
“She’s in Meaford,” he says as he tosses the file down onto my desk. “Or, just outside of it. In a house on Georgian Bay.”
I open the file, pulling out papers. My eyes fall to an image on the first page and stay there.
It’s Valentina, looking beautiful and bored in some kind of lineup at a fast-food coffee place.
“Rest stop on Highway 400. Barrie area. She’s with her mother, Carlotta Titone.”
He fishes out another page and points to a security video’s still of Valentina and her mother getting into a big, plain SUV. The popular, generic kind of vehicle you see two hundred of on the road before it’s even eight in the morning.
“That’s Thornbury. They stopped for supplies there, then continued through Meaford. I did some digging and found out that one of Vincenzo Titone’s corporations owns a property on the water. I sent Tommy up that way this morning.”
Now, he shows me his phone, swiping through images Tommy sent. Photographs of a giant white and blue house on rocky shores. There’s a dock jutting out towards the water.
And on that dock is a small figure with very big sunglasses and very dark hair.
“This is from today?”
“Yup,” Rowan confirms. “Tommy rented a boat and went by. That’s the address.” He jabs a thick finger at line of text on one of his file’s pages.
“What else do we know?” My voice is harsh. I sound insane. But I’ve never really cared about looking or sounding insane before and I’m not about to start now, especially when I’m on day four of no real sleep. “Who are the neighbours? Italian?”
“Doesn’t look like it,” Rowan says. “The closest property on the right is owned by a couple with Polish names. Looks like it’s an investment property that they use as a short-term rental. There’s a group of five adults renting it currently.”
“Five women?”
“Three men, two women.”
Three men in the house beside her.
Don’t fucking like that.
“The house on the other side, which is also the last property on the beach, is currently unoccupied. The owner died recently, and the estate is selling the property.”
My bloodshot eyes burn. Something in my brain feels like it’s going to burst.
“It’s for sale right now?”
“Yeah.” Rowan slides a paper from the pile and holds it up, showing me a printout of a real estate listing. The house is even bigger than the Titone property, a sprawling grey stone mansion among the water and the trees and the rocks. There’s a nice-looking deck boat tethered to the dock. Beside the photo of the property, I scan the listing’s information, including the asking price: 2.4 million dollars.
I tear the sheet in half.
Then, I rise from my chair and shove the ripped paper against Rowan’s chest.
“It’s not for sale anymore.”
Rowan takes the ruined paper from me and then sets it down. He’s already pulling up the realtor’s information on his phone as I brush by him.
“Make it happen, Rowan,” I tell him. “I don’t care what it costs. Don’t care what it takes. You need to double their asking price? Do it. You need to put a bomb in the estate executor’s car? Do it.” I open the door to leave and give him one last look over my shoulder as I go. “I want the keys in my hand tonight.”