14. Who Is Bianca?
Who Is Bianca?
Salvatore
“Are we set for shipment at the end of the month?” Elio lifts his caffè shakerato. Froth coats his mustache with more salt than pepper these days. He wipes it away with a cloth napkin.
“We’ll accommodate your request,” I say to the sun’s glare. It’s blinding my phone buzzing on the knee-height table between us.
Andrea
Do you want to go back and get her? The flight is only an hour.
Fuck off.
“Good. We acquired a few new restaurants in need of more product,” Elio says. Code: We took over businesses, forcing them to use our supply company. The food industry is a common cash grab for mafias. I should know since I supply produce and fish wholesale.
Andrea
Remind me, who is the one checking his phone like she has your number?
Testa di minchia.
I cut my eyes at my partner shoveling another meatball into his mouth. Flavia dropped off an extra platter after Andrea inhaled the first, along with the spaghetti ala vongole, braciole, and pesce alla griglia.
“Happy to hear demand is high.” I shift my gaze from my partner dressed like a character from Miami Vice back to Elio.
Andrea
How’s your hostage doing in your basement? Still mad you had her tied up?
She’s not my hostage.
Tied up is a different story.
Bianca’s—or Diana’s—ankle is shackled to her bed. Had she not assaulted two of my men who checked on her, she’d be free to move around the room she’s called a crypt since waking up hours ago. Crypts don’t have area rugs or a private bathroom.
She should be grateful I didn’t take her life in my kill container. I only wanted to scare her into giving me the information I needed. The hurt in her eyes after Luiggi administered the drug to transport her back to my property did something to me. What, I don’t know. I’ve never felt it before.
Luiggi informing me she was the one they’d picked up in Napoli did not end well for the Preda associate strung up on the wall.
I was angry and got a little saw happy. I want to believe Trouble is who she says she is.
But in this business, everyone’s guilty until proven otherwise. It’s a risk I won’t take.
Bianca has done nothing but shout and attempt to knock out anyone who enters her room.
The only person she hasn’t screamed at is Alfonso, who bickers with me every time she calls him Alfred.
It’s not her fury that activates my urge to check the security cameras placed around the room more than I care to admit.
It’s her whimpers: the silent cries wedge between my ribs.
I despise them like I despise deception.
She’s yet to ask for me, which shouldn’t piss me off. Except it does.
What was her play, anyway? Fuck me before stealing someone else’s money and disappearing?
I’d never let her get away that easily.
“Salvatore.”
“Yes?”
Elio’s brows furrow. “You okay?”
“Of course,” I say.
Andrea’s grin widens over his goatee-lined jaw that’s working overtime eating garnish.
Crow’s feet creased around Elio’s eyes tighten on a long tug of his cigar. Ember slips through ash to curl hints of cedar and clove into an exhalation of smoke that ribbons through a saltwater breeze.
“Our restaurants are capturing more of the tourist market,” Elio says, the brim of his straw fedora catching beads of sweat from the humidity thickening the air. “You two have done well for yourselves, but that’s not why you flew here.”
Because I needed a fucking distraction.
Elio is perceptive and ruthless. Our business partnership spans over a decade, built on the exchange of food and weapons. Contracts and cooked books. Our respect is mutual, but I won’t tell him why I requested our quarterly check-in occur in person at his home in Naples.
“There was another attack on one of our facilities. We suspect the Preda, which breaches our territorial agreement,” I say.
Elio’s whistle is slow. “Who did the skinning?”
I flash a grin and lean into the heat of the outdoor cushion. “You had your calling card. I have mine.”
Tales of Elio’s days as an enforcer before taking over the Fratellanza rattled the underworld. “The Butcher” was notorious across Southern Italy for mailing pieces of his victims to their families.
A finger.
A spleen.
A big toe, just because.
The instinct to kill still lingers behind eyes mirroring the color of the iced coffee he holds between his fingers. Elio no longer touches day-to-day operations, but he keeps his ear to the ground and his finger on the trigger.
He reaches for his cigar and extends his arm over the back of his oversized chair. “Michele informed me about it but left out the details,” he says about his nephew, his right hand.
“Does he still do business with the Preda?” Andrea’s elbows rest on top of his cream chinos. “Cocaine is a hell of a drug.”
“No,” Elio says, his tone clipped. “We’ve been out of the drug business. Michele knows no drugs under any circumstances.”
The Fratellanza is one of the big four mafias. It controls most of the European gun market and utilizes alliances across the Americas, a business Tino has been clawing to break into since his aging father threw him more territories.
“Tino is an incompetent fool, just like his father. Do what you gotta do, but avoid war at all costs.” Elio’s eyes meet mine. “Not unless you’re willing to pay the price.”
His gaze grows distant, stretching over the crystals dancing across the bay’s waves.
The Fratellanza lost hundreds of members after one of the biggest mafia trials since I was a child.
Elio had already left the drug business after losing his two sons during a time when status and reputation couldn’t afford safety.
They still can’t, but I have no one to lose except Nonna, whom I keep protected.
I never cared about legacy or heirs. Only revenge.
I get to the point. “Do we have your support if it comes to war?”
The sun streaks over Elio’s wrinkled hands. “You’re a good leader who’s reshaped the Scilari. I appreciate the business we do, but I am a man who values family and unions.”
Elena.
Elio has been pushing me to marry his daughter by his mistress since she turned eighteen, four years ago. Unifying families through marriage is a tradition I have zero fucking interest in fulfilling. Ziu is adamant that it’s good business, but what business do I have being with someone half my age?
I change the subject. “You once came out of retirement.”
He nods. “Different circumstances, Salvatore. I’ll do anything for family.”
“You should marry Elena and get it over with.”
“No.”
“Does this unnecessary trip to Naples have anything to do with your hesitation?” I don’t bother looking at Andrea’s toothy grin. He’s been flashing his teeth since we arrived.
“Is her background check ready?” I insert the key into the lock.
“With what computer?” He gestures toward the empty corridor. “There wasn’t time between last night’s interrogation and this trip to Elio that could’ve been a conference call on a secure line.”
“If you stopped fucking around, you’d have it done. I want to be sure it’s her.”
The front door opens into a tiny entrance hall of art and stone. Traces of freshly cut flowers tug at my nostrils. I follow the scent of blended citrus up a concrete staircase drenched in bright rays from the skylight.
“I think she’s telling the truth,” Andrea says. The coincidence is crazy, but maybe she was at the wrong place at the wrong time.” He laughs. “She’s got balls. Talking shit in the kill container in a bonnet.”
I’ve stared into the eyes of a hundred lives I’ve ended.
All have a moment of regret, that fraction of a second they wished they’d chosen differently than the path leading to a closed casket.
Bianca’s reaction wasn’t one of last rites for crimes committed.
Panic widened her stare and the flush that inched up her neck.
It’s been fucking with me all morning.
“You care for this one.” Sarcasm laces Andrea’s tone aimed at my back. “I don’t blame you.”
“I care about protecting what’s ours from a threat,” I say.
“What’s the chance she shows up in the same apartment as the woman we’re looking for and has the same name as Bianca? Too many coincidences are never a coincidence.”
The landing opens becomes a corridor of white walls and wooden floors.
“Take anything that might be useful.”
“Got it, boss.” Andrea snickers, entering a bedroom.
I follow a whiff of the floral scent to an open door on the left. A bed draped in fabric faces a view of Naples. The room is simple—a mirror and a few frames hang on the wall, a single bookcase, and a chair in the corner—to match the place of a woman who wears a bonnet outside.
Shoes spill from inside a small closet stuffed with sundresses, shirts, and pants on hangers. Who knows what the fuck I’m looking for. Evidence. Something to prove she’s not the person we’re looking for. The clothes in here are unexpected for a woman who showed up to my property in pajamas.
It didn’t stop me from digging deep in her guts.
The things I still want to do to her and that fucking mouth… The thought of her stretched wide—under me, on top of me, on her knees with tears streaking that pretty face—taking inch by inch tempts me to fist my dick right here.
A green book is next to a pen on her nightstand. Journal scrolls across the textured cover in gold foil. The diary entries date back over a decade and thin as the years stretch.
Excitement for a new job.
Bad dates.
Burnout.
The last entry was June eighth, seventeen days before Simone and a local team grabbed her. She came to Italy for an adventure, a departure from the life she’d wasted working at a job that never valued her.
Human resources management.
“Aren’t you full of surprises, Trouble.”
Maybe she’s who she says she is, which works to my benefit.
My attraction to Bianca is primal. She arouses a foreign instinct, an urge to be closer.
I grab the journal and bag with her purse beside the door. Anything I don’t trust is a threat, regardless of how beautiful she is.