Chapter 9
Nine
“I’ve got it,” I whoop in triumph from across the room. The bar was the easiest place to set everything up and since last night I’ve done nothing but search for the woman responsible for nearly having my best friend’s new bride kidnapped. Charity LaMontagne’s days are numbered.
Rising from the plush couch, Kenzo makes his way over to me, peering over my shoulder to study the security footage I found. Kenzo and his team have been working relentlessly since the wedding, combing through every inch of the initial footage on the night of his wedding, but there has been no trace of her.
Until now.
“See these red markers here and here?” I motion to two seemingly identical sections. “Upon closer inspection, they are not seamlessly connected like the rest of the footage. Someone has deleted and clumsily reassembled these portions. Amateur work.”
“What times are these from?” he asks me.
I punch in a few commands, and a new screen appears. “ About half an hour before your wedding and—right before your reception.”
“Do you think you can retrieve the original footage?”
Smirking, I give him a confident nod. “My program is currently reconstructing everything as we speak.”
“That’s good news,” Kenzo says with relief. “Perhaps we’ll be able to determine if she was taken against her will or not.” He stares at the computer for a few seconds longer. He doesn’t have to speak for me to know what he’s thinking.
Why go through the trouble of deleting footage if nothing incriminating took place.
“Wait, there’s something else,” Adrian speaks up from across the room. He approaches us with several sheets of paper in hand and lays them down on the counter between us. “I dug into Charity’s spending habits and noticed that she visits the same store every month around the same time.”
“Why is that significant?” I ask. “So she enjoys shopping. I went through some of her receipts; that woman loves her Botox more than Jennifer Coolidge.”
“But here’s the thing,” Adrian interjects, his eyes gleaming with discovery. “The purchases she makes are always for the same amount.” He points to the totals on her credit card statement. “When I went through her email. She had returns for those exact amounts on the same day. Except, there are no returns on record.”
Kenzo leans in closer to inspect the statement. “But that doesn’t make any sense. If she’s returning items, shouldn’t there be some indication of it?”
Adrian smirks triumphantly. “Exactly. Which leads me to believe that she is getting her money back through some other method. ”
“But why go through all that trouble?” Kenzo wonders.
Adrian shrugs. “Perhaps she needed cash without her husband knowing.”
“Or maybe she needed cash to hire someone to kidnap her own daughter at the wedding?” I suggest with a heavy sigh.
“Let’s go shopping, brothers,” Kenzo laughs as he slaps me on the back.
Wonderful.
“So—” Here it goes. I knew it wouldn’t be long before one of them would become too curious to hold back. “Are you going to tell us what’s been going on with you?” He turns slightly in his seat next to mine to face me better.
“And why you showed up in the middle of the night with a girl who was gaunter than the Grim Reaper?” Kenzo puts in his two cents from the front seat.
“Nosy fuckers.” I roll my eyes but there is no heat behind my words. This is what the brotherhood is about. Caring for one another.
“She’s Faro Nardoni’s daughter,” I tell them. They both are taken aback at that statement.
“How did you end up with Nardoni’s daughter?” Adrian asks bewildered. “Isn’t he still in Italy?” His face turns thunderous. “Did you fucking go to Italy without us?”
Of course, he’d be upset thinking I did something that irresponsible. Returning to Italy would be a death sentence for me. There is a hit out on me should I ever step foot in the country of my birth. The place my family called home for generations. It is suicide to return.
“No,” I assure them, guilt piercing my chest when twin relief spreads across their faces. “I happened upon her while I was searching for another. Her brother.”
“Faro Nardoni doesn’t have a son,” Kenzo states, confused.
“He’s illegitimate from what I’ve gathered.”
“And why were you looking for him?” Adrian raises a brow in question.
I huff out a breath as I face the men I call family. The ones who have stood by my side since were young boys in school. I can’t lie to them. It already pierces my heart knowing I’ve kept this much from them when I know I should have shared the incident when it happened. But I couldn’t because I didn’t want to ruin what they were gaining.
Adrian finally found the woman of his dreams—his secret pen-pal—and Kenzo has had enough on his shoulders without me adding to it, especially after finding Evaline. It isn’t something I’ve wanted to bother them with, but I can see I was wrong from the disappointment on their faces as I replay the assassination attempt.
“You should have told us when it happened.” Kenzo shakes his head angrily. “We would have been there.”
“I know,” I admit with a small nod of my head. “I didn’t want to bother you with something that I could easily handle.”
“An attempt on one is an attempt on all,” Adrian reminds me. “We aren’t our fathers. They worked together but stood apart. That isn’t who we are. We stand together on this, no matter how far apart we may be.”
He’s right, and I know that. I knew it the moment the bullet pierced the plaster next my head, and I know it now. But still, a part of me doesn’t want to drag them down a road that only leads down one path. The path to war .
“We’re in this together,” Adrian reminds me harshly. “It doesn’t seem much like a coincidence that Elio was able to get away with Gia Nardoni so easily without some kind of debt.”
That is exactly what I’ve been thinking as well. Elio owes someone, and whoever it is wants me dead.
“Did she tell you where her brother is?” Kenzo asks. I shake my head.
“I’m not even sure she knows where he is,” I admit with a shrug, relaxing one knee over the other. “The cabin I found her in was severely remote. The power was cut, and the phone line was dead. She was half-starved and bordering on hypothermic when I found her. Gia was expecting him to come back relatively soon, but he didn’t.”
Adrian growls. “Fucking chicken shit ran and left his sister to die in that cabin?” If there is one thing that ticks Adrian’s psycho box, it is something like this. He has a sister of his own and, to him, it is a brother’s duty and honor to protect her. He would never have left his sister to rot away in a cabin while he ran and hid. That isn’t who he is.
“Who cut the power?” Kenzo asks. I shake my head.
“Not sure,” I tell him honestly, shifting in my seat when I see the driver approaching our drop-off point. “It wasn’t the brother. Not unless he snuck back, cut it, then left.”
“Why rescue her from Nardoni if he was just going to leave her to die?” Kenzo’s question mirrors Dario’s. My capo and he think a lot alike. “Unless whoever hired him did it.”
No one has time to contemplate what that means because we’ve arrived at our destination. Whoever tried to kill Gia isn’t my concern. She isn’t family like these men are, and if you aren’t family, you are nothing.
That doesn’t stop me from wondering what I’m not seeing. I’ve always been able to visualize the bigger picture, but nothing makes sense. Not like it should and that, more than anything, puts me on edge.
I can’t afford not to see five steps ahead. My father didn’t and look where he is.
Dead.