Chapter 15
SCORPION
Rocco zips expertly through the countryside, taking Priest, Saint, Lucky, and me back into the belly of the beast. It’s rare that all four of us are in the same car at once.
But we stayed overnight at Priest’s place for the wedding, and this is the most efficient way to get us to where we need to be—the city where shit has apparently hit the fan over the last few hours.
Priest is on the phone with one of our capos. Lucky is on his laptop, pulling up camera feeds. Saint is firing off text orders on a burner. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what went down.
The last twenty-four hours have been like whiplash on speed. I’ve gotten married to a Bratva princess I was keeping as a prisoner a week ago. I spent the morning trying to distract myself from how fuckable she is before chasing her down the driveway and bandaging her feet, for fuck’s sake.
With a resigned sigh, Priest ends the call. The lines of worry in his face tell me everything I need to know. “The cartel lost three, and they’re not fucking happy about it. The coke is gone, along with all the money. Then there’s our soldiers…”
“They’re all dead?” I press, just to confirm.
“Every fucking one of them.”
“Cazzo.” I pass a hand over my jaw, registering that information. “Four of our crew dead?”
That’s a hell of a lot of guys to go down at one time.
“Five,” Saint says, looking up from his burner. “Pierluca’s oldest boy was there too.”
“He’s still in fucking high school,” Priest says.
Pierluca Notaro has been a capo since our father’s days as don. He’s trustworthy and solid, a family guy with six kids and a wife who’s the quintessential PTO mom. It’s going to break them when they find out their eldest child was killed last night.
“Ricky was a good kid,” I mutter, my throat thick.
Death is a way of life in our world. But it’s not every day that eight people get clipped, including a seventeen-year-old whose life was just beginning.
“This is war,” Priest says with barely leashed rage. “We’re going to hunt down the bastards responsible for this and make them pay.”
“Damn right we are,” I agree. “We’ll get revenge in the name of every man who was slaughtered.”
Not only did the motherfuckers ambush our guys, they also stole our entire shipment. It’s a big blow, but we can afford to lose millions. The lives of our men, though, are irreplaceable.
“Got any info on the cameras that were wiped?” I ask Lucky, feeling helpless as Rocco hits the highway.
His eyes are glued to the screen, fingers flying over the keys. “Still working on it. Whoever hacked into the system knew what he was doing. I haven’t been able to detect how they got in, and I also can’t seem to retrieve anything from the cloud.”
“Fuck.” Saint snaps his burner in two and throws the pieces on the floor.
There’s only one person I know who is sophisticated enough to perform an operation like that.
“I have a feeling I know who’s behind this,” I say.
Priest’s eyes swing to me. “Sidorov?”
I nod, not surprised he’s suspicious of my new brothers-in-law. “Dmitri has the capability to hack and wipe the cameras and tap into the cloud. I don’t know of anyone in the other families who’s that tech savvy. This is high-level shit.”
“But he was at the wedding reception when it went down,” Saint points out. “So was Pakhan and at least a dozen of their top guys. Last I checked, it’s still impossible to be in two places at once.”
He’s not wrong, but I start turning that around in my mind.
The reception was filled with guests, and it was overwhelming in more ways than one.
I’m not sure where Dmitri was before or after our meeting in the gazebo when he issued me a warning that seems to have new meaning in the ugly light of day, given what happened overnight.
“I didn’t have my eyes on them every second,” I point out. “Did you?”
“No,” Saint admits. “Lucky, check the security logs. We should have a full account of when everyone arrived and left the reception.”
“Already on it,” Lucky reports, fingers clicking away.
“Cazzo.” Priest runs his fingers through his already disheveled hair. “Are the surveillance cameras on my property compromised too, or just the ones at the drop location?”
Lucky taps away for a few seconds before answering.
“From what I can see, they’re all good. Clear footage, starting in the morning and still running live now.
It’s also backed up to the cloud. I have the security log open, and Mikhail and Dmitri Sidorov didn’t leave the reception until after the ambush went down. ”
“That may have been intentional,” I point out. “An alibi.”
Knowing Dmitri as I do, I have no doubt that he could easily hack into the cameras and cloud from his phone.
All he would have had to do was find a quiet spot where he wouldn’t be interrupted.
A bathroom, likely. But Priest’s security footage should show us where he was every second of the reception.
“I’ll start reviewing the footage from last night,” I volunteer, knowing Lucky has his hands full with trying to restore the surveillance cam footage that was wiped from the cloud and the cameras themselves.
Priest’s phone rings again. It’s another capo, and he has to take it. Word is spreading fast about what went down overnight. Everyone rightfully wants answers. If they have targets on their backs, they deserve to know.
I pull up the surveillance system from his estate and start wading through hours of video, one camera at a time.
By the time we reach the city, my gut is unsettled from staring at the video while Rocco gives every race car driver a run for his money.
It doesn’t help that, now that we’re in the metropolis labyrinth, Roc is taking us on the scenic route in case we have a tail.
We’re headed to the underground club I run. It’s the safest bet on short notice because of the tight security. As we roll into the guarded underground parking, I’m one more traffic light stop-and-go away from vomiting all over the fucking interior of the Navigator.
Roc pulls it into park, and I spill out the side door, needing to plant my feet on concrete and take a deep breath, even if it does stink like oil, exhaust, must, and desperation.
Rocco shoots out of the driver’s seat and is guarding me in a heartbeat, even though there’s no need.
The security here is tighter than tight, and no one comes in or out without my permission.
There’s no chance we have a sniper lying in wait.
He pulls a pack of cigarettes from inside his suit jacket and offers it to me wordlessly. I don’t like showing any weakness, but Roc is like another brother to us, and he already knows I suffer from motion sickness. He also knows the easy cure.
“Thanks.” I take it and tap out a single burner, then stuff it between my lips.
Roc lights it for me, and I puff, grateful for the distraction and hit of nicotine. Anything to settle my stomach. My brothers unload from the car next, Priest still on his phone, Saint scowling, Lucky with his laptop under his arm.
“Bad fucking habit, fratello mio,” Saint snarks.
I make a point of blowing smoke in his direction to be a dick. “Fuck off.”
“Stronzo,” he hisses, waving at the wisps curling around him to disperse them.
I finish my cigarette on the way into the club, finding an ashtray just before the secret entrance.
Once we’re inside, we get down to business.
Hours pass by as we review footage and question our men.
By late evening, we’re running on caffeine and greasy burgers from the club’s kitchen, but the pieces of the puzzle have started to fall into place.
Priest is pacing my office, his usually calm facade seething with rage. “Is Cantarelli a rat, a traitor, or just a stupid motherfucker?”
It’s a question we can’t answer until we meet up with him.
Giuseppe Cantarelli is one of our capos.
He’s also the common denominator in what went down at the drop last night.
Cantarelli organized the shipment with the cartel.
He wasn’t at the wedding reception or the deal, and he sent some low-level soldiers in his place.
Those men were all ambushed, along with Ricky Notaro who went along for the ride, a last-minute decision that ended up costing him his life.
“If he’s a rat or a traitor, then he’s also a stupid motherfucker,” Saint points out. “He had to know this would come back to him.”
Cantarelli was supposed to be the one receiving the shipment, but we’ve learned that he backed out ten minutes before the cartel was supposed to show. Lucky pulled up his bank records and found a recent hefty deposit that’s unexplained.
Andriani soldiers were waiting at the drop, the cartel showed up with the shipment, and then shit hit the fan.
The money and the drugs are gone. The cartel is furious.
Not only did they lose their product and the money they were expecting in exchange for the shipment, they lost men as well.
They’re threatening to cut ties with us, which would strangle our ability to meet the demand on our turf.
The whole thing leaves us in a precarious position in more ways than one.
“Can you see where the money came from?” I ask Lucky, referring to the deposit Cantarelli made.
“Not yet. They’ve been clever about it and covered their tracks.” He frowns at his laptop screen, tapping away on his keys. “But it looks like he’s trying to move it into an offshore account this morning, one that’s in his wife’s name.”
“That makes everything look even greasier than it already did,” Saint mutters.
“Does he think I’m a fucking idiot?” Priest rages. “Luck, divert that blood money to one of our accounts. Make sure it doesn’t get to where he’s trying to send it.”
“On it,” Lucky says, making some clicks with his mouse, concentration etched on his face.
“In the meantime, I want eyes on Cantarelli,” Priest orders Saint. “Find out where he is and put a tail on him.”