Chapter 23
SAINT
I’ve never been more relieved to see Priest in my life than when he walks in the door of the warehouse that’s the designated meeting point with Colletti and Joey Bones Panzeri.
It’s late—almost midnight—and it feels like a lifetime has passed in the span of one day.
Our rat situation progressed at the speed of light, and I’m glad Priest made it back in time before we settle the issue with a bullet in Joey Panzeri’s brain.
“Frattore mio,” I greet him. We embrace and clap each other’s backs. “You look like you’ve been lying in the sun all day.”
Even though he had to cut his honeymoon short, it clearly did him good. He needed the break. Being a don is a hell of a lot of pressure. Being the stand-in almost did me in.
Priest gives me a once-over. “And you look like shit.”
“Could be because I’ve been dealing with a lot of it, thanks to our Russian friends and fucking Joey Bones Panzeri,” I say wryly.
“You found the rat?”
I nod. “Earlier tonight, undercover agents moved on the empty warehouse by the river, acting on information only Joey was fed.”
Priest’s expression is grim. “Where’s Panzeri now?”
“Colletti is bringing him in, making sure there’s no tail. He thinks he’s going to be overseeing a shipment.”
“Is he being tracked?”
Priest is all business. I can see him mentally checking off the list, making sure I crossed every T.
I shake my head. “Negative. Colletti’s gone over him with a fine-tooth comb. His phones were confiscated. There’s no way anyone will know his location until it’s too late. They should be here in the next fifteen minutes. The plan is to take him into the back office. He won’t know what hit him.”
“Who’s going to do the honors?”
As don, Priest can’t get his hands dirty.
We need him clean. Many an excellent don has rotted away in prison for stupid crimes he never should’ve been caught committing.
Clipping Joey Panzeri? Not worth it, even if his disloyal ass is what landed us close to an all-out war with the Bratva.
No such fucking thing as omertà for Joey.
“Colletti’s got it covered,” I say, staying deliberately vague. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”
He rubs his jaw. “What the fuck is it now?”
I don’t know how the hell to break this down, so I just blurt it out.
“Antonella Rossi is alive. Turns out, she’s been living in a coastal town all this time.
She claims she cheated on our old man with Tomasso Revello and that when she realized she was pregnant, she went to our father with the truth.
She says he threatened to kill her, so she ran and had twin daughters in hiding.
Their names are Camilla and Bianca, our half sisters.
Sidorov found them somehow, and that’s when she came slithering back to us.
Lucky’s taken her in, and now she and the girls are at the safe house with Isla. ”
By the time I finish, Priest is clearly shocked.
“Wait a fucking minute. You’re going to have to say that again, because I thought I heard you say our mother showed back up.”
“You heard correctly, but I prefer not to give her a title she doesn’t deserve.” The word mother feels wrong. She spawned us. Abandoned us. That’s it.
“And that we have half sisters who were spawned by fucking Tomasso Revello,” he adds.
“Yup.”
Priest presses his fingers to his temples. “Who also happens to be my wife’s father.”
I nod. “Correct.”
“What the fuck?” Priest roars suddenly, his voice so loud that it echoes off the old warehouse walls.
I wince, because it hurts my ears. “My sentiments exactly.”
He rakes his fingers through his hair. “Our mother isn’t dead?”
I understand his bafflement. After so many years passed, I think we had all begun to suspect she was gone. That maybe our father had killed her and took the secret with him to the grave.
“Nope,” I confirm. “She just cheated on our father and ran off to raise another man’s children.”
He hisses out a breath. “Luna’s half sisters. Jesus, this is beyond fucked up.”
“Almost incestuous,” I agree, because I’m not above ribbing him about this new familial development.
How the hell else am I supposed to entertain myself?
I’m falling hard for a woman I can’t keep, one who’s made no secret of the fact that she wants nothing to do with the Mafia world I inhabit.
My mother is resurrected from the dead. I have two half sisters I didn’t know about last week.
I flick a glance at my watch. And in about five minutes, I’m going to have to kill a man.
Yeah, I’ll take my laughs where I can get them.
“Too far,” he warns me with a glare. “This is going to tear Luna apart. She has no idea about any of this.”
“Well, since you left her at the safe house, I guess she’s finding it all out the hard way.”
“And without me.” He rubs his jaw, looking like he’s in physical pain, and all over his need to protect his wife. “Fuck. I should be there for her.”
I understand that protective mode he’s slipping into, because I feel the same when it comes to Isla.
I want to save her from the world and everything in it.
To tear apart anyone with my bare hands who dares to hurt her, then chop the shreds of their corpse into tiny pieces and dump them into the ocean for sharks to devour.
It’s violent and aggressive, in a way I’ve never felt before. How the hell am I going to let her go when this shit finally dies down?
“What’s with you?” Priest gives me a hard stare. “You look like you want to beat someone to death.”
“I do. Fucking Mikhail Sidorov.”
“I can’t believe the prick gave his blessing to a bomb being planted in Sergio’s.” Priest shakes his head, clearly misunderstanding the reason I want to destroy the new Pakhan.
I mean, yes, I want to slit his throat for destroying the restaurant we’ve been painstakingly building—a legit establishment with a damn good chef and rapidly growing street cred among the city’s upper crust, despite its ties to the Andriani family.
We need all the aboveboard businesses we can get as a front.
Losing even one sets us back. But if I’m honest, I’ll admit—at least to myself—that what makes me want to claw out his liver and feed it to him raw is what he ordered his men to do to Isla.
“He should have talked to us first,” I agree.
“Aleksandrov would have. We could have cleared the air and gotten to the bottom of this mess with a whole lot less money lost on both sides, not to mention all the scrutiny he brought us. Thank God we have guys on the inside who can sign off on it being nothing more than a gas leak.”
“Good thinking on that one.”
Is this my older brother praising me?
“Are you feeling okay?” I ask him, suspicious. “You’re not usually this nice to me.”
“Fuck off. I’m nice to you all the time.”
We grin at each other.
“Good to have you back, frattore mio. Sorry about the abrupt end of the honeymoon, but also not all that sorry.” My phone dings, and I extract it, glancing at the screen to confirm the message is the one I’ve been waiting for. “Panzeri and Colletti are here.”
We wait where we are while I pull up footage of the security cameras leading to the stock room where Panzeri thinks he’s headed to pick up the shipment. These will be wiped clean afterward, but for now, they’re instrumental in letting me know where I need to be and when.
“You good?” Priest asks me.
Colletti and two of his top soldiers are accompanying Joey Panzeri.
They’re making small talk I can pick up on the cameras.
Something about hash browns for breakfast at the diner.
It’s mundane, a reminder of the human stakes.
But I’m not shaken by listening in on what will become some of Panzeri’s final words.
Rats must be exterminated, or they keep multiplying.
“I’m good,” I confirm, silencing my phone and reaching for my piece. “They’re approaching the spot. You stay here, and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
I quickly backtrack to the stock room, waiting around the corner just out of sight.
I hear them coming, still talking about the diner, which apparently serves up the best Shit on a Shingle.
They head into the room where we’ve strategically stashed cutting and packing material to make it look like we’ve just received a shipment.
“You sure your guy is going to want a few bricks?” Colletti asks Panzeri.
Part of the ruse in luring Joey here was that we unexpectedly came into a stolen haul of coke that we needed to unload under the radar.
The timing had to be perfect in getting Panzeri away from any potential handlers before he learned we set him up with the other warehouse location.
He volunteered to help sell the coke, and Colletti brought him here.
It’s best this way. They only put up a fight when they know something’s wrong.
But when they think they’re a part of the inner circle and they’re about to score big, that’s when you clip them.
It’s all about the element of surprise. My old man taught me that lesson, and he was wrong about a fuck of a lot of things.
But not that.
“My guy has a lot of connections upstate,” Panzeri is bragging. “I’ll run it through for you, no problem. Tell me what you need to unload, and it’s done.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” Colletti says. “We came into this a little unexpectedly, so it can’t go the usual routes.”
It’s the phrase I’m waiting for, the predetermined signal that we’re good to go.
“Check this box first, Rafael,” he adds, talking to his soldier. “Let Joey Bones have a look at the quality.”
I slip around the corner, gun at the ready, finger on the trigger.
Colletti is waiting. He catches my eye and nods, moving to the far corner of the room.
I take in the setup, and thank fuck it’s just as planned.
Joey Bones is bent over a shipment of coke that’s not even coke.
It’s sucralose powder. His back is to me.