25. Leona
LEONA
My hands were handcuffed to a fucking metal table in an interview room. Hours had gone by. The FBI agents had given me a paper cup of water, which I hadn’t touched—not putting my DNA on anything—but nothing else, and it was noticeably cold in here.
Shitty FBI interview tactics, freezing me out.
It wouldn’t work.
Hate fire kept me warm from the inside out. Hate for Greco. Hate for these fuckers coming after me. Hate that none of my men were here, and all of them were probably losing their minds.
Where did they take them?
What happened?
Before I’d been perp-walked out of the casino, I’d made Cas and Ciel promise they wouldn’t let anyone go crazy. Assuming they kept the guys together, the two of them could handle everyone until we could figure this out. Obi would call Samuel Achebe, and I was sure he’d show up any minute now.
The cool metal of the cuffs made my wrists ache as I stewed in this reality.
Fuck. We’d walked right into the trap. I should have known better. I should have had Ciel check the cameras nearby. I should have ordered our men to investigate first. I shouldn’t have taken Greco’s phone call.
The door to the interview room opened, and my two favorite Special Agents walked in. Jack Greer and Farrah Badawi.
“Hello again, Miss Vero,” Badawi said. Her dark hair was still pulled back into that severe, low bun, but this time she wore a cream blazer outfit with a burgundy undershirt that looked absolutely gorgeous against her dark skin.
She slid into one of the two metal chairs on the other side of the table.
“Special Agent Badawi,” I greeted lightly. “I love your outfit.”
She smiled and gestured to my blood-spattered shirt. “Yours, too. I love that leather jacket.”
I almost continued with our polite small talk, pretending like we were just two women who had maybe met in the elevator and exchanged some compliments, but Greer snorted. With a petty laugh, he looked me up and down.
“What’s with the blood?” He plopped down in the free chair.
“Uh.” I looked down at my clothes. It had to be blood from the bouncer’s leg wound. “I’m on my period.”
Greer recoiled in disgust. “You can’t expect us to believe that.”
I shrugged. “Periods are bloody affairs, Jack. I don’t expect a man to understand.”
Badawi hid a smile while he gestured at her in disbelief. She gathered her papers and straightened them.
“Care to explain the situation in which we found you?” Greer asked, eyes narrowed.
“Not really,” I answered.
“Illegal gambling, guns…none of it looks good.”
I kept my lips shut.
Greer wiped his bottom lip with his thumb. “You’ve been standing us up. We had to come and get you.”
“If you wanted me that badly, Greer, you just had to ask,” I said. He rolled his eyes and frowned. “I’m sure my lawyer is on his way to join us. You don’t mind, do you?”
Badawi tapped the edges of a thick file folder on the table before she placed it down and opened it. She started looking through the pages. “How about we get started with some simple questions?”
“Okay, then. What am I being arrested for?”
She smiled. “We will be the ones asking the questions.”
“It’s my right to know.”
“Racketeering, to start,” Greer said, raising a hand so he could count off on his fingers. “Murder, attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder, drug smuggling, possession with intent to sell, breaking and entering, cybercrime, and illegal gambling.”
I whistled. “That is a list, isn’t it?”
That list named everything the guys and I had done for the last six months. But we hadn’t been involved in gambling until tonight. Max had run all of that.
So that meant they were trying to loop me into crimes he committed with the Family.
“It is extensive, yes,” Badawi said.
“What do you have to say about those charges?” Greer asked.
I sat back in my chair and crossed one leg over the other. “I’ll wait to speak until my lawyer is here.”
“You’ve been a busy girl, haven’t you?” Greer added. “Running around the city. Getting into all sorts of messes.”
I bounced my leg and kept my face as passive as possible. He was trying to get a rise out of me, and it wouldn’t work.
“Innocent people are usually willing to work with our investigation.”
“Cool.” I acted like I was going to pick up my water cup, but I accidentally knocked it over instead.
Water spilled over the table. Badawi snatched up the file and shot to her feet, while Greer shoved backwards to avoid being soaked.
“Oops. My bad! Jack, darling, could you be a doll and fill up my water for me? I’m parched. ”
His eyes fell to the cup and then dragged back up to me. He looked like he was about to snarl an insult, but he sighed heavily, stood, and grabbed the empty cup.
“Thanks so much,” I said as he headed back toward the door. “Oh, could you also please see if my lawyer is here? I’d hate to keep us all waiting silently in this room. Appreciate it.”
He glared, then left. A short minute later, he opened the door and tossed Badawi a roll of paper towels before exiting again. The heavy door thunked shut, leaving only me and Badawi.
Badawi put the file folder on the floor, unrolled a bunch of paper towels, and began cleaning up the mess.
My hands pulled at the cuffs. “I’d help, but as you can see, I’m a little tied up.”
She smirked. Once she finished wiping up all the water, she tossed the soaked paper towels into the wastebasket in the corner. “Sorry about Greer. He can be a little abrasive.”
I snorted. “Bad cop.” I gestured to her, as much as I could with my hands bound. “Good cop.”
Her mouth crooked up at the corner. “Something like that.”
I looked around the room, unwilling to continue making small talk.
The silence stretched, and I got increasingly annoyed that it was taking Greer so damn long to fill up a tiny paper cup.
Something had to be going on out there. I watched the one-way mirror, hoping I could see something behind it, but all I saw was me in my bloody clothes in a room full of metal.
“You have to understand that we’ve been working this case for a very long time,” Badawi said, finally breaking the silence.
“The RICO case?”
She eyed me, neither shaking her head nor nodding.
The most they could connect me to happened within the last few months. Before that, I wasn’t doing anything related to the Five Families organization. They were focusing on me, but this case was much bigger than me. My father had probably given them enough to go after the whole mafia.
But I still didn’t know why.
Just that he was willing to doom everyone else around him.
I could never become like that. No matter what happened, I would never make choices that put my safety and freedom above those of my men.
“How long?” I asked.
“Years.”
My memories trailed back to the last time we spoke at Ryuji’s club. “A few weeks ago, you said my father was acting as a confidential informant for the United States government.”
“That’s correct.”
“Tell me more about that.”
“We’re the ones conducting the interview, Miss Vero.”
“Are you?” I looked around, with Greer still nowhere to be found. “You sure about that?”
Her jaw clenched as she glanced back toward the door. Looked like neither of us knew where he was.
I leaned forward. “Do you want to go check on him? Poor guy could have gotten lost.”
Her lips pursed together like she were holding back a laugh, but she pushed up from the table and stood. At the same time, the door burst open. Shouts echoed through the open door until a moment later, Samuel Achebe pushed into the room.
“Samuel!”
“Leona, there you are,” he said once he caught sight of me.
He looked around the room and then frowned deeply.
“What kind of interview is this? Where is water for my client? Why is she handcuffed in such a way? Why is it so cold in this room? This kind of treatment from such an esteemed agency is absolutely unacceptable. I demand that she be released. At once.”
Greer poked back into the room. “She is under arrest for a slough of crimes. She’s not getting out of here anytime soon.”
“Unbelievable!” Samuel scoffed. He crouched down in front of me and placed his suitcase on the table. His hands went to my wrists. “Her hands are freezing! What is this? A torture chamber?”
I held back my smile and instead played up his dramatics with a heavy shiver of my own. Then I added some chattering teeth for good measure.
“Oh, this poor, sweet girl! Look at what you have done to her!” Samuel exclaimed. “This treatment is unacceptable. I will write a formal complaint against both of you.”
Badawi suddenly looked concerned.
Greer spluttered. “Sit down, Mr. Achebe. Now that you’re here, we can start the interview. No one is going anywhere until we’ve talked, and then once that is done, Leona Vero will be processed into the jail system.”
I nudged Samuel with my knee and gave him a look. He leaned forward so that I could whisper in his ear. “Where are my men? Are they okay?”
“I got them out of police custody first. It took a while, but with some bribes, I bought us some time. They are…upset,” he whispered back. I snorted at the massive understatement. “They’re waiting outside the building. Don’t worry, I will get you out of this.”
“They’re trying to pin the RICO case on me,” I whispered back. “Can you get me out of that?”
“I’ll certainly try,” he said, squeezing my shoulder. I gave him a stiff nod of understanding, and he stood. “What do you want with this farce of an interview, Special Agents? I demand to see the evidence against my client.”
Greer and Badawi took their seats again.
Badawi started pulling files and pictures out of her folder.
Crime scene photos, witness testimonies.
All of it from places where my men and I had been before—whether that was fighting the South Americans and their tainted drugs, or going after the Albanians and their trafficking.
But there was more than that—pictures that were at least a decade old of crime scenes I didn’t recognize.
Dead bodies I didn’t know. Phone records.
Call lists. Pictures of our Family’s underground casinos. Pictures of Max.
Dozens and dozens of pictures of Max. Walking in the streets. Phone to his ear. In meetings at the VCI building. Sitting in his car.
They had surveillance of him for years.
Shit.
“And what is all of this supposed to mean?” Samuel asked. “I see nothing in here that implicates my client.”
“Miss Vero gave the orders,” Greer said. He pulled up a photo from tonight’s debacle at the casino. I stood in front of my men while they crowded around, clearly protecting me. He pushed it in front of Samuel. “She is the ringleader. Controlling it all behind the scenes.”
Samuel rolled his eyes. “My client is young. Some of these pictures date back a decade or more. Are you implying she was some criminal mastermind at the age of ten? No jury will believe that.”
Greer shrugged. “There’s plenty here. Enough to establish that she’s simply walking in her father’s footsteps. Mafia families are a generational thing.”
Thanks, dad. You really set me up for success with this one.
“My client had nothing to do with any of her father’s alleged crimes. If you believe her father had connections to criminals, perhaps you should interview them.”
“Oh, we will.”
“All of this is circumstantial at best,” Samuel said. “If you say there’s enough to establish my client is following in her father’s alleged footsteps, you must have either proof or a witness testifying to that fact.”
Greer shrugged as he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.
“Who is your witness?”
“You know I can’t discuss that, Mr. Achebe.”
So they had found someone else. Was it one of Greco’s men? Sandrini’s? Maybe Ciel could try to hack into their evidence files.
Badawi leaned across the table and locked eyes with me. “Leona, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
I looked at Samuel, and he responded on my behalf. “What are you saying, Special Agent?”
“I understand how easy it is to get caught up in things outside your control,” she said quietly. “If you could give us anything that would help put these organizations behind bars, you would be doing a good thing.”
Our earlier jokes about good cop, bad cop came back to me. Greer tried to corner us, and she was clearly trying to offer a way out. Even so, she felt earnest where he was jaded and vindictive.
“We just want to put bad people behind bars,” she added. Then her eyes tracked to the scar running down my face. “Perhaps the people who gave you that scar. But we need your help.”
I crossed my arms in my chair, sat back, and went silent.
I kept the emotion off my face as best as I could, but an angry heat flashed down the back of my neck and arms. The Vokshis did this to me.
Not the mafia. Not Max. And while my father had allowed the Albanians to run wild inside this city with zero repercussions, he was dead.
The Vokshis were dead, at our hands. We were the ones cleaning up this city, whether the FBI liked it or not.
Samuel bristled. “Exactly what kind of help are you asking for? Are you offering my client a deal?”
“Yes,” Badawi said. “These organizations are complicated, and so is their leadership. We understand that. All we need is Miss Vero’s testimony as far as who is the true person pulling the strings.”
“And if you received that testimony, you’d drop the charges against her? Is that what this deal is?” Samuel asked.
Badawi nodded. “The District Attorney would offer immunity to Miss Vero, depending on the depth of evidence and testimony she is willing to provide.”
They wanted me to snitch.
If I gave them someone else, someone responsible for ordering these crimes, they’d let me go.
“Who do you think is the ‘true person’ pulling the strings?” My hands clenched together. “I expect you have someone in mind.”
Badawi shook her head. “We just want the truth.”
Yeah, right. With my eyebrow raised, I looked to Greer instead. He pushed forward a picture of Max.
My heart thumped inside my chest. All the air seemed trapped in my lungs.
They wanted me to snitch on Max.