Chapter 28 – Luca
LUCA
The basement beneath Onyx serves multiple purposes. For the most part, it's storage for legitimate club business, and a quiet place for conversations, and other more hostile meetings that can't happen upstairs. Where there are witnesses. And carpets.
Nico has already started working on a man, on his knees, arms bound by chains when I arrive. There’s blood streaming from his nose and a split above his eyebrow. He’s young, maybe mid-twenties, with the kind of expensive designer clothes that screams new to the business and no common sense.
"Who sent you?" Nico asks, almost bored, before delivering another sharp jab to his ribs, holding out a sheet of paper that Corso apparently safety-pinned to his bare chest, the shining metal piercing through the man’s tanned flesh, before stringing him up and leaving him here while he went to get a drink.
"Because it wasn't your idea. You’re clearly too fucking stupid to set up a hit like this. "
The man grunts, chin hanging against his chest, finding just enough energy to spit out a rasping, "Fuck you," along with one of his broken teeth.
"Luca." Nico steps back, flexing his knuckles. "Recognize him?"
I circle the room slowly, studying the man's face. It takes a moment, but then it clicks. I’ve seen him here before, in the club.
He’s not just Italian, he’s one of our own.
"You work at Lorenzo’s." I crouch down to his eye level, head tilted, hands hanging loosely between my knees.
He spits blood onto the concrete floor, aiming for my pants, but fortunately for him, misses. He grimaces as the movement causes him pain, the thick chains swinging and cutting further into his wrists, all his body weight dragging him down.
"I don't know what you're talking about."
I hit him. A clean, hard strike to the jaw that snaps his head sideways and sends his entire body rocking. The simplicity of violence. The clarity it brings. My mind narrows into a pinpoint focus, zeroed in on nothing but getting what I want from this man.
Information.
"Let's try again." I grab his hair and wrench his head back so he can see the note Corso left me. "We know you were there. What were you doing?"
It's a picture, grainy, but clear enough, of the man in front of me, caught on CCTV a block away from the bar where our unwitting shooter was hired. Underneath, in Corso's terrible blocky handwriting:
HIRED HITMAN WITH CASH.
Our guest’s bravado is cracking, fear leaking through the edges. "I was just running an errand for a friend. Someone he owed some money to. I didn't know what it was for or why."
"Perhaps you should have asked." I laugh darkly. He was told to say that exact phrase verbatim if he was picked up. This man has never said the word errand in his life.
Our guest pales, finally picking up on my absolute lack of sympathy for the predicament he’s found himself in.
It's quite possible he was kept in the dark, that he's merely been used as a pawn, but it doesn't make keeping quiet any more forgivable.
Once the shooting happened, he should have come forward.
Instead, he kept his mouth shut, either because he suspected he was in hot water, or because he was paid not to talk.
Regardless, he made the wrong decision.
When I push to my feet, he grows more frantic, looking to Nico for help, but he's turning to the wrong person.
"Luca, I swear. I thought the order came from you, from the top."
Unfortunately, those two things are not the same, not yet.
I take my time with each punch, each snapped finger. I let him understand exactly how much trouble he's in and that holding out is just delaying the inevitable. By the time I straighten and roll down my bloodied sleeves, he's given me a name, the words falling out of him between split lips.
Nico stands to the side, arms folded to mask his fury. I don't react to the name I hear, just store it away.
They will pay dearly, but this situation needs to be handled delicately.
Information obtained, I pat the man on the shoulder and give it a squeeze, reassuring him the pain is almost over, then I pull the gun from my back, take a step back and shoot him straight in the head.
He paid someone to come to my restaurant and shoot my fiancé. He knew what the consequences would be if he got caught.
"Nico. Get rid of him." I turn toward the sink, running the water cold. "Don’t say a word to anyone about what you heard," I order without needing to look and see if he’s agreeing.
In our world, it goes without saying.
“So we know who set up the hit. But he didn’t do this alone.”
“Definitely not,” I grit out, angrily scrubbing my hands.
“Do we go pick him up now?” Nico looks to the ceiling. He’s right. He could well be here. But I shake my head.
“No, we need to play this one carefully.” I want whoever planned this. “And I promised the O’Sullivan’s they could have the shooter.”
I’m shrugging on a clean shirt when my phone lights up on the shelf beside me. An alert, one of the sensors at the house tripping, followed three seconds later by a blank text from Tony.
Nothing. No words.
Nico holds up his phone with the alert on the front screen and frowns, thinking exactly the same as me. If it was set off by accident, why hasn’t security turned it off?
The door bangs open above me. Footsteps, fast and urgent, and then Corso appears at the top of the stairwell, steady as always, but slightly agitated, which, when you're dealing with Corso, is akin to a full-blown panic. He doesn’t even look at the body on the floor.
"Luca. We have a problem."
“I gathered that.” What I want to know is the extent of it.
"Mikhail. He's in the country. Our guys tracked him from the airport to a car rental place this afternoon." He pauses. "They lost him."
Shit. I grab my phone.
"He's not the shooter, and he didn’t pay for the hit," Nico says behind me, working through it. "So what's he here for?"
I know exactly what he wants.
“Revenge.” Dread slides down my spine. “Mikhail and Kate…”
Nico’s mouth parts in disbelief. The Russian assassin is Kate’s forbidden love, and in Mikhail’s twisted mind, I allowed her to die.
He's come to get even.
“Fuck,” he says, drawing the word out. “Do you think he’s here?” Nico draws his gun, but I shake my head.
Taking my life would be too easy. He's a cold-blooded killer, a hitman for hire, a ghost. And he's lost the only person who made him feel one iota of anything.
He wants me to suffer as he does, to lose the one person who means the most to me in this dark, depraved world we live in.
I'm already moving, taking the stairs two at a time, shoving through the crowd above, my heart slamming against my ribs.
“He's not after me. He's after Sienna.”