CHAPTER TWELVE
It would be another twenty-five minutes before her detail chief hurried back into her office.
“It’s time to go, Ma’am,” he said, and Trina didn’t say a word. She hurried from behind her desk ready to go.
Two additional detail crew were waiting outside of her office and, along with their chief, they escorted her down the stairwell that led to the back of Champagne’s.
Three SUVs were just pulling up when they made it outside, and a man Trina recognized as Sal Gabrini’s underboss Robby Yale hopped out and opened the back passenger door of the middle SUV.
When Trina got inside, Reno and Sal were already in there.
Her heart began to pound. Sal was in on it too? He brought his cousin along? It had to be even more dire than Trina thought if Reno brought Sal along too. “What’s wrong, Reno? Tell me our children are okay. Tell me!”
“Everybody’s fine,” Reno said as he held her hips to guide her to the middle seat between he and Sal. When she sat down, Robby Yale got on the front passenger seat and ordered the driver to drive.
“Where are they?” Trina asked.
“Jimmy, Carmine, and Sophie are all at the penthouse. Alex Drakos has Madison on lockdown in Florida. Mariah and the baby are in a safe house.”
“Why couldn’t they just take her to the PaLargio too?”
“She didn’t want to go,” said Sal. “Y’all too crazy for her. She wants a divorce from this family.”
“Well too bad,” said Reno. “She’s got a Gabrini baby. Ain’t no divorcing that.”
“What about Dommi?” asked Trina. “Has anybody notified him?”
A weary look appeared in Reno’s eyes. “Everybody’s fine,” he said again. “Except for Dom,” he hated to add.
Trina’s heart dropped as she looked at Reno. She had on her eyeglasses, but he could still see the fear in her eyes. “What’s happened to my baby?”
Reno didn’t want to even speak it, but that was the reason she was there. “They snatched him, Trina.”
Trina frowned. “They snatched my child?” Then she wondered if the blackmailers decided to take her child and hold him for ransom until she gave them what they wanted. Her voice became hysterical. “Who snatched Dommi? What are you talking about, Reno? Who took Dominic?”
“The Scorvino gang.”
Now Trina was lost. “The who gang? Who are the Scorvino gang?”
Sal looked at Reno. “Tell her, Reno.”
Trina looked at Sal when he began speaking, but when he looked at Reno, so did she. “Tell me,” she pleaded.
“Dom is back in the business again.”
Trina frowned again. “The business? What business?”
“Mob business.”
But what did that have to do with her blackmailers? “But Dom’s the sheriff--”
“That’s his cover,” said Sal. “Which is very clever of him since it didn’t start out as his cover.”
“What cover? What are you talking about? What’s going on, Reno?”
“Our Dominic is the boss of the Arvanatti crime family.”
Trina was floored. “What?”
“We’re going to see Lolo Arvanatti now. He’s the old man. The figure head of the family if you will. But Dom’s in charge.”
“But how could Dommi . . . Why would he . . .”
Trina looked at Reno for answers. But Reno had none either. “He became boss a few months ago is all I know, Tree. Did I know about it before today? No. Did Sal know about it? No. He kept that shit undercover.”
Then he looked at Trina. “Did you know Mariah and the baby were back in Vegas? That she broke up with Dom again?”
Trina looked at him as if he was from another planet. “Of course I knew that, Reno. Where have you been?”
Reno leaned his head back. Apparently everywhere but where he needed to have been. Now his wife was getting the hots for some throwback lover and his son was in danger.
“But if Dom’s been abducted, then that baby should be at the PaLargio.”
“I was going to make the arrangement once I found out they were back in Vegas, but they’re already under the protection of Dommi’s capos from the Arvanatti crew.”
Trina still could not believe it. Dommi was a mob boss?
Ever since he was a kid, she knew it would come to that.
But when he left Mick and went into law enforcement, she thought it was surely out of his system.
She thought his sudden need to want to talk to Reno had more to do with his breakup with Mariah again than with anything mob-related.
And it had nothing to do with what she was going through either?
She still wasn’t convinced. She had to hear what this Lolo Arvanatti had to say before she would ever be convinced that her son being kidnapped at the same time she was being extorted was just a random coincidence. In her world, coincidences rarely ever happened.
Although she was praying, for Dommi’s sake, that it happened this time.