CHAPTER TWO #2
Employees nodded respectfully as I passed them. The sound of slot machines and distant conversations blended together throughout the casino. A woman from the janitorial staff smiled at me while pushing her cleaning cart down the hallway.
I smiled back politely before continuing on my way. Then, against my better judgment, I found myself wondering what Juliet looked like when she smiled. I bet she had a mischievous smile.
Fuck. I needed to stop thinking about that woman every five minutes. Shoving the thought aside, I pushed open the conference room door and stepped inside. The scent of lemon filled the air. I guess the staff had just finished cleaning the office.
Julisa was already there, placing iPads in front of each chair at the long conference table. Six chairs total. Financial reports were neatly stacked near the center, beside bottles of water and folders.
She no longer provided snacks during the meetings, complaining that no one ate them anyway. The moment she spotted me, she started muttering under her breath in rapid Spanish. Yeah. She was definitely in a mood.
“Hello, Julisa,” I greeted, walking farther into the room. “How’s it going?”
She responded with another stream of rapid Spanish while rolling her eyes so hard I thought they might get stuck in the back of her head. I hid my amusement and pulled out the chair at the head of the table before sitting down.
“Five years,” I reminded her. “Five years and then you and Anthony can go back to Louisiana.”
“Returning to Louisiana isn’t the problem,” she snapped as she placed another iPad onto the table. “I actually like Italy.”
“Good. Then what’s the problem?”
Huffing out a sigh, she faced me.
“Your translators are the problem,” she stated flatly. “I need someone who can understand me better before I lose my fucking mind. You know what happens when I lose my fucking mind, Romaneo Cattaneo.”
Her left eye twitched slightly. That wasn’t a good sign. She was right, I knew what happened when she lost her mind. Anthony once showed up at my place here in Italy, carrying an overnight bag after Julisa lost her mind and tried stabbing him in the nuts.
Why? Because he’d returned from the grocery store without her favorite coffee. In his defense, the grocery store here didn’t sell the coffee she wanted. He’d told her that. She hadn’t cared. She’d wanted that coffee, and she’d wanted it right then.
That situation had taught me two things very quickly. One: Julisa was crazy enough to follow through on threats. And two: Never let a woman addicted to caffeine run out of her favorite coffee. Ever.
“What can I do to stop you from going crazy?” I asked carefully.
“Get me a translator who understands me.”
A translator who understood her.
I leaned back slightly in my chair as I considered that. The only other translator I could think of was Stefano DeLuca’s girlfriend. But would she be willing to work here? She was the translator at Tower D.
However, Tower D was closed for now, which made Sienna available. It was worth a shot. If we paid her enough, maybe she’d even help Julisa improve her Italian faster.
“I may know someone who can help,” I told Julisa. “I’ll reach out tomorrow.”
“Today,” Julisa corrected immediately. “You’ll do it today.”
I sighed. “Today,” I agreed.
“Good.” She went back to arranging things while muttering under her breath in Italian this time. “Voi uomini Cattaneo mi fate impazzire cazzo.”
You Cattaneo men drive me fucking crazy.
I chuckled. “You know I speak Italian, right?”
“I know,” she replied without looking at me.
The conference room door opened a second later. The rest of the team had finally arrived. Anthony smiled at Julisa as he took his seat. She pretended she didn’t see him. Apparently, she was angry with him also.
Davide DeLuca greeted me when he entered the room. Once everyone was seated, Julisa told them to turn on their devices and open their folders. She then explained that the passwords for the files on their devices were in the folder.
At every meeting, the files had a different password. This was an added security measure she insisted we have, and I was all for it. Once she sat down, she told everyone that the folder contained projections for next month and that on the device, they could review stats from the first quarter.
I reviewed the numbers as she spoke. We’d exceeded my expectations, despite a bump in the road that had nearly forced us to shut down. Just thinking about the compliance disaster we’d dealt with a few weeks ago made my blood boil.
For nearly a month, the casino’s gaming license had hung in limbo because one greedy idiot decided betraying me was worth the payout. At first, the issue looked like a simple administrative mistake.
Several employee compliance files tied to casino floor workers suddenly had missing documentation during a routine gaming audit. Without those background clearance confirmations, renewal approvals, and identity verification forms, those employees couldn’t work the gaming floor.
One or two incomplete employee files wouldn’t have caused such a stir. But there had been more than ten incomplete files, which triggered a formal review of the casino’s gaming license.
And once regulators began their investigation, they’d said they may have to issue a temporary suspension until the matter was corrected. That would’ve destroyed us. No gaming license meant no gaming floor.
No tables. No slot machines. No VIP gambling.
The entire casino would’ve been crippled. Investors started panicking. Lawyers got involved. Julisa practically moved into her office, trying to help fix the mess while Anthony worked overtime keeping staff calm.
And I spent weeks trying to keep the situation from turning into a public disaster. At first, I honestly believed someone in compliance had fucked up. Then I started noticing things that didn’t make sense.
The secretary was confident that all the employees' folders were in order the week before. Files didn’t just disappear on their own. Not that many. Not all at once. Someone had tampered with the records before the audit.
That realization pissed me off enough that I stopped handling the situation legally and started handling it the Cattaneo way. Thanks to the systems we had in place, we could keep track of who opened documents and when.
It didn’t take us long to find the person responsible. I’d had the fucker brought to the facility that the DeLucas allowed me to use to work on my pharmaceutical pursuits. It took a broken jaw, missing teeth, and several hours tied to a chair before he finally admitted the truth.
Pasquale Cattaneo had paid him to alter the records and destroy the files. I should’ve guessed it from the start. That miserable bastard wanted the casino shut down. He wanted the DeLuca partnership destroyed.
And more than anything, he wanted me out of Italy. He saw this casino as a stain on the Cattaneo name. The family here didn’t want to be involved with the DeLucas or any casinos.
They didn’t want the world to believe they’d returned to their old ways. But I hadn’t and still didn’t give a fuck about what they wanted. Once he confessed everything, the employee pleaded with me not to kill him.
He’d cried, telling me about his wife and kids while blood poured from his mouth. I killed him anyway. His family wasn’t my responsibility. They were his. The bastard should’ve thought about them before accepting payment to sabotage my casino.
As for Pasquale...
Well, that motherfucker was still breathing only because I hadn’t decided exactly how I wanted to end him yet. But family or not, I would end him before I returned to the U.S. Which meant, I had one week left to kill my cousin.