Chapter 10
SUBORNER
You’re the reason I can’t trust anyone
Blood trickled down a cut below my eye. I twisted the scrap car part in my gloved hand and massaged my temple with the other. My slow exhale thundered in my head. The dead man at my feet wasn’t going anywhere. Another dead end and more complications. Damn it.
“You need to see the doc?” Massimo, my capo generally in charge of collections, asked.
I shook my head, too busy thinking through this mess.
Piled cars and parts surrounded us. As expected, the meeting with Stathis Dimakos in a junkyard was a trap.
We’d disarmed. He’d been outmanned, yet he still had the gumption to try to take me down in hand-to-hand combat and slice my throat with scrap metal.
Now his brains were splattered over my shoes and suit, along with all the cars and crap in this corner of the junkyard, including the bloody handbrake handle I held.
At least the imbecile confirmed the rumors before his attack, although he also said the Sahin clan and the Armenians both worked solely in imports from the Middle East and Eastern Europe to the United States.
They didn’t hassle themselves with exports.
Which meant this was another dead lead. I hung my head. My sister was out there somewhere, and none of these fucks knew anything.
My phone vibrated. One glance at the caller ID and my mood plummeted further. Giambrone refused to let up—four calls in two days.
I turned away from the scene and walked to the car. The distant city lights lit up the sky over the columns of scrapped vehicles.
“Wrap him up and keep him on ice. Intact,” I told my crew of ten, ignoring the call. “Then clean this up.”
“You want any particular message left behind, boss?” Massimo asked.
“No.” I handed off the murder weapon and then tossed him my soaked black gloves for disposal. “He was never here, and neither were we.”
Vinny and I slid into the back seat of a nondescript sedan without a word spoken, in case of bugs.
I scanned through emails with suppliers and investors, rereading the same ones two, even three times, before finally turning the phone off.
It was pointless tonight. My eyelids drooped, and a crick developed in my neck.
Streetlights zoomed past, a never-ending pattern of light, dark, light, dark—kind of like my search for Persetta.
I sighed and closed my eyes for the rest of the drive.
It didn’t take long to drop the car off at the nearest auto detail shop owned by the members of the outfit, where Jac and Tore were waiting to pick us up. Despite the late hour, the shop crew wasted no time taking the sedan in.
The sounds of the city hummed in the background—sirens, dogs barking, tire rubber burning from street races, and gates and fences rattling with the breeze.
The city never truly slept. We slipped into Tore’s Cadillac, Vinny taking the front passenger seat next to Jac, while I relaxed in the back seat next to Tore.
“Well, that didn’t go as planned.” Vinny shut his door.
“No shit,” I muttered, staring at the hazy gray-blackness of the sky through the sunroof. “Fucking Stathis Dimakos.”
Jac pulled onto the freeway, headed for my home in Newport Beach for the night. The headlights from our bodyguards’ car trailed close behind.
“First, Elio kills the brother,” Tore said. “Now you kill him. This is going to be a problem.”
I nodded slowly. Considering Stathis was close with his cousin Ilias, it was likely. “Probably.”
Ilias Dimakos controlled a small part of Los Angeles as the head of its Greek mafia, but what made him a contending power was the large telecommunications company his family owned. He wasn’t a large figure in the underworld, but this would make him troublesome nonetheless.
“Fuck.” Vinny slammed his palm against the dashboard. “Fuck.”
I smirked with wry amusement at his rare loss of control.
“Let’s not worry just yet.”
“Dare we ask?” Tore questioned.
My father had been a cruel bastard, but far from dumb.
He kept records, some written, most coded, on every transaction made that wasn’t noted in the declared accounting books.
I read those journals back to front so many times for clues on what he’d done to my sister that I practically knew them by heart.
Every favor transaction my father ever held was detailed in there.
They were the kind of records any government agent would salivate to get their hands on.
“Alastor Dimakos’ death was planned by Ilias himself, owing Elio a favor for the execution,” I told them. “Seems the kid was talking to the pigs after Ilias carved Alastor’s girlfriend’s face up for calling his wife a whore.”
“That’ll do it,” Vinny said.
“Elio took the fall, on the condition that Ilias smooth it out internally.”
“Not enough with his cousin,” Tore added.
I nodded. “We might be looking at a war because of that buco del culo”—asshole—“if we can’t turn this around.”
“And nothing to show for it.”
I sighed, scratching at my empty palm.
“Any chance Dimakos will be willing to overlook this?” Jac asked.
A dark glance from my consigliere in the rearview mirror matched my exact thoughts.
The likelihood of that happening was practically nil.
We Italians were known for our loud voices and expressive gestures, but the Greeks were known for their exceedingly strong family foundations.
In the Cosa Nostra, the don made every life-and-death decision, but the Greeks prioritized family on another level.
None of their leaders survived long if they were willing to do away with family.
It was exactly why Ilias went through my father instead of handling his snitch directly. It also made Ilias manipulable.
My phone rang again. Another call from Giambrone was my first guess, except this had the French country code.
I stared at the vibrating phone, my fingers clenched.
“You going to get that?” Tore asked.
There’d already been two calls from France in the last two months, all from the French fucker who broke my sister’s heart years ago. Now a third. I was tempted not to answer.
“Hello,” I answered gruffly, expecting Adrien De Villier’s aggravating accent. I never understood my sister’s infatuation with the prick, regardless of the arranged marriage that had once been planned between them. “De Villier, this better not be you calling again.”
“Renzo, aspetta un attimo.” Hold on a second. My throat seized. That wasn’t Adrien De Villier talking at all.
I sat up straight and adjusted my hold on the phone. “Persetta? Is that you? Persetta? Rispondimi.” Answer me.
I caught Tore’s confused glance across the car and Jac’s wide-eyed stare in the rearview mirror from the driver’s seat as I called out her name again and again.
No answer, except for a muted female conversation on the other end of the line.
Was it really her? Or was I so tired I was hearing things?
After nine months, was I close enough to giving up that I heard her voice when it wasn’t there?
No, she’d spoken Italian. She’d said my name. It was her. It had to be.
“Persetta,” I yelled. “Pick up the phone!”
Still no answer, except for the god-awful chatter on the other end. My body pulsated with the need for an answer. To hell with the Greeks and war.
“Pull the car over!”
“We’re almost there, boss,” Vinny said.
“Ho detto, accosta la macchina, ora!” I said, pull the car over now!
The tires squealed as Jac cut through two lanes of traffic and slammed on the brakes. My hand and phone smacked against my ear as the car stopped abruptly. The moment the car was off, Jac turned in his seat, his blue eyes spearing me.
I tugged the suffocating grip of my tie loose.
“Persetta, I swear to all that’s holy, if you keep ignoring me, I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Send me halfway across the world in a sex trafficking ring? Babbo’s got you beat on whatever you could think up.”
My breath caught. Madonna, it was her.
“Don’t joke about that!” It was really her. She was alive. All this time…only one phone call away.
“It’s her,” I mouthed to all three of them, my eyes watery.
Having grown up together, Tore and Vinny were just as protective of her as I was.
And Jacomo, he’d spent his life guarding her alongside his best friend—Persetta’s biological father, Giorgio, who died the day she was taken.
For almost nine months, we searched without end, all for her to be the one to reach out.
She was alive. She was talking. She was lucid.
“I was losing faith I’d ever find you. I tried, Persetta. I really swear I did.”
“I got out. That’s what matters. I can’t…I can’t talk about it more than that.”
The strength she spoke with left me amazed and flabbergasted.
I always knew I’d find her, but how and in what condition…
I’d expected to have to pick up her pieces and help glue them back together.
She didn’t sound like the bubbly sister I knew who hid her heartache and pain behind cheer and smiles for everyone else, but she wasn’t broken either.
“We don’t have to. It’s just so good to hear your voice. Where are you? I’ll come get you. Why are you calling from a French number? Did De Villier have anything to do with this? I swear if he hurt you—”
“Calm down. He helped save me.”
Calm down? Calm down! She’d been missing for nine months, and now she was practically waxing poetic about the man who’d broken her heart years ago.
I could hear her infatuation. That cazzo didn’t deserve her.
Never had, never would. No matter what part he played in rescuing her, not when his abandonment left her in my father’s clutches to begin with.
We spoke of everything and nothing after that.
Of her injuries and permanent loss of vision.
Of our mother’s suicide. Of our memories with her.
Trips we’d taken together. Trips we’d still like to take.
How business was doing. My new responsibilities.
How I was coping. All for it to land back on her relationship with the De Villier bastard.
“I’m going to marry him,” she told me matter-of-factly.
“Over my dead body.” My left hand toyed with a pen pulled from my breast pocket, tapping it against my thigh.
“Don’t tell him that. He might arrange it,” she teased. “I’m serious though. Once we iron out the kinks, I’m going to say yes.”
Smoke was on the verge of spewing from my nostrils.
“I won’t sit by while that pezzo di merda”—piece of shit—“brainwashes you into—”
“Don’t you dare finish that sentence.” I clenched my jaw so tight my teeth ground together. “I’m getting married. And you’re going to come because that’s what loving brothers do. Right?” I couldn’t counter the gentleness in her tone. “I want you to give me away.”
“Shouldn’t…” I shoved my fingers hard into my temples. “Shouldn’t you just come home for a while? Let things settle. Figure it out after.”
“San Francisco isn’t my home anymore. I can’t go back there, and I don’t want to leave here. You might think it’s sudden, but not for me. This is my life now, and I’m happy with it. Be happy for me. I need this. I want him. Accept it. For me, please.”
Just like that, it felt like I’d lost her again. Nine months of searching. Fifteen minutes of talking. And she was all grown up and out of my life. I couldn’t even fault her for not feeling like San Francisco wasn’t her home after what our father had done. It was all spiraling out of control again.
We hung up not long after. I stared listlessly at my phone for a long while. All that digging, scouring, strategizing, and hunting put to bed in the space of fifteen little minutes. She was found. She was safe, and it was all over.
A loaded silence charged the air.
Tore tried pulling details of the conversation out of me. Jac just nodded and faced forward, accepting that she was well taken care of and nothing else mattered. Vinny let me be.
I was left adrift, collapsing against the headrest a little emptier than I’d been.
The one person who mattered the most in my life didn’t need me anymore.
She’d been my entire focus. Nine months’ worth of purpose gone just like that.
She was protected. She was happy. It was for the best, and I should have felt good.
Excited. Triumphant. So why did my chest feel so hollow instead?