Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
ENZO
There are times when I find it hard to concentrate on fucking work. And that only happens since Lola started working for me up on the top floor where my office and Lola's now exist.
She is that perfect and fine line between sweet and filthy. The filthy hides in the shadows and only peeks out with some of her silky shirts, her skirts when she wears them over pants, and, of course, the knowledge of what she looks like under all that shit.
That all works together to fire up my imagination.
Not that it needs it.
And it has been a week now. It is Friday, so when I say the outfits, I mean a grand total of four now, but...I have seen her naked.
I have got her naked on my phone.
Sure, she is murky beneath the pool water, but it is enough.
And, giant pervert that I am, she doesn't know I watched her. She doesn't know I have seen her naked.
Cade and I have a job for the Syndicate, but I'm not doing that here. It is not that I don't trust the security measures that Louie has in place—which I don't—but my time is better spent digging and sifting through files and emails.
Some of the work I have given her is not a test... I can't see her trying to skim or scam Barwon.
I want to see if she is able to not just see errors or things that don't sit right, but I want to see if she will bring it to me.
She has.
Reluctantly.
Lola's dislike for me is a turn-on, I won't lie. There is a delicious edge to hate that is often rooted deep in lust.
And I remind her of her cushy past.
"It's six." Lola stands at my doorway.
I lean back in my chair and put on my smuggest smile. "And?"
"What do you mean, and?"
"Did you want a tour of the floor?"
Her eyes narrow, and she doesn't step foot into the office. "No. I have seen the executive bathroom for guests and the crappy one for me."
I snap my fingers. "Let me guess. You use the executive one."
"No one else does." The hint of acid in her voice does my soul good.
"What about the conference room?"
She looks at me with loathing and a spark of lust I tuck away.
A spark that makes my dick twitch, and I wonder if I can get her to the point of acting out a boss/secretary fantasy.
It would require her to wear a short ass skirt, stockings, sky-high stilettos, fake glasses, a bun, and a white shirt with no bra.
I would have her take notes. And some cum down her throat would be nice. Maybe up her ass or her cunt as I drill her on the desk.
It is pretty fucking basic as far as fantasies go, not imaginative in the least, but I'm not planning on doing it, just using it to amuse myself with.
Still...
Yeah, I would do it if I could.
Right now, though, I think she might want me as much as she loathes me. And she would run screaming if it happened.
"I have seen it. And the cigar lounge—"
"I think it is meant to be for private meetings. Or reading." I have wondered about that room myself. "There's the bedroom..."
"Should I throw up on you now or later?" she asks, sweetly.
I laugh. "Maybe Louie had a lot of late nights?"
"It's a waste of money."
"Lola, Louie comes from a lot of old money. Who knows what he was thinking?"
One thing is for certain, I'm never touching that bed or room. Not without a forensics cleaning team going in first.
I'm not one for getting precious about such shit. But I know Louie. I know the kind of things he gets up to. Or did.
Actually, escorts might be another reason he had personal money issues.
Or not escorts—they are usually professional—but the kind of girls who will sleep with him want a lot spent on them. So...
Louie is an idiot.
Lola doesn't move from her spot. "I don't want a tour or anything. And definitely not a bedroom."
"Then why did you come and tell me the time?"
"It's past home time."
"Go." I motion for her to leave the room, my cock harder still because there is something fucking hot about her annoyance and primness that strokes me the right way.
Lola's eyes flash fire that she dampens, and then she turns and stalks out, eating the hardwood floors with her sneakers as she goes.
The look is...
Delicious.
I have seen plenty of working women who race to and from work in their kicks, only to change into sky-high stilettos for the rest of the day.
But while Lola doesn't go for sky-high anything, just modest heels with phone-smashing power, she does have sexy little outfits I'm sure she would never think of as sexy.
This look revs engines. Mine, at least.
The chick she is buddies with here, Ruby, is objectively fantasy-worthy. Gorgeous, blonde, big tits, and an hourglass shape, and not afraid to show it.
I like that look.
It is one of my favorite looks.
But there is something about shorter, compact, sexily demure coal-haired women with a killer glare that does it for me.
I shake my head. "Fucking focus, Enzo."
I get down to work, exchanging texts with Silas and Cade. But Cade is neck-deep in a side project for the Syndicate.
That is fine. I need Silas's skills.
"Working hard, not smart?" Silas says from my doorway.
I almost jump out of my skin. "How the fuck did you get past security? And what if you ran into Lola?"
He saunters in, putting his computer bag down, and finds the booze, pouring the Irish whiskey—good old Jameson's—into a glass as he inspects the room.
"The how's part of my job, fool," he says, no sting in his words.
"And I would have liked to run into her.
Just to see what the fuss was about. But.
..as a consummate professional, I waited until she was long gone and not coming back. Pretty in person, too, by the way."
My hand tightens on my thigh. "That's not part of your job."
He smiles as he sits opposite me. "And as for how I got in? As I said, consummate professional."
"Professional asshole." I reach for the bottle, pouring some into the glass on my desk.
He looks around. "Is there another room?"
"Yeah. Cade's."
He just looks at me. "What about Violet?"
I just laugh. "Finish your drink."
He does as I down mine.
Together, we head out and grab a cab to a building that Silas hasn't seen. It is near Cade's loft, hidden in the back of a shuttered business that announces a new coffee shop opening soon on the covered window.
It will be one of those New York stalwarts that are perpetually closed and advertising a new establishment every number of months or so. But inside, it is a hacker's paradise.
I know Cade has been there recently from the empty energy drinks on the dusty front counter, as well as in the back, near the computer systems.
We set up shop.
"So, when do you want me to drop the report on your girl?" Silas asks.
I scowl at my screen, one of Cade's energy drinks next to me, plucked from the fridge. "She's not my anything, and I will let you know."
"This Emilio, her father, what was he like?"
I shrug, deep into hacking some of Dom's business fronts to try to get to the real Dom, to find some secrets I can use, evidence he is the one I'm looking for.
Something about this is beyond mafia business and revenge. It smells like revenge in a way, but not the regular kind.
I keep that to myself because it is not anything more than an instinct, a sense I have.
I could be wrong.
I have been wrong before.
But...
My father has more to gain by crushing Lola if I boiled it down to revenge, money, and taking back what is his, any way he can.
But I don't think it is.
My father would throw Lola under a bus if he could and hand her over if it made sense to him. But I don't think it is him.
It doesn't feel like how he does business. And Lola is nothing but a dead man's daughter, a man he hated. Or better yet, a man he grew to hate.
She is the epitome of her father to mine, but hurt her? I can't see it.
To him, her floundering, drowning, and him not lifting a finger is the revenge he enjoys.
Dom?
I don't know him.
But I know what he is like, and I know his family enough to know Gino doesn't do business with them. Nor does my father.
At least, Dad didn't in the past.
I blow out a breath. "A shark masquerading as a goldfish in a small pond."
"What the fuck does that mean?"
I shrug. "Finance man on the outside who did a lot of fund management and moving for the mafia and rich businessmen. The group was small, but I'm thinking he played in a bigger patch than he let on."
He nods. "Is that why the FBI went after him?"
"They tried when he was alive, but he killed himself before they closed in. I only know this part through the whispers."
"And Dom?"
"He's the kingpin, the Don of the Rebecci family."
"And they did business." It's a statement, not a question.
"He was a finance man, he did money for a lot of people. If Emilio ripped Dom off, I think we would have found pieces of him in the Hudson." I frown, taking a sip of the energy drink as I gaze at the information on the screen in front of me. "We have also found nothing like that."
"You and Cade?"
"No, me and the fucking Easter Bunny."
He snorts a laugh. "No need to get frustrated."
"We have been over this shit, we have deep-dived into everything we can open. If there's more, it is offline or locked away behind some kind of firewall we can't hack."
"Could be we need to get in there physically."
"Get in where? His home? His offices?"
I know Dom has some kind of link to Emilio, and we can't find that, either.
Emilio's shit is locked up. And anyway, if the FBI grilled Lola, it meant nothing was there for them to get to any of the other crime families. And the man who could have told them things for a price was dead.
"I don't think whatever this link between Dom and Emilio—"
"If there's a link," Silas says.
"—is something on a computer somewhere."
Silas leans back, taking a swallow from the bottle he pilfered from the office. "So, we're going about this in the wrong way. But you knew that. Why you got me involved."
"Dom is an expert in covering his tracks."
Silas shrugs. "Every mafia player walking around free is an expert in that. Or they hire an expert to cover them."
"So, what do we do?"
"Stop digging into Dom."
I narrow my eyes, thumping my chest. "I can feel it in here that I'm right about Dom."
"Yeah? You might be. But a dead man can't shift things around and—"
"The FBI has all his files."
He shrugs. "So? There are ways to get a peek at those files, ways I can open.
And there are other things in boxes that I'm sure Lola got returned to her, things deemed not evidence, as the scandal is about the potential rather than facts.
No arrests were made, so she will have a lot of things back.
In boxes. In storage, because she doesn't strike me as someone who wants to go through that shit. "
I frown. "And how do we get to that?"
"I have ways."
But I shake my head. "Silas, I have been over every part of Emilio. I have been watching him for years. I have client lists that I'm sure the FBI doesn't know about. I have exhausted all the angles regarding Emilio Mancini."
Silas grins at me. "Maybe. But I haven't."
"And what do you think that will prove?"
"That I'm the better hacker." He takes another swallow of the whiskey.
I let that dig slide.
He is a PI with hacking skills, but his real talents lie in connecting dots no one else can. He does the footwork and puts in hours, old-school style, when needed.
I shrug. "Fine. Entertain yourself."
The thing is, Silas thinks outside the box.
And I wait for him to get up, leave, and go do whatever magic he does. But instead, he sits there and starts getting to work on his computer.
"Here you go."
I go to him, curious. "What?"
They are receipts. Gifts.
Emilio is meeting with someone.
A woman.
I'm frowning as I go over it.
I don't ask what he hacked to get this. It looks innocent. Because it is. On the up and up.
And nothing the FBI is interested in.
"It was all hidden behind a name. Lottie."
"Who the fuck is Lottie?"
"It seems to be a nickname for his kid."
But I shake my head. "Her name's Lourdes, and only those close to her called her Lola. It would be Lola."
"Unless you used Lottie to cover something." Silas has his shit-eating grin on. "Lottie got taken out, Lottie was shopped for, given gifts. Legitimate purchases. It looks like his daughter, right? But it isn't. Not unless he bought her some Perla lingerie."
I stare. "He has a girlfriend?"
"He was hiding an affair. I'm a PI. I know how to look for this shit.
" Then Silas leans forward. "What if the husband of this so-called Lottie is somehow involved in all this?
Revenge on the daughter seems a sweet thing, don't you think?
And if Lola was some kind of marriage collateral, even sweeter. "
"But Emilio's dead."
He shrugs. "Revenge is best served cold."
"Through a Ouija board?"
"Takes all types."
I think about it. "No, it is too convoluted."
"It isn't."
"You're wrong."
Silas leans forward, grin growing wider. "Really? How about a bet?"
I laugh. "You will fucking gamble on anything. You and Louie would make good friends."
"Doubt it. I rarely lose."
"Fine." I hold out my hand. "You've got a deal, and it's going to be sweet to prove you wrong."
"You can try."