Chapter 3
Chapter Three: Emilio
Once we get to the door, I tell her to wait because the others will have questions. She didn’t look too happy about it, but it’s just easier this way. She leaned against the door with a huff and I left her there before she could say some smart-ass comment about it.
Leone's at the head of the war room table with a coffee that looks cold and a stack of papers he hasn't touched and the posture of a man being held up by marionette strings.
Alexandra sits to his left, laptop open, fingers on the keyboard in the fast rhythm she gets when she's chasing something through a financial network.
She doesn't look up when I walk in. She's gone.
Whatever she's building on that screen has swallowed the rest of the world.
Claudio is against the far wall with his arms crossed.
He looks at me when I enter and does the full sweep, head to boots, reading my condition in under two seconds.
He sees the circles under my eyes. He sees the tension in my shoulders.
He sees whatever my face is doing. His expression doesn't change, but his left eyebrow lifts a quarter inch, which in Claudio is a standing ovation.
He knows.
Of course he fucking knows. The twin frequency doesn't lie, and I've been broadcasting on it since the diner.
"Sit down," Leone says without looking up.
I sit and the chair scrapes concrete. Aurelio used to sit where Leone sits. The old man's chair is the same one, leather worn to a shine on the armrests where his hands rested for twenty years. Nobody's suggested replacing it because replacing it would mean admitting he's not coming back to it.
He's been in the private wing for two weeks.
The doctors come and go through the east entrance, so the soldiers don't see them, but everyone knows the Don is dying.
Where and when are the only open questions, and Leone carries the answer to both on his face every morning when he walks out of Aurelio's room and into this one and pretends he’s okay.
Charlotte told me once, late in the kitchen when Claudio was asleep and she was drinking tea and I was drinking whiskey and we'd hit the hour where people stop performing, that watching Leone hold the organization together while Aurelio fades is the loneliest thing she's ever seen.
She said it's the loneliness of a man who inherited his father's weight without inheriting his father's certainty, and the gap between those two things is the thing that will either make Leone or break him in half.
And the fact that Aurelio isn’t actually Leone’s father and the seat belongs to Dahlia, only Dahlia doesn’t want anything to do with the mafia, which left Leone the only logical choice.
"The bartender is secured?" Leone asks.
"She’s waiting outside.”
"Did she talk?"
"She gave me pieces at the diner on the way in.
A marina south of the waterfront, a boat called the Meridian Star, Tuesday and Thursday handoffs.
She heard names, schedules, details about intelligence being exchanged between people embedded in both families.
" I let that land. "Both families, Leone. Not just Castillo. Bonaccorso too."
The room changes. Not a sound, not a movement.
Alexandra's fingers stop on the keyboard.
Claudio's arms loosen by an inch. Leone's eyes come up from the table and find mine, and the exhaustion burns off and leaves behind the thing that makes Leone dangerous, the focus.
The absolute, unblinking focus of a man who's been handed a thread and intends to follow it until everything attached to it unravels.
"Both families," he repeats.
"That's what she said. The men she overheard used the name Kreiss. She didn't recognize it, but the way she described the conversation, it’s our Kreiss."
Leone stands and walks to the map on the wall. The city spreads across it in faded color, marked with pins and circles and the accumulated intelligence of two years of war. Red for Castillo territory, blue for ours, yellow for neutral. He stares at it before releasing a long breath.
"Kreiss," he says. "Alexandra, find where he’s at right now."
"Already on it." Her fingers are moving again. "Give me an hour."
"You have thirty minutes."
She doesn't argue. She types faster. That's their thing. Leone sets the impossible bar, and Alexandra clears it and neither of them acknowledges how insane that is because that’s just how they thrive.
"More leaks.” Claudio says from the wall. "Marco Vidal. The Maryland documents confirmed him as Castillo-side. But if she's right and they've got people in both families, Vidal might not be the only one."
"Vidal is confirmed but not located," Leone says. "We've got the name, the role, the paper trail. We don't have the man. The raid gave us the evidence but not the body."
"She might have more," I say. "She's not giving everything up at once. She gave me the marina over eggs and toast and held back the rest. She's not stupid, Leone. She dealt me one card to prove she had a hand and she's keeping the rest facedown until she knows what kind of game this is."
Leone turns from the map and looks at me. It's the look he gives soldiers before he assigns them something that will either define their year or ruin it, and I've been on the receiving end enough times to know that whatever comes next is going to eat my schedule.
Fuck…
"You're her handler," he says.
"I'm her what?"
"You extracted her. She responded to you. She talked to you in a diner when she had no reason to trust anyone in this organization. You're the point of contact. You stay with her, you keep her comfortable, and you get the rest of the intelligence."
"Leone, no. I don’t want to babysit the vixen.”
His brow raises and a smirk forms on his face.
"Vixen, huh? In any case, yes you are. You're the only person in this compound who can sit across from a hostile civilian and make them want to talk.
Claudio terrifies people. Carmelo hasn't said a full sentence since February. I don't have time. You're it."
Claudio's mouth twitches. The bastard is enjoying this.
"She threw a lamp at my head," I say.
"Then you're already building rapport." Leone sits back down, picks up his cold coffee, and drinks it without flinching, which is its own kind of violence.
"I want everything she knows. The marina, the handoffs, the names, the schedules.
I want to understand what Kreiss's operation looks like from ground level.
And I want it before Kreiss figures out we pulled his witness out of that Delaware apartment. "
"About that." I lean forward. "Whoever put her there is going to notice she's missing. If they haven't already."
"Which is why time matters." Leone sets the mug down. "Kreiss went dark after the Maryland raid. No communication, no movement. That's not retreat. That's preparation. He's building toward something, and she might be the only person outside his network who can help us see it coming."
"Don’t you want to talk to her? You summoned her here.”
Alexandra glances up from her laptop. Her eyes move from Leone to me and back. “No, I think you should handle this one.” He says before dismissing me with a wave.”
I find her exactly where I left her. I look at her. She looks back. A guard passes at the far end and doesn't look our way. A few minutes later the rest of the room exits and walks down the hall, heading to wherever they’re headed, leaving us alone.
"Okay," I say. "You want direct, I'll give you direct. Leone wants me as your point of contact. I stay with you, keep you safe, and help you give us the intelligence you're carrying. In return you get protection, a room, food, and good whiskey."
"A handler." She basically spits the word at me.
"A contact."
"Same shit, different title."
"Not the same shit. A handler manipulates. A contact communicates. I'm not going to trick you into talking, Savannah. I don't have the patience for it, and you'd see through it in about ten seconds and then you'd throw something else at my head, and I only have so many heads."
"You have two. And the one I’m staring at is not as pretty as you think it is."
"It's exactly as pretty as I think it is."
She almost smiles. "Touche. I'll talk to Leone about it since he’s the boss," she says. "Today. I'll give him the marina, the boat, the schedules, the names I remember. But I have conditions."
"Name them."
"I move freely in this compound. I don't get locked in rooms or escorted to meals or filed away in a drawer somewhere."
"Done."
"I want work. Something to do with my hands. I've been sitting in rooms for two weeks and if I don't have something to do soon I'm going to redecorate this corridor, or your fucking face, with my fists."
"I'll figure something out."
"And I want to know what's happening. The real version, not the sanitized one you hand to civilians. If my life is on the line because of what I heard, I want to know exactly how on the line it is."
"I'll tell you what I can. Some things I won't be able to share, operational details, names of our people, things that could get someone killed if they leaked. But the big picture, who's coming for you, why, what we're doing about it, you'll have it."
"And if you lie to me?"
"I won't."
"Everyone says that."
"Everyone isn't me." I hold her gaze. "I'm bad at a lot of things, Savannah. Patience, mostly. Sitting still. Following instructions when the instructions are stupid. But lying isn't one of them. Ask my brother.”
"That's a lot of words to say trust me."
"It's a lot of words because I mean it. Two words would be cheaper but less convincing, and you don't strike me as a woman who's convinced by cheap."
The corner of her mouth moves again. "Okay," she says. "Take me to Leone."
He said for me to deal with it, but who the hell am I to deny this vixen her moment?
I push off the wall and walk beside her.
Not in front. I've already learned that lesson.
She keeps pace easily, her stride matching mine, and I notice for the first time that she's tall.
Five-eight, maybe five-nine. In shoes with any kind of heel she'd look me dead in the eye, and the thought of Savannah Cole at my eye level makes my cock throb.
I love me a strong, tall woman.
We pass two soldiers in the corridor. Both nod at me.
Both look at Savannah and then find somewhere else to put their eyes when they notice me watching them.
Good. Word will spread fast enough. New woman in the compound, Emilio's assignment, hands off.
The compound gossip network moves faster than our actual intelligence operation, which is embarrassing but useful.
"The people in that room," she says. "Your brother, the woman on the laptop, Leone. They all armed?"
"Everyone in this building is armed."
"Including you right now?"
"Two weapons. One on my hip, one on my ankle."
"Jesus Christ."
"Welcome to the family."
"I didn't say yes to the family. I said yes to the briefing."
"Same thing around here."
At Leone’s office door, she stops. Her hand goes to her pocket.
The cap. She doesn't take it out, just presses her fingers against it through the fabric, the way I touch the grip of my gun before I walk into a room I'm not sure about.
The grounding point. The thing you reach for when you need to remind yourself what you're carrying and why you're carrying it.
"Ready?" I ask.
She takes her hand out of her pocket and opens the door herself.
"I've been ready for two fucking weeks," she says, and walks in ahead of me.
Leone looks up, then Alexandra, then Claudio who is in the middle of a call.
Three of the most dangerous people in the city, all armed, all uncovering a conspiracy that has been engineering a war for years, and Savannah Cole walks into the middle of them and sits in the empty chair across from Leone and folds her hands on the desk.
"My name is Savannah. I'm the bartender from your waterfront club, and I know things that are going to change how you fight this war."
Leone blinks once before looking at me with a glare. I shrug, because what the fuck else am I going to do? Savannah doesn’t seem the type to listen to anyone, much less respect the word no.
Alexandra's fingers hover above her laptop. Claudio hangs up and Leone’s gaze shifts to her.
Leone leans forward. "Tell me."
She does.