Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Luca
"Sit," Bruno says.
I take the chair across from him.
Bruno doesn't speak. He lets the silence do its work, the way he always does. I've seen him sit across from men for ten minutes without saying a word, watching them sweat through their shirts.
Valentino breaks first. "The men at your apartment weren't Beka."
I process that. The Albanians didn't send them. Which means someone else knows about Gemma. Someone else tracked her to my building.
"Fuck," I say.
"It gets worse," Bruno says. His voice is flat, the tone he uses when he's already decided how something ends. "I had a call with Kalinowski this morning. The Beka organisation isn't looking for the woman."
"They've been chasing her for eighteen fucking months."
"They were chasing her husband's debt." Bruno's eyes don't move from my face. "The husband who isn't dead."
The words land wrong. Like hearing a language I should understand but can't parse.
"What?"
Valentino turns from the window. "Dominik Voss staged his death. He owed money to too many people. Beka, the Serbs, some independents out of Detroit. He ran a long con and disappeared."
I think about Gemma in the bedroom three nights ago, telling me about the phone calls and the men who showed up at her door. About the husband she identified in a morgue. The husband she buried.
"She identified the fucking body."
"Voss paid someone to make the dental records match. It's not complicated if you have the right contacts." Valentino says.
The room feels smaller. Hotter. I think about Gemma on the floor with her daughter pressed against the wall, her body curled around the child like she could stop bullets with her spine.
"Why the fuck would he send people after his own wife?"
Valentino sighs. He moves from the window to the chair beside Bruno's desk, lowering himself into it with the careful movements of a man who's been awake too long.
"Liam found him. Dominik. He's been living in fucking Milwaukee this whole time, forty minutes from the woman he left holding his debts. "
"And?"
"And he wanted money for the information he gave us." Valentino's jaw tightens. "Fifty thousand. Liam paid it."
"What information is worth fifty thousand from a dead man?"
Bruno and Valentino exchange a look. The kind of look that tells me whatever comes next is going to change something I can't change back.
"Gemma Holt," Bruno says, "is the biological daughter of Cesare Orsini."
The name hits my chest like a fist.
Cesare Orsini runs Milwaukee. Has run it for thirty years. The Orsini family controls everything from the ports to the politicians, and Cesare built that empire on bodies and silence. I've never met him. I've heard enough.
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"She's adopted," Valentino says. "The family in Wisconsin adopted her as an infant. They don't know where she came from. Neither does she."
I stand up. The chair scrapes against the floor behind me. "You're telling me she's Orsini's daughter and she doesn't fucking know it?"
"Her mother was young, unmarried, and she killed herself three months after Gemma was born." Valentino's voice is steady. "Before she died, she left Gemma at an orphanage outside Madison. A private Catholic place. The nuns handled adoptions quietly back then."
"How does Voss fit into this?"
"His mother worked at that orphanage." Bruno leans back in his wheelchair, fingers steepled.
"She was there when the woman brought the baby in.
She knew the whole story—who the father was, why Maria couldn't keep her.
She told Dominik years later, probably didn't think it mattered. But Dominik remembered."
I pace to the window. I can't stay seated at the moment.
"He married her to get to Orsini."
"He married her to become part of the Orsini family," Valentino corrects. "To present himself as the husband of the heir Cesare never knew he had. He thought it would buy him protection. A seat at the table."
"And?"
"And Cesare shot him in the leg and told him to get out of Milwaukee before he finished the job."
I turn around. "Cesare knows about her?"
"Cesare has known about her since the day Dominik walked into his office." Bruno's voice is cold. "He's been watching her for two years. Keeping his distance."
The pieces click together in my head, each one worse than the last.
"The men at my apartment were his?"
"They were Orsini's," Valentino confirms. "He's been having her watched. We assume that when she disappeared from her apartment and stopped showing up to work, he sent people to find her. They tracked her to your building through the same cameras the Beka people would have used."
"They weren't trying to take her. They were trying to fucking extract her."
"They were trying to bring her home." Bruno's mouth twists. "Cesare's home. Whether she wanted to go or not."
I think about the men in my hallway. The blood on the floor. Dante's bullet grazing his arm.
"We killed Orsini's men."
"Yes."
"We killed the soldiers of a man who runs Milwaukee, and we have his daughter in our fucking compound."
"Yes."
The silence stretches. I can hear my own heartbeat, loud and steady in my ears. The wound in my thigh aches like it knows something bad is coming.
"What does Orsini want?"
Bruno looks at Valentino. Valentino looks at me.
"He wants his daughter," Bruno says finally. "And he wants the head of whoever took her from him."
"She wasn't fucking taken. She came with me because someone was trying to kill her."
"That's not how Cesare sees it." Bruno's fingers tap against the arm of his wheelchair. "In his mind, you kidnapped his child. You're holding her against her will. And now his men are dead because of you."
"She doesn't even know who she is."
"That's the only reason you're still alive.
" Bruno's eyes are flat, unreadable. "Cesare doesn't want her to find out this way.
He's been planning how to approach her for two years.
He has a whole story prepared—how he only just discovered her existence, how he searched for her, how he wants to welcome her into his family.
He can't do that if she finds out he's been watching her like a fucking stalker. "
"So what? We hand her over? Let him spin his bullshit story?"
"We're going to be smart about this," Bruno says.
The door opens behind me. Dante walks in first, and Liam follows, closing the door with a quiet click.
Bruno waits until they're both settled before he continues. "I have an idea."
I don't like the way he says it.
"Luca will marry her."
The words don't make sense. I hear them, but they slide off my brain like water.
"What?"
"You heard me." Bruno's voice is calm. Patient. The voice of a man who doesn't need to repeat himself. "You'll marry Gemma Holt. It solves several problems at once."
"I won't."
Bruno looks at me. His expression doesn't change. He doesn't argue, doesn't threaten, doesn't explain. He just looks.
Then he turns to Liam.
"Liam will marry her then."
Liam nods. One sharp movement of his head. No hesitation. No question.
"Fuck that," I say.
Valentino laughs. The sound is harsh, unexpected. "Are you fucking her?"
I turn on him so fast my bad leg screams. "Watch your fucking mouth."
Valentino laughs harder. The kind of laugh that comes from somewhere deep in his chest, the kind that says he's figured something out and finds it hilarious. He shakes his head, still laughing, and leans back against the window frame.
"You're not fucking her," he says. "But you want to. That's worse."
I don't answer. My hands are fists at my sides.
Bruno watches the exchange with the same flat expression he's worn since I walked in. When the room goes quiet again, he speaks.
Bruno's fingers tap against his desk. "I want to start business with Orsini."
"You've never wanted business with Orsini." Valentino says.
"I didn't have leverage before." Bruno's eyes land back on me. "Now I do."
The pieces are clicking together in my head, but I don't like the picture they're making. "Why the fuck does he want her now? Dominik told him about her two years ago. He shot the bastard and sent him running. If he wanted his daughter, why didn't he take her then?"
Bruno is quiet for a long moment. His fingers stop tapping.
"I don't know."
The admission surprises me. Bruno always knows. Bruno has answers for everything, plans within plans, contingencies stacked three deep. Bruno doesn't say I don't know unless he means it.
"Cesare Orsini has watched that woman for two years without making contact." Bruno's voice is thoughtful now, like he's working through a puzzle out loud. "He knew where she lived. Where she worked. He knew about the child. He could have approached her any time he wanted. Instead, he waited."
"For what?"
"That's the question." Bruno looks at Valentino. "What does a man like Cesare wait for?"
Valentino pushes off from the window. "The right moment. The right circumstances. Something that makes the approach look natural instead of calculated."
"And now we've fucked that up for him," Dante says from the wall. His voice is rough, tired. "We killed his men. We have his daughter in our house. Whatever story he was planning to tell her, it doesn't work anymore."
"Which means he has to adapt." Bruno's mouth curves into something that isn't quite a smile. "And when a man like Cesare adapts, he makes mistakes."
"There's something else," Bruno says. "A year ago, Cesare tried to marry off his legitimate daughter. Natalia. She was twenty-three," Bruno continues. "He arranged a marriage with Giovanni Falcone. Sixty-two years old."
My stomach turns. Giovanni Falcone is a piece of shit. Everyone knows what he does to the women in his house. Everyone pretends they don't.
"Natalia ran," Bruno says. "Three days before the wedding. Disappeared. Cesare's been looking for her ever since."
The implication settles into my bones like ice water.
Cesare Orsini sold his daughter to a monster. The daughter he raised, the daughter he supposedly loved. He traded her like livestock for a business deal.