Vow Of Fire (Blood and Vows #1)

The Art of Extraction

Dante

Ileaned against the far wall of the basement, arms crossed, studying the traitor tied to the chair.

Alberto Ferro was shaking, his face and hair slick with blood and sweat.

His cheap suit was in shreds, torn when Rocco grabbed him off the street earlier today.

His lip was split down the middle, blood mingling with saliva as he whimpered through his half-open mouth.

His left eye was swollen shut, and a nasty bruise was forming on his right cheekbone.

It wasn’t pretty.

I’d given Rocco twenty minutes alone with him, and that had been enough. The guy was a quivering wreck.

The naked bulb hanging above the chair flickered in the dim light of the filthy warehouse. Rocco stood to the side, cracking his knuckles one at a time. The sound was unhurried, and all the more disturbing for it.

Alberto flinched, and to be honest, I couldn’t blame him. Izzy had found Rocco a few years back at an underground boxing match, pulling him off some guy he was beating the shit out of on the pit floor. According to my sister, he’d been a monster down there.

My family paid him well to keep doing what he loved. Breaking people.

In the chair, Alberto wept.

I let him.

Six of my men were dead. Blake. Reggie. Cam. Three more whose families I’d visited only that morning, whose wives I’d looked in the eye and lied to.

No, they didn’t suffer. It was a quick death.

My jaw tightened. They didn’t need to know the truth.

But that wasn’t all. Three million in product gone. An entire fucking shipment. Our route into the country compromised. An ambush no one had seen coming, executed with information that could only have come from inside the gallery whose containers we’d used.

So Alberto could cry for as long as he wanted. I had time.

A long beat passed, after which I nodded at Rocco. He pursed his lips and melted into the shadows. His job was done. I’d take it from here.

“Alberto,” I said in a low voice, stepping out from the shadows. His unswollen eye widened, as if seeing me for the first time. Beneath the mess on his face, he paled.

“You know who I am?”

He nodded. “D—Dante Mar—Marc…” He couldn’t get the words out.

“That’s right.” I cut him off. “You and I are going to talk about last Tuesday night.”

He drew in a shuddering breath. “I don’t know anything about that. I told Mr. Rocco that—”

I crouched in front of him, elbows on my knees. Close enough to smell the blood on his breath. We were eye to eye. This way I could read him better. I’d know if he was lying.

There was a click as Rocco let himself out.

The deserted warehouse sat in a rundown part of Brooklyn, sufficiently soundproofed and reinforced that no one would hear the screams of the people we brought here.

Nobody could get inside, either. Half the buildings in this neighborhood were condemned or owned by men like me. This one was both.

It stank of dust, diesel, and violence. Although we usually cleaned up the blood, there were still dark stains on the ground and a faint metallic stench in the air.

The cops didn’t come around here much, probably because nothing that went down in these parts was ever solved. It didn’t do anything for their closure rates.

Suited me fine.

Alberto coughed, then bent over and spat blood onto the concrete floor. I waited until he was upright again, then demanded, “Who did you tell about the shipment?”

He blinked at me. “Only the courier company that was supposed to pick up the paintings.”

The Agora Gallery represented a contemporary artist from Bogotá called Mateo Reyes, whose work was currently the gallery’s hottest acquisition. Art critics and collectors alike were salivating over his latest work, which meant Agora was shipping several of his pieces to New York.

“Not that shipment, dumbass.” I dragged a hand through my hair. Jesus Christ. Did he think we were doing all this for a couple of swirls of paint? “The drugs. Who did you tell about the drugs?”

He frowned. “What drugs?”

Vincent, our fixer, had arranged for the Colombian shipment to be hidden inside the temperature-controlled containers transporting the high-end art.

Because the containers couldn’t be opened for fear of ruining the paintings with all that salty sea air, they were the perfect hiding place for our product.

I sighed. So it was going to go down this way, was it?

“The container was ambushed, my men were shot. Their blood is still staining the fucking dockside. You were the only person who knew about that shipment.”

“You’ve got it all wrong, man. I work at the Agora Gallery. In logistics. I don’t know anything about drugs.”

He was convincing, I’d give him that much. Only problem was we had proof.

“We looked at the phone records, Alberto. Your desk line. You made several calls to an unregistered number in the weeks leading up to the delivery. Always after hours. Always on the days you worked late.”

He shook his head, confused. “I did? What number?”

“You tell me. It was a burner phone, Alberto. Whose number was it?”

His face crumbled. “I swear, I don’t know anything about any calls to a burner phone. Anybody could have used my desk phone.”

That was true, except we knew it wasn’t anybody. We’d been watching Alberto for some time, ever since he’d been seduced by a hot Russian model a month ago, a woman who was way out of this geek’s league. It was exactly the kind of play the Bratva would make. That’s why we’d looked into it.

Then, a few weeks later, our shipment gets ambushed in a style that closely resembled the Bratva’s MO. Coincidence? Not a fucking chance.

We’d taken precautions, obviously, but it hadn’t been enough. We hadn’t expected the scale of the ambush. That level of firepower was rare, even in my world. Again, the Russian crime syndicate was one of the few organizations that had the ability to pull off something like that.

“Not everyone had access to your system.” According to our fixer, who also happened to do the gallery accounts, along with a handful of the other small businesses we laundered money through, Alberto was the only one who had a login to the logistics database.

“Anyone could have hacked in.”

He was grasping. Trying to divert the blame.

I fixed him with a steely glare. “Then there’s the matter of the fifty thousand dollars you received from an offshore trust.”

He stared at me, then gasped. “That was from my uncle. He died and left me some money. It’s totally legit. You can check it out.”

“We did,” I answered through gritted teeth. “It came from the Caymans.” No name, no address, just a hefty sum under the radar. Definitely shady.

“That’s where he lived,” Alberto insisted. “He wanted to avoid inheritance tax.”

For fuck’s sake. How stupid did this guy think we were?

Whoever had paid this fucker knew how to hit us where it hurt—in our product line. In this case, it was a rather large cocaine shipment that had come in last week from our Colombian associates.

Except it had never reached us. Armed mercenaries had stormed the container after it had been offloaded, stealing our merchandise and neutralizing my guys waiting to take delivery. It had been a goddamn massacre.

With no survivors, there was nobody to report back. CCTV in the container yard was sketchy. Precisely why we’d chosen it.

“Who got to you, Alberto?” I said quietly. “Who did you tell?”

He was sobbing now, tears mixing with the sweat and blood smeared on his face. “Nobody. It wasn’t me.”

Well, the leak sure as hell hadn’t come from our side. My family was tight.

Nico, my brother, had vetted everybody who worked in that gallery, and Alberto was the only one with access to the shipping details. Then there were the suspicious call logs, and the fifty grand from an account in the Caymans.

I knew better than most that everyone had a price. My time in the military had taught me that.

I absently fingered the old scar on my left forearm, long since covered by a tattoo of a bullet hole—jagged-edged, the kind you’d see in a comic book. Apt, I’d thought when I’d had it done. Most men hid their scars. I’d had mine inked louder, so I wouldn’t forget.

A betrayal. A bullet I should have seen coming. A constant reminder that life was cheap and trust was cheaper.

I stared at the pathetic logistics manager, letting the silence drag out.

“Last chance, Alberto. Use it.”

“Okay, okay,” he stammered.

I exhaled. Finally. It was about fucking time.

“It wasn’t me. But… I might know who it was.”

I narrowed my eyes. Another attempt to shift the blame? Find a scapegoat? Or was there really another player in all this? A third party leaking information to our rivals that we didn’t know about.

“Who?” I demanded.

He hesitated. “If I tell you, will you let me go?”

I scowled at him. “Now that depends on whether I like what you’ve got to say.” If he was on the level, there might be a deal to be made. I was a reasonable man.

To a point.

He gulped.

“She knew what was going on,” he blurted out.

“Who?”

“The gallery owner. The woman who hired me.”

I mulled that over. We’d had very little to do with the gallery management. Vincent was our inside man. He handled the laundering side, and he was fucking good at it. I’d never even been to the Agora before.

“It’s true I deal with the logistics,” Alberto went on. “But she paid the shipping fees and organized the climate-controlled transport for the artist. She had access to the exact docking times, vessel name, and container coordinates.”

Except, she wouldn’t have known about the drugs. Vincent would have made sure of that.

“I also caught her at my computer last week,” he added, eyes widening in recollection.

I let the silence stretch out. “I hope you’re not lying to me.”

“I’m not, I swear. When I came in, she said she had to look something up on the manifest. I’m the only one with access to the system, so she has to use my login when she needs anything.”

I went still. “The shipping manifest?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, his front teeth pressing down on his lower lip, reminding me of a beaver. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. She could have used my desk phone. She’s always working late at the gallery.”

I drew in a breath. “What is her name?”

“Evelyn Cruz.”

I repeated it to myself. Once, twice. Tasting it on my tongue.

“She has some very wealthy clients,” Alberto continued, eager to help now that he had my attention. “Investors. Wealthy individuals. Russians.”

“Russians?”

“Yeah. Mikhail Orlov is a personal friend. He’s often at exhibitions and auctions.”

Fuck. Then it was the Bratva.

Orlov was the money man for Sergei Malakov, the head of the New York branch of the Russian crime syndicate. They were a growing threat to Marcelli business and had been a thorn in our side for the last few years.

“There’s an exhibition tomorrow night,” he continued, blabbering now. “You should ask her.”

“Maybe I will,” I murmured, straightening up.

Alberto might be full of shit, but there was one way to find out. I had to speak to this Evelyn Cruz.

This was our first tangible lead since my men were ambushed. If the gallery owner had told her Russian client about our shipment details, their blood was on her hands.

“What are you going to do with me?” Alberto whimpered.

I straightened up and pulled out my phone. “You’re going to stay put, Alberto. Until we can verify whether what you’re saying is true.”

I fired off a text, and a second later, the door opened and Rocco stepped inside.

Alberto whimpered. “Tell him to lay off me. I’m not lying, I swear—”

Rocco smiled. A thin, sinister grin.

I glanced at the man Izzy had rescued from the pit. His loyalty was unquestionable. He’d do whatever I said, when I said it. I knew that much.

“Rocco, behave yourself until we can verify his story.” I paused, my eyes glinting dangerously back at the prisoner. “And if it turns out he’s lying, he’s all yours.”

The smile deepened.

Alberto trembled.

Ten minutes later, I stepped out into the cool October night. The warehouse door slammed and I breathed in, leaving the smell of blood and sweat behind me. The fresh air bit at my skin, but I relished it.

Evelyn Cruz.

I didn’t know who she was. Not yet.

But I would.

If she was in any way responsible for my men’s deaths, then she was already dead.

She just didn’t know it yet.