“Marcello,” Igor chuckles. “Bad time?”
“Igor,” I say through gritted teeth. “You’re a dead man walking.”
“It’s a shame how all this is playing out,” he replies. His sadness almost sounds genuine. “Trust me when I say I did not want it to be like this, Marcello, but it was the only way.”
“Fuck you and your pathetic lies,” I spit. “Face me, you fucking coward!”
“I cannot, Marcello, even if I do want to, believe me.” He clears his throat, ending in a laugh like it’s a fun and games to him .The next time he laughs I will personally put a bullet in his brains. “Anyway, your guy, what was his name…Giovanni. He proved quite useful to us. So please thank him for me.”
Giovanni? What the—
It suddenly hits me like a ton of bricks.
Fuck.
Giovanni was a rat who leaked information to the Russians.
“I will be honest with you, Giovanni didn’t do it willingly. We were going to kill his baby daughter if he didn’t do as we said.”
”Fuck you,” I spit the words out as rage burn through my chest.
The old Russian sighs on the other end of the line. He talks to someone in a muffled back and forth I can’t hear. Then to me, he says, “We want you to know that we can do anything. Get to anyone. Even you.”
“Who is we? Igor, who the fuck is ‘we’?” I squeeze the phone so tight in anger that I’m surprised it doesn’t snap to bits. “Igor, if you don’t fucking—”
The line goes dead.
The fucking bastard!
I let the phone fall from my fingertips. It clatters to the floor. I stand still for a moment, breathing heavily, staring at the wall like it has answers written out for me. The only thing going through my head right now is that I want for nothing more than to rip my gun from its holster and shoot down any motherfucker who dared to betray me.
I almost shot the only man I can trust.
Fuck Giovanni. He will pay for this by eating his own tongue.
Finally, I turn to Claudio and offer him my hand to help him to his feet. “I am sorry, friend,” I whisper.
“Up the security and be ready for war,” I order as I set the gun down in the chair where Claudio was seated, and I stalk out of the basement.
I was seconds away from executing an innocent man, all because I was blind to the oldest trick in the book. Igor has me rattled. I won’t let it happen again.
I badly want to find Harper. When I’m with her, she calms me.
But I don’t have time right now. Instead, I go upstairs and retreat to my own quarters so I can figure out how I’m going to take down the Bratva.
Marcello
The door to my study swings open. Mario pauses at the threshold and looks at me. In his brown sweater vest, house slippers, and eyeglasses perched on his nose, he looks like a studious professor.
It’s nearly three in the morning.
“Little late for you to be awake, old man.”
“Sleep is elusive for a man of my age and condition. Too many ghosts in the brain, I think,” he says, tapping his forehead to illustrate. He winks. “You might know something about that, don’t you, Marcello?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m afraid that doesn’t seem to be true.”
I sigh and press the ice-cooled glass tumbler against my forehead. A migraine looms in my future. “I don’t need you to come down here and speak in riddles, vecchio.”
He chuckles again. Vecchio—Italian for “old one.” I’ve used this name for him for years now. As a general rule, I don’t like speaking Italian. It’s what I used to speak with my mother. English is a much harsher, more brutal language, and that suits me better. It doesn’t remind me of the dead past, either.
“How would you like me to speak then, Marcello?”
I turn my face with great effort to fix him with a cold glare. As cold as I can muster right now, at least. “At the moment, I’d like you not to speak at all.”
“Fair enough,” he says.
We sit there in silence for a while. I can sense Mario didn’t come here just to keep my company. He may be old, but he’s wily, always up to something, always making strategic moves. There’s a purpose to this visit.
“Fine!” I bark when I can’t take the quiet anymore. “For fuck’s sake, come on. Out with it.”
He looks at me over the top of his eyeglasses. Those brown eyes, so placid and comforting … I shudder. The last thing I want right now is to be comforted.
“Out with what?”
“Oh, for God’s sake, are you going to make me drag it out of you? Say whatever the fuck you came here to say, vecchio.”
This time, he doesn’t laugh. He just maintains that steady gaze, unblinking and unmoving. “I don’t think you will like what I came to say.”