Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 83776 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83776 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 419(@200wpm)___ 335(@250wpm)___ 279(@300wpm)
And now it’s fucking things up.
“He’s swearing up and down that he never stopped. Do you want me to rough him up? Maybe if I take an ear—”
“Absolutely fucking not,” I say, nearly shouting at the damn phone. “Do not hurt the goddamn driver. He’s a fucking Rossi employee, and we’re supposedly their ally. Keep him restrained, keep him talking, but don’t go beyond that.” I rub my face, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. Time to take charge of this clusterfuck before it gets worse. “Call Dominic and tell him what’s up. He’ll report this to my father. I’ll call Carlo Rossi and find out what the fuck he has to say for himself. When I get there, I’ll talk to the driver personally, and we’ll straighten this out. Do you understand this? Call nobody but Dominic. Keep this quiet for now.”
Emilio clears his throat and I know he’s about to say something I won’t like. “There are half a dozen soldiers here, you know, to help unload. They’re our guys, but you know how the soldiers can be. They don’t shut the fuck up.”
“Keep them contained. Take their fucking phones if you have to, I don’t care, but keep them quiet. I’ll be there soon.”
I hang up, breathing hard. This is fucked. This is beyond fucked—it’s the worst-case scenario.
If the truck had been caught midway and robbed by someone like Santoro, I can handle that. I’d hunt down my merchandise, steal it back, and kill anyone that dared to take what’s mine. That’s simple math.
But this is a mess. It sounds like nobody actually stole from the truck—so either the Rossi Famiglia decided to short me, which I really doubt considering Stefania is still in my bed right now, or somehow the whole mission was compromised from the start, and Santoro’s got spies all the way in the Rossi organization.
If that’s the case, my life is going to get very difficult.
Don Alessandro stands in the middle of the warehouse with his arms crossed over his chest and glares down at the opened crates before him. I remain off to the side, watching as my father inspects the weapons that managed to show up. His personal bodyguard and close advisor Dominic Amato, a severe-looking bald guy with a graying bushy beard and a bizarre obsession with Adidas track suits, walks beside him and quietly points out what’s missing based on a shipping manifest.
“Carlo swears he oversaw packing himself,” I say once my father’s through. He stands motionless and it’s hard to read his expression, but I know him well enough to say he’s beyond fucking pissed right now, as I expected. “He says every single weapon was accounted for when the truck left his facility.”
“You trust him?” Father asks, and it’s the sort of question that comes laced with a dozen implications.
“I’m married to his sister. I trust him.”
He grunts and looks back at the crates. Right now, he’s not my father—this is all business, and the kind, jovial man that lets his guard down among his family during Sunday dinner is gone, replaced by the cruel, vicious kingpin of a powerful crime family.
That’s my father’s real superpower. He’s multiple people jammed into one body: loving and doting, sinister and terrifying, deadly and heartless, kind and magnanimous, all depending on what the situation calls for. Growing up with him was both good and terrifying depending on the day, and I learned how to ride his moods like a wave, adapting and surviving as needed. I wouldn’t say my father is a bad man, and I’d kill anyone that suggested I had a hard childhood, but I’m also aware that my father is more complicated than most people understand.
“The driver,” he says and looks back toward the storage room where he’s being held.
“He swears he stopped only twice, once to use the bathroom and once to get fuel. He claims he was out of the truck for a total of thirty minutes, tops, and Carlo vouched for him.”
Dad grunts and looks at Dominic.
“We could get creative with our questioning,” the bodyguard suggests.
I grimace and hold up a hand. “He’s a Rossi soldier. If we start hurting him without permission, there could be problems. We don’t need to start anything with an ally right now, not when Uncle Luciano’s getting aggressive.”
Dad gives me a hard stare. “Stop calling him that,” he says, his nose wrinkled as if he smells something bad. “What do you suggest then? Since this was supposed to be your job.”
I look away from him and step toward the crates. “I’ve been running this through my head all morning, and there are only two reasonable scenarios. First, the driver is lying, and he’s secretly working for Santoro, but if that’s the case it’s basically suicide to show up here with missing goods. Second, Santoro somehow knew this was happening, and he had a skilled team break into that truck while the driver was taking a piss and cleared out what they could before he came back. I think the second of the two is the most plausible.”