“This isn’t just a regular job,” I say as I show him my phone. “A contraband run in Noho? Something’s off with this. I can’t let her do it.”
“You need to let her do it,” Leo presses. “We won’t find out who’s behind everything unless we see this through.”
Something isn’t quite sitting right with me about Leo right now either. He’s usually the first to jump to Camille’s aid. He can’t possibly be that mad at her for sleeping with me. “Aren’t you the one who’s usually trying to watch out for Camille? And now you’re just willing to let your best friend walk into an unknown scenario in Noho?”
“Camille wants to see this thing through too,” Leo says as he stands his ground. It’s not often my little brother stands up to me, but lately he’s been trying his hand at it more. “Don’t you think that she wants to know who’s trying to kill her? If you pull her out of this now, you’ve exposed that this is a trap to lead us to the people behind the plot. She won’t get a second chance at this, and you’ll never find out who’s responsible. She’ll spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder. I don’t think that’s what she wants.”
I hate the fact that he’s right. “Fine,” I begrudgingly agree. I really want to catch the bastard behind this and put him down so that I can get on with my regular business of running myborgata. And so I can spend some time trying to figure out how I feel about Camille. I look back over at her and see that not only is the man who was at the mailbox gone, but Camille is ready to be on the move too. Whatever the job is, it looks like she’s starting on it right now.
After shooting a quick text to Nick, the three of us all trail Camille on her run from a distance. Hopefully, this run will lead us to whoever’s behind this. We make it all the way to the edge of Noho, watching Camille like a hawk as she weaves in and out of people on the street and gets on and off the subway. But then we run into a problem. I hear Leo make a noise behind me as we step off the train and onto the subway platform, and I turn to see what’s happened. I don’t even know how he’s managed to do it, but somehow he’s gotten his arm stuck in the closing train doors.
“Gabriel!” Nick says in a short panic as he turns to try and pull my brother’s arm free. The train doors are automated. They won’t wait or stop just because someone was foolish enough to get snagged in the doors. The subway is getting ready to pull away from the station and Leo will be dragged from the platform and beneath the moving train.
I turn and throw all my weight behind trying to pry the door open with no success, and I can hear the train get ready to move. “You idiot!” I shout at him. This level of carelessness is impressively stupid, especially now when I’m trying not to lose sight of Camille. Between the urgency to get him unattached to the subway before the train moves, and my anger at my brother for making me take my eyes off Camille, I yank him sharply to lodge his arm free, dislocating his shoulder in the process. He lets out a yell that makes a whole crowd of people on the platform turn around. But at least he’s wrenched free from the train before it pulls away with only seconds to spare.
I turn around in a frenzy to set eyes back on Camille, but she’s gone. “You fucking idiot!” I shout at him, not even caring about making a scene now that I’ve lost sight of Camille. Leo looks up at me in pain while Nick pops his shoulder back into place. “She’s gone! Camille is gone! How many times have you ridden on the subway in your lifetime, and you had to pick today to be a moronic fucking tourist and get your arm caught in the door?” I scold as I glare at my brother.
“It was an accident,” Leo says.
“I don’t care if it was divine intervention—we’ve fucking lost her now. Camille is missing.”
Nick tries to get me to calm down since people are starting to stop and stare at us. But Leo’s little absentminded injury has distracted me for a split-second long enough to lose Camille, and now I’m furious. “Call the crew and put every man on the search,” I tell Nick as he gets right on it. I can feel panic rising in my throat at the thought that something might’ve already happened to her. It all happened too fast. It was like the perfect storm. All it took was a split second of me being distracted and Leo being a fool, and now we’ve lost her.
The three of us search all around the area and all of my men scour the city for her. But after hours of trying to find her, everyone comes up empty-handed. “We need to get off the streets before our presence is noticed and it raises all sorts of red flags,” Nick warns. “If any of the othercapossee your whole crew combing the streets, they’re going to know something’s up.”
“Tell the guys to go back, then,” I say. “But I’m still searching for her myself.” Nick nods and gets ready to head back to gather the crew and get an update on things. “Take Leo with you,” I say as an afterthought.
“No, I’ll stay and help you look,” Leo protests.
“I think you’ve helped enough for one day,” I scowl at him. “Go back to my apartment and wait.”
Leo hates it when I pull rank on him, and he gives me an angry glare at my direct order, but I couldn’t care less. This is all his fault.
“Come on,” Nick says as he eases my brother along with him. “Best not to get into a brotherly fight out here in the open streets.”
After they leave, I spend the rest of the day and well into the night continuing to search for any clues that might point me toward Camille, but there’s nothing. After several more hours of shaking people down and scouring the city, I still have no idea where she is. I’ve tried messaging her phone, but the texts are showing as “undelivered,” which makes me even more worried about what’s happened to her. Finally, realizing that I need to regroup and come up with a more effective plan to locate her, I head back to my apartment to check on my stupid brother. I’m sure he’s still mad about his shoulder, but I’m also sure he’ll recover. I may have been harsh with him, but mistakes like that aren’t allowed in our kind of work. A mistake that distracts attention away from the mission could cost someone their life. It could cost Camille her life. And to be honest, I’m going to let him have it again as soon as I get back to the apartment building.
When I get to the front door of the building, I can already tell that something’s wrong. There’s a metallic smell of blood in the stale air of the hallway. Even in the elevator, there are signs that something’s happened—dried blood on the button leading to the penthouse floor.
As soon as the doors open and I step out into the top level, I’m greeted with the sight of a massacre. The bodies of some of my men litter the hall. Pito, my loyal underboss, is laying lifeless, his body sprawled in front of my door with his eyes wide open in the back of his head.
I panic as I race into my apartment and look around for Nick, only to find myconsigliereslumped in the corner of the entryway and sitting in a pool of blood. I race over to him and am relieved that he’s at least still alive.
“Nick, what happened?” I ask as I speed-dial 911.
“Leo’s been taken,” he says as he chokes up a mouthful of blood that he spits on the ground beside him. “We tried to stop them. But there were too many.”
“Who? Who did this?” Why did they want my brother?”
“Don’t know,” Nick says, wincing as he tries to shake his head.
One of the perks of being rich and powerful is having half the EMT staff in this city on my payroll, for incidents that require immediate assistance and no publicity. It’s only a matter of minutes before I hear the medics rushing up the stairwell and spilling out into the hallway. “Oh my God,” one of them says as soon as the stairwell door opens.
“In here!” I call out. “Get in here now! The ones in the hallway are already dead. We need your help in here!”
Several EMTs rush into my apartment and instantly start to tend to Nick as I pace the doorway and feel my rage start to boil in my blood for whoever did this. I watch as they load Nick onto a stretcher and start to carry him out. “Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah,” one of the female paramedics assures me as they quickly get Nick into the vehicle. “He’s going to need some stitching up and a blood transfusion, but he’ll survive. A moment later and he might not have. We’ll take it from here.” I nod and look around at the scattering of dead bodies in my hallway. “Did you already call the cops?” she asks.
