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“Maddalena, stay in the car.” Garrix gets out and checks the area.
He raises his gun as he scans the shipping containers, then goes around them and out of sight. I don’t like not having a visual of him, but he didn’t motion for me to get out yet. A shot rings out from the direction he disappeared in. I jump out of the car, my gun in hand, as I run to the shipping containers. When I find Garrix, his face is covered in blood, and there’s a man face down on the ground.
Garrix
“Kitten, I didn’t tell you to get out of the car,” I reprimand her, but she just smiles. “We’ll talk about that later. Since you’re here, got anything to tie this fucker up?”
“I was worried. Did he shoot you?” She checks my body as she undoes the belt on her dress, sighing in relief when she doesn’t find a bullet hole.
“Ha, no. I shot him to incapacitate him.”
She checks his pulse, then ties his wrists. I drag him back, and Rocco smiles.
“Look what you caught down by the docks,” he guffaws. “It looks a little small, you want to throw it back?”
Leo snickers, and I roll my eyes. The unknown man tries to free himself, but his vision is unfocused and he seems pretty out of it.
“There’s a good hiding place for surveillance near the entrance. Knew I’d catch someone there.” Everyone stares at me. “I may have watched Maddie before I officially met her. It’s a long story, and we don’t have time to get into it. We have a meeting we’re late to.”
I hear Rocco mutter stalker, but before I can say anything, Maddalena touches my arm.
“Hold on one minute.” She takes some baby wipes out of her purse and cleans my face off. “Your eyebrow is split. Take these and try to put some pressure on it after we get in.”
Rocco and I drag the man inside, much to the curious murmuring of the Vettore family. The table is only half full tonight—Franco, Luca, JC, Max, her father, Gabriele, and a man I recognize as her Zio Tomasso, the Consigliere.
Fox is also there. He gives me a wave and I smile back at him. “You’ve been busy, son.”
“Keeping Maddalena safe is a full time job. My favorite job,” I reply. She smiles, and I yearn to capture it in a picture. But my knuckles are busted and bloodied, and I have to deal with this shithead I found.
Rocco and I throw him onto the table, much to Don Vettore’s frown.
“Look who I caught lurking around the front door,” I announce. I cut his shirt down the middle to show his tattooed chest, and when the table sees them, everyone falls silent. “Looks Russian to me.”
“Who’s running point on security tonight?” Maddalena asks. “I didn’t see anyone outside, and this asshole shouldn’t be here to begin with.”
“I instructed the security to lie low and out of sight. I didn’t want to broadcast that all the core members of the Vettore family are having a meeting,” Luca replies.
“What happened on the way over here? I’m assuming it’s bad since you all walked in together, and you look like that,” Max asks as he gestures to my eyebrow.
“We had a tail, and your sister and I decided to meet them head on. They shot up the car, and your cousin and his partner gave us a ride,” I explain.
“This is the second time we’ve been confronted by Russians,” my little killer says, her voice cold and firm. “We have reason to believe there’s a mole inside Nuova Notte feeding them information.”
“And what proof do you have of that?” John Carlo spits, his words dripping with venom. “You can’t just throw shit like that around, Maddie. This is serious.”
I crack my knuckles, trying to distract myself from the vivid daydreams I’m having of throttling this asswipe and choking him to death. Thankfully, Don Vettore clears his throat, snapping me back to reality.
“Maddie, can you explain the reasoning and evidence behind that for us?” Don Vettore leans forward in his chair. “I know you and Garrix have been investigating this, but I need proof before I act on it.”
“I didn’t have any clothes after my apartment got ransacked, so we arranged for a personal shopper to pick out some things for me at Van Auso, and we went to pick them up. Bridget kept trying to get me to try the clothes on before we left because there were Russian soldiers hiding in the changing rooms when we arrived. She later admitted they knew I was coming there, and that they threatened her daughter.”
“You gave her the ultimatum to sell her shop because she betrayed you,” the Consigliere puts the pieces together. He must have had his meeting with her already.
“They asked me to use my backway into the city’s camera system to pinpoint when they got there. They arrived about fifty minutes after Maddie placed the order,” Max adds. He nudges his sister’s elbow, and she gives him a tense smile. I think it’s his way of letting her know he’s here for her.
“The only way they could have mobilized that fast was if someone from Nuova Notte tipped them off. The only people from Garrix’s security detail that knew were French and their resident tech genius, Whit,” she explains.
“The Brigade doesn’t betray each other—that’s part of our code. We’re brothers and sisters in arms,” Fox says.
