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Gia is exceptional at her job, and most of the time I don’t want to know how she gets the information she does. There are several reasons for this, of course, but mostly I’m fairly certain that I would have to hold her to justice in some way if I did.
There are rules, even if it seems like there aren’t, and I don’t want to know if Gia crosses them.
However, Caterina’s words flutter around my head, an angry swarm of bees that plague me in a way that they shouldn’t.
She had a lot of questions.
But they were unfortunately excellent questions.
And, as I sit, I have to admit that the answers to them could change some things.
Could change a lot of things, actually.
She’s right.
The Russians don’t have any reason to attack us as an organization, or attack me in particular. I just signed a dealwith them not two months ago that set us both up nicely for a lucrative set of exchanges around a variety of well-made faux leather goods that keep plenty of money flowing to us from the US, where the demand is high, and people are both rich and stupid.
Unless, of course, the question she posed is right.
Who do they owe a favor, and who owes a favor to them.
Fuck.
Unfortunately, I think that I am the one they owed a favor to. Gia got one of their daughters, a pale, waiflike creature, out of a spot of trouble in Greece about a year ago. It turns out, even protected princesses like Alyona can manage to slip their guard, provided the right motivation.
The motivation, in this case, was a Greek shipping baron’s son, who had no intentions of treating the slip of a girl in a way that her father approved of.
Gia returned the girl to the family’s summer home in St. Petersburg, intact in all the ways that mattered.
Hence, the favor.
However, it is highly possible that there was more at play than just my favor. In fact, if another group had something that the Russians couldn’t function without…
Fuck.
That opened up a world of problems. Literally. The Russians had their fingers in double the pies, so to speak, that I did. They could have issues with anyone, from the yakuza to the cartels that dominated South America.
If any one of them had some kind of leverage that I didn’t…
A favor was outweighed by many things.
But what?
And who wanted to start a war with me that badly?
Of course, my mind went to the De Lucas. After all, they had the most to gain if a larger power took us down. Marco would be poised to take over all of my business enterprises, especially after my marriage to Caterina.
But she had a point there as well.
The De Lucas were miniscule compared to the Rossis. They were insects at the feet of giants, and if they were to do something like this, it would be the gamble of someone far, far more desperate than I knew Marco to be.
And someone stupider.
She was also right about the fact that her family wouldn’t have leaked Luna’s location. Gia, again, is extremely good at her job. I have complete confidence that if Gia did know about Luna, she would have said something.
She did, upon finding out that there was something odd about a townhouse. At the time, however, she had thought it one of the boys’ mistresses put up with a child.
She didn’t know.
