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A very, very bad place to be.
If Rudy wasn’t very careful, if his son wasn’t even more careful, then they would soon find themselves facing that bastard Cranston and those hick Mackays in the worst possible way. That was something Rudy intended to avoid at all costs.
He’d had the family investigated after Marlena’s disappearance and Gerard’s death. What he had learned made him wary. The shadowed vendetta that had played out against his organization for a year afterward still had the power to keep him awake at night.
The authorities had watched his family much too closely, his sources among the law enforcement agencies began disappearing, but when his son had been jerked out of England after leaving the family and nearly imprisoned, Rudy had known they had made enemies the family could ill afford. Word on the street was that the Genoa crime organization had shaken the wrong tree in Kentucky and they were going to pay for it.
It was a tree he had no intentions of shaking again in a way that meant he, or anyone in his organization, could be identified.
The only good thing that had come of it? Homeland Security had pissed Andre off enough to return home and ensure that they could never do so again. He was now learning the ropes and moving in as Rudy’s right hand. And a very effective right hand he was.
The bodies Andre disposed of were never seen again. There was no evidence to lead back to Rudy, Andre, or the family, and no loose lips spilling family business secrets.
It was a good life.
Unless those gems weren’t in his possession when the owners came looking for them.
Resignation burned a hole in his gut.
Fuck. He was going to have to go after a Mackay.
He wasn’t frightened of the Mackays, but he was definitely on guard against them.
So much so that he would have gladly let the disappearance of those stones go, unless the Mackay girl tried to sell them. He would have washed his hands of them if the men arriving soon to collect them would have been willing to do the same. Or if perhaps they would have taken the task of collecting them from Kentucky.
That wouldn’t happen, though. At least, not until they wiped every last trace of the Genoa family from existence.
Yes, this definitely had the potential to be very, very dangerous. And that potential was growing by the minute.
SIX
Andre Genoa stared at the hotel from the driver’s seat of the dark gray van with a growing sense of fury as he disconnected the call he’d just taken.
Son of a bitch. He didn’t need this, not right now. Not at this point in the game.
“Marcel says she’s just called for a bellhop, Dennis,” he told the man he’d chosen to retrieve the jewels. “You’ll go up. When she answers the door, load her belongings. Maneuver her cart into the elevator first, where Marcel will be waiting for you. He’ll block her while the doors close. Take the cart to the room service elevator and out the back entrance. I’ll be waiting for you there. We’ll just take everything, then go through it later. ”
Dennis was the less violent of the two men, and the one known to be the most protective of his daughter and wife. He was Andre’s best bet in ensuring Piper Mackay wasn’t harmed.
“Got it, boss. ” Nodding his head, Dennis opened the door and slid from the front passenger seat.
As the door closed behind Dennis’s bulky form, Nate Ryan, his best friend and partner, moved into the seat, his gray eyes narrowed against the lights of the vehicles moving along the busy street as Andre pulled out of the parking space and headed toward the hotel’s back entrance.
“This doesn’t feel good, Andre,” Nate murmured as they turned down the small street used for deliveries. “It doesn’t feel good at all. Who chose Marcel to head to the hotel ahead of us?”
“No, it doesn’t,” Andre murmured. “Rudy didn’t say anything about sending extra men in. ”
He hoped it was just indigestion, but something warned him this task was a hell of a lot more dangerous than the Mexican food they’d eaten earlier.
Marcel tended to give him indigestion, though. The man was a self-important moron. His arrogance had only grown in the past year, after Rudy and Boris Cheslav had chosen him as an emissary between the two families. Marcel had saved Boris’s ass a few years back when he’d learned that a relative of the family working an important drug buy was actually a DEA plant. Boris had immediately moved the other man into the upper level of his organization.
When Boris had approached Rudy with the request to handle the jewels coming into the city, he’d revealed the fact that Marcel, Rudy’s third cousin, was actually one of his men, and would be their contact during the transaction. Which meant Andre couldn’t get rid of him, as much as he would love to.
Marcel was fucking untouchable until the agreement Rudy had made with the Russian family was completed. If the other man disappeared, then the suspicious, highly paranoid Russian might just slip the leash his own son had on him, and strike out at the Genoa family. They couldn’t risk that.
Pulling the van into place, Andre glared at the back entrance of the hotel, willing Dennis to hurry, to complete the theft of the girl’s belongings quickly.
“A fucking Mackay,” Nate sighed beside him then. “What are the chances?”
