AllFreeNovel
Share Us
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?”
What were the chances. For a man that didn’t believe in coincidence, he was suddenly being given supposed proof that they existed.
“The chances are pretty much fucking nil,” he growled. “After we get back, find out why she’s here, and start tying up loose ends. I want to know every fucking move she’s made, everyone she’s talked to, and every breath she’s taken since she made the decision to come to the city alone. Dawg Mackay is too fucking paranoid to let one of his sister’s travel here without a baby-sitter. And Timothy Cranston would die and go to hell before he’d let one of them travel anywhere alone without a shadow.” He turned and glared at Nate. “I haven’t found her shadow yet. That means, she doesn’t have one.”
Nate’s expression hardened. “Someone playing with us again?”
“That’s what my gut’s telling me.” Andre made the realization in a flash. “Someone’s definitely playing with us, and I want to know why.”
* * *
The planner Jed had scrawled his number in lay on the table next to the door, where Piper had thrown it after having to force herself not to call him. Again.
She wanted to call him.
She wanted to rail about the decision to travel to New York alone, and she wanted to curse Eldon Vessante to the pits of hell, and she needed someone to listen to her. Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of anyone she could call whom she could trust to keep the details to themselves.
Even Amy, the friend whose sister had given her a ride to the train station, couldn’t be totally trusted. If Amy even suspected Piper might be harmed, or had been, then she would call Dawg in a New York minute.
Amy might not know Dawg. She may not have a very high opinion of him after some of the stories Piper had told her about his protectiveness, but Amy had become a good friend over the past few years. She returned to Somerset each summer just to see Piper’s new designs, and over the course of those visits, they had become close.
Besides, Amy also trusted her sister, Gypsy, and Gypsy was a female version of the Mackay men. Pure military, tough, and suspicious. She would convince Amy to call the Mackays, if she didn’t just call Natches herself.
The only bright spot in the night was that she had been able to get a ticket on a train departing in two hours. It would put her in Louisville five hours later, and from there the price for a rental car home wouldn’t give away the fact that she had been in New York City.
