“Threaten my father?”
It takes me a second to place a conversation that feels like a lifetime ago. A conversation in an elevator in a hotel with a woman who had just become my wife.
“Mia…I never threatened Marco.”
She glances over at me, eyes shining with something distraught. “Don’t do that. Don’t lie to me.”
“I told you I would never do that. I didn’tneedto do that, why would I…” something suddenly clicked. “You never believed me, did you?”
“Just tell me the truth! If you just admit it, then maybe I can…maybe we can talk about it, maybe we can fix this.”
A part of me feels a pang of something warm at the thought of forgiveness—only this is not something I need forgiveness for.
“I never threatened him, Mia. I swear it. And…” I take a breath, knowing my next words might just incriminate me further. “I don’t think Teo would have either.”
“He didn’t,” she replies with certainty.
Ah. She’s spoken to him. She believed him. Which means all this time…
“Look, I think this is something you need to discuss with your father,” I say, surprised by how pragmatic the words come out. “But I need you to know that I would never. I could never intentionally hurt you.”
Her eyes flicker over to mine, and I pray that she sees the truth in my face.
This has been hurting her.I’vebeen hurting her.
“Okay.”
My heart skips. “Okay?”
“I’ll talk to him.”
I let out a breath. “Okay.”
The moment stretches again until Mia sighs and gets up.
“I’m sorry,” she pauses but continues before I can ask what for. “I didn’t get much information for you yesterday. Things went south a lot sooner than expected.”
I close my eyes for a moment to realign myself.
“We know that intercepting their shipments has caused them a fair bit of inconvenience. Hopefully, Amos is too distracted trying to placate his clients to notice us working against him.”
“Ivan is suspicious of me,” Mia says as she pads across the room to grab a bathrobe.
I click my tongue. “I tagged his car before I left. Do you think he’d jeopardize your position with Carmen?”
She turns to look at me, contemplating something with her teeth against her bottom lip. “He told me if I stepped out of line, he’d…” she swallows, “bleed me out in front of those tech guys and let them have me.”
Something very cold and very lethal comes over me.
“I think Ivan has outlived his usefulness.”
The tracker takes us to a factory near the Coney Island Yard, and sure enough, as Max and I pull up a block away, Ivan’s sleek, gray Mercedes is parked right outside.
We settle in to wait as long as we need to.
The sky turns slowly gray, and by the time Max is done getting me up to speed on his last meeting with Dante—the Guild is sending the Cartel’s stolen merchandise to California—the heavens have opened.
I watch as the rain trickles down the window. It makes it more difficult to see the entrance to the factory, but not impossible.
