Page 90 of Unruly

“Someone will be close.”

“How close?”

“Close enough,” Catherine replied, offering nothing else.

“Call me—”

“Boss?”

Cross looked up his desk at the new voice in his office. An enforcer—one of two that he had watching the house—stood in the doorway looking at him with concern. The man’s worry wrote heavy lines across his brow.

“We got, uh, a problem,” the man said.

Cross held up a single finger to ask the man to wait, and went back to his wife. “Catherine, I’m going to have to let you go. Call me when you get back, or … right after the meeting is done. Got it?”

“Don’t get bossy, Cross.”

“Catty.”

“I’ll call you. Love you.”

“Love you,” he echoed before pressing the button to end the call.

Cross gave all his attention to the enforcer in the doorway.

“A problem, you said?”

The man nodded. “At Zeke’s place.”

“Zeke isn’t at his place,” Cross said slowly as though he were talking to a small child. “He chose to move Kayta to somewhere else given our deadline to hand her back over to the Russians is now up.”

“I know that, boss, but—”

“What problem can there be?”

“The place is on fire.”

Cross straightened in his chair, and then instantly got to his feet. “You’re serious.”

“Since Zeke wasn’t home, we were told just to do a drive by check on the place every so often. The boys and I were taking shifts to check on it. Marty just got back—said the place is lit up like a dried Christmas tree. Firefighters and cops are already there. Half the damn block was standing out on the road watching the whole thing go down.”

Zeke’s house was a twenty-minute drive away. Three blocks from Wolf’s—Zeke’s father—home. He could call Wolf to let him know his son’s house was on fire, and be at Zeke’s place in less than fifteen minutes if he broke a couple of traffic laws.

Cross snatched the keys for his Rolls-Royce Phantom from the side of the desk.

“Someone call Zeke.”

“Will do, boss.”

“And one man stays here to watch my damn house. You and another can come with me, but stay close behind in your vehicle. We don’t need more surprises coming our way.”

Cross had absolutely no reason to suspect the fire was caused by the Russians, except … Zeke’s house was brand new, just built a couple of years earlier, and up to code. New houses didn’t usually just burn the fuck down unless they were helped along a bit.

Given the deadline was up for the Russian’s demands, they had yet to act on any Donati man, and silence always came before a storm, Cross just knew.

This was them.

Of course, it was.