Page 42 of Daddies of the Underworld

He hadn’t eaten either. He never did when hunting.

Matteo took a sip of his espresso. “Who did you work for in Bari?”

Marco reached for his water instead of his coffee. “A restaurant near the port. Small place. You wouldn’t know it.”

“You'd be surprised.” Matteo made it obvious he wanted an answer.

“I don’t remember the name.” Marco shrugged, easy and embarrassed. “I washed dishes for cash. Not exactly a career highlight.”

Nina’s hand tightened around her fork, but she did not lift it. “He did what he had to do.”

“I did not say otherwise.” Matteo watched the siblings over the rim of his cup. To people who did not know him, they wouldn’t see anything amiss.

Dante and I did.

His stillness was a weapon, and it was also his defense.

Marco leaned back and pointed at me with his fork. “What about you? Nina said you grew up poor too.” He took his time looking around with a pointed stare. “Could have fooled me.”

My phone buzzed against my thigh, and I glanced at it beneath the table.

Matteo: Run Marco Russo. Full history. I want to know everything but do it quietly.

Which was why he’d sent this to me instead of our guy downstairs.

I tapped my fingers on the table, starting with my index and rolling down to my pinky.

Our signal that said I understood.

Matteo did not look at me.

He buttered a piece of toast with a superb calm like he had not just taken a proverbial knife to Nina’s moment of happiness.

Her life mattered more, and Marco had arrived a little too conveniently for all three of us.

That was one–of many–problems with men like us. We distrusted everyone.

And most of the time we were right.

After breakfast, Nina took Marco to see the garden terrace. Dante followed at a distance, and Matteo fell in step beside me.

I opened my office door and stepped inside. “If we do this and we’re wrong, it’s nothing. But if we are wrong and Nina finds out, she will have very many, very hateful words.”

Matteo stared at the cameras I ran in my space. It was nothing like the control room, but it allowed me to feel connected when I worked. “Better to be wrong and suffer her wrath than be right and let him hurt her because we feared her wrath.”

My thoughts exactly, but the confirmation made this easier. Still, I had one more thing to say. “She raised him. You saw her face. If we come at him too hard, she will stand between him and us. She will choose him.” I crossed to the desk and woke the monitors.

Matteo shook his head, his chin dropping toward his chest. “If he is a threat and we ignore it because she loves him, she may not live long enough to forgive us.”

Point taken. “Then we do everything carefully.” I logged into the summit finance portal and pulled up the transfer review I had abandoned last night. “No accusations until we have more answers.” Once I had the program running its financial analysis, I moved to a second screen and put Marco’s name into our customized background search. Seconds later, information began pinging up on the screen. “Partial hits in Bari and Naples. Inconsistent employment, which we expected. But he has a lot of debt.”

“Debt is a great motivator. Especially if that debt is owed to the bad people he mentioned.” Matteo sank into the chair beside me. He rarely did when in here, but every now and then he let himself be nothing more than a man with a problem too big to face standing up.

I pulled the debt file, but the early results showed nothing more than small loans and missed payments.

A few questionable transfers pinged from names that sounded fake enough to insult a snail. “His debt is spread out. It’s messy. It’ll take a bit to unravel.”

“Messy can kill.” Matteo spoke to the desk, his head in his hands.