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And what might be happening to her.
“You heard that,” Luca said, voice tight.
“Yeah. You can’t stop Pops if he wants to do something.”
And, technically, he and Luca sort of shared the running of the Family. Our father had old contacts that were valuable, but Luca had the new knowledge, the contacts with the next generation that was taking over for their fathers.
So Luca didn’t exactly have authority over our father.
He was going to do what he felt like he had to do to help protect the Family.
“That’s Lettie,” Luca said when there was the slamming of doors in the driveway.
A moment later, a woman entered who was vaguely familiar, though I remembered her as this round-faced, standoffish kid who was always watching what was going on instead of engaging in it herself.
She was short, especially by our family standards, with a compact sort of body that was neither skinny nor plus-sized, but skirted that line in the middle.
Her black hair was cut in a blunt shoulder-length bob, framing a face that had lost some of its fullness with age, which allowed her natural bone structure to show through.
She was wearing jeans, a black long-sleeve t-shirt, and no-nonsense flats on her feet.
Behind her were two others, moving inside wearing dark blue scrubs.
“Who is worse?” Lettie called, tone calm and authoritative, making it clear this was not her first—or maybe even tenth—shooting. Which made me feel mildly better about the whole situation.
“Over here, Lettie,” Luca called. “Mass isn’t conscious,” he added as Lettie motioned for one of the scrub-clad women to attend to Aurelio as she and the other approached us.
“Never see you at these things,” Lettie said to me, by way of greeting, as she nudged me out of the way to get closer to Massimo. “Let’s see what we got,” she added, pulling off the dishcloth, and probing at Massimo’s thigh with her fingers.
And it must have hurt.
Because it was enough to shock Massimo back to bleary-eyed consciousness.
“Fuck. Can’t be good. She’s got her serious face on,” he said, looking at Lettie, but his eyes didn’t seem fully focused. “Josie,” he breathed out, gaze sliding to me.
“Gone.”
“Fuck. I tried to—“
“We know you did. You did everything you could,” Luca cut him off.
“Aurelio?”
“Alive. And in better condition than you. You need to be preserving your energy,” Lettie said.
“Basement,” Massimo said, gaze sliding back to me.
“Think he’s a little out of it,” Lettie shrugged as she shoved the dishtowel back into the wound. “We need to move him. Get the stretcher,” she demanded to her assistant who nodded and ran off to do so.
“The basement,” Massimo said again. “She threw one into the basement.”
“Threw one what?” I asked, not ready to brush it off as incoherent rambling, not with how serious his face looked right then.
“The men. The one who shot me. She threw him in the basement.”
He barely finished the sentence before I was getting to my feet.
“Matteo, wait,” Luca said, tone fake-calm. “You can’t go down there this early. You’ll shoot him before you can get any answers.”
At that, I reached into my holster, pulling out the gun, and slamming it down on my kitchen counter before making my way toward the basement.
No.
I wasn’t going to kill him.
But I was going to make him wish he was dead.
“Leave it,” I heard Luca call to either Lucky or Milo who were probably about to follow me. “Let him get it out of his system,” he added.
And those were the last words I heard as I shoved the console table out of the way, unlocked the door, and charged down the steps.
My shower curtain liner was half hanging off the side of the steps, likely there because Josie had used it to pull the guy out of the kitchen to lock him up.
The man himself was on his side on the ground at the bottom of the steps, rocking with a hand pressed to his head, and another to his side.
I barely even slowed momentum as I practically flew off the bottom stair, cocking back a leg, and slamming it full force into the fucker’s side, sending him sprawling onto his back, eyes huge.
With his hand down, I could see the knot on the top of his head that he’d been cradling. Someone had hit him over the head. And I couldn’t help but think it had to have been Josie. Massimo would have been incapacitated. She must have snuck up behind.
Which explained the cast iron skillet on the floor a few feet away from Mass.
She’d snuck up behind him and whacked him on the head. Likely when he’d been ready to put a final bullet in Massimo.
I didn’t like that she’d felt the need to do that, to step in, to be involved in shit she never should have had any part of.
