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“You do realize this is the twenty-first century, right?” Dante sneered.
“I don’t want to leave a trail online. Especially if the Snake can access it easily.” David didn’t bother to look up. He held down the corners of the map with anything that had been lying around; unused coffee cups, a plate, and the wooden napkin holder.
My eyes scanned the paper warily. There were red dots along the river running through New York City, as well as the coast along Jersey and further up north. “What is this?”
“This…is every shipment and deal we’ve tracked for the past year.”
“Wait—the past year?” My head snapped up. “But we’ve only known about the Snake for a few months.” Dante and Killian exchanged dark looks.
“You’ve only known, yes.” He seemed unbothered by the fact that he’d kept this information to himself for so long. “We’ve been tracking them for much longer.”
“And you still haven’t been able to catch them,” Dante cut in. “So why do you expect to catch them now?”
“Because they seem particularly interested in the two of you,” David pointed out.
“You want to use us as bait.” Dante’s voice fell flat. “Fuck that.”
“Dante.” I shot him a warning glare. “Just let him talk.”
“The Snake has had various dealings locally and internationally, in the black market for weapons, drugs, and everything in between.” David’s finger traced the red dots along the coast. “Not only have they been stealing territory from your families and the other criminal families in the city, but they’ve been slowly expanding across the ocean in Europe, Northern Africa, and Asia.”
My eyes widened slightly as the air was knocked from my lungs. “I never realized it was this big.”
“You wouldn’t have.” David glanced up at me. “You’ve been a bit preoccupied.”
“If this is so big, then why do they have a small town suit like you dealing with it?” Killian asked, folding his arms across his chest.
David sighed. “Because I’m not as small town as you think I am? That’s beside the point.” He pointed to our family’s shipyard. “The point is that there’s another shipment coming in. And that would be the best time to try and get the Snake’s men to talk.”
“That’s pointless.” Dante shook his head. “None of them will talk. If we do manage to catch one alive, they’ll either kill themselves or refuse to give anything up. Not that they can tell us anything anyway. None of them have met the Snake.”
“There’s one.”
We all looked at David in surprise. “There’s no way,” Dante insisted. “I would have heard about it.”
“You don’t have our resources,” David noted. “We found one man who had a connection with all of this. He’s most likely the closest to the Snake. Or, at least the closest person we know of.”
“Who?” I asked quietly.
“Ivan Caputo.”
I frowned, trying to remember where I knew that name from. Dante’s face went white. Killian’s breath hissed through his teeth.
“Your source is wrong.” Dante’s words cracked at the end.
“Ivan’s been our father’s underboss for as long as I can remember,” Killian said. “There’s no way he’s involved. We would have known about it.”
“Just like you knew all the other men who switched sides?” David shot back.
Ivan…now I remembered. Ivan never really spoke much, and most of his dealings were used with his fist and gun rather than his words. I didn’t know much about the guy, just that he’d been close to Sal Scarano and had become a made man, even if he wasn’t full-blooded Italian.
“Tell me,” David leaned over the table, “where is Ivan right now?”
Dante’s mouth opened once before snapping shut. A dark look passed over his face. “I lost contact with him. With everyone, really, even my own brother. I’m not sure where he is.”
David turned to Killian, who shrugged. “I never know anything, so don’t look at me.”
“We tried to find him,” I said slowly, “after Dante left everything to me. But no one could. He disappeared.”
