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“You know I hate it when you do that.” She brushes his hand away, acting like he’s an annoying dad, but I catch their secret fist bump in the side mirror as he climbs out of the passenger seat.
Blending in with the other racegoers, we make our way into the course, keeping trackside and anonymous.
“I look like a city wanker.” Viper tugs at the lapels of his black Armani as we circumnavigate the Parade Ring.“Does my cock look big in this?”
“You’re the one who calls himself a snake.” I scan the rows of private boxes above us, but all I see is tinted glass. “Besides, you lived and breathed these types of threads when you and your father were the new order answer to the fucking Krays.
“That was before.”
Before they took her and broke her.
Before…A beautiful Ada-shaped line, separating the heaven of her body under me, opening up for me,undoing me,with the fourteen-year hell of her absence.
“What happens if Ada’s in there with O’Sullivan?” he says, reading my mind again.“How far are you willing to bend the rules?”
I push back hard on a feeling, swallowing it down like bad medicine. According to Silas, a car picked Ada up from her brick jailhouse six hours ago and she hasn’t returned home since.
“I’ll make it up as I go along.”
“Sounds perfectly reasonable,” he says, looking unimpressed. “In the meantime, I need a drink to cancel out the taste of corporate arseholery.” He takes a step towards the nearest bar when my hand comes crashing down on his arm.
“Wait.”
He turns to see what’s caught my attention, and then my hand becomes a restraint as he’s surging forward, his drink and self-control forgotten. “Get off me!” He twists his arm to shake me loose, his expression rabid. “You know what that bastard did to my father.”
Mine too.
“Wait,” I repeat, spitting out the word through gritted teeth as the tall, unmistakable figure of Guido Rossi glides past us, less than ten metres away, before disappearing inside an on-course bookies establishment. “Not here. Not out in the open. Get Bambi on the phone. Tell her to send me through the course map.”
But it’s like I’m talking to him through a wall. The rest of me is in another room with my dead father, being hustled out of the door. Next, I’m on a bridge in London, fighting with him for a freedom that was never mine in the first place, until, finally, I’m lying on the basement floor, choking on his treachery, listening to the sound of his footsteps on the wooden staircase as he walks away.
But he won’t be walking away today.
“You didwhat?” Next to me, Viper is firing threats into his phone before hanging up with a curse.
“What is it?” I murmur, my eyes never deviating from the bookies.
“Bambi got bored and gave Thiago the slip.”
For God’s sake.“Find her. I’ll improvise.”
I go to follow Guido, and then it’s Viper’s turn to stop me. “Tell me the plan first, before you fuck us all to hell.”
I give him the benefit of my coldest smile. “Santiago told us to leave O’Sullivan and Semenov alone, but he never said anything about the rats.”
CHAPTER 20
FRANKIE
The second Guido leaves the bookies, I’m his new shadow, tracking him back past the Parade Ring and into the Clubhouse.
Here, the crowds are swarming like flies, and the queues at the bar are ten-deep. I hang back behind a group of mouthy drunks—the patient executioner—as he waits to be served.
I never knew hate had a flavour. It’s flooding my mouth as I watch him acting all nonchalant, making small talk with the people waiting either side of him like he’s a regular rich guy in an expensive blue suit and not a King Deceiver wrapped up in his coat of lies.
Once he has a large whiskey in his hand, he moves to the far end of the bar where the crowds are less compact. He sips it slowly, savouring each mouthful, and then he’s glancing at the results of the last race on the giant flatscreen above him.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d say the old man was stalling.
