AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“When she cut her wrist, did you ever notice the small cut just below it?”
I think back to that night. She’d been gone for weeks while I'd been locked in my room surviving on bread and water. The only thing that kept me sane was the hidden phone I had to text Adrik with. All it did was text. I’d stolen it from one of the security guards. It was a burner phone with prepaid texts that I often bribed one of the maids to refill for me every few months.
My father had let me out of my room that night, telling me that he’d give Ada back once I apologized to Peter for shoving him in the dirt when he took my doll. I’d never apologized for anything so fast.
I’d found her in the bathroom with a torn-apart razor to her wrist. Fearing the worst, I slapped the razor from her hand and covered the cut with a towel. Now that I look back at that moment, I realize I didn’t pay attention to the mark. I’d just assumed she made it, like she told me. I took Ada at her word.
I was wrong to.
“The cut that scarred just below the mark is where the doctor guesses she was trying to dig under the skin to shear off the mark.”
If that’s true—if the mark wasn’t ever a scar she created, that means —
Lilacs.
Wisteria.
Dragonbells.
“She’s my sister.”
Twenty-Eight
The file before me is damning. It’s a firehose of information I’m attempting to disseminate. Luan Osmani, fifty-two years old. Spent most of his life in Albania until his cousin Armir, head of the mafia in Albania, moved Luan and his sister to Vegas. At the time, the Albanians were spearheading their way into weak territories that the five families held.
At the time, many of the mafia families were involved in their own civil wars, leaving their areas unprotected and without proper resources. Luan’s sister married Vegas’s Albanian boss, a man named Edan, to help solidify the alliance between the states and the homeland. Several years later, after a bloody war that brought all five families together for the first time since Vegas’s inception, the Albanians were defeated.
I remember my father telling me it had been the longest and bloodiest war he’d ever seen against a mafia family. The Albanians were like cockroaches, they just kept coming back. Hell, they still do even after all these years.
According to Bridgett’s records, when the Albanians were defeated, Luan ran for the hills and had never been heard from again. His brother-in-law had been murdered by Castellanos and his sister had—a photo popped up on the screen. She is younger in this photo than the one I had previously seen, but there is no mistaking she’s the same person.
The woman Vanya claims is Ada’s mother. Cora Berisha, born Cora Osmari disappeared off the face of the earth after the war. Until she popped up several years later after being arrested for prostitution. She’s young, probably around the same age as Luan when he first came to the States. Her cheeks are hollow, eyes sunken.
She was a user, like most prostitutes who worked for Castellanos. Prostitution, for the most part, is legal in Nevada if they are under licensed brothels. What Castellanos and Spiridakos did with their prostitutes—was not.
Years go by with a few more arrests for possession and then suddenly, it all stopped, and she’s checked into a local rehab.
A rehab for pregnant mothers. Nine months prior to Ada’s birthday. At least she didn’t lie about that. So, Ada is an Albanian princess. But who is the father? I doubt that Castellanos would have sent her to rehab if she was pregnant with some random John’s baby. He wouldn’t care enough. Hell, I doubt he would have let her carry it to term.
So why the rehab?
“Boss,” Anton steps into my office, a grim look on his face. That is never good. “You’re going to want to take a look at this.”
He tosses me a cell phone.
“What is this?” I ask as I tap on the screen to wake it.
“We managed to crack into the fucker’s phone,” he says. “It’s connected to his iCloud, the stupid idiot. We managed to get all his transaction history as well as archived messages.”
I look down at the screen and swipe through the particulars he’d left up.
“One set of messages has him chatting on Hades Net with the username E-Ris,” he informs me. “It details the hit on the Castellanos family.”
My eyes digest the particulars of the hit. It’s laid out before me like a fucking roadmap. Every single detail is just as the crime scene depicted.
Don’t let the staff suffer. Kill them with gas. Let them fall asleep as I fell asleep with them so many times before.
“Whoever ordered the hit was a staff member in Castellanos’s house,” I speak aloud. “But who among them could afford to hire a hitman? Trained or not.”
