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I looked at my brother and tried to see what a woman would see in him. He was egotistical and overconfident. He wielded insults like a weapon, but maybe he was different with ladies who interested him. I couldn’t see him dulling those sharp edges of wit and instant comebacks with anyone, but there had to be something.
“There’s no way you’re packing a cock big enough to convince thirty women to sleep with you,” Frankie chastised, leaning back.
“Thirty-two,” Louis corrected again. “I can whip it out and show you if you want to see it, brother.”
Before I could reach over and smack him, Sierra audibly gagged. “This is so far from where this conversation was supposed to go,” she said, shooting daggers at Louis. “If you take out your penis, I’m leaving.”
Louis smirked and reached for his zipper. “You don’t have to ask me twice.”
“Jesus Christ, how are we related?” Tommy muttered, groaning and looking at the ceiling.
I never thought I’d be happy seeing Bella walk into a room, but as the office door opened and she strode inside, I sent a silent thanks to whatever higher power rested in the seat upstairs. I gripped Sierra’s knee a little more tightly, and she shot me an amused look.
“I wasn’t invited to the party,” Bella said with an exaggerated pout.
Frankie closed the file of names and slid them toward me. I took them swiftly, understanding his unspoken demand to look into them and get back to him with any updates. Tommy closed his laptop, and he smiled up at Bella, giving her a nod in greeting. She returned his greeting before striding behind the desk and planting herself on Frankie’s lap. He wrapped an arm around her, his eyes softening slightly as he planted a kiss on her cheek. We all knew this marked the end of the conversation, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
“Sierra and I have some business we need to attend to,” I said, glancing over at her with a look that would tell her precisely what I had in mind. When I met her eyes, my finger twirling circles on her knee froze, and her heated gaze shocked me. Oh, she knew exactly what I was thinking, and I had a feeling she wouldn’t fight against the heat this time. A lot had changed, and I couldn’t wait to explore all the little intricacies that had changed between us.
“Yes,” she agreed, following as I stood.
Bella only gave us an amused look as we left the room and sealed the doors behind us.
24
SIERRA
Carlo carried the file in one hand and held my hand with his other as he pulled me from the meeting. “Are you going to explain what we have to do, or are you going to leave me guessing?” I finally asked as the doors to the office sealed behind him and he dragged me further into the house. We hadn’t been together since the night in my apartment when I’d told him the entire, unbridled truth about what had happened to me. Since that night, I’d felt freer. Almost entirely unchained and released from the fear and anxiety that night had brought down on me.
Maybe it was because I knew I had Carlo now. I knew nothing would happen to me so long as he stood at my side. That hatred that had burned deep within me had turned into a different kind of fire that terrified me to acknowledge. I yearned for him in a way I knew I shouldn’t. He was dangerous. He’d killed people and done things I couldn’t imagine. But with me, he was different, and I could see that as clear as day.
Logic told me to stay away. My brother insisted I don’t get involved.
But my heart knew what it wanted, and it was Carlo.
“I think we’ve done enough work for the day,” he said, guiding me up the stairs and toward the upper sitting room. I found myself faced with a street view of the city, and even though we were lower than many of the taller, more intrusive buildings, this vantage offered an impressive view.
I strode toward it, following where he guided me, and I spoke before thinking better of it. “What are you guys going to do about the list of women I gave you?” I asked.
Carlo didn’t speak for a moment as he grabbed my hips and pulled them back into his front. I relaxed into it, looking down at the street and wondering if any people could see me the way I could see them. “It’s a complex situation,” he finally said.
“It doesn’t seem complex to me. You know their faces, and I saw addresses in the listing. You could save them all. You have the resources.”
“We’re going to do our best,” he said, but I recognized that as the cop-out answer it was.
I turned, shaking my head. “If it was me, would you still just ‘do your best?’” I asked. “Would you be sitting here right now, doing nothing?”
I didn’t know how I expected him to respond, but what he did wasn’t it. Carlo pushed my hips back into the large window, and my back pressed there as he looked down at me with hard, serious eyes. He rarely looked at me with an expression so serious. “If you were in this list of women, I would go to the safehouses myself and kill every motherfucker inside. I wouldn’t stop until everyone was dead.” I flinched at the words, and his gaze softened slightly. “Don’t ask me questions if you don’t want the honest answer to them, and this is the honest answer. I would go through hell itself to see you safe,tesora, but you’re not in this situation, and you won’t ever be again.”
“But there are plenty of women who are,” I pushed. “We can help them.”
“You won’t go anywhere near any of this shit,” he pressed, shaking his head. The way his body effortlessly kept me pinned to the glass had liquid pooling between my thighs, and I tightened them together to hide the evidence of my arousal. “There is no ‘we’ when it comes to helping them. I’m going to do what I can, but until we take out the Luccheses, this isn’t going to stop. Hell, even when we take them out, there’ll be a dozen more people to kill before it's over. This is bigger than one man or one file of people being held captive. This is a country-wide ordeal, and we don’t have the power to stop it.”
“But you do,” I told him. “You have more power to end this than anyone.”
He sighed. “We do, and we’re going to keep doing what we can. But we’re not taking big risks until you’re out of that house and we’re all safe. You and my brothers come before those women.”
I shook my head. “They need help,” I told him.
