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“I hate to disappoint you, my friend, but you’ll never be getting grandbabies from me. Holly’s the closest thing to a grandchild you’ll be seeing around this clubhouse.”
“Never?” Mike laughed. He laughed so hard his face started to turn red. “Now you’ve gone and done it,” he said when he’d caught his breath. “Saying ‘never’ is just tempting fate.” He shook his head. “Not smart, Brute. That bitch is gonna bite you in the ass now. You’ll have a ring on your finger and babies waking you up in the middle of the night before the year’s out.”
I tried to laugh—really, I did. But the thing about Mike was he’d made more than a few predictions in the past. Uncanny, accurate predictions.
“You just keep that crazy shit to yourself, my friend,” I said, pushing back from the table and standing up.
What bothered me more than Mike’s prediction was that it didn’t sound wholly terrible. For me, at least. For Greta?
“She’s too young,” I snapped and headed for the door while Mike kept on laughing from behind me.
“She’s young and beautiful and one hell of a fuck if that show earlier was any indicator. If you don’t scoop her up fast, some other asshole is going to.”
Something ugly and cold roiled in my veins. “Over my dead body,” I barked, then left the room.
I could still hear the old fucker laughing through the door.
I was tempted to go back in there and teach him a lesson—old man or not—but the clubhouse door opened, and Leo and Ella walked in. The matching looks on their faces said this wasn’t a social call.
“What’s wrong?” I said, crossing the room in five long strides. Greta’s face flashed behind my eyes. Did Domínguez’s men get to her? Was she hurt? Had she gone and done something crazy? Offered herself up to the fucker in exchange for his victims? Fuck, that was precisely what the crazy girl would do.
“Nothing’s wrong,amico,”Leo said, holding up a placating hand.
I had my hands clenched in fists, and my heart was pumping blood so hard I could feel it pounding in my temples. I looked back and forth between them, waiting for a better explanation.
“Raven heard about what you and Gabe have been up to—probably from Greta. She was talking to me about it and mentioned a name; Ella recognized it. She thought you’d want to know.”
“What name?”
“Javier Domínguez,” Ella said, meeting my gaze.
She’d come a long way from the day I’d found her outside my bar, looking for a job. She’d reminded me of a skittish mouse then, but not anymore. Life and energy didn’t radiate from her like it did Greta, but she looked happy now. Fulfilled.
“Do you know him, pretty girl?” I asked, half-hoping she did and half-hoping she didn’t. Before she’d become Leo Luca’s girlfriend, she’d been the victim, the slave, of a man named Fiorenzo Avalone. A man who’d used her to collect a wealth of information from other scumbags just like him.
She shook her head. She was a girl of few words; I don’t think that would ever really change.
“But you know something about him?”
She nodded. “As soon as his father died, he employed a… a front boss.”
She looked up at Leo, who smiled at her encouragingly. I couldn’t imagine this shit was easy for him either. He loved that girl, and the constant reminders of the hell she’d lived through had to be hard to swallow. After hearing just a vague sketch of what had happened to Greta, I’d wanted to burn those fuckers to the ground. Maybe Deo and Gabe too for letting it happen.
Ella nodded and turned back to me. “Chances are whoever you met wasn’t actually Javier Domínguez.”
Son of a bitch.
“Do Gabe or Greta know yet?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Ella wanted to tell you first,” Leo filled in. “We’re heading over to the Costas’ next.”
“I’ll follow you there,” I said, motioning toward the door, but as they turned to leave, I took hold of Ella’s hand. “Thank you, pretty girl.”
She shrugged. “I like to help. It gives some purpose to what happened.”
Leo and I both winced, while Ella’s features remained smooth. Maybe the wisp of a girl was stronger than both of us.
