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Wait—West Eighth?
That’s where I was last night when I was attacked by...
Two men.
Hm.
“We need to make sure who did this,” Lombardo says evenly. “Why were they even there? That’s nowhere near Liggari’s current territory. Were they working, or—“
“We’re fucking Castellanis,” Rizzo bellows. “We go wherever we like in this fucking city!”
The room devolves into back and forth shouting, despite Jack and Lombardo trying to calm the older men. Sandro stays silent. Brooding. But he watches them all closely.
I stay quiet as a mouse. From time to time, I feel Sandro’s eyes on me, but I keep mine trained on the entertainment at hand. At last, Sandro has had enough.
“Basta!” he snaps, slapping a hand down on the table, and everyone shuts up at once. He’s really come into his own since Ciro got out of the way. And when Sandro tells everyone to go forth and find out solid information, they all file out.
“Not you,” Sandro says to me in an undertone. And then, “Jack,” he calls out, “you stay.”
I don’t miss the dirty looks Rizzo and Montanari send Jack’s way. They don’t like how much Sandro depends on him. But if they made themselves a little more dependable, they wouldn’t have to be jealous.
Once the door closes behind them, Sandro turns to us, his eyes cold and calculating. “I want you both to use your skills. Find out who did this. I want to make them pay.”
“You think it really was the Bernardis?” Jack asks.
“No,” I say.
“Don’ttry to tell me it was my mother,” Sandro warns. “But…thank you for that information,” he adds grudgingly.
“I wasn’t going to say your mother.”
“Then who?”
“Actually, I rather think it was me.”
A silence stretches on after my statement, brittle as glass. Sandro’s face is still, but then I hear a subtle shift in the rhythm of his breathing. His body is rigid, hands clenched tight at his sides as he stares intently at me. “You?” he asks softly.
“I was going to explain everything this morning. I was going to come to you at once—“
“And yet you did not.”
That quiet tone means I’m in big trouble.
“I was asleep!” I protest.
Sandro glances at Jack, gives a quick upward jerk of the chin. Jack comes over, takes my arm, and says, “Why don’t you take a seat, Julian, and tell us all about it.”
“Yes,” Sandro breathes. “Tell us why you disobeyed my express order to avoid harming anyone but our enemies.”
“You don’t understand,” I insist, as Jack ushers me into the chair in front of Sandro’s desk. “I didn’t know who they were.”
“So you attacked two random guys?” Jack snaps from behind me, hands gripping my shoulders as though I’m going to make a run for it. “That’s notbetter, Julian.”
“It’s much worse,” Sandro says, coming around to half-sit on the corner of the desk, arms folded as he glares down at me. “Explain.”
I do just that. I explain how I was walking away from The Cellar late last night, after failing to persuade Leo Bernardi to back off from the Roxanne Rochford situation. “And I’d just seen a lady to her car, and wasabsolutely minding my own business, when two men came out of nowhere and attacked me. They were dressed in black, with balaclavas, so I had no way of knowing who they were or why they were after me.”
I recount the fight, blow by blow, and try not to sound too excited about it. “And then I took photos of them after,” I add.
