AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The door bounced off a man’s hard body.
In slow motion I saw the face of the man as he came toward me.
With each step he took toward me, I took a step away from him trying to keep him from me until my back hit the bathroom wall and there was nowhere left for me to go.
His face snarled as he looked at me. I didn’t recognize him.
But he knew who I was. “Cate Russo...you’re even more beautiful than I had imagined.”
His complexion was pale, and his hair was light brown. The slight trace of an accent in his voice made a shudder run through my body.
He was Russian—which must mean that he wasBratva, part of the Russian Mafia. My father had called him Dmitri. This could only be Dmitri Petrov, head of the Chicago Bratva.
I was standing still but my breaths were coming in heavy gulps and needles of terror were piercing my skin.
He reached out his hand toward me. I tried to push past him but his arm caught my body and his other hand yanked my head back with a violent tug at my hair.
I cried out as pain ripped through my scalp and neck, but he held my head back at an awkward angle and forced me to look at him, into eyes which were dark and menacing.
I saw his hand moving toward me from the corner of my eye. “Oh Cate, how I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
As I tried to scream, he forced a damp cloth against my mouth. I struggled against his hand smothering me, fighting the sickly chemical smell that was threatening to overwhelm me.
But it was no good.
The chemical was taking over the air I was inhaling, slowly stealing me away from my body and making me fall down into a deep black hole of unconsciousness.
ALESSIO
I faced my brother, Marco Marchiano, in the kitchen of the mansion we shared.
“Ovidio Russo’s men have alerted me that he didn’t show up for a meeting this morning and the soldiers at his home weren’t answering their cellphones. They checked his house and the two guards there had been shot dead.”
“What happened?” Marco growled. Marco was twenty-seven years old and Capo—the boss of the Fratellanza. I was a year younger than him, and I was his Consigliere—his second-in-command and chief adviser.
“They checked the security footage from the house and grounds—it was the Russians. Dmitri Petrov was there.”
Marco frowned as he considered what I had said for a minute. “What the hell?”
“Well, I’m thinking that both us and the Russians have been having problems with bad drugs over the last few months. It’s strange for us both to have the same problem, at the same time, given that we have completely different drug suppliers.”
We’d been having problems with bad drugs. Someone had mixed some shit into our drugs, and the resulting impure product had caused numerous deaths, meaning that we now had the FBI sniffing around us.
“Go on,” said Marco.
“Ovidio oversees our drug shipments when they arrive, so he has access to all our drugs. Now it appears that he is also involved with the Russians in some way, otherwise why would they take him? So, it seems that Ovidio is the common denominator in this whole story. The Russians have recently started having the same problem of bad drugs in their supply chain, causing lots of deaths too among the drugs they sell.”
Marco understood now and summed up my theory. “Goddamnit, if he’s been diluting our drugs with some other shit, that would increase the overall weight of the drugs. Then he could sell the extra weight to the Russians, making himself a tidy amount of money on the side.”
I nodded. “He might have gotten away with it if the drugs hadn’t started causing so many deaths, alerting the Russians and us to the fact that there is a problem with the chemical makeup of the drugs.”
Marco grimaced. “It seems like he got greedy.” He shook his head. “Traitors always eventually get tripped up by their greed.”
“What are bad drugs?” asked our younger sister, Debi, who had come into the kitchen.
“Nothing for you to worry about, shortcake,” I said gently. We always shielded our fourteen-year-old sister from the details of our business. Of course, she knew what we did, but I would protect her from the more sordid aspects for as long as I could. “Why don’t you take the dog out for his walk?”
“Okay, Alessio. Come on, Mr. Fluffy, do you want to go for walkies?” The dog didn’t need to be asked twice, and he started barking excitedly, bounding toward the door to the garden.
