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I kick the chair next to me as soon as the door closes behind him.
“Motherfucker!”
More than once I wanted to tell Nico to go fuck himself over the past years, but business is business. And Nico pays good money for each shipment, even if he does so with disdain. He’s always been jealous of Blackwood’s location. Blackwood’s coastline, both north and south, is too jagged and rocky to allow for another port, and with the forest and mountains surrounding us, there’s only one private airstrip. One that belongs to the Saints. Nicolosi is stuck with our port, which means we’re stuck with him and his shady dealings.
“I don’t get it. Why would he come here just to tell us his cargo is late?”
And that’s the other side of the coin.
I sigh, sitting down on the meeting room table, my feet carelessly propped up on the upturned chair, and bury my face in my hands. The weight of everything that’s happened in the last month is pressing down on me, making it hard to breathe.
“There’s more to it. Somehow, he must have found out. Most likely, he just wanted to see for himself.”
“See what?” Angelo prompts.
“Stevie,” I whisper with resignation. The secret I’ve kept for the last nineteen years aching to be let out.
“Your assistant? He wanted to see if you really have an assistant?” Angelo asks, confusion clear in his voice.
I inhale, lifting my head to meet his gaze. “Not quite.”
“Quit being cryptic, Dante. What’s so special about Stevie?” he demands, growing impatient as Luca opens the door and strolls inside. I motion for both of them to sit down. It’s time they found out how deep the hole I’ve dug for myself is.
The words stick in my throat as I clench my jaw. “Well, I guess one thing is that her name is not exactly Stevie.” I look at Angelo then at Luca who already knew that part. “I fucked up, brothers. I really fucked up,” I admit.
“You’ve always had our back,” Angelo says, placing a hand on my shoulder and squeezing it with reassurance. “How about you let us have yours for once?”
I take a deep breath, steeling myself for the truth. One I’ve been hiding for far too long. “How much do you remember about the Carussos?”
15
ALESSA
It’s good to have friends in high places.
Or at least deep dark web sort of places. Wherever @dirtyhackz and their fellow hacker friends reside. Probably in a penthouse somewhere, surrounded by at least six high-resolution screens and riding a scooter to get from the kitchen to their bedroom. Lucky bastards.
One thing is clear—I really need to get myself a scooter because I can’t seem to let this scooting around thing go. I have a thing for things on wheels, and evidently, scooters are not excluded from that category.
I also have a thing for hacker friends who help me send innocent looking emails to one Nico Nicolosi titled ‘Oh my god! Look at the tits on her!’, and an attachment comprising a lovely picture of a well-endowed brunette that has an itty-bitty bikini on and a lovely itty-bitty string of code encrypted into said lovely picture.
As soon as Nico opens the email on his computer, that little code will open a door for me to get inside and have a look around his files, hopefully helping me make sense of the data I’ve found on Dante’s port log spreadsheet, which of course I have emailed myself already.
@dirtyhackz said they will walk me through how to get into Nico’s computer this evening, provided Nico is old school enough not to open his emails on his phone. Until then, it will be a waiting game. I sigh with frustration and make sure Dante’s chair is in the same position as he left it in. He just strikes me as a bit of a control freak, you know, the sort of person who can tell if their stapler has been moved one inch to the left.
Just to see if I’m right, I decide to fuck with Dante by tilting the fountain pen on his desk forty-five degrees. I’m giddy, anticipating his return, checking the door every few minutes. But the anticipation slowly ebbs away as the hours tick by and I’m still all alone.
Out of boredom, I end up finishing the task Dante left me with, typing up all his boring documents. I’d have gone back to his laptop to get digital copies of those files, something I’m almost certain he has, but with him due any minute, I chickened out. So, like the good assistant that I am, I painstakingly type up all the documents, adding an almost invisible watermark—‘My gun is bigger than my dick’—on every page. I email the files over, then dump the originals on top of his stupid fountain pen, not caring anymore if he even notices it’s been moved.
Being efficient is a curse, trust me. With nothing else left to do, I spend the next half an hour playing Solitaire on my laptop, then getting bored with that, I decide to rearrange my part of the office. I rotate my desk until it faces the window, then feeling like I need a bit more zhuzh I go to Dante’s office in search of treasures. No longer caring that he might get pissed off, I rummage through his things, coming out with a stapler, a paperweight and a sharp-looking letter opener that will come in handy as soon as Dante notices I stole his shit and tries to kill me. A girl’s gotta have the means to defend herself.
After a short deliberation, I also decide his big leafy green plant would be more at home by my desk, obscuring his view. The blasted thing is a lot heavier than it looks though, and by the time I’m done dragging it over, I’m out of breath and feeling like I’ve just done a cross fit session. Happy with the new look, I take a much deserved break, staring at the ocean and imagining the calm whooshing sound the waves are making.
It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Blackwood for almost a month now. No thanks to Dante, who is definitely going to run me out of town as soon as he notices I’ve been pilfering through his things. Not that it’s going to happen anytime soon at this rate. Dante has been gone for hours now, and I’m actually starting to worry, which is ridiculous because why would I worry about a mafia boss? He obviously can take care of himself. Except… I just can’t forget the expression on his face when he received his text. Like something really angered him. Like something was wrong.
Trying to shake away the feeling, I check in with @dirtyhackz about the capo-email-infiltration-mission situation. I might be stupid for trusting a hacker I met a day ago with potentially incriminating data, but in the words of Kip Dynamite,we chat online every day, so I guess things are gettin’ pretty serious. Basically, @dirtyhackz is the La Fawnduh to my Kip. Ok, fine. So maybe it’s not exactly a love story, but we clearly hit it off from the start. They are clever, funny, compassionate, helpful, and fluent in sarcasm, which makes them legend material in my books.
Plus, it’s not like I’m sharing any information about Dante or his businesses. All I want is access to Nico’s files to compare the data and see if I can find out why the hell the bus station dude even mentioned his name. And if @dirtyhackz turns out to have their own agenda, hopefully thecapo and his shady business dealings will be enough to keep him busy.
