AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Dangerous territory.
Bastian eyed the ceiling for a few drawn-out seconds.
“That bounty will prove troublesome. We should set a counter bounty on Ranieri Andretti’s head. Either he’ll give in and remove the bounty or he’ll raise it, in which case we’ll do the same. We all know which syndicate has the most money.”
His low murmurs made it nearly impossible to hear, but I’d been trained in surveillance.
I was a rat.
A damned good one.
Goosebumps lined my arms. It never felt good to be ashamed of your identity. Of the very thing that defined you.
But hell, I hadn’t even passed the name Everett along to the bureau yet.
Surely part of me still had limits.
Gio swept his eyes around the bar as he spoke, “Or we’ll have killed the Andretti syndicate’s boss.”
Bastian shrugged.“The position belongs to Niccolaio anyway.”
“Niccolaio still cares for his brother.”
“His brother doesn’t deserve the sentiment.”
“If you were in Ranieri’s position, at eighteen or so years old, and you’d just seen Asher with a gun near your Uncle Vince’s dead body, would you not have drawn the same conclusion? The same assumption?”
Silence.
“Irrelevant.” Bastian stood, looking powerful in his tailored suit. “Uncle Vince wouldn’t have let anyone sneak up on him. That’s the difference between a Romano and an Andretti. We’re the hunters, and they’re the hunted.”
He left, and every part of me warred over what to do with the groundbreaking intel I’d just discovered.
Niccolaio Andretti had a bounty on his head for killing his uncle, and he’d been hiding in Romano territory.
The bodies dropping all over the city?
They had to be connected to the bounty on Niccolaio’s head. Which meant a thread of evidence connecting those bodies to the Romano and Andretti families existed.
The bureau would just have to find it… if I told them to look.
Don’t do it, my heart warned. They don’t care about you. Even Jenn would give you up in a heartbeat for her job.
I’d been cleaning the same spot for the past ten minutes, but I didn’t care.
Because the realization struck me hard.
Perhaps everything I’d ever been taught was wrong.
And my job in the bureau?
I was slowly coming to terms with the fact that I didn’t want it anymore.
BASTIANO ROMANO
People are made to be resilient.
We overcome cancers, hurricanes, heartbreaks. We are fighters, scavengers, survivors. The experiences we endure teach us to be better versions of ourselves…but for some people, better doesn’t exist.
