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“She has a scar.” His voice broke, his gaze drifting away as he continued, “It stretches from her knee to the top of her thigh.”
I wanted to ask him how she got the scar, but I was too occupied in analyzing his niece’s face and committing it to memory.
“Please find Bailey,” he pleaded again. “Please.”
He said that you couldn’t miss the scar, which meant out of the fifteen women I’d just gone by, not one of them was Bailey. It was a long shot that she’d be here, that on the first opportunity we would find her. Life was never that easy, no matter how much I wanted it to be.
The man in front of me paused and waved his arm to a table ten feet away. “Would you like a drink?”
“Beer,” I told him. “In a bottle. Keep the cap on.”
He nodded, then twirled around, heading the way we’d just come. Meanwhile, I turned to look for Gio. He was sitting there, a woman dancing on his lap, but as he glanced over and saw me, he pushed her off with more force than was necessary.
I winced as her face met the floor and blood burst out of her nose, but she didn’t make a damn squeak of pain. She just got herself up and continued to dance to the low music playing as redness flowed over her mouth and down onto her chest.
Slowly, I turned to look back at Gio and noticed his narrowed eyes. He was most probably wondering what was taking me so long to get to him. I didn’t want to seem too eager, so I waited just a couple more seconds and then joined him.
As I sat down, the man placed my beer in front of me and a glass of amber liquid in front of Gio.
I got comfortable in the booth with the small round table in front of it, staring out over the entire room. I refused to be the one who spoke first, and I was more than comfortable to sit in silence. I’d grown up in a house where you could only talk when you were being asked something. Plus, he’d invited me here, and even though I needed to get on his good side, I wouldn’t lick his goddamn ass in the process.
“Your reputation precedes you,” Gio said, not taking his attention off of the naked woman dancing in front of him. She looked thin—too thin—her bones peeking from under her skin. “I heard that you once tortured a man for five weeks, bleeding him out slowly, and causing unmeasurable pain.”
It was true what he was saying, but what he didn’t know was that I’d lost myself in that time. I’d given in to the dark part of me, letting it take over, and I hadn’t been the same since. Darkness wasn’t just a part of me anymore, it was all I was now.
I refused to answer him. I didn’t trust him at all, so there was no way that I was going to acknowledge my past to him.
He glanced at me, a knowing look in his eyes. “I get it, you don’t trust me”—he leaned back in his seat—“yet.”
I cracked my neck to the side, still saying nothing. That was how you got people like Gio Pozzi to talk. He’d dig his own grave with his words, I knew he would, it was only a matter of time.
Another woman joined the dancing one in front of Gio, looking even skinnier than the first one. They looked like they hadn’t been fed in months, and all I could think about was Mr. Blue’s niece. There was a chance she could have been here. Especially as no one had been able to make a connection between this place and Gio. It was a secret, one that he’d exposed by inviting me here.
He was playing his hand, giving me something to hold over him, which meant he was going to watch me like a damn hawk.
“Doyoutrustme?” I asked, lifting the bottle of beer to my lips. There was no way I was going to drink anything in this place unless I’d opened it myself. Too many times I’d snatched people up by slipping something in their glass.
“No.” Gio grinned. “But I will. And this is the first step.” He waved his arm in the air, sending the two women away. “I built this, and by inviting you here, I’m showing you something that no one else knows about.” We both knew the inclinations of what he was saying. “When I took over from my uncle Piero, he’d nearly made us completely legit.” He laughed, but it was more of a cackle of disbelief. “We were making barely any money, soldiers were going hungry, trying to look for other jobs. The organization was in the damn gutter.”
I kept my expression neutral as he was talking, not willing to give a single thing away.
“It didn’t matter that we had politicians’ ears and could bend the rules for other families in The Enterprise.” He paused, pushing his point home, although, since Lorenzo had taken over, that hadn’t been an issue. We handled our own business. “I had to make a business decision that would keep us alive, and this is it.”
I glanced around at the dimly lit bar. Women were walking around, all in various states of undress. Gio was trying to make it look like a strip club, only, the women who were usually at those looked like they wanted to be there, whereas, these acted like robots. They didn’t give anyone eye contact. And most importantly, the men weren’t throwing bills at the women. It was crystal clear that they weren’t here of their own free will.
“And what isthis?” I asked, tilting my head just a little, enough to let him know I was interested in what he was saying. “Because it ain’t a strip club.”
He pursed his lips, staring at me for a beat. “You’re right.” He clicked his fingers and pointed at me. “I knew you’d be able to see behind the curtain. Just like when we were kids.”
He’d acknowledged the fact that we used to know each other. I wondered how long it was going to take him, and I was reminded yet again about the fact that I hadn’t told Lorenzo about that little fact yet.
Movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention, and I snapped my head around. A man, no doubt one of Gio’s soldiers, rushed over and whispered something in his ear. Gio’s jaw locked, his hands clenching on his lap.
Within thirty seconds, Gio was standing and telling me, “Business calls.” His eyes were almost black, his rage taking over. “Stay. Have a taste of some of the fruits that I have on offer.” I wanted to cringe at his words, but I managed to keep my cool. “We’ll talk about my proposition next time.” He stared at me for a beat, pushing his point home and reminding me why he’d invited me here in the first place. Then with one last look, he stepped away and disappeared, leaving me surrounded by men in dark corners jerking themselves off, or the women giving them blow jobs.
The thought of walking out of this place was all I could think of, but I knew I needed to stay to make it look like I wanted to be here. There was no doubt someone would be watching me in Gio’s absence, and I had to make sure that they reported back the correct vibe to get me ahead with him.
So I waved one of the girls over, and ordered her to kneel in front of me. I wasn’t going to get her to do anything, but just having the control over another person would have been enough. It wasn’t always about getting off, and Gio would have known that. He was smarter than any of us realized, and I somehow knew it was going to take a lot more to eradicate him than we originally thought.
