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Brilliant-blue eyes flash through my mind and I feel my lips tug upward. The wait is finally over.
“Ladies,” Gunn says as he enters, followed by Luca and an older gentleman. We all turn to him. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Gunn Sinclair, and this is Luca Sinacore and his uncle, Ray.”
Luca stands at one end of the table while the other two move to find seats. “Before we begin, I want to thank each of you for your presence today. And as a show of gratitude, I’m going to offer you something that may save your lives.”
He places a stack of papers in front of Marc Tadesco, who takes one and passes it down to the next person. We do this until we’ve all got a packet of copied documents stapled together.
“Guat is thees?” Jorge Ruiz asks in his heavily accented voice. “Why is my uncle on thees list?”
I read the “list” Maxton was referring to on the first page. Francesco Gianni, Giuseppe Tadesco, Bryan McKenzie, Sergio Ramos, Clive Maxton, Sean Murphy.
“Those are the names of the men involved in the elimination of someone so powerful, they all had to come together to accomplish it,” Luca replies.
My eyes fixate on the first name. Francesco Gianni.
“Who?” Rowan Kane, who was a soldier for Bryan McKenzie and then James McKenzie’s underboss before both were killed in Boston, asks.
Luca looks around the room. “Have you heard of the Ferryman?”
Blood rushes up my neck to my face as I hear Luca ask the very question his brother Tony asked me a few months ago. When I pushed it to the backburner because there were other, more pressing issues to deal with.
Finding out who killed my father was my priority, which meant my efforts were all put into getting Joaquin to realign himself with the right people, not talking to him about something that may or may not have been a threat.
I’m all ears now.
I flip through the pages, reading as fast as I can as Luca fills us in on everything he’s gathered.
“His name was Stephen Black,” he says. “He worked under Tadesco in Chicago for years, growing his power right under his nose. They called him the Ferryman because he was a smuggler. The mark he left on anyone he killed was—”
“Pennies,” I finish for him.
“Why was he taken out?” Rowan asks.
Luca shrugs. “We can only guess at this point since most of the men on that list are dead now. Except for your father.” He looks at Maxton.
Maxton taps his fingertips against the table. “He might as well be. As of late, his drug of choice has him unable to tell his asshole from his head.”
My brows pinched as I process all of this, I ask, “If Stephen Black is dead, who’s killing Dons?”
“His son,” Gunn answers. “Gideon Black.”
So Gideon has been taking out the heads of the organizations that came together to take out his father?
First it was Tadesco. Then McKenzie and then Tony when he began to poke around the ashes. Then it was my cousin only a week ago.
“Renzo is the latest casualty,” Luca says, looking at me.
My jaw tenses even though I will myself to remain calm. These men are all powerful, all as ruthless and deadly as I am. If there is any hint of a lie, they’ll see it.
I’m not ready to share that I’m the one responsible for Renzo’s death. Not when I don’t know who’s here willing to be a part of a truce and who wants to start a war.
Either way, it may have been me who killed him, but I’d bet anything he was already living on borrowed time. In fact, I probably only hastened his death by hours. Maybe even minutes.
“The pennies are the Ferryman’s calling card,” Luca tells us. “If you look at the deaths, they all have 2009 pennies. All except for my brother’s.”
“What makes him so special,” Rowan asks.
Luca turns his hard gaze to him. “The Sinacores aren’t on his target list, for one.”
