“The feds think they’re so smart. They have guys planted here, planted there.
What they don’t know is that we have a few of our guys planted with them.” He made a satisfied sound. “Looks like you would have been better off cleaning your own house before coming into this one.”
“Why did you keep the information to yourself?”
“Because my plan to take my rightful place as head of the Venuto family was already well under way. And just like it’s important that I know my opponent’s weaknesses—in Giovanni’s case it was his children—it’s equally important to know when to use those same weaknesses against them.” He shrugged again. “Besides, I knew the family didn’t have anything to worry about when it came to you.
Giovanni was already being shown the door, so it wasn’t difficult to talk Claudio into slamming it shut behind him…permanently. And you always did have a soft spot for Gia.”
Lucas heard Gia’s voice in his ear.
“Two just gained access to the front,” she said.
“Close the door,” he said. “Close the door now!”
He ripped off his headset in case she chose to stay in contact with him over protecting herself. He tossed it to the bed, only then seeing the spot of red against the white blanket. A spot that grew wider.
It was then that he realized that Lorenzo wasn’t sleeping. He was dead.
* * *
Gia cursed Luca for taking off his headset and then pushed the button to close the safe-room door even as she kept her gaze glued to the scene unfolding. Vito was only a couple of feet away from Luca now.
“So tell me, Vito,” Luca said to the other man. “How is it you think yourself deserving to be head of the Venuto family?”
Gia hated that she could hear what was being said but that she couldn’t respond.
“Kill him!” she ordered Luca. “Just shoot him, for God’s sake, and get back here.”
She glanced at the other monitors. Another man had gained access to the kitchen.
But wait…
She looked closer. He didn’t look like the other men. He didn’t appear to be armed and he wasn’t wearing a mask.
Her stomach lurched. Frankie.
What was he still doing there? Could he be in on what was going down? Or had he been in his room in the stables, saw movement in the house and made his way over? It would be just like him to not see the men even now making their way closer to the back of the house. Then again, the place was always teeming with armed men, so why should these be any different?
Oh, God.
The kid was lucky he had made it to the house in one piece. But how long would that luck hold out once the gunmen gained access and started shooting at anything that moved?
She smacked the hand-size button that controlled the door. It opened with a low, electronic hum. Gia began to slip into the library, then backtracked and picked up two handguns, shoving one into the front of her slacks, holding the other straight out in front of her.
“Frankie!” she whispered fiercely. “It’s me. Gia. I’m in the library.”
“Hey, Miss Gia. What’s going on? How come none of the lights are working? All of them are on outside—”
His words were sheared off by the sound of a bullet shattering the glass of the kitchen door.
“Frankie, run!”
He headed in the opposite direction.
“No, toward me! Here in the library.”
He stopped, apparently unsure which way to turn, and then finally started toward the library…just as the library doors shattered inward.
* * *
Lucas’s palms were dry where he held his gun steady on Vito, although his adrenaline levels shot up at the sound of breaking glass coming from downstairs.
Damn!
Had Gia closed the door to the safe room? Was she even now inside, watching everything unfold on the monitors?
Or had she left the door open and was now prey to the men who were gaining entrance to the house?
Nowhere in his mind was how he was going to make it back to the room.
“Why did you kill Lorenzo?” he demanded of Vito. “He was no threat to you.”
“He was more threat than you know.”
“Because he conspired with you to kill his father?”
Vito stared at him.
“Yes, Gia and I know. Lorenzo told her this afternoon.”
“No matter. He was of no use to me anymore, anyway. And just as soon as I get you and Gia out of the way, the family’s mine, no challenge anywhere.”
“Oh, but there will be challenge everywhere, won’t there, Vito? Because that’s the nature of this business. The last man standing is the king of the hill.”
He pulled the trigger at the same time as he ducked away from the bed. The bullet hit Vito in the upper chest. The older man stumbled back a few feet, but he remained standing. Lucas hit the floor with a thud and scrambled to a crouched position, his gun still out. Vito’s wound wasn’t immediately fatal. But judging by the amount of blood spreading across his chest, it might kill him soon.
“You son of a bitch!” Vito shouted, pressing one hand over the wound while he aimed his weapon with his other.
Lucas pulled his trigger again, this time aiming for Vito’s head. He hit him in the forehead with deadly accuracy.
Why take any chances?
Gia was as low to the floor as she could be and still be mobile. She held the gun out with both hands. “Here! Over here by the bookcase,” she called to Frankie.
The teen ran in her direction and at the moment she knew hope that they’d both make it inside the safe room with no problem.
Unfortunately others apparently heard her call out and a line of automatic gunfire embedded bullets in the wall to her right, splinters from the wood paneling filling the air. Frankie got hit in the calf and fell immediately to his knees, only a few feet away.
Gia put her gun down, her firepower no match for the weapons the others had. She hurried toward the young man.
“Come on, damn it!” she whispered harshly. “It’s only a few feet. You can make it.”
“I don’t know, Miss Gia,” Frankie said, his voice sounding unusually raspy. “I don’t think I can.”
She grabbed him under the arms from the back, determined to drag him if she had to.
More gunfire. She moved as fast as she could. She dropped to her knees, protected by the open safe-room door.
“Wow, Miss Gia. I didn’t know it would hurt so bad…”
His words trailed off, but they were enough to let her know he was still, somehow, miraculously, alive. She stumbled to her feet again and pulled. Only a foot and a half to go.
“Hang in there, kiddo. Hang in there.”
The sound of footsteps on crunching glass. She blinked up to find one of the masked men standing ten feet away, his weapon aimed directly at her.
A single shot. Only she wasn’t the one who was hit. Instead, the bullet hit Frankie in the upper left chest.
Tears welled in her eyes and her heart threatened to beat straight out of her chest as she turned to dive toward the room, hoping against hope that the automatic door would close in time to save her.
Another shadow appeared behind the gunman.
Luca!
Only it wasn’t Luca. She recognized him as Carlo Giglio, the hit man who had once worked for her father and who had taken Tamburo out under Vito’s direction earlier that afternoon.
Her feet slipped against something wet. Her hope beginning to wane, she realized it was Frankie’s blood that coated the polished wood floor.
So this was it. This was how it was going to happen. She was going to die mere inches away from a room that would have shielded her from a thousand bullets. In her father’s house. The place where she had grown up. The last of the Trainellos gunned down in cold blood.
Everything seemed to move in slow motion. Her right foot caught traction and she lunged at the same time she heard the dull echo of another bullet
exiting its chamber.
Only it wasn’t the gunman who had fired. It was Giglio. And he had been aiming not for her, but the back of the head of the gunman.
Chapter 21
“I’m going in,” Lucas said into his cell phone, talking to Smith. Lucas had managed to scramble out of the bedroom window and climbed to the roof where he had gained cell access, pressing the panic button by uttering a single word to his handler: “Firefly.”
Five minutes later, Smith was there, and helicopters hovered above the estate, illuminating the entire area with light. FBI tactical agents were dropping by rope to the ground. Bright flashes lit the night as gunfire erupted.
“Don’t make a move, Paretti!” Smith ordered him.
Lucas dropped his phone and climbed back down and through the same bedroom window. Moving past both Lorenzo’s and Vito’s bodies, he grabbed Vito’s extra gun and then headed for the hall, not stopping until he’d run down the stairs, through the foyer and into the library. He needed to make sure Gia had closed the door. That she was sitting safe in the room, cut off from all that was going on around her.
The sight of a body on the floor stopped him in his tracks. Oh God. Not again…
His heart threatened to go into arrest.
He slowly neared the still form lying on the floor, releasing his held breath when he realized it wasn’t Gia’s body, but Frankie’s.
He reached down and searched for a pulse in the kid’s slender neck.
The hidden door began to open. As soon as it was wide enough, he slid in sideways and gathered Gia up into his arms, kissing her face even as he pressed the button to close the door again behind him.
“Sweet Jesus, I thought that was you outside,” he said harshly, holding her so tightly he was afraid he was hurting her.
“It’s Frankie. I tried to help him, tried to get him inside, but…I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
He tunneled both hands into her hair and held her cheek against his, feeling the hot dampness of her tears on hers. “Thank God that you’re okay,” he murmured harshly. “Frankie’s still alive. We have to get him help now.”
It was then he became aware that they weren’t alone in the room.
Instantly, he shoved Gia aside and drew the weapon he had tucked in the back of his pants at the same time as the other man did the same.
Giglio.
“Stop,” Gia shouted. “Stop right now, both of you.”
Lucas looked between Gia and the hit man, trying to fit the pieces together.
“He saved my life,” she said, looking like she had been to hell and back. There were wood chips in her hair, smears on her face, and blood all but covered her hands where she hadn’t completely wiped them clean. He guessed it was Frankie’s blood.
“I’ll lose mine if you lose yours,” the toughened gunman said.
“I don’t understand,” Lucas said to Gia.
Despite his offer, Giglio dislodged his left hand from his weapon and held it up. A moment later, he dropped his gun to the floor and held up his other hand.
“Ain’t no big deal,” Giglio said.
“But you killed Tamburo.” Lucas kept his gun on him.
“Yeah, I did. But I thought I was doing it on behalf of Gia. That’s what Vito led me to believe.” He looked down at his large hands. Lucas wondered if he saw all the blood that covered the deceptively clean skin. “It wasn’t until a few minutes ago that I realized that Vito had lied to me. Lied to all the men. It wasn’t Gia he was trying to protect. It was her he was trying to kill.” His head snapped upright, and eyes that were amazingly green and alert looked at Lucas.
“Giovanni Trainello was like a father to me. I would never have betrayed him to nobody.” He nodded toward Gia. “Even though she don’t know me, she’s like a sister to me. I couldn’t stand by and let someone kill her. I vowed that I’d protect the Venuto family to the death. And to me, the Trainello family has always been the Venuto family. Ain’t nothing going to change that. Ever.”
Lucas finally lowered his gun.
The world was sometimes a strange place. Gia’s real brother, Lorenzo, had plotted to kill their father.
And a jaded hit man she didn’t even know had put his own life on the line for hers.
Gia moved back into his arms and he held her, just thanking God that she was okay.
And she was okay, wasn’t she? Even with the FBI taking out the attackers outside, and with them safely closed up in the room, she wasn’t avoiding him, grabbing on to his status as FBI as a reason to push him away. Instead she clutched to him as if he was the most important person in her life.
He pulled her away slightly so he could look into her eyes, seeing in them the love that had always been there. A little dented, a bit shadowed by betrayal, and tried by fire, but love nonetheless. Love for him.
He kissed her deeply, feeling his own love for her balloon within him.
Everything was going to be okay. He knew that as certainly as he knew his own name. So long as Gia loved him, everything was going to be all right.
Epilogue
Three years later…
The old Trainello estate couldn’t have looked more different. But the changes weren’t about aesthetics. Rather, the family that lived there now shared little in common with the crime family that had once inhabited it.
Mostly.
Gia Trainello Paretti stood at the kitchen counter that was covered with flour and rolled out fresh pasta. She methodically cut ravioli squares, filling half with ground beef and tomato, the other with a mix of ricotta, Romano and Parmesan cheese.
It sometimes seemed impossible that three years had passed since the night that had changed her life forever…and then at times it seemed decades ago. Every now and again, she still jolted awake in the middle of the night, drenched in a cold sweat, convinced that an army of gunmen was advancing on the house. But then Luca, her husband and father to their two-year-old son, Angelo, would cradle her in his arms, and she would know that no one hid outside waiting to catch her in the crosshairs of their scope.
The reason for that was twofold. First, she and Luca had called for a final meeting with the remaining three heads of the crime families a week after Vito’s failed takeover attempt. Through sometimes heated negotiations, and due to more than a bit of Luca’s persuasive bargaining powers, they’d brokered a deal that dissolved, once and for all, the Venuto crime family.
All illegal activities had been divided between the three families. Legal businesses with questionable side activities were sold to the highest bidders.
And Gia disavowed any right to the Venuto family name or any activities that might be carried out now or at any time in the future on behalf of the same.
The second reason she felt secure in the knowledge that she was no longer at risk was her husband.
She smiled wistfully now as she dropped the ravioli one by one into a large pot of boiling water. Luca was not only the man she’d always loved, and would always love, no matter what, she knew that he would give his very life in order to save hers. And she would do the same for him.
And with the addition of little Angelo into their lives, nine months exactly after the date of their erotic encounter on the kitchen counter, both of them would do the same for their son.
Luca was no longer with the FBI. While he didn’t go into detail about the explanation behind his resignation from the bureau, she suspected it had something to do with her, and the FBI’s wish to bring her up on charges. Charges they couldn’t file because Luca refused to turn state’s evidence.
So she’d given up being the Lady Boss, and he’d given up his badge. An equitable compromise, she thought.
Now he commuted into the city via the train three days a week to work as an estate attorney, and she worked as a freelance designer for Bona Dea.
Gia felt a vague pang in her chest. If every now and again she felt a bit of sorrow that her father’s hard work and sacrifices—including his life—in order to keep the bus
iness that was the Venuto family going strong were lost, all she had to do was look into Angelo’s bright blue eyes to know that she’d made the right decision.
So much bloodshed. So much innocence lost.
The mafia family might be about connections. But love of her blood family trumped all. She would do anything and everything in order to keep them safe.
And that meant keeping them out of harm’s way.
If every now and again the widow of an ex-family member showed up on their doorstep needing help, and she extended that help, that was between her and the widow. No one else need know about it.
She caught herself absently running her hand over her slightly rounded stomach and looked down at her apron-covered baby bump.
The sound of laughter caught her attention and she looked out the window to where their two-year-old son giggled in delight as he toddled under the spray of the hose.
Hands lightly grasped her hips from behind and Luca pressed his body against hers. She tilted her head to give him access to her neck and he kissed it. “Mmm, something smells good.”
“I’m making ravioli.”
“That’s not what I was talking about.”
Angelo’s laughter sounded again and they looked through the window together at where the toddler was swept into large, male hands and held up in the sunlight.
Carlo Giglio.
Luca shook his head. “Who would have thought a man with his past would be so gentle with a child?”
Angelo squealed in delight and Carlo’s pockmarked face broke into a wide grin as he swung the boy around like an airplane, instructing him to extend his arms and even making zooming sounds as Frankie stood nearby, watching affectionately. The kid still needed considerable physical therapy but everything pointed to his making a full recovery. And he and the old hit man had formed a close bond with Carlo taking the younger man under his wing and leading him in a direction well away from the one he’d chosen at the same age.
Dangerous Page 14
