by Leah Wilde
“You mean…my mom? I don’t know. She’s known these guys for years, longer than I’ve even been alive. Why would she—” Vince cut himself off, sighing deeply as he considered the reality of the situation. “Jesus Christ, you’re right. I mean, if she was serious about threatening me the way you say she did, then there’s no telling what she’s capable of.”
Fiona looked at Vince sadly, reaching over to grab his hand and give it a reassuring squeeze as she continued to look through the stack of papers. “There’s just a lot of administrative stuff. Boring shit, really,” she explained.
“Like what?” Vince asked. He needed something to take his mind off the fact that his mother was a cold-blooded murderer, somebody who was probably taking out respected members of the Romano family organization just to secure her own power.
“Um, more coded stuff, papers that don’t look like anything special to the naked eye,” Fiona explained. “Like here, there’s a supply order for ‘18 more Russian wrenches.’ That’s code for the sex workers we’ve got working in Jersey and in the city. Not sure what Paulie meant by including this, except maybe to say that your mother or Guido or both of them together were working to exert control in the business in other ways before Paulie’s death.”
“Let me see the paper,” Vince said, taking the document from Fiona’s hands and perusing it quickly. “It says here that they want the wrenches to be small. What does that mean?”
Fiona’s brow furrowed, her face contorting like she’d just heard something horrible. “Where does it say that?”
“Here, in the fine print at the bottom,” Vince said, pointing out the words on the page for Fiona to see.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Fiona sighed out, banging her head back on the hard surface of the safety deposit boxes behind her.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Vince said, rubbing the back of Fiona’s head and giving her a quizzical look. “What’s going on?”
“They’re underage, Vince,” Fiona said, shaking her head in disgust. “They ordered teenage Russian girls. At least, I hope they’re teenagers. Maybe they’re even smaller…oh, my God, fuck.” She sighed deeply and buried her head in her hands, her shoulders heaving for a second as she fought to catch her breath.
“They’re trafficking in underage girls to prostitute themselves in the city?” Vince asked, his stomach turning over as Fiona nodded. “My dad would’ve never agreed to that!”
“I know,” Fiona said, dropping her hands from her face to look at the paper again. “But that’s what it means. There’s…a ‘G’ stamped here on the bottom. That means it was Guido’s deal.”
“Fucking sick bastard,” Vince groaned out, shaking his head at his brother. His dad taught them to respect women, to treat them like human beings, not playthings to fuck and ruin and discard. But Guido was apparently not his father’s son, at least not in any way that counted. He was a monster.
Fiona sighed deeply, tearing Vince out of his angry reverie, and put the papers aside. “I don’t know what to do with this.”
“You could hand it over to the FBI. I’m sure it’d be admissible in court somehow,” Vince said, even though he felt like he was going to throw up just at the concept of involving law enforcement in the family business.
But Fiona just shook her head. “There’d be no way to get the feds to agree to just take down your mother or Guido or the people on their side. They’d go after everybody in the organization, not just the people who have been killing their own flesh and blood. We’d have to sink the whole boat just to get at one or two of the passengers.”
“Fair point,” Vince said, feeling a little helpless and lost as he stared at the stack of papers on the ground next to Fiona.
“I don’t know what to do,” Fiona said sadly, her voice sounding soft and hollow. “I really have no fucking clue.” Vince wished he knew what to say to comfort her, to guide her, but he was just as lost as she was. There was no easy way to solve this. It made him wish his father was still around. Paulie would know what to do. Paulie wouldn’t be this confused. He must be so disappointed in me, Vince thought to himself with a deep sigh.
“I wonder why Paulie never told you about this until now,” Vince said after a long moment of silence. “I mean, he could have shared this with you any other way, rather than making you come out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Maybe he wasn’t sure yet,” Fiona said, biting her lip. “Maybe he didn’t know for sure that they were set against him, and he didn’t want to put them in danger unless…” She trailed off, looking up at Vince with wide, sad eyes. “Unless they actually killed him.”
“And you’re sure about that?” Vince asked, his anxiety peaking inside of him as he considered the unthinkable. “You’re really certain that they…did it?”
Fiona looked so solemn, her face falling with despair as she nodded. “I’m really confident about it, yeah. I guess I can never know for sure, but my gut is telling me it was them. Especially now that we have all of this to consider,” she said, gesturing to the pile of papers in her hand.
Vince chewed on the inside of his cheek, using the pain to distract himself as his thoughts floundered, completely tangled up. “I guess I really come from pretty fucked-up people,” he finally said, his voice sounding far away even to himself.
Fiona scooted closer to him, rubbing the back of his hand soothingly until he looked up at her and met her eyes, which were filled with some kind of inner light, some kind of new energy that hadn’t been there earlier that evening. “It doesn’t matter what you come from,” Fiona said softly but firmly.
“It does,” Vince argued back. “It’s who I am. I can’t ever run from that, can I? I tried for over a year, just to bury myself in the city and ignore everything that was going on back here. But while I was away, my mother was killing off older men in the organization, men loyal to my father, so that she could take over as soon as she whacked my dad. How am I supposed to deal with that?”
“Right now, you don’t deal with it,” Fiona said, shaking her head firmly. “That’s going to follow you for a really long time. It’s probably going to wake you up at night. It’s probably going to make you feel like there’s no point looking for any kind of hope in the world, any kind of salvation. It should make you feel that way. It’s natural. That just means you loved your father.”
“Yeah, well, what good does that do?” Vince spat out, frustrated. “Honestly, tell me. What is the point of loving my dad if I can’t even do the one thing he needed me to do? I wasn’t even boss two days before they ripped it away from me.”
“So, get it back,” Fiona said, dropping Vince’s hand and getting to her feet, brushing off the dust from her legs and straightening up to her full height. “Come on. We have work to do.”
Vince stared up at her for a minute, feeling no urge to get up and follow her back out of the warehouse. Honestly, he felt perfectly content to just lay there in a pile of despair, committed to the reality that there was nothing he could do to fix the situation he was in.
“Seriously, come on, let’s go,” Fiona said, leaning down to speak directly in his face like a drill sergeant. “What, you’re just going to give up? That’s it? We finally get a shred of evidence against your mom and your brother and you’re willing to throw in the towel?”
“It’s not like that,” Vince said defensively, even though he knew that she wasn’t stretching the truth very far.
“Then tell me what it’s like,” Fiona said, calling his bluff.
Vince sighed deeply and rubbed his forehead, willing the pounding in his head to fade away, to no avail. “Look, I buried my dad today, and then two seconds later, my mother and brother stole the company out from under me. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers to show how quickly things happened. “There was nothing I could. It’s like you said earlier. There are too many enforcers, too many people whose loyalties are aligned with my mother. Otherwise she never would’ve been able to kill this many people,” he said, gesturing
to the papers on the ground beside him.
“We have to try,” Fiona insisted, leaning down to pick up the papers. “We can’t just give up.”
“Why not?” Vince asked, even though he had a feeling he already knew the answer. It’s because of Paulie, he thought. Because of his legacy. Because of what the Romano family used to stand for. Loyalty. Honor. Respect. All of that deserves to be defended.
But Fiona surprised him by shrugging. “For your own goddamn piece of mind,” she said. “You have to fight this, otherwise you’re going to feel like your life got taken away from you, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t come with me right now.”
Vince looked up into Fiona’s shining, brilliant, honest eyes, and he knew that she was telling the truth. All his life, he’d been searching for the control that he felt he’d never naturally had. He’d been compensating for what he felt he was missing, exerting power in a safe way to prove to himself that he wasn’t weak. But now there was a real opportunity to show what he was made of, and he was cowering like a little boy. “How do you know we’re not just going to get killed?” he muttered.
Fiona surprised him again, this time by shrugging in a nonchalant manner. “I don’t. Now come on, come with me. If I’m going to get whacked, I’d rather it not be alone.”
Maybe because she was so flippant about it, maybe because he could sense the thread of fear in her eyes, maybe because she was just so damn beautiful that he would do anything she said—he got up and followed her out of the warehouse.
“What do we do now?” Vince asked as they headed back towards her apartment.
“First, we sleep,” Fiona said. “We’re going to need our strength if we’re going to do this.”
“Do what?” Vince asked.
“Go to war,” Fiona said simply, filling Vince with a calm confidence that he’d thought he’d lost forever.
Right, he said to himself as he followed Fiona back to her apartment, back to her blissfully soothing bed. I can do this. I have to do this. I have to be strong.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The next morning, the plan came together all at once, popping into Vince’s head as soon as he woke up, still clutching onto Fiona even in his sleep. “Fiona,” he whispered softly, wanting to wake her up as gently as possible. “Fiona, I know what to do.”
“Hmm?” she murmured as she blinked her way awake. “What?”
“To get my mother and Guido,” he explained. “We can’t go to the cops or the feds or anyone right now, not without proof. So, we have to get some.”
“But how?” Fiona asked groggily, wiping her eyes in an attempt to shake the tiredness out of her head.
Vince smiled down at her, overwhelmed by how goddamn cute she was. He loved seeing her like this, bare of make-up, totally relaxed. It was so comforting, seeing her in her natural habitat. He wanted to make a habit of it, but he didn’t want to push too hard. He didn’t want to come on too strong and scare her away. “I have to set a meeting with Guido and my mother,” he explained, tentatively reaching out to rub the side of Fiona’s head, brushing her hair out of the way gently. Her eyes slid shut for a moment, soothed by Vince’s careful touch, but then they snapped back open as his words sunk in.
“Isn’t that dangerous, though?” she asked, a sense of urgency to her voice as she straightened up next to him, finally waking all the way up. Vince felt a little sad about that. He’d love to watch her sleep or talk groggily for hours if he could.
“Yes, probably,” Vince said, admitting the truth rather than lying to her for the sake of convenience. “There’ll be some danger, but I don’t think they’ll hurt me.”
Fiona sighed and shook her head. “You didn’t hear your mother when she threatened me. She meant business, Vince.”
“She’s always like that,” Vince argued, even though he couldn’t make the pit of fear at the bottom of his stomach go away very easily. “But if she wanted to kill me, she’s had plenty of opportunity thus far to make it happen already. She doesn’t want to do it if she can avoid it. So I’m just going to meet with her and pretend that everything is okay. She’ll probably be relieved that I’m not pissed at her for deposing me.”
Fiona’s brow furrowed as she considered Vince’s proposition. “So, you make her let her guard down and then…?”
“I get her to admit what she’s done, while secretly taping her. The feds have been pulling that shit for years, getting a guy in the organization to flip for them and then wiring him up so they can collect evidence to put us away. I figure it’s about time we appropriate their tools for ourselves.”
Fiona nodded slowly, quiet for a minute before she finally said, “It’s a good plan. I like it.”
“Okay, I’ll call my mom and set a meeting up,” Vince said, swinging his legs over the side of Fiona’s bed and reaching for his phone on the bedside table.
“What should I do?” Fiona asked, getting up along with Vince.
“Wait here,” Vince said, wincing inside when he saw how Fiona’s face fell in disappointment. “I can’t bring you with me, Fiona. You know that.”
“Yeah, I guess I do,” Fiona admitted, sighing deeply and nodding in agreement. “There’s no way she’d trust you enough to talk about the hits she’s arranged if I’m there, that’s for sure. So, you have to go alone.” She hugged herself, wrapping her arms around her torso tightly, and Vince’s heart fell in his chest, just seeing how scared she was.
“Hey,” he said, stepping closer to her so he could wrap his arms around her and make her look directly into his eyes. “It’s going to be okay. I promise.”
“How do you know?” Fiona asked nervously.
“Because it’s my family,” Vince replied. “They’re fucked-up and awful and maybe even evil, but I know them. I know how they’ll react to things. My mom is going to open up and tell me the truth, if only just to brag about it. She’s always been complaining about how she doesn’t get enough credit for helping Dad to run the organization. Once I get her to relax and have a few glasses of wine with me, she’ll open right up. It’ll be easy, I swear.”
“But you’ll be walking into a lion’s den,” Fiona argued, staring up at him with worry etched all over her face.
“That’s true,” Vince agreed. “But you’ve forgotten something. I’m a lion, too.”
That made Fiona crack a smile, her face lighting up a little as she smirked up at Vince. “Yeah. That’s right, isn’t it? You are.” She leaned in to kiss him, gently brushing their lips together. Vince tried to deepen the kiss, reaching behind Fiona to grab at her ass, but she pulled away a second later, putting a hand on his chest to keep him at bay. “Tangerine,” she said.
“All right, all right,” Vince said, holding his hands up in defeat. “Not now. We’ve got business to do.”
“You have business to do,” Fiona said with a sheepish smile. “I’ve got to stay at home with my dad, who’s probably wondering what the hell is going on.”
Vince nodded and stepped closer again, just to press their foreheads together this time. “Okay. I’ll be back soon, I promise. As soon as I can.”
“You text me as soon as you get something incriminating on your mother, okay?” Fiona said, dropping a soft kiss on both of Vince’s cheeks before letting him step away.
“All right. See you soon,” Vince said as he exited her bedroom, leaving her house without looking back, even though he knew Fiona was following him to the door. He couldn’t let himself look at her again, otherwise temptation might get the better of him and cause him to fall back into bed with her. Later, he promised himself as he walked to a central area around a bus stop about a half mile away from Fiona’s apartment and then dialed his mother’s phone number.
“Victoria Romano speaking,” his mother said into his ear as soon as she answered the call.
“Ma, hi, it’s me,” Vince said, wanting to sound as casual as possible.
“Oh. Hello, dear,”
his mother said after a short pause. She sounded a little stiff and awkward, like she wasn’t expecting to hear from Vince so soon.
“So how are you holding up?” Vince asked. He didn’t want to let on that he was at all upset about the events of the day before, so he kept his tone light but a little concerned and interested, like he was really invested in his mother’s peace of mind.
“Oh, fine, dear, I’m fine,” his mother said.
“That’s good,” Vince said. “I know it can be tough, you know, since you’ve been so busy ever since Dad passed.”
“Yes, well, I suppose it’s all catching up to me now,” his mother said, sighing deeply. You fucking bitch, Vince thought to himself, his jaw tightening painfully as anger washed over him. You’re not actually upset. You fucking killed him.
“I just wanted to see if there’s anything I can do for you, since you’re going through so much,” Vince said, grimacing at the words that were leaving his mouth.
