Through the Fire (New York Syndicate Book 3)

by Michelle St. James

  It was still risky, but she was emboldened by the distance between her and New York and the encrypted phone Damian had left her.

  To say nothing of the men around her.

  She pitied any man who tried to breach the house on Kythnos. Damian and Cole alone would have been formidable; together with Locke and Derek, they would be a force of utter destruction.

  “Think he’s still in New York?” Cole asked.

  Aria thought about it. “He shouldn’t be — he would be foolish to stay — but my gut says yes. New York is his town. What’s it all for if he relinquishes his hold on it?”

  “You don’t think he could be holed up in Greece with Anastos?”

  “We don’t even know if Anastos is here,” Aria said. “But I think Damian is right — animals return to their den when they’re wounded. That would place Stefano here and Malcolm in New York. Plus, there’s the question of motivation.”

  Cole raised an eyebrow. “Motivation?”

  “Anastos doesn’t care about New York. Not really,” she said. “His interests lie here in Greece.”

  “So why help Gatti in New York at all?” Cole asked.

  She had a feeling he knew, that he was testing her.

  She shrugged. “Probably something as simple as money. New York only matters to Anastos inasmuch as it affects the balance of power worldwide. Letting the Syndicate take it back is a step toward their domination of the rest of the world. Beyond that, I don’t think Anastos cares about New York. Malcolm is different.”

  He studied her across the table. “How?”

  “Malcolm thinks New York belongs to him. It’s his home. He put up with Primo’s sickness all these years because he thought it was taking him closer to owning the city. What would be the point if he left now?”

  “He might still get out with his life,” Cole said.

  “I could be wrong,” Aria said, “but I don’t think Malcolm’s life means much to him in and of itself.”

  Malcolm had no family that she knew of. No woman, no children. His only love was money and power. Without those things, she wasn’t entirely sure he would find life worth living.

  Cole sat back in his chair. “I don’t think you’re wrong.”

  “No?”

  “No.” He waved at the computer. “Anything I can do to help?”

  Twelve

  Damian squared his shoulders and kept his eyes alert as he continued down the street. He could have chosen another of the neighborhoods they’d targeted for tips on Stefano’s whereabouts. Omonia held too many memories, and none of them good.

  Every man he saw might have been party to Aria’s imprisonment. Every restaurant might have been the source of the cold food she was fed. He listened to the sound of the busy street — the cars and sirens and shouts — and wondered if they were the same sounds Aria had heard from the tiny dungeon in the months she’d been held captive.

  But he wouldn’t let it beat him. Wouldn’t let it keep him from the important work of finding one of the men responsible for what had been done to her.

  He let it fuel his rage instead. Let it kindle the embers that glowed hot in his body, ready to spark to life at every turn.

  There was only one thing that would quiet the fury boiling in his blood — and that was more blood.

  Stefano Anastos’ blood.

  Malcolm Gatti’s blood.

  He would see the streets run with it and then he and Aria would begin again in peace.

  He made a point of letting his jacket flip open every now and then to reveal the weapon holstered at his side. Stefano’s men were undoubtedly in the neighborhood even if the man himself wasn’t. The show of potential force would deter the ones looking for trouble to ease their boredom.

  Nothing would deter the others.

  He stepped into a bakery on a busy corner. The warm, yeasty scent was a respite from the smell of the city, and he approached the glass case with interest, studying the pastries and rolls as he waited for a man in a white apron to finish ringing up the purchases of a woman with graying hair and a too-small coat.

  He’d spent the last three hours wandering into businesses they’d targeted as likely assets of the Anastos operation — bars that might be fronts for bookmaking, strip clubs that were probably used to launder money, storefronts that were likely targets for protection money.

  He’d slipped thousands of American dollars to countless men and women, asking subtly about Stefano. So far he hadn’t had any luck, but he wasn’t discouraged. If Anastos had gone to the trouble to stay off the digital grid, it only stood to reason he would be equally careful in person.

  It might take time to get a solid lead, but they would find it.

  He wondered how Locke and Derek were doing in Metaxourgeio, another of the city’s crime-laden neighborhoods known for being under Anastos’ control.

  The man in the apron turned to him, saying something in Greek. Damian cursed his lack of proficiency in the language.

  “No Greek,” Damian said. “English?”

  The man nodded, smiled. “English! How can I help?”

  Damian pointed at a thick square of baklava in the case and held up two fingers. “Please.”

  The man started wrapping the pastry and Damian’s gaze was drawn to movement in the doorway behind the counter. A young woman studied him with dark eyes.

  “More?” the man asked as he set the bag on the counter.

  “No, thank you.” Damian pushed a couple bills toward him. Then added a couple more. “Does Stefano Anastos prefer baklava, too?”

  A wall quickly came down over the man’s face. He took the money with a nervous laugh. “Only little English. Not much English.”

  Damian reached for the baklava and held up a folded stack of bills, shielded by his body from the window at the front of the store. “No one will know.”

  The girl in the doorway shifted nervously on her feet and the man turned, loosing a stream of angry Greek that sent her scurrying out of sight back through the doorway.

  “You go!” the man said to Damian, making a waving motion as he glanced at the street beyond the window. “You go now!”

  Damian added a couple more bills to the wad in his hand. “No Anastos?”

  He glanced at the money in Damian’s hand and licked his lips before he shook his head. “No! You go! Now!”

  Damian backed away, slipping the money into his pocket as he lifted his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Okay, okay. I go, but someone in this neighborhood is going to take this money. It might as well be you.”

  He stepped onto the street and bit into the baklava. The man had wanted the money. He’d just been scared, which was understandable with a monster like Anastos.

  Damian would come back if he didn’t get a break soon. He surveyed the businesses lining the street, his gaze coming to rest on a narrow doorway that looked like the entrance to a dive bar.

  He brushed the crumbs off his hands and started walking.

  Thirteen

  Aria was pouring her first cup of coffee when a knock sounded from the door of the house on Kythnos. She was debating whether she should answer it when Cole appeared at the back door like a bloodhound on the scent of prey.

  “How did you hear that in the guest house?” Aria said as he drew his gun and started for the front door.

  “I heard it,” he said.

  He parted the curtains an inch and peered out the front window, then opened the door slowly, the gun still in his hand.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  Aria couldn’t see the person on the other side of the door, but she knew it was a woman from the voice that drifted into the house as they exchanged words.

  “Wait here,” Cole said, closing the door and turning to Aria. “Did Damian or Locke say anything about a woman coming today? Someone named Nora Murphy?”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar, but her head was still fuzzy with sleep. She shook her head.

  Cole removed his phone from the
pocket of his jeans.

  “Shouldn’t we let her in?” Aria asked.

  “Would you want to let her in if she were a man?” Cole asked.

  He had a point. It was totally sexist to assume someone wasn’t dangerous because they were female. Aria had gone to Velvet to make sure Malcolm was dead, would have killed him herself if she’d had the chance.

  “It’s me,” Cole said into the phone. “A woman is at the door, name of Nora Murphy. You know anything about that?”

  He listened, then sighed. “Fucking-A. Thanks for the warning.”

  Aria assumed he was talking to Locke, because Cole would never in a million years talk to Damian that way.

  He put the phone back in his pocket. “She’s legit. Part of Locke’s team, delivering intel on Gatti.”

  He opened the door. “Sorry about that.”

  A woman with glossy blond hair and striking blue eyes stepped through the door. “I understand,” she said. “I’m sorry if I surprised you. I should have known Locke wouldn’t mention that I was coming.”

  Cole shut the door behind her. “Yeah, communication isn’t his strong suit.”

  Her laugh was short but warm. “That’s putting it mildly.”

  She held out her hand. “Nora Murphy.”

  “Cole Grant.”

  They shook hands and the woman turned to Aria. “You must be Aria.”

  Aria nodded. She needed way more coffee.

  Nora approached the kitchen and set her bag on the counter that divided it from the living room. She held out her hand.

  “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Aria said, shaking her hand. “Would you like some coffee?”

  “I’d kill for some coffee,” she said. “Not even a private plane can make that flight pleasant.”

  She slid onto one of the stools at the counter as if she’d been there a hundred times before. Maybe she had.

  Aria poured her a cup of coffee plus one for Cole, who had retreated to the guest house, probably to change out of the rumpled clothes he’d obviously thrown on in a hurry.

  “So you’re working on Malcolm?” Aria asked.

  Nora nodded. “And Anastos, though I haven’t gotten very far with either of them.”

  “Very far?” Aria asked. “I thought they were completely off-grid.”

  Nora took a sip of her coffee. “More or less, but I still have friends at the Bureau.”

  The Bureau. The FBI.

  Now Aria remembered; Nora was the woman Damian told her about in La Jolla: a former FBI agent dating another former FBI agent, both of them now working for Locke.

  “How does the Bureau help us at all if Malcolm and Anastos are off-grid?” Aria asked.

  “Two words.” Nora reached for the bag she’d set down. “Incidental collection.”

  “Incidental collection?”

  Nora removed a laptop from the bag. “The Bureau doesn’t have to surveil Anastos or Gatti to pick up their conversations or movements — they just have to surveil people who might be talking to or meeting with Gatti or Anastos.”

  Aria immediately understood.

  “They picked one of them up making contact with someone else who was under surveillance,” Aria murmured.

  “Exactly. They can stay off-grid all they want, but everyone has to eat, and from the sound of things in New York, Gatti and Anastos have also been coordinating bombings and executions in the city. That means contact with someone, or multiple someones, as it were,” she said, opening the laptop. “No guarantee you’ll be able to trace either of them from what we got, but Locke said to bring it all just in case.”

  A flare of hope sparked to life inside Aria. After nearly a week of making contact with people she knew in New York, she’d begun to despair of ever finding out anything that might help them track Gatti.

  Damian wasn’t faring much better with Locke and Derek. They’d been pounding the pavement in Athens every day, but even with the large amounts of cash they were pushing around, no one was talking

  Either everyone in Athens was extraordinarily loyal to Anastos — or extraordinarily scared of him.

  This was the first break they had. Aria didn’t know how helpful it might be, but it had to be better than what they had.

  Which was nothing.

  “You came all the way from California to bring this stuff to us?” Aria asked.

  “On Locke’s orders,” Nora said, her gaze straying to the ocean beyond the house. “Although I have to say, it’s not a bad gig.”

  Aria laughed. She had a feeling she was going to like working with Nora Murphy.

  “Tell you what,” Aria said, turning to the fridge, “let’s have breakfast. After that, we’ll go over the intel before we hit the beach for a break.”

  Nora grinned. “Intel and the beach? I like you already.”

  She was already tapping at the keys on the computer when Aria started cracking eggs into a bowl.

  Fourteen

  Damian sat behind the wheel of the SUV, his eyes on the busy streets of Omonia. It was his fifth day in the city. Five days of ferry rides in from Kythnos, stepping into one waiting SUV at the ferry terminal in Athens while Locke and Derek stepped into another.

  They’d gone their separate ways, canvassing every area of the city even remotely connected to Anastos’ operation — and they’d gotten nowhere.

  They’d had tips, more than one occasion when they thought they’d gotten a break in the form of a sighting, an alleged business partnership, a possible hit on Anastos’ passport.

  But it had all come to nothing.

  There had been two more hits in New York — an explosion at one of Damian’s satellite offices outside of the city and the beating of two of his men.

  They’d survived, but it still pissed Damian off.

  He needed Cole in Greece to protect Aria, and if he sent Aria back to New York with Cole so his underboss could take command of the situation there, he’d have to worry about Aria being thousands of miles away from him.

  Nowhere was he less inclined to entertain the idea than in Greece, where the memory of her imprisonment was around every corner.

  He was beyond grateful for the beautiful house on Kythnos, a refuge for Aria while she worked with Nora on finding Malcom. He wanted to punch someone every minute he was in Athens, and he wasn’t even the one who’d been kept prisoner there.

  He could never have subjected Aria to the memory of it.

  He scanned the street, marking the places that were worth trying a second time. Every day he was here, there was a greater chance he would be made by Anastos. How long would it be before word got out that someone was looking for him? Before he was dragged into some back alley or stuffed into a car?

  He wasn’t worried about Anastos. Damian could take that lazy fucker alone. He could even take two or three of his men.

  But if they sent a team for him, it wouldn’t be that easy.

  He fucking hated that the bastard was eluding them using tactics he and the Syndicate had actively worked to banish from their model.

  It was a big, ironic fuck you from the universe.

  He checked his weapon and stepped from the car. He was halfway down the street when someone called to him from a narrow alley.

  “Mister!”

  He followed the voice, saw a young woman standing in the shadows of the two buildings on either side of the alley, and looked around, thinking she was talking to someone else.

  “Yes, you,” she said, waving him into the alley. “Come.”

  This was shady as shit. Was Anastos using women to lure him out of the street now?

  But that didn’t make sense either. He was on Anastos’ territory. If the other man wanted to kill him, he would have had one of his men shoot him on the street and no one would say a word to the police.

  Hell, they wouldn’t even talk to Damian, and he was giving them money.

  He rested his hand on his weapon as he headed for the alley, looking into the
shadows beyond the young women to head off an ambush.

  It wasn’t until he was standing next to her that he realized why she looked familiar: she was the girl from the bakery, the one who had stood in the doorway and was shooed into the back when he’d been trying to bribe the baker.

  “I know where he is,” she said, her dark eyes shining as she looked around to make sure no one was listening or watching.

  “Stefano Anastos?” Damian asked.

  She nodded. “I can tell you.”

  He nodded, his hand still on the gun in its holster. “Okay.”

  She shook her head. “Money first.”

  And now he saw the shrewdness in her gaze. He couldn’t blame her. Neighborhoods like Omonia weren’t easy to live in — and they were even harder to grow up in.

  The girl had balls. He felt a hell of a lot better giving her money than people who remained loyal to someone who was obviously terrorizing them.

  He pulled a thick stack of bills from his pocket and divided it in half. He handed her one of the stacks.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Then you get the rest.”

  She took the money and stuffed it into the pocket of her skirt. “My cousin works as dancer for him,” she said. “He is a bad man. A mean man.”

  Dancer was code for stripper. Damian didn’t care or judge. People — and women in particular — had been doing what they had to do to survive for millennia. Any asshole who wanted to criticize a stripper instead of the men who paid to drool over them needed to check their moral outrage at the door.

  “Where?” Damian asked. “Where is the club?”

  “It is called Skin,” she said. “You can find it.”

  She held out her hand for more money.

  “Not so fast,” he said. “Is he there? Stefano Anastos? When is the last time he was seen?”

  Her eyes flashed. “My cousin has bruise on her wrist last night,” she said.