by Bethany-Kris
“Yeah, I get that.”
Now, her voice turned faint.
Her head stayed turned down.
Bene wondered why.
“Anyway,” Vanna said, closing the book and looking up with a bright smile. All that strangeness was gone, and in its place was the sweet, but sexy woman who caught his attention, and had yet to lose it, even if he wasn’t willing to dig into the whys quite yet. “Food, you said?”
He could have pressed on her behavior.
Or the change in demeanor.
Instead, Bene just said, “Yeah, let’s get some grub.”
8.
The mansion was wired to the nines. Every single light in the place could be shut off with a press of one button from Bene’s phone—or any of his other family members, he explained. A camera rested in almost every high corner, keeping watch on hallways and main rooms. The security in the place was top notch, no doubt about it.
Yet, even knowing that, Vanna didn’t hesitate to slip out of the bed she shared with Bene for the weekend once he was passed out, to take another walk through the mansion. After all, he promised he would clear out all the footage of their time in the place, and he didn’t even have to look at it to do it, just select dates he wanted to wipe from the memory. Which meant, for the most part, she had free reign when he fell asleep to do what she wanted.
And needed.
Apparently, his parents wouldn’t appreciate them being there when they ... well, weren’t, basically. Bene had been quick to explain that wouldn’t even matter once he got rid of the footage of their time there. Vanna found that amusing.
A little.
Vanna only felt the slightest tinge of guilt when she headed past the library about what she was doing. Mostly because she had never felt any connection to the Guzzi family except through the stories she’d been told, and the moments she shared with Bene.
Other than that, her hate fueled by the past and memories of her father kept the vendetta well and alive for her. Nothing else factored into it—she never considered the fact that the family shared a whole life that they wouldn’t want destroyed by someone like her. That behind the private walls of their lavish homes, hid stories of ... well, a family.
Love.
Kids.
Marriage.
More.
So yeah, she felt a little bit of guilt as she passed the library, remembering that for the last several years, she had bought a newspaper every second Sunday just to get a peek at the anonymous reviewer’s take on recent book releases. Reading, like cooking, had been a way she forgot about the loss of her father, and it helped her to get through tough times. She loved books, and the fact that she had enjoyed reading a column that Bene’s mother wrote—a fucking Guzzi—had her doing a double take.
Not to mention, the way he spoke about his mom.
And his dad.
His brothers.
All of them.
He spoke about them in a way that almost made her want to like them—as though meeting them would be easy because they seemed like likable, interesting people through his point of view. She didn’t want to give them much time in her mind for that shit because nothing good would come of it, she was certain.
After all, she was here for one reason.
She might enjoy fucking that man.
It meant nothing.
She was still here for a damned reason.
Vanna couldn’t afford to forget it. Her stupid heart couldn’t get in the way of her end game, and neither could her conscience. She wasn’t supposed to have one of those, anyway. And what really were the Guzzis or their love worth to the fact that because of them, her father died. No, they didn’t pull the trigger, but they also didn’t have to.
It only took one pebble to make a landslide.
Decades ago, Gian Guzzi was the pebble.
Vanna would be their landslide.
Palming her phone, she climbed the stairwell to the third floor of the mansion. Down the hall, and to the left, facing the entire front of the Guzzi property, rested Gian’s office.
The door had been closed.
One of those off-limits rooms.
Vanna pushed the door open, and for a moment, simply stood in the doorway. She couldn’t help but notice how there weren’t any cameras in the top floor hallway in this wing. There weren’t any cameras inside the office, either.
Not surprising.
No criminal wanted his acts on tape.
Vanna took in the richly stained wood of the oak desk that dominated the middle of the office, and the built-in shelves that matched behind it. A large, wingback office chair with studded detailing along the sides sat proudly behind the clean, yet still personal, desk. A few pictures of the family rested on the top, and a bowl with a few knickknacks, a lighter, and even a money clip with a few hundred-dollar bills sat inside.
A laptop sat on one side.
A desktop on the other.
In the middle, a pile of folders.
Windows across from the desk overlooked the entire front of the property, giving the man who sat behind the desk a good view of anyone coming near his home. She doubted that was done in error, but rather, purposefully.
Vanna took a single step in the room, hitting the home button on her phone to turn it on before typing in the passcode. It took no time at all for her to get the camera running on her phone as she crossed the space, and went to the desk first.
Surprise.
The drawers all had locks.
And they weren’t budging.
She focused on the folders instead, flipping the first couple on top open to look inside. She didn’t really understand what stared back at her, except it was something about a maple syrup farm, and the fact that it made a lot of money.
But why the off-shore accounts?
Because those documents were right underneath.
Attached to the farm.
She could clearly see deposits into the accounts on the paperwork, too, and not ones that came from the farm. It looked more like transfers from other accounts. Like someone was using the maple syrup farm to hide other cash flows.
It took her a second.
Money laundering.
And wire fraud.
Vanna started snapping pictures.
She’d send them off once she left.
The office was a fucking gold mine. Surely, she could do something with this. Especially, if it was exactly what she thought it was.
Only time would tell.
• • •
“Where have you been all weekend?”
Vanna’s head snapped up, gaze darting to the end of the hallway instead of the phone in her hand that had taken her attention while she headed up to her penthouse. She’d been distracted, replying to Bene’s text in one window asking if she got up to her place safely—he’d driven her home, but she promised she was fine to head up alone, even though he offered.
In the other text chat, her contact asked if she thought she would be able to get inside the Guzzi mansion again for another round of her spying. According to his message, he needed more info on the maple syrup business to hand over before he could guarantee anything would come out of her findings.
Fucking perfect.
Fuck her whole life today. Because in her distraction, she totally missed the man waiting at her front door looking like he had been standing there for way too long. Damn, he probably did, too, knowing him. Had his car been parked downstairs? Because she missed that, too.
Mario gave her a look when she didn’t answer right away. “Well?”
“Quebec,” she lied.
She didn’t even know why she said that.
Just did.
It was the first thought to pop into her head, and apparently, she was too fucking stupid from spending the weekend under a gorgeous man that knew how to play her body like nothing else to care about thinking up a good lie for Mario when she returned home. This had been inevitable, and even she knew that.
This a
sshole was too attached.
Always nearby.
She couldn’t have him ruining her plans.
“Why?” he asked.
Vanna quickly turned off the screen of her phone and dropped it into her bag as she came up to her door, keys in hand. God knew he didn’t need to see either of her chat windows. That wouldn’t be good for her end goal. “To see a new restaurant one of the previous graduates opened up last year—she’s looking for someone to apprentice under her, and my name was suggested.”
All lies.
She pulled it out of nowhere.
Thing was, Mario had never been very interested in her schooling, the fact she wanted to be a chef, and he didn’t have the first idea what it would take for her to become one. Like the fact that she would need to apprentice under someone for a set number of hours before she could get her seal.
As she turned to slide the lock into her deadbolt, Mario slipped in beside her. His hand landed to the door right by her head, making Vanna still as she tilted her head to the side, staring at him. He looked back, a smile curving his lips, but a fire burning in his eyes.
It meant nothing good.
“What?” she asked.
“You didn’t think to tell me you were going out of town for the weekend? You just dropped off the radar, Vanna. Hell, you didn’t even stay long enough to say goodbye to my parents on Friday night. I had to apologize to my parents for you. Do you even realize how fucking stupid that makes me look to them?”
Oh.
Was that the problem?
He needed to make things good with Senior, and his ma?
Vanna wished she cared.
“Didn’t think I had to mention it,” she replied.
Hoping that would be the final say on the matter, although she knew that was a pipe dream in and of itself, she unlocked the door, and reached for the knob to twist it open. Mario’s hand dropped to hers, his fingers tightening almost painfully.
It stopped her from opening the door.
“You didn’t think to mention it to me?”
That nice smile of his was gone.
Mario wasn’t even pretending now.
This man could ruin everything for her—beyond just the Guzzi family, and her plans ... he could screw her entire life with a single conversation. All he would need to do was go to his father, say Vanna had stepped out of line, made the clan look bad, and best-case scenario would be that she was put under lockdown by the boss. Given a chaperone to follow her everywhere, to the point she probably wouldn’t even be able to piss alone.
Worst-case scenario?
His patience for this game he thought he’d been playing with Vanna for years suddenly ran out, and instead of locking her down ... he just ended her. It was the Camorra way, after all, but especially for women who didn’t stay in line.
God knew Vanna walked a thin line for a long time in this life.
She searched her brain for something—anything—to focus Mario’s attention elsewhere, so that he dropped this line of conversation. If he started looking too deep into her business—more than the asshole already did—her plans would come crashing down before she could properly get started on making them work.
“Do you want to go out for dinner?” she asked.
He blinked. “What?”
“Dinner. You and me. Right now, because I’m hungry and I don’t feel like cooking.”
“We’re talking about something right now.”
“I get it—let you know where I am. Sorry, next time I will. So, dinner?”
She wouldn’t call it a date.
He might, though.
That’s all Mario wanted.
Just the idea they were something.
His smile curved his lips again. “Fine, woman, dinner.”
Battle won.
She was sure it wouldn’t be the last, either.
• • •
Vanna tapped her ballet flat against the tiled floor of the college’s hallway, trying to settle the way her nerves suddenly decided to make themselves known. It didn’t seem to matter how many times she had these meetings, or the fact that they had never gone badly—never mind that she hadn’t even been caught doing it—she still became terribly nervous.
Classes at the college were over for the day, and since it wasn’t unusual for Vanna to hang around for a bit after she finished, no one ever thought twice about the fact that for the last month ... she had stayed an extra hour every Friday.
The squeak of cheap shoes against the tile had Vanna sighing. She glanced up, but stared at the white brick wall across from her position, instead of the man she knew was approaching her from the left. Soon, he was sitting on the bench to her right, and swiping at the screen of his phone while she waited for him to speak first.
It always went this way.
Never failed.
She thought it was stupid sometimes—anyone could see them having a conversation, so why did they need to make it seem like they were just two random people sitting in a hallway of a college that the man with graying hair clearly wasn’t attending?
One look at him, and everyone would know.
Cop.
He looked like one.
Smelled like one.
Walked like one.
All cops were the same.
They simply wore different badges.
“How was your week?” he finally asked, never looking up from his phone.
Vanna rolled her eyes. “Could we not?”
His head tipped up, giving her a good look at his aging profile, the lines speaking of years past etched on his features, and the almost gray eyes that seemed cold whenever he did stare at her. His jawline had softened, but she could still tell that once upon a time, he had probably been a very handsome man.
A long time ago.
Probably before his partner, who once thought to take down the infamous Gian Guzzi, had failed, ruined his career as a detective in the process, and then proceeded to drink his life away. Then he decided hanging himself from his stairwell would be the best option.
Vanna learned, with nothing more than a conversation at her father’s grave with this cop, that vendettas didn’t stay with only Italians. Sometimes, a person’s need for justice when it came to something that just wouldn’t let go of their very soul, and they were willing to do anything to get what they wanted.
Like this man beside her.
Jacob Keefs. A constable in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. A detective who had been moved from several divisions after several upsets in his earlier career—including a failed attempt to take down Canada’s biggest crime family, the Guzzis. He’d worked with her father for a time, according to him. Just enough for her father to trust him, and for him to trust Adam. A cop that was willing to be dirty to serve his desires to end a criminal empire ... was it justified?
She didn’t know.
Didn’t care.
This time, it was all about her.
Her vendetta.
“How about,” Vanna said quietly, peering down the hallway to check for anyone at the other end, “you just tell me what I need to look for next, and we’ll go from there.”
The man grumbled under his breath. “Your father at least gave me conversation during our meetings. Passed the time a little easier.”
Yeah.
Well, she wasn’t her dad.
Her father might have been fine with justifying his reasoning for working with a cop—dirty or not—but she certainly wasn’t the same. Even Adam had told her that cops couldn’t be trusted, all the while he worked with one, and now here she was ... doing the same thing. The difference was, Vanna didn’t trust this cop to save her life.
She didn’t doubt for a second that if it helped him get what he wanted, then he would quickly throw her right under the bus. It was the one and only reason she kept a tab on this man for her own purposes, just in case she ever needed to use it.
It was a good thing to do.
“Again, anything you want
me to look for?” she demanded.
“You certainly hit on something with the last bit you sent to me. Took it higher to my superiors, without mentioning the name of my source, of course, and he jumped on the chance to tell me to go ahead with it. Whatever I needed, he was willing to make it happen. Seems he thinks the Guzzi family’s money laundering and wire frauds using their maple syrup farms could really lead to something huge.”
“One business of many, probably.”
“They control a good portion of this city, areas of Quebec, and beyond. Their reach is—”
“I know who I’m dealing with,” she muttered, “I don’t need the rerun, Mr. Keefs.”
She understood better than anyone.
He couldn’t tell her differently.
Vanna risked everything to see this vendetta through. The career she hadn’t even been able to start yet, her freedom, and even her life. Yes, she understood very well the kinds of people that she was working to take down, and what it would mean if something fucked it up. She didn’t need his reminders.
Besides, now they were just wasting time.
“I have to leave soon.”
“Right, right.” He cleared his throat, sitting back on the bench to rest his leg over his right knee while he pocketed his phone. “Anything relating to the maple syrup farms would be good—even better if you can find documentation of any imports for their businesses. I have reason to believe they’re also smuggling their drugs, illegal cigarettes, and more through those businesses, and if so ... maybe you can find something. If we could catch them at a port of entry, it’d be a heyday.”
“His office was clean.”
“You found the folders.”
“I found things that suggested something wasn’t right. Bank accounts. Documentation of transfers. Nothing that says that cash came from illegal means, or otherwise. You told me that yourself—it’s enough to suspect that’s what it is, but they have to find the source of the cash, and what’s making it for them, before you can prove they’re laundering it.”
