“Love you, loser,” she said.
He choked out a laugh. She tried to memorize the sound of it. Tried to banish the feeling that she wouldn’t be back to hear it again.
14
Ed was waiting when they got to the dock. He took their bags, and Angel and Sara embraced while David stood silently by. They hadn’t been around each other enough for Nico to expect David to like him. They didn’t even know each other. But Nico needed to do his part to set the record straight before he left with Angel.
He clasped a hand on David’s back and turned away from the women. “I’m going to keep her safe,” Nico said. He might not be able to guarantee his own safety, but he would get Angel home to her brother even if it killed him. “You can count on it.”
“I don’t see how you can promise that,” David said.
Nico looked in his eyes. “I am promising. And I don’t make promises lightly.”
“Okay,” David said.
Nico considered his next words. “I know we haven’t had a chance to get to know each other, and I know you have every reason to despise me. But I love your sister with everything I am. Her safety matters more to me than my own life, and since you matter to her, that means your safety matters that much to me, too. If there were another way, I’d take it. But you and I both know she won’t stay.”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“And you have to do your part, too,” Nico said.
David looked surprised. “My part?”
“You have to get well,” Nico said. “You have to show her that you want to stay alive, because right now, she’s living in fear that you don’t, and I’m not sure she’d be able to make it without you. She needs you. Do you understand?”
“She needs me?” David asked.
“That’s right,” Nico said. “She’s been carrying all of this on her shoulders while you get well, but she can’t do it forever, and she can’t do it without you. So take this time to regroup. Take your meds. Sleep and talk to Sara. Pull it together so that when she comes back you can be here for her.”
He didn’t say the other thing lingering in the back of his mind; that if he didn’t make it out alive, Angel would need her brother even more.
David’s nod was slower this time, like he was really thinking about what Nico said. “Okay.”
Nico clasped his back. “Good.”
He said a quick goodbye to Sara and got in the boat while Angel exchanged a few words with her brother. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears, but she kept her chin up, even tried to smile as Ed pulled away from the dock. She waved until they turned back toward the house.
Nico put his arm around her. “They’ll be okay.”
She nodded, but he couldn’t be sure she believed him.
They sped across the water and were back in Bass Harbor well before noon. After some quick instructions to Ed — including a weekly grocery drop to the island — he and Angel made their way up to the parking lot where they’d left Luca’s SUV. It wasn’t ideal. Nico had no way of knowing if Raneiro was searching for the vehicle. But it was a chance they’d have to take until they could get some clean papers and a new car.
“Are we going to the Hudson Valley house?” Angel asked when he got on the highway heading south.
“The Hudson Valley house burned to the ground a month after we rescued David.”
He didn’t look at her as he said it. The pain of losing the historic house — the one place where he most felt his mother’s presence — was still too raw. He’d loved having Angel there last fall, had hoped to bring her back, to share the history of his family summers there with her. In some of his wildest dreams, he even thought they might have children who would grow up there one day.
“Burned to the…” she didn’t say anything for a long minute. “What happened?”
“Electrical short, they said.”
“They?”
“The fire marshall.”
“Were they right?” she asked.
“Probably not.”
She reached across the console and took his free hand. The feel of her small hand over his, trying to offer him comfort after everything he’d brought to her door, almost undid him.
“I’m so, so sorry, Nico,” she said softly.
He nodded. “Me, too.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“To make sure I had nowhere to go,” he said simply.
“You can rebuild it,” she suggested. “When this is all over.”
“Maybe.”
The task in front of them wasn’t a small one. Getting out of the Syndicate with a free pass to a new life was unheard of after a hit had been taken out. The hit meant you’d already crossed the point of no return. That you’d betrayed them or fucked up so bad they needed to make an example of you. Letting you go then was a show of weakness, and the only way Raneiro would be willing to risk a show of weakness is if taking another course was so valuable that the upsides outweighed it.
And Nico wasn’t fooling himself; there were few things worth a show of weakness to Raneiro Donati.
He was glad when Angel changed the subject.
“So where are we going?” she asked.
“Albany.”
“Albany?”
He nodded. “There’s a small international airport there. The city is low key but big enough to get lost in for a little while. We’ll get a hotel, buy a cheap phone, and call Raneiro. Then we’ll figure out what’s next.”
He took them up through the Berkshires and into Vermont before cutting back down into New York. He was steering clear of Boston, and while he wasn’t crazy about the tolls — toll booths always had cameras — there was no way to get to New York without them that wouldn’t involve miles of backroads.
They stopped once for dinner and twice for gas and arrived in Albany just after sunset. The city was old and gritty, populated by brick buildings that had been standing since the early 1900s — some of them even longer — and bordered by the Hudson River in the east. He took the turnoff for the airport and pulled up to the ticket machine for long term parking.
“I thought we were getting a hotel,” Angel said, waking up in the passenger seat as the lights from the parking lot shone into the front seat.
“We are.” He navigated the car toward a spot farthest from the terminal. “But we need to ditch this car first.”
They removed their bags from the backseat and left the ticket on the dash. Then he led Angel away from the terminal, not wanting to be caught on one of the airport’s security cameras. He walked backwards, looking for a cab leaving without any passengers, and finally flagged one just before they hit the main road leading away from the airport.
The cabbie dropped them a couple of miles away at a sleazy motel. A hundred dollar bill let them slide without ID. Nico wasn’t crazy about bringing Angel there even for a night; he wanted her to have the best of everything. Wanted her sleeping on silk sheets and waited on hand and foot. But that would have to come later, after he’d secured her safety. For now, they needed to stay under the radar, and that meant avoiding the use of their real names.
“I’m sorry about this,” he said, setting their bags down in the tiny room.
She looked confused. “About what?”
“This… room,” he said, looking around.
She walked toward him, put her arms around his neck, looked into his eyes. “I don’t care about the room, Nico.”
She stood on tip-toe, touched her lips to his, slipped her tongue in his mouth. His cock immediately responded, standing at attention like it always did when she touched him. He couldn’t remember what it was like to be touched by someone else, to be kissed by someone else. He hoped he would never have to be reminded. He only wanted her. Today and forever.
Her mouth on his. Her hands on his body.
She took his lower lip between her teeth and tugged until he groaned.
“Work now, play later,” she said.
He sighed. “Tease.”
“You sure you want to do this?” Angel asked when he booted up the phone.
“We don’t have a choice,” he said.
She opened her mouth like she wanted to say something, then closed it.
“What?” he asked.
“I was going to say we could run. Just get David and run.”
“But?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to run.”
He smiled at her through the darkness. “Me, either.”
He opened the phone and dialed the number he’d memorized after the death of his parents. Raneiro answered on the second ring.
“Who are you and how did you get this number?”
The voice almost stopped Nico cold. It was the voice of his mentor and friend. The voice of the man who had been like a father to him after his own father had been murdered by Carlo Rossi. But it was also the voice of a cold-blooded killer. A kid who’d grown up on the mean streets of Sicily and now gave orders to the most vicious men in the world.
“It’s Nico,” he said. “We have two minutes before I disconnect this call.”
He couldn’t be sure Raneiro had the kind of tech savvy on staff to trace the call after the fact. But Raneiro had money. Lots of money. And money would buy any kid of knowledge. It was better to be safe.
“Nico…” He felt a twinge of satisfaction at the note of surprise in Raneiro’s voice. “Where are you?”
“You now I’m not going to tell you that, Nero. Cut the shit. Tell me what you want.”
A low chuckle unspooled from the other end of the phone. “Always straight and to the point, Nico. I have always liked that about you.”
“So?” Nico prompted.
“What do you want, Nico?” Raneiro’s voice was cold now, all hint of affection gone.
“I want out. For Angelica Rossi, her brother, and me. A free pass.”
“Nothing is free in this life, Nico. Didn’t your father teach you that before Carlo Rossi put a bullet in his brain?”
Nico reigned in his temper. He had been groomed by Raneiro, and he knew all the older man’s tricks. Raneiro was baiting him, trying to throw him off balance by appealing to emotion.
“Then tell me what you want as a trade,” Nico said.
“Some things can’t be bought or traded,” Raneiro said. “You let a woman infiltrate your mind, Nico, your heart. Now you pay the price, and so does she. The east coast is in shambles. I’ve given you more than enough time to rectify the situation. The only thing left is to make an example of you.”
Nico looked at the time ticking on the phone’s display. He had nine seconds left before he had to disconnect the call.
“Everyone has a price, Nero. You taught me that. There’s something you want more than you want to make an example out of me. Tell me what it is and you’ll have it.”
1:57… 1:58… 1:59…
“Phone me again tomorrow at the same time,” Raneiro said.
Nico disconnected the call, then crushed the phone under his foot.
15
They didn’t speak about Raneiro again that night. Instead, they went back to the hotel and made love into the morning. It was a strange kind of decadence — setting aside the outside world, the contract on their lives, the possibility that they wouldn’t live to have a future together — to lose themselves in each other. For a few hours, the dingy motel room faded to nothing. There was only Nico’s arms around her, his body sinking into hers while she cried his name, his mouth on her sex while she writhed in his hands. There was only his smooth skin, the defined angles of his body, his mouth devouring her like he would never have enough.
They fell asleep just before the sun came up and roused themselves around noon to get food. They walked the opposite direction from the diner, not wanting to be seen too often in the same place, and stopped at a hole in the wall that served tacos and burritos from a walk-up window. They took their food to a small table shielded by an umbrella. Angel was unwrapping her first taco when she finally asked the question that had been hovering in the back of her mind.
“What if Raneiro doesn’t want to trade?”
“He will,” Nico said. “A man like Raneiro always wants something.”
“What if it’s something we can’t get him?” she asked.
Nico took long drink of his water. “We’ll have to find a way to get it.”
“And then what?” she asked. “We do what he wants and let him walk away?”
Nico shook his head. “I’m not sure anyone ‘lets’ Raneiro do anything. He does what he wants. The rest of us make allowances accordingly.”
“What about all that he’s done?” Angel had to work to keep her voice calm. “What about bankrolling David’s kidnapping? Shooting at me in my own house? Forcing you underground for four months? He just gets away with it all?”
He took her hand. “Getting out of the Syndicate alive after all that’s happened is a best case scenario, Angel. Expecting to exact revenge along the way would be pushing it, even for me.”
She pulled her hand away, the food turning in her stomach. “He ruined our lives,” she said. “David will never be the same.”
And neither will I. She didn’t say it out loud, but it was true. When she’d come back from London after her father’s death, she’d been devastated by the truth about her father, by everything that had happened with Nico. But it was all recoverable back then. She was going to start over, figure out a plan to move on with her life.
Then Raneiro sanctioned the attacks on the Vitale family. Angel had stepped in to help Nico, and David had become a casualty of the turf war. His kidnapping and mutilation, followed by what had felt like the very real death of Nico, had flipped a switch inside her, changing something fundamental about who she was. She would never be able to get back all those old parts of herself, and even if Raneiro let them go, they would be looking over their shoulders their whole lives.
“I know that,” Nico said. “But I think we need to be smart here, because it’s going to come down to life or revenge. I know what I want most. Do you?”
She turned her face away, not wanting to answer the question.
“You’re going to have to answer, Angel. If not for me, than for yourself.”
She was still thinking about the question when they left the motel room later that night armed with the second of their four Tracphones. Life or revenge. She wanted life, didn’t she? A life with Nico? One where David was safe and happy? Did it matter if Raneiro paid for his crimes against them? The answer should have come easy.
They walked toward a McDonald’s this time, keeping up their pattern of changing locations. She wasn’t sure such remedial measures would matter if Raneiro ever tracked them to this part of Albany, but she couldn’t argue that it was worth a shot.
Nico pulled the phone from his pocket. He was starting to dial when she put a hand on his arm. “Wait.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“I want to hear what he says.”
He hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll keep the phone between us.”
“Thanks.”
He dialed and angled the phone out from his ear so she would hear it ringing. A moment later Raneiro’s voice came on the line. She had a flash of him the time he’d checked up on her in Boston; cold eyes, expensive suit, the kind of apathy that told her he wasn’t afraid to bet it it all, even if he lost. A man with a lot to lose who wouldn’t mind losing it.
“It’s me,” Nico said.
“I’ve always appreciated your punctuality,” Raneiro said.
“You taught me that it was rude to keep people waiting.”
Angel was surprised by the warmth of the laughter tha
t made its way across the miles. “So I did, Nico. So I did.”
“Did you think about it?” Nico asked. “About what you want in exchange for our freedom?”
“There is little that’s more important to me than my position in the Syndicate — and in pursuing opportunities for its growth. Letting you and Miss Rossi go will make it harder to maintain respect within the ranks.”
“What is it you want us to do?” Nico asked.
Angel pulled back from the phone and looked at Nico. Raneiro was making it clear that there was nothing he wanted as much as he wanted to make an example of them.
Nico shook his head and held up a finger, indicating that she should wait.
“As I’ve said - ” Raneiro started.
“You said there was ‘little’ that’s more important to you,” Nico interrupted. “Not nothing.”
“Astute as always,” Raneiro said. Angel could almost see the smile on his face, and then she understood; he was fucking with them. There was something he wanted, but he wanted to make them sweat before revealing it.
“Just tell me what it will take,” Nico forced the words out through clenched teeth.
“Well, there is one thing…”
“I’m waiting.”
“It’s an impossible task,” Raneiro said. “Especially for you and Miss Rossi, given your lack of recent tactical experience.”
“It didn’t seem to slow me down when I was putting a bullet in your man’s head back in Boston,” Nico said.
The phone went silent, and for a minute, Angel thought Raneiro had hung up. Finally he spoke.
“I’ve been looking into a new revenue stream,” Raneiro said. “It’s quite competitive, and a certain data file held by a certain someone would go a long way toward getting my foot in the door.”
“Hire a hacker,” Nico said. “They’re a dime a dozen now.”
Raneiro sighed. “I’m afraid this is more complicated. This particular file is reputed to be held on an external hard drive that is impossible to access, even for the best.”
Lawless: Mob Boss Book Three Page 6
