Born into the Mob, page 7
Davit lightly slapped her cheek and grinned like a damn maniac. “All that money that disappeared…It had to be millions. And I know a few dozen Italians who would do damn near anything to have access to it.”
His grin spread, so wide his lips practically touched his ears.
“So we’re going to sell you to the highest bidder.”
***
Luca met his uncle in Gino’s old office.
“How appropriate that we’re meeting in here. Davit paid me a visit at the club tonight,” Luca said without preamble.
Frankie’s gaze swept over his person. “You don’t look like you were used as a punching bag. He must not have had Narek with him.”
Luca touched his bruised kidney and winced. “Narek was there too, but they didn’t need to beat on me to get their point across.” He dragged in a breath. “They kidnapped someone. Someone important to me.”
“They took one of your dancers? Those sons of—”
“Uh…” Actually, his uncle had just given him an out, a way to save Nina without confiding her identity. He cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“Fuckers,” Frankie spat. “Who’d they take? Trixie? Fiona? Shit, did they take Serendipity? I’ll fucking kill them all myself.”
Well, now Luca knew who his uncle’s favorites were, he supposed. “Um, does it matter? Davit took one of my dancers, and I need your help to get her back.”
Frankie started tapping on the screen of his phone.
“What are you doing?” Luca asked.
“Texting a couple of the guys. To be honest, they’re all bored out of their minds these days. This is just what they need to lift their spirits. Plus, Davit needs to be taught a lesson—”
“No!” Luca dove toward him, snatching the phone out of his hands before he could press send. “No one else can know what’s going on.”
“Why not?”
“I…” What the hell did he say? “Davit said not to involve anyone else.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what Davit said. He won’t hurt your dancer if that’s what you’re worried about. I’m sure his choice was deliberate.”
Wasn’t that the truth.
“Which means it’s one he thinks provides a lot of revenue to the club. Give me my phone so I can send that text.”
Luca put his hands behind his back. “No one else can be involved, Uncle Frankie. Please.”
Frankie paused in the process of reaching around Luca to try to get to his phone. He furrowed his brow. “What’s this about, Luca?”
Luca dragged a hand through his hair, tugging on the strands for good measure. How the hell did he get his uncle to help, without telling him who he was helping? And without involving anyone else from Gino’s old crew?
“Don’t lie to me,” Frankie warned.
“Goddamn it.” Luca lifted his face to the ceiling and closed his eyes. He was so damn lousy at this game.
He sucked in a deep breath. “Nina Sarvilli.”
It was cartoon-like, the way Frankie’s entire body jerked and shuddered. “Sorry, what? I don’t think I heard you right.”
Luca pressed his lips together and then said, “You heard right.”
“Gino’s kid? What about Gino’s kid?”
“Well, she’s not exactly a kid anymore.” Far from it.
“Wait, you know Gino’s kid? You’ve had conversations with Gino’s kid?”
Luca winced. “I’ve actually had a lot more than conversations with her.”
He watched Frankie’s face as he connected all the dots in his head.
“They kidnapped Gino’s kid?”
Luca grimaced. And then nodded.
“Jesus. Fuck. I gotta sit down. I’m too old for shit like this.” Frankie staggered over to Gino’s chair and dropped heavily into it. Something he never would have done before Gino died.
Luca went to the liquor cabinet built into the bookshelves and grabbed a bottle of bourbon that had been there since Gino’s days. This stuff didn’t go bad, did it? He didn’t drink it, so he had no idea.
“Hurry up and pour it. I need something to calm my fucking racing heart.”
Luca splashed brown liquid into a lowball glass and handed it to his uncle. He tossed it back in one swallow and almost gently placed the empty glass onto the desk. “Okay, start at the beginning.”
At least Frankie wasn’t losing his shit, talking about revenge and murder. Luca took that as a good sign. He still had no clue whether he could talk his uncle into helping him though.
“She showed up here Friday afternoon. Out of the blue. When she introduced herself, she used a different last name—”
Frankie lifted his hand at that point. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know what it is.”
Another good sign. Hopefully.
“Anyway, when I asked what she was doing here, she said she wanted to see her childhood home. Said she used to live here. That’s how I knew exactly who she was.”
“Almost twenty years after she disappeared like smoke, she comes back because she wants to see this house?” Frankie glanced around at the office, his mouth pinched like he’d just tasted something sour.
“She was trying to wrap her head around her own roots. Figure out who she really is. Her mom and her uncle don’t talk about it. But they were adults when it all happened, so they got to make that choice. She didn’t.”
“So she’s a lot like you. Wanting to check out the grass on the other side of the fence, to make sure it really is greener where you are.”
Luca dragged his hand through his hair. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“How did this go from her reminiscing over her childhood to her being kidnapped by the Armenians?” Frankie arched his brows, even though Luca could tell he’d already guessed the answer.
“We hit it off. Started talking.”
“Flirting.”
“Yeah.”
“I can only imagine. She was a cute kid. Asked a lot of questions. Sharp as a whip. Now that I’m thinking about it, you would have been two peas in a pod had you ever hung out together as kids. Good thing you didn’t, though, considering the trouble you’ve gotten yourselves into as adults.”
Luca combed his fingers through his hair again. “It wasn’t intentional. It just…happened.”
“It always does. Kinda how love works.”
That was the second time someone suggested he was in love with Nina. That wasn’t the case. Christ, they’ve only known each other for two days.
“So yes, we’ve been hanging out. She’s supposed to go home tomorrow afternoon. I figured I’d show her a good time and put her on the plane and never talk to her again.” Best not to mention the conversation they’d had right before she was kidnapped.
“I get how bad this looks, Uncle Frankie. I know how pissed off everybody is over the money disappearing. But she—”
“She’s not the one who stole it. I understand that. But the rest of the crew, I doubt they’ll be so calm if word gets out that a connection to the reason half of us went to prison and all of us were out of jobs is back in town.”
“That’s why I asked you to come alone. I wasn’t even sure if you’d be cool with it.”
“Oh, I’m not. Not by a long shot. You really fucked up here, Luca. This is going to start a war. And we don’t even have a general on our side. If anyone else finds out that woman they have is Nina fucking Sarvilli, it will become nuclear. And she won’t survive.”
Luca paced to the door and clenched his fists. “I know.” He turned to face his uncle. “I have to get her away from them. I don’t even care about the club. They can have it. I just want to get her out of Detroit and back to her life without any scars.”
He paused, staring at the desk where Frankie sat, twisting the empty lowball glass with one hand while drumming his fingers with the other. That picture of Nina blowing bubbles was in the drawer under his left arm. Luca could see it clearly in his mind’s eye. He’d stared at that picture a lot since he’d found it the first time he’d walked into this office, after buying the house because it would elevate his status with the local Italian community.
Frankie was right; he and Nina did have a lot in common.
They were both born into the mob. And they’d both had the opportunity to get away from this lifestyle.
And they’d both ignored that chance.
Chapter Nine
A moment after they had their little revelation, Serendipity and Davit dove for each other, kissing and dry humping and pawing like animals in heat. Nina had watched very little porn in her life, but she could honestly say this was the worst of the small sampling.
Figuring they were too engrossed in each other to notice her, she tried to sneak up the stairs to freedom, but nope, her captors were able to multitask. She made it to the fourth step before Davit grabbed the back of her dress and flung her down the stairs. She was going to be a black and blue mess when this was all said and done.
Assuming, of course, they intended to actually let her out alive.
“Let’s continue this upstairs,” Davit said to Serendipity, then he turned his focus to Nina. “Make yourself comfortable in your new accommodations. I have a feeling this will be the nicest you’re treated for probably the rest of your short life.”
His maniacal laughter chased him and Serendipity up the stairs.
Nina gave herself to the count of one hundred, and then she hurried up to the top to check, hoping that maybe in their lust-crazed haste, they’d forgotten to lock the door.
Of course, her luck wouldn’t run that positive.
Back down at the bottom, she paced and paced and paced, desperately trying to come up with a plan for escape. She had to get the hell out of here. Davit hadn’t told her what he intended to do, but she wasn’t stupid. No way he wouldn’t take his newfound knowledge to members of Gino’s old crew. The man thought he was sitting on a gold mine.
About ten years ago, Uncle Antonio and Aunt Phoebe had decided to remodel their house. They converted the office on the main floor into a master suite. Nina had helped pack up all of Uncle Antonio’s paperwork and equipment to move it upstairs into one of the smaller bedrooms, and she’d come across a receipt for a donation to a charity, in Aunt Phoebe’s parents’ memory. The amount of that donation had been staggering.
Uncle Antonio had said that donation helped him to sever all ties to his brother’s illegal empire. He’d also mentioned the money had been what he’d saved from the salary he was making as Gino’s greenbacks guy and was a fraction of the amount the cops back in Detroit had kept after Gino died.
Yeah, she had to get the hell out of this place, stat.
She wore herself out pacing and stressing and trying to come up with a plan using nothing beyond her memory from reading mysteries and thrillers in her spare time.
She’d heard of a show called MacGyver that was popular in the ’80s, well before she was born. She and her friends had watched one episode and spent the entire sixty minutes laughing at the main character’s mullet. If only she’d actually paid attention to the storyline! Because wasn’t the highlight of each MacGyver episode about getting out of tight situations using nothing more than duct tape and a paper clip?
Of course, she didn’t even have that, so…
Finally, she gave in to exhaustion and fell asleep, but not before enacting a plan that probably only made sense because she’d been delirious and overtired when she came up with it.
***
“Well, hell, now I can’t say no,” Uncle Frankie said.
“Wait, you were seriously not going to help me?”
Frankie shook his head. “No, I wasn’t going to say no. Although it was tempting. Because I gotta be honest, Luca; the grass really is greener on your side of the fence.”
“I know. Just please help me. I can’t save her by myself. I don’t have the first clue what to do, other than to go to the cops.”
“Christ, no, don’t do that. That butt-doctor cop, what was his name?”
“Proctor.”
“Yeah, him. He’s retired, but if you go to the cops, that asshole will jump out of retirement so fast, all our heads will spin. And don’t kid yourself that Gino’s old crew has all gone legit.”
“That’s why I called you.”
Frankie swiped his hand over his face and then pulled his phone out of his pocket. “We can’t use any of the old crew. At least, not anyone local. Even if they agreed, I wouldn’t trust them not to double-cross us once we extracted Nina.”
Luca watched him as he moved his thumb over the screen of his phone. “Let’s hope my negotiating skills haven’t gotten too rusty.” And then he said into the phone, “Hello, Samuele. It’s Frankie. No, don’t hang up. I’m not calling to threaten you… Yeah, I’ve known where you were for quite a while. You disappeared during a very volatile time in the organization. I made it a point to keep tabs on someone who had the potential to take me down.”
The name Samuele rang a bell. Luca recalled Frankie talking about him back when Nina and her mom and uncle disappeared, and everybody was scrambling, trying to stay out of prison, while Gino went down in flames because his brother had taken every last cent to his name. If Luca remembered correctly, Samuele had disappeared around the same time.
“Look,” Frankie said. “I’m calling to ask a favor… Yes, it involves making a trip back to Detroit. I know you have a family and a normal life now, but this is important. It’s…my nephew. He’s gotten into some shit, and it’s a delicate situation. I can’t pull in any of my guys. It involves a certain situation that happened right about the time you disappeared… I’m going to call you back on a different number.”
He disconnected the call and waved at Luca. “Give me that phone you called me from. It occurs to me that cell phones aren’t exactly secure, and mine is more likely to be tapped than that one.”
Luca handed him the phone. Frankie arched his brows as he took in the sparkling case and the picture of Nina and her sister on the screen. “This is Nina’s phone?”
Luca nodded. “They didn’t take her purse when they dragged her away.”
Frankie stared at the picture. “I see her dad in her, but mostly, she’s a carbon copy of her mom. Lucky kid.” He glanced up at Luca. “I can see why you would have had a hard time simply sending her on her way when she showed up on your doorstep. Especially if her personality hasn’t changed.”
Luca didn’t respond. He hadn’t known her when she was a kid, of course, but, yeah, she had a pretty amazing personality as an adult.
Frankie handed him the phone back so he could unlock the screen and then punched in a number and put the phone on speaker. “Samuele,” he said. The person on the other end grunted. “You’re on speaker. My nephew, Luca, is here with me.”
“How bad is it that you’re calling me, of all people?”
“It has to do with Gino’s daughter.”
There was a beat of silence. “Gino Sarvilli?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you do, track her down too?”
“No. She came to us.”
“Fuck.”
“Yeah. And now she’s been kidnapped.”
“She’s probably already dead.”
“Jesus, Samuele, don’t say shit like that. You’re going to give my nephew a fucking heart attack.”
There was another moment of silence, and then the guy on the line said, “So that’s what this is about. Your nephew went and fell for the last woman on earth that he should have been messing with?”
“For Christ’s sake, it wasn’t on purpose,” Luca snapped.
“It never is, kid,” Samuele said, sounding awfully wise.
“No one else but us know who she is, at this point. Unless, of course, she’s outed herself to the Armenians.”
“She wouldn’t,” Luca said. “She’s smarter than that.”
“Wait. What do the Armenians have to do with this? I thought it was one of Gino’s guys who took her. Isn’t this about the money?” Samuele demanded.
“The money’s gone,” Luca ground out.
Frankie’s eyes widened. Samuele didn’t say anything.
Luca nodded. “The cops took it. All of it.”
“Holy shit,” Frankie said. “Antonio was a fucking magician when it came to growing greenbacks. There had to have been enough to fund a small country.”
“Or an entire police force,” Samuele piped up.
“It gets better,” Luca said as he cupped the back of his neck. “Nina was raised by a cop. Her mom married the guy who ultimately killed Gino.”
“Now that’s fucked up,” Samuele said.
“I thought Antonio and Margot ran away together,” Frankie said.
“They did, but just as friends. Antonio was in love with some other woman. She went with them, too.”
“The jogger,” Frankie blurted. “Holy shit. It’s all making sense now.”
“Who’s the jogger?” Samuele asked.
“The one who saw me take Nina,” Frankie explained. “She went to the cops, told them Nina had been kidnapped. Wouldn’t shut up about it, so Gino sent Antonio to get to know her, figure out what all she knew, to determine if she needed to be taken care of.”
“And Antonio fell for her instead,” Luca said. “According to Nina, they’re still together, still happy.”
“Good for them,” Samuele snapped. “Now let me see if I understand. You need me to help get Gino Sarvilli’s grown daughter away from the Armenians, without Gino’s old crew realizing she’s back in Detroit?”
“That sums it up,” Frankie said.
“Yes,” Luca added.
“Then what happens?” Samuele wanted to know.
Frankie glanced at Luca, who blew out a breath. “Then we send her back to wherever she’s been living all this time.”
“I can’t fucking believe I’m going to do this,” Samuele said, and then Luca heard a sound, like the guy just punched something. The wall, maybe? “I’ll check flights. Assuming I can catch a red-eye, and taking into consideration the time difference, I should be there in seven or eight hours.”
