Page 11 of The Sicilian Brotherhood I

“Just make sure you lock the door,” she urged.

Strange request.

“Come on then,” I replied, “And don’t try to run again. If you do… I promise you, I’ll kill you.”

Gooseflesh prickled across the arm I was holding as I said it. Good. She should be scared. Franco might have been a little punk, but I wasn’t. I made good on my threats and if she was as involved with the Sardinians as she claimed, she should have known that.

Once she was upstairs, I locked her bedroom door. Dahlia had been right about one thing, it was too close to sunrise for me to sleep. If I had to be awake, Raimondo would have to awaken as well. I lumbered to his room and banged on the door gruffly.

“Up. Call the rest of them over.”

I heard a shuffling behind the door and Raimondo grunted curses under his breath in Italian. Good enough for me. We had plenty of work to do and what I’d been searching for had just fallen into my lap.

She was a pretty thing, sure enough, and a part of me would have never wanted to treat a woman that way voluntarily. But at the end of the day, she was a Sardinian, if not genetically by allegiance and very nearly by marriage.

Considering her precious fiancé had abandoned her and left her to be killed, and considering how she’d betrayed him the second I held a gun to her head, I got the sense that relationship was over.

Raimondo ambled downstairs, his dreadlocks tied in a knot behind his head.

“They’re coming,” he grumbled.

“Good. I have coffee.”

“Shouldn’t you be making her do that?” He asked, gesturing upstairs.

I snorted, “She tried to run you know.”

Raimondo smiled, “You should have let me punish her for that.”

“I handled it.”

“Good.”

“She has info on the star.”

He raised his eyebrows, the one with the scar in it struggling to match the height of the other one.

“Is she lying?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You should get it out of her, that way we can be rid of her.”

“I’m not getting rid of her,” I replied flatly.

Raimondo scowled.

“Why not?”

“Because,” I replied, “I don’t want to.”

“She’s a liability,” he protested.

“That’s what you think.”

“You said it yourself, she tried to run.”

“She’s scared. Of course, she tried to run.”

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