Page 50 of King of Wrath

A rash of crime has hit the city and if I were to guess, the Carcettis are behind it.

Mason appears five minutes before our official start. “Jake.”

“Mason,” I answer my nephew, sitting back in the chair. “What’s the word?”

Mason grimaces. “It’s ugly.”

Shit. My hunch was right. “Tell me.”

“I could start with how I’m currently living with Leo and his very loud sex life,” Mason wrinkles his nose as Leo appears on the screen.

“I fucking heard that,” Leo spits. “And I don’t know where you get off telling me that my sex life is loud. I heard the spanking you gave Char?—”

“I meant, what’s the word in Vegas,” I interrupt, sure that Mason and Leo could explode on this call if I let them. They are brothers and they love each other fiercely, but they mix like oil and water.

Mason sighs. “We closed the Diamond.”

“How pissed is Toni?”

Leo scrubs his face, his ever-present stubble scratching into the microphone. “He bombed one of our buildings. Again. Small pyrotechnics, but we had to shut the casino floor of the Starlet down.”

“What else?”

Luke appears on the screen, the chat shuffling as he settles into his chair looking more tired than I’ve ever seen him. His dark hair is a mess and there are dark circles under his eyes. Luke usually has adevil-may-care attitude, but he’s the one man who stayed in Vegas while the rest of us have scattered and I can tell he’s taking the heat. “Are we discussing Toni’s crime spree?”

Roman jumps on the call too, the compound lanai in the background. I can say one thing, Nia would like that space. “What are we discussing?”

“We’ve only gotten as far as the bombing,” Leo interjects with a frown.

“The good news…” Luke smirks. “I had cameras installed everywhere with automatic backup of the footage every thirty seconds. Not only did we get several of his henchmen on camera before he shot them out, but we got Toni with them two minutes before the bomb went off. He’s being investigated by the FBI as we speak.”

My brows lift. I may not have to get Nia to confess to anything. Toni is going to put himself in prison. I know the rest of her family poses a danger to her as well, but with Toni behind bars, my attention and my loyalties will no longer be divided. I won’t have to choose to make Nia a witness and my family will be safe from Toni.

Granted, the rest of the Italians might want my head and Nia’,s but I made that problem when I put that announcement in the paper.

“Jake?” Roman asks.

I snap my attention back to the call. “Anything else?”

“We’re considering moving you and Nia to the compound.”

“Why?” I like being here with her. And while the compound has way more security, it might also be a place someone thinks to look. Here, we are completely off the grid, tucked far away.

“Toni’s turning over every stone to find her,” Mason answers. “And I mean every stone.”

Luke winces. “We didn’t expect him to be this adamant. He’s offered the other family’s major real estate to get her back, he’s had men in all the competitors’ establishments causing trouble, and he called Mason making all sorts of threats…”

“Like that would work,” Mason snorts. “But he’s going to keep trying until he lands in prison or…”

“Someone gets really hurt.” Inwardly, I grimace.

“Is it because of what she knows?” Leo asks like I’ll have the answer.

And I do. “Oh, she holds all kinds of secrets.”

“She sharing with you?”

I nod, and then poke my fingers into my eyes. It feels wrong to share our private conversations with them. Which is so fucked up because that was the whole point of bringing her here. So I don’t talk about her mother or the way Toni hurts her. Instead, I share what impacts them the most. “Toni’s made a deal with a foreign family. They’re going to pay top dollar for her to marry some high-up.”

---