Page 14 of Taboo Flames

CHAPTER 4

Giovanni

As soon as Aurora rushes away, I dash out of the bathroom and grab the nearest towel, about to pursue after my little peeping tom to?—

To do what? I ask myself.

I have no idea, but I just know I shouldn’t let her run off on me. Just as I step out of the bathroom to give chase, my phone on the nightstand goes off. I bite out a curse as I reach for it, one hand clutching my towel to my waist.

“This had better be very important,” I bark into the phone.

“Boss,” Fiore, one of my men, says into the phone. “It’s about some of our products. It’s—uh—it’s missing.”

“Our newly arrived products or the ones en route?” I ask, transferring the call to loudspeaker mode so I can yank on my clothes.

“Our newly arrived products.”

“I’ll be there shortly,” I say curtly and then hang up. Somebody, one of my men in particular, has dipped his fingersinto my products, and I was going to have to teach the moron a lesson.

I dress quickly, debating the merits and demerits of calling Aurora to enquire about her presence in my house, but I finally decided to look into the matter later. Right now, I don’t need anything distracting me from what I’m about to do.

I jump into my car and drive out of the compound in the direction of one of my hidden warehouses in an abandoned school building. I get there to find my men all tense and uneasy.

After a quick inspection of the product, I’m filled with murderous rage, but I lean against the wall with my hands in my pockets and maintain an easy posture.

“There’s supposed to be fifteen crates of coke here. Why am I seeing only six?” I ask in a deceptively calm voice.

Fiore steps forward. “The other nine were supposed to come from the Torricelli family, but the Albanians caught wind of our trade and crossed us. They gave a better offer and swiped the drugs.”

My hands curl into fists at my side. “And how did the Albanians know about our trade?”

All the men immediately begin to look everywhere but at me. I run my gaze around the room, cataloging all their different expressions. Neither of them wants to say what is very obvious. We have a mole.

It isn’t anything unusual or shocking. In my world, it’s a given for people to get greedy and try to make extra cash by selling out their brothers. But it’s one of the things I don’t tolerate from my men.

Relationships in the mafia are built on trust and loyalty, without which there’s nothing but bloodshed and betrayal.

Betrayal is something I’m more familiar with than most. I know it like the back of my hand because I have lived with it all my life. It shaped me into what I am today. The very people whowere supposed to have taken care of me had been the ones to set me on my journey into the life I now lived.

There weren’t a lot of close family bonds in the mafia, but one thing family never did was abandon family.

Like the way my mother abandoned me. I didn’t know who I hated more: the mother who had showered me with love only to betray me at the last moment by disappearing or the father who had chosen coke and gambling over me until they led him to an uneventful death.

The memory of watching my sperm donor leap after his little bag of coke and right into oncoming traffic was one I have tried all my life to exorcise.

I hadn’t been stupid enough to love him. Or worse, mourn him. I had far more pressing matters to deal with, like the shame of a parent meeting such an end. For years, I hadn’t been able to live it down.

Back then, boys my age were cruel, and they never let me forget that I was all alone in the world because neither of my birthgivers thought I was worth sticking around for.

That is all in the past, though. I’m not that pathetic boy from years past. Giacob Giordanohad taken me in and reinvented me into the man I am today. I only wonder how I’d have ended up if he hadn’t.

“Who knew about the trade?” I ask Fiore.

“Emilio, Tippy, and I.”

“Where are Emilio and Tippy now?” I ask.

“Emilio is one of the casino guys,” Fiore said. “Tippy’s at the hospital with his ma. She has cancer or something.”

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