Page 61 of Taboo Flames

“You can’t drive while you’re on the phone,” she chides me angrily.

“And I can’t fuck my best friend’s little sister either,” I drawl coldly.

She flinches imperceptibly, and something ugly inside me triumphs at the dirty blow.

“Yes?” I say into the phone.

“Gio,” Giordano’s easy voice says into the phone, “I have news.”

I immediately pull the car over with a screech, “News?”

“Information, actually,” he says. “It’s about your Miss Vitale’s little problem. You will want to hear it. How soon can you get here?”

I look over at Aurora, looking small yet mutinous in the passenger seat. By now, she’ll know about him from what Fabio told me. So, since there is nothing to hide, I tighten my hand around the steering wheel and say, “Twenty-five minutes. Thirty tops.”

After hanging up, I throw the car into reverse.

“We’re taking a little detour,” I say when I see her puzzled expression.

“You mean extra minutes in the car with you?” She gasps dramatically. “How terrific. I’m so excited,” she adds sarcastically.

“If you wanted to be home so badly, you shouldn’t have left then.”

“It’s not the fact that I’m out of my very gorgeous, comfortable, well-decorated, spoilt little princess room, Gio,” she bites out. “It’s the company I have to endure. You can drop me off here and?—”

“Shut the fuck up,” I say quietly but deathly serious.

She snaps her mouth shut.

There’s a flutter within me that I can’t explain. But a little voice inside me points out that it’s the excitement that two ofthe possibly most important people to me are about to be in the same location, and I may be the tiniest bit excited about it.

I may even be eager for them to meet.

As we drive through Giordano’s steel gates, she turns to face me. “Is he a rabid werewolf? Why does one man need so much security?”

I ignore her in favor of parking the car and turning off the ignition.

“Stay here,” I order her.

I expect an eye roll or something similar, but she just looks down at her phone and starts clicking away. I feel a mild headache coming on, brought on by having to deal with Aurora.

I turn away and head into the house.

Entering the house, I find Giordano in the dining room. He’s seated at the head of the table with a newspaper open in front of him, and when I enter, he immediately drops it and takes off his reading glasses.

“This country’s gone to shit,” he begins, staring in disgust at the newspaper before he stabs a finger at it. “The policies they put in place only favor a select few. Now, I don’t mean to be a martyr because I’m in the class of the wealthy who benefit from these policies, but we all know the other classes will try to get back at us and cause problems.”

“I don’t think they should be favored just so they don’t bother us,” I say easily. “It’ll be like giving a hungry kid a tablet so you don’t have to feed it.”

“Hmm,” Giordano replies thoughtfully. “Anyway, about Il Sguardo Nero. I heard something about some big plans being in the works. I don’t get the sense that he’s in the trade.”

By trade, Giordano means the sale of guns and drugs.

I lean forward curiously. “Then what could be his source of power?”

“I’m still looking into it, but I suspect he’s more of a service provider than anything. Mercenaries for hire and so on.”

I raise a brow in surprise. That’s rather interesting. “That gives me an angle I can work from.”

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