Page 93 of Little Dove

I stop us just outside Nico’s office and tell the others we’ll be right in. Papa gives me a concerned look but leaves us be. The others go inside and shut the door. I pull Amara down the hall, away from the guards, and to a window seat that’s tucked around the corner before the stairs that head up to the next floor. I sit down, and pull her into my lap. She curls into me, gripping my shirt tight. “I know it has been, Amara. I would like nothing more than to take you away from it all and give you time to settle, but we don’t have that luxury right now. Soon, though, I promise. For now, just know I’m here for you, and all you need to do is lean on me and I’ll help you keep going.”

She’s quiet for a minute, then she leans forward and presses a gentle kiss to my mouth. “You know, I’m really lucky you foundme, Lazaro,” she whispers when she pulls away. “If I had to do this with anyone else, I don’t think I’d be able to survive it. It would probably break me.”

I smile at her. “I’d have found you eventually,colombina. You are the other part of me, and a man searches the world for that until his dying breath.”

“I believe you.” She sighs, pressing her forehead to mine. “I’m just overwhelmed today with everything. I had a moment with the girls earlier, and told them everything that happened to me. I’m feeling raw and vulnerable, but then I was working on Rori and Sofia’s hair and I started to calm down. I wanted you, but it was nice to have time with them and Massimo and just be normal for a little while.”

My heart clenches at the thought of her sharing her secrets with the women, but the rational part of me knows that it’s best it happened when I wasn’t there. I’d have lost my shit about it and probably done something stupid like kick them all out to comfort her. “Your strength never ceases to amaze me, Amara. Are you feeling better now?”

“I think I’m just nervous about what that room means. I know it’s not going to be anything good, but up until now, other than knowing that my family is after me to marry me off for power and they’re trying to take this place out too, I don’t think I really thought about the other parts of this life. About what things might mean, and I’m just being hit with so much all at once it’s shaking me.”

“Then let me hold and steady you. If it gets to be too much, hold on to me, and I’ll help you.”

She presses her mouth back to mine. “You’re making me fall so hard for you, Lazaro. It terrifies and excites me.”

Elation fills me, and I hold her tighter. “I have already fallen for you,colombina. I did the minute I saw you. You were so sassy, so strong. You took no shit from me, and you trusted mewhen you had no reason to. We will make this work, Amara. You and I, we’re going to be so strong that our grandchildren will envy us.”

She giggles. “That’s a ways off, but I hope we can make it happen eventually.” She kisses me again, then pulls away. “Alright, let’s get in there. I want to know what’s going on.”

I help her to her feet, take her hand, and pull her back down the hall, feeling decidedly lighter.

When we walk into the office, everyone looks at us, and I arch a brow at them. “What?”

“We were waiting for you,” Alonzo says impatiently.

I glare at him. “I needed to talk to Amara, but we’re here now,” I tell him simply, my tone hard. “What do we know?”

“We’ve only started going through the documents,” Alessio chimes in. “So grab a stack and start reading, but Nico said he would give us a bit of history on this too.” I release Amara and step forward to take some papers from Dante’s desk. Glancing at them, they look to be just random notes. Nico sits behind the desk, Gia in his lap, her face full of concern as she watches him.

“My mother was a drunk, and she liked to pop pills to help her cope. She and my father had no love lost between them, though maybe at one time she loved him. Either way, she decided to fuck him over and slept with many men, uncaring if he found out, aside from one that I learned about later. She was so focused on her husband she forgot about her son.” He gives a sharp smile. “Especially once I became Don and started really paying attention. By then she was so into her act and her betrayal that I think she thought I would just brush her off like my father did.”

“Clearly, you didn’t,” Pietro states. “And this is when you found out about whatever all this is?”

Nico nods. “I found out that she was wrapped up in an affair with Seamus Gallo, and the two of them cooked up an entirepipeline to get their sex trafficking ring through our territory and out into the rest of the States without anyone ever being the wiser.”

Silence roars. “Your mother and Seamus Gallo?” Alessio repeats slowly, whistling low. “I thought for sure you were going to say Ivan or Leonardo.”

Nico shrugs. “Could be she screwed around with them too, but the only one I found out about was Gallo.”

“That’s why you set the Irish and Russians against each other,” I say, watching him as the pieces start to fall into place. “You wanted Seamus out of the way, but you didn’t want anyone to know it was you because if you did, then you’d have to tell them why you were going after him.”

Nico inclines his head. “If I declared war on Seamus right away, especially as such a new Don, it would have ended in me losing important ground that I couldn’t afford. Not if I wanted to make it clear that I wasn’t to be messed with. So I killed my mother, shut down their operation, and let Seamus believe that my mother took the blame on her own. I spread the rumor that I killed her and my father so I could take my place here, but I sent Seamus a picture of her body and a warning. Since then, he’s mostly stayed out of my way while I worked on positioning myself to destroy him.”

“I’ll give you points for being clever and not rushing into anything idiotic,” Pietro tells him. “But if you killed her and dismantled her operation, this discovery shouldn’t be such a problem for you.”

“The problem is the mural,” Nico says tightly. “I shut down the operation in my territory but?—”

“That map was of the entire city,” Massimo finishes, straightening. “You’re saying that they were running their pipeline through the entire city, not just your territory.” Nico nods once, jaw hardening. Gia rubs at his chest soothingly, andhe grips her hand in his, holding it tight. “And because of that, you think that the trafficking might still be happening now. Do you remember the exact route they had before? Is there anything different?”

“I’d need to look closer at the map,” Nico says.

“I sent it to everyone,” Papa says after a moment.

I pull out my phone, looking at it carefully. The map itself is remarkably detailed, right down to neighborhoods and different landmarks. This is something developed over a very long time. There are multiple lines crossing over it, along with a few marks that look like stars or circles, though I can’t quite tell from the image, even if I zoom in. One thing is certain though, there are multiple lines extending throughout the entire city, and through every territory.

“Can I see?” Amara whispers. I hand her my phone, before turning my attention back to the others.

“That isn’t an operation that happened overnight, that was years of work,” I state grimly. “And that means if it’s still going, they have figured out how to keep it off the radar.”

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