Page 108 of Sin & Secrets

And now I’m going to have to figure out how to live with it. Even if living without her means that I’ll slowly become a shell of the person I once was.

I shake these thoughts from my mind as I step into the office. These were my friends. Donatella was right. I should at least pretend to let them help me.

“So?” I ask the room, immediately getting to business. “What is it you have for me?”

Marco clears his throat and approaches my desk first, holding a thick file of documents. He dumps them in front of me with an unceremonious thud.

“What am I looking at here, Chiavari?” I ask the older man irritably.

“Loan agreement paperwork,” Marco replies as I take a look at the document at the top of the pile.

I tense at the sight of the name signed at the bottom. “Carmine Bellini’s loan agreement paperwork.”

“The man was many things, but sloppy was not one of them,” Marco continues. “Look at the handwriting. The loan he allegedly took out on Lazzaro’s behalf wasn’t written in cursive.”

I massage my temples. “This feels like grasping at straws.”

“I knew my friend.”

“Not well enough.”

Marco’s lips curl out slightly. “I knew him better than anyone. Better than the goddamn wife who abandoned him. Carmine was a good man. If you hadn’t caught him red handed with the Cartel, I would never have believed he’d do something like that.”

I stare at him. This is a rare rational display of passion for something other than accounting.

“So you’re saying he didn’t write the loan?”

Marco slams Lazzaro’s loan document on the table before me with the flat of his hand. “No. I’m saying he wrote it under duress.”

Beside me, Teo quirks his eyebrow. “An interesting theory.”

“Boss?”

I look up and motion for Martino to join us.

“That night at theCandelabra,I took a look in Lazzaro’s office before Cas was due on stage. I didn’t understand what it meant at the time, but…” he hands me his phone.

On it is a picture of an unkempt desk. Documents litter every corner. There are so many you can barely see the oak surface beneath. The trash can beneath is overflowing.

I swipe to the next photo. This one is more zoomed in on a crumbled piece of paper, half-burned on top of the trash. I swipe again, and the paper unravels.

“Cage the canary,”I read aloud.

“It was still smoking when I found it. Lazzaro did a piss poor job of trying to destroy it.”

I keep looking at the handwriting. There’s something so familiar about it. “So someone else gave Lazzaro the instruction to kidnap Bellini.”

“I have a good idea who it might be.”

We turn to look at Dante standing with his usual swagger in the corner. The South African must have been fully briefed on the situation, judging by the look of pity he throws my way before continuing.

“I was in South Africa when the tobacco shipment went out. I helped them load it into the damn shipping containers myself. There was no possibility they could have arrived here empty unless someone intercepted them en route.”

“We’ve been over this already, Dante,” I say, already tired.

But Dante shakes his head. “I looked into it. The Cartel don't have their own ships or dock.”

“So they hired a civil trawler,” Teo counters.

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