Page 20 of His Juliet

They stopped talking right away and shook their heads. They might not know who I was, but they could sense the danger around me.

“I’m Romeo De Luca.”

Their eyes widened.

“Good, you know who I am now. That girl I was with? You stay away from her.”

They nodded furiously.

I rolled my shoulders and headed to the street. It was time for me to return to my real life.

* * *

“Where the fuck have you been?”Matteo asked when I walked into his office.

“Needed some air.”

He fixed me with a skeptical stare, but I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about Juliet, so I just took the seat across from him.

“Did Franco find something?” I asked.

He sighed, scrubbing his face with his hand. “No, but Sofiya talked to the girls you rescued.”

I arched an eyebrow, surprised that he’d let Sofiya go over to the safe house apartments.

“Not my choice. She insisted,” he bit out.

“You forcing her to rest now?” My smile widened at his responding glare. I got a kick out of teasing him, but I suddenly understood his reluctance to be away from his wife. “What did the girls say?” I asked.

“They don’t speak much English, but the men who transported them to the club kept saying the word ‘liberty.’”

I frowned. “As inStatue of?”

“Or the Port.”

Fuck. There was a container shipping facility on Staten Island called Port Liberty.

“You think that’s how they’re getting the girls in?”

“Franco got ahold of some of the surveillance footage. Facial recognition software had a partial match on the Butcher. The man’s face was in shadow, but it could have been him. That was two nights ago.”

“You think they brought more girls in?”

“I have no idea. We’ll keep monitoring the footage, but I need you to scope it out tonight.”

I nodded. “I’ll get a small team together and connect with Franco on comms.”

“Thank you.” Matteo shifted in his chair. I waited to see if he would say anything else. “I’m sorry I’m not coming with you. Sofiya doesn’t want me in the field, especially now that she’s getting closer to giving birth.”

“It makes sense. We’ve got this, fratello. This is why you have me.”

He scrubbed his hand over his face and looked out the window at the dark city. “I’m not used to sitting on the sidelines.”

“Things have changed.”

Before he met Sofiya, I never would have imagined my brother changing his behavior for a woman, but I guessed that’s what love did to you.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be listening in on comms tonight.”

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