Page 52 of His Vow
I shift on the stool to bring her onto my lap. My mouth finds hers as her fingers dig through my hair.
Fuck. Lucia just told me she loves me as much as I love her.I think I might cry too.
It’s a long while before we’re back on our own stools. The bowls of Alfredo fettucine zapped in the microwave to reheat and are now ready to be eaten.
I give her shoulder a gentle nudge. “You aren’t eating. I’m going to think you don’t like my cooking. And no lie, it will be the best Alfredo sauce you’ll ever taste.”
A laugh bursts from her. “Really, that’s a very high bar.”
“I know. It’s an amazing skill of mine.”
“Just one of many,” she concurs with a wink before lifting a forkful to her mouth. “Hmm, it is good.”
Chapter twenty-one
Antonio
Two Weeks Later
“Take a seat, gentlemen,” the woman suggests from the head of the conference table, and an assistant leads Gio and me to the two seats on her left.
Another man, with an equally stern expression, sits to her right, a thick wad of papers stacked on the table in front of him. I’ve always been wary of auditors in the past, but today my feeling is more one of relief. Finally, they have completed the report and are going to present their findings. She picks up one of the bound documents from the pile. The flick of the first page barely cutting through the tense silence in the room.
“Obviously, this report is too extensive for us to go through page by page in this meeting, but I would like to talk through the executive summary. Then when you’ve had a chance to look at the full document, we’ll reconvene.”
The assistant reappears to hand Gio and me our own copies, and the senior auditor, in her monotone voice, directs us to the correct page.
I quickly scan down to the figure at the bottom. In bold font, the 1.3 million euros burns itself into my retinas.
Holy hell!That’s only the fraudulent bank transfer figure. There’s another 2.7 million euros in lost product.
Fuck!In total, that’s around 4.5 million US dollars.How did this happen right under our noses?A question for another day and another meeting. The auditors are only here to detail the extent of financial loss. We’ve got another team of investigators hopefully answering the how and who.
We spend the next two hours breaking those numbers down in more detail. She drones on and on about the LLC that’s being used to effectively launder the stolen money. Important information, I’m sure, but if it doesn’t give me a person’s name, I’m not interested in where the money went. My priority is fucking stopping it.
By the time Gio and I are rising from the table with a copy of the report clenched in each of our hands, we’re both seething with anger. So fucking angry that we don’t even speak until we’re back in our Midtown Manhattan offices where we can talk privately
“That’s it. We were right all along,” I say, throwing my crumpled copy of the report onto Gio’s desk as I fall into one of the leather chairs. Gio moves to perch against the wooden edge in front of me.
“Thankfully, the fraud is only within the company’s Barbieri Foods subsidiary.” Gio’s eyes have turned a steely gray, and his arms are so tightly crossed that the muscles are stretching the sleeves of his white business shirt to the limits. If it wasn’t a custom-made shirt of the finest quality, it would already have been shredded.
He flicks over the first couple of crisp white pages to the executive summary. “Those numbers are only what they can trace. And most of it is product going out of the Naples port.”
“That’s going to fuck up our new distribution contract if we don’t stop it,” I mutter.
Gio pushes off from the desk to walk around it and drop into the chair behind. “Fuck, this is a mess that we don’t need right now.”
I couldn’t agree more, and I pick up my copy of the report again, turning over a few pages to the tables of data included. “Fuck. This has been going on for ten years.” I glance across the desk at Gio, my mouth open. Five years, we expected. Not ten. “Great-Uncle Paolo was CEO of Barbieri Foods. He must have known something about this.”
“Possibly. But the losses were small ten years ago. It was only in recent years that the theft has become more brazen, and the product has started to go missing from the port. But you’re right; I can’t believe he missed all this. Even with his obvious decline in health over the last five years.”
“Have the investigators been able to trace any of the big sums of money?” I ask.
“Not completely, because it’s been mostly transferred around various LLCs.” He glares at me across the expanse of wood. He knows I stopped listening. “It’s looking more like a professional racket.”
“Fuck,” I exclaim again, struggling to convey my shock through any other word. “What do we do next?”
Gio, with his brilliant business mind, hopefully has a plan. He leans forward in the chair, resting his elbows on his desk and linking his fingers together in front, and I’m sure he does. “First we need to both read the report fully. Then we need to get our asses over to Italy tomorrow to meet with the company lawyers.”
