Page 143 of Dangerous King
Silence fills the room for a few beats, as each of us contemplates being shot. I don't think any of us hasn't met lead yet in one part or another of our bodies.
Stephano scoffs under his breath. "Getting pumped full of lead by his own bodyguard in a parking garage. That's our standard now?"
"Calm down," I warn, "We don't need sarcasm. We need answers."
Toni refills our glasses. "I've already doubled the security around the house. Vito," Toni's second-in-command, "is vetting all the guards again."
"Too bad Casimo is dead," Stephano signals to Toni that he wants another drink too.
"Yeah," I agree, closing my eyes for a second to relish the burn of the whiskey down my throat. Casimo was the guard who attacked Marcello after they came back from a meeting.
"Who was Marcello meeting?" Stephano asks.
"The head of the Los Conquistadores, Matías Rivera." Toni fills us in, churning my gut.
"The Venezuelans? Again?" I ask incredulously.
Toni slaps the cigarette-burned counter. "Motherfucker! I didn't make the connection."
Stephano types on his phone, "Making notes to check deeper into Matías." He looks up, "By the way, have either of you paid attention to the news?"
"Only to check on Carlos' trial," Toni admits.
"Too busy with wedding prep." I grin, rubbing my upcoming nuptials into their faces. "My wife?—"
Toni cuts me off, "Futurewife."
I glare at him. I like sayingmywife. It makes it clear to everyone that she's mine. But I let Toni off the hook.
"Aren't she and your mom doing all the work?" Stephano doesn't miss a beat."
I'd rather go to hell than admit that for the past week, I've used any excuse in the book to see Cat whenever I could, even if it meant having to deal with color coordinating napkins and napkin holders. Or, here I shudder at the memory, studying calligraphy types for the nametags.
"What'd I miss?" I ask, because my lips will remain sealed about all the things I've done and put up with over the past week just to get a glimpse of… my—future—wife!
"Kingsley's bill came through," Stephano fills us in, and I arch an eyebrow.
"Well, I'll be damned," Toni grins, "I bet that doesn't sit well with Roberto."
"Or Ledyanoy Prizrak," I refill our glasses. "He was supposed to have him killed before the bill went through." A bad feeling settles in my stomach. Ledyanoy Prizrak isn't the type of man who'll forgive losing a one-point-five billion dollar contract. I'm not afraid of him, but I do worry about what kind of revenge he might be planning. He got to Izzy once. He's resourceful. "Have you found out anything about him?"
Stephano stops typing into his phone and looks up, "We dug into him more. He's not flying completely solo. Ledyanoy Prizrak is one of the top contractors for an outfit called Omertà Infernale—Hellbound Silence."
Toni scoffs, twisting his glass. "Dramatic much?"
"It's smart branding," Stephano says, not rising to the bait. "The name plays on Omertà, the code we were all raised on. Silence.Loyalty. But Infernale? That implies they punish anyone who breaks the code. Traitors. Whistleblowers. Anyone who talks."
"Never heard of them," Toni mutters, cracking his neck.
"That's the point," Stephano says. "They're not street level. They're high-end, like Ledyanoy Prizrak." He taps a few times on his phone and turns the screen toward us. "They scrub digital records. Bribe therapists. Erase court files. They make scandals vanish—for a price. And they don't just clean messes. They remove problems."
"Like?" Marcello asks.
"Inconvenient exes. Leaky executives. Viral videos. They even wiped out a senator's affair trail with enough finesse to make the FBI look like amateurs." Stephano exhales, clearly impressed. "They recruit the kind of soldiers no one else will touch—ex-military, dishonorably discharged, some with serious PTSD. Their founder's a fucking cyber genius. Built the network himself. He stays totally anonymous. No face. No real name. But his code leaves fingerprints, and I've been tracking them."
I lift a brow. "You admire him."
"I respect the architecture," Stephano admits. "It's efficient, decentralized. Brilliant, really." He pauses before looking at Toni, "That's not all. They don't only make inconvenient cyber scandals disappear."
