Page 31 of Her Keeper
Now that took my breath away. Before she was kidnapped, Sloane had been working with the city to take Joseph to court for racketeering, and it had been a nightmare. She’d gotten to Italy and fallen in love with him—if she’d ever beennotin love with him, which I doubted—and had come back and done her best to bury the case. Undermine the very agency she worked for. And for the most part, she’d been successful.
But that had been a really serious charge, and if Alf was saying Monica had more on us than Sloane had...
Wait.
I’d seen what Penny had given her, and it had been mostly vague and innocent. None of that would have painted the bad picture Alfonso was talking about. Something wasn’t adding up, here.
“There’s more,” Alfonso added, yanking me out of my thoughts. “This... I’ve had a look at what they have, Michael, and it’s criminal. If they have proof and they hand it over to the AG, it could mean indictments. Criminal indictments.”
“Shit,” I said quietly.
“Yeah. I don’t have anything else yet and you know I’m working my hardest to keep this from happening, but I wanted to give you a heads up. I figure the earlier you know, the longer you have to build an escape route.”
“I’m already using the only escape route I have, Alf, and it’s not for me.”
“I know. I’ll be in touch. Start figuring out whether you can build a second escape route for yourself.”
He hung up before I could answer, and I let my brain start working on the problem. First, there was the issue of what Monica had. If she had actual proof, not just anonymous sources, then this could be very bad for all of us. But that brought up the next question: If she had enough to prove what Alfonso was saying, then she had a whole lot more than Penny had given her.
Where the fuck was she getting her information?
I thought back to all the things that had happened, and how they’d seemed like they started around the same time as Penny started working for me. I’d been so sure that Penny’s presence had matched up with all the problems, but when I looked at what Penny had passed over, I’d thought I must be missing something. Penny herself had said she’d only given Monica stuff that didn’t mean anything.
She’d been fighting to keep everything innocent and vague.
And yet Monica had enough information on me that it could lead to a criminal indictment.
We had another mole, I realized.Anothermole. And someone a whole lot higher up than Penny had been. Someone who knew about some of the top-level rackets we were running.
Shit. This was bad.Verybad.
My phone rang again and I half expected it to be Alfonso calling back to tell me he’d found out more. Instead, it was my brother.
“Tell me you have something good,” I breathed. “Because I’ve had all the bad news I can handle for one morning.”
“I do,” Joseph said, his grin coming through loud and clear. “I found Monica. She’s been shacking up with Tony Caruso. Fucking the fat slob, if you can believe it. I know she’s about to run that article but I’m figuring if we can get to her and stop her, it might give us some breathing space, at least.”
Breathing space from the article, yes.
Which would give us time to figure out what to do about the mole.
“I don’t suppose you know where she is this exact moment,” I said, wondering at the reversal of fortunes here. I’d always been the one to solve Michael’s problems for him. He was the hothead, I was the one with ice water in his veins. He was the hero. I was the fixer.
And yet here we were.
“I happen to know exactly where she is. And if we can get to her quickly enough, we can stop the article and ask her who the fuck she’s working for. And why they’re doing it.”
I was moving before he finished talking. “Text me the address and meet me there. I want this done as quickly as possible.”
“Me, too. Because Dad’s sent his best teams after your girlfriend, and I’m not sure I can stop them all.”
I hung up without answering him. I didn’t want to think about Dad’s best teams coming after Penny. Or finding her. I wanted to figure out who was after us so we could redirect Dad to huntingthem. I wanted his teams off Penny’s trail.
And then I wanted to find a way to keep her safe from the mafia for the rest of her life.
14
MICHAEL
