Page 42 of Vicarious

I play with the loose piece. Jiggle it around and suddenly the top of the table rises.

“Clever,” I say.

“Holy fuck. Lene was right,” Cres breathes.

Cres apparently had no clue who Phae was when she met her, and I’ve decided to keep it that way. The less people who know about her the better.

As I begin to flip through the papers, I say, “Yes. She was.”

And isn’t that an understatement because fuck. If Phae had gotten her hands on this years ago, if she’d just had a little bit of time, she could have toppled Pray’s entire criminal empire with one article that would have probably gotten her a fucking Pulitzer Prize.

I look around and see a copier in the corner. Hopefully there’s some ink in that damn thing.

“We have to make copies of all this,” I say handing the things I’ve already looked through to Cres.

She takes them and begins to copy the documents while I look through the rest. Any one of these would be enough to incriminate Pray. We could take him down without ever firing a single shot if we got it to the right people. All of it would be enough to incriminate Pray, take down his entire operation, and force his legitimate businesses into closing. So I’m going to have to be careful about exactly what I’m going to use if I want to leave his operations intact.

I pause as one particular document catches my attention. An official birth certificate with an official seal. Two copies.

“Adelena Fantoni,” I read. “Father, Sansone Fantoni. Mother, unknown.”

Fantoni… Now where the hell have I heard that name.

It takes a moment. But a memory comes back to me. Not even a memory. An offhanded comment when I’d gotten deep into the drug war and trying to figure out who was behind it. That name. It came up in our investigations. And when I mentioned it to Phae, she’d gone very quiet before saying,“If they’re involved in this, then you need to be careful. That’s not a name you should fuck around with, Adrian.”

She wouldn’t give me any more than that except to say she had a reliable source.

“Cres,” I say while staring at the document. “Do you know a Fantoni?”

“Do I? Hell yeah, and so should you. That’s the Italian mafia family your boss supposedly has ties to. Rumor has it that they owned Pray Drinks and ownership was supposed to pass to Stephen’s brother as the eldest child of the family. But Stephen didn’t want to live his life in service to his brother the rest of his life so he killed his brother, managed to get ownership of the company, and by the time his family figured out it was too late.

“He cut all ties, named himself after the company he stole, and started his crime empire with people he poached from his own family’s connections. But there’s no actual proof of it. Just rumors. Stories passed along some of the Italian families in New York to explain why your boss rarely ever goes there and why some of them are so pissed off at him besides the huge drug war he started to steal all their power.”

“How long ago was that?”

“I don’t know. Around the time he became CEO and owner I suppose.”

Cres didn’t mention anything about a family being involved in that. And I’m not going to volunteer anything in case she doesn’t know.

Adelena Fantoni.

I look at the photo again. But not of Pray. Of the woman next to him. The woman who looks so familiar to me. Those brown eyes. That facial structure. Where have I—

Fucking shit.

She reminds me of Phae. She doesn’t really look like her. Not in the way Lady looks like Phae. But she has those same eyes and that cheek structure.

“No fucking way.”

“What?” Cres asks from where she’s finishing up the copies.

“Nothing,” I say as I make a split second and risky decision.

I decide to take one of the copies of the birth certificate and hope that Pray doesn’t periodically go through it. And if he does, that he doesn’t remember there were two copies. Then I take a picture of the framed photo.

Cress brings me back the originals of the things she copies, and I send a quick text to one of Eileen’s helpers to meet us in the hall so they can secure the documents we’ve found and Cres and I can go back to the nook we disappeared to so no one will be any the wiser.

We put everything back in place. Exactly as we found it. Except for the birth certificate I stole. The birth certificate that could change everything if my hunch is right. And not necessarily for the good.

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