Page 48 of The Secrets We Keep

“Well, I’ve had a few informants in my day. I’ve never called them baby girl.”

“It’s rude to read other people’s text messages,” Luca sniffed.

“I’ve never been one for manners. Getting that close to an informant is a terrible idea.”

“It’s fine.”

“It won’t be fine if one of you gets bored and she decides to go to Gallo and out the whole damn thing.”

“She won’t,” Luca assured him. “Going to Gallo is the last thing she’d do. I know what I’m doing, Alexei.” He leveled Alexei with a hard stare. “And I’d appreciate it if my brother didn’t find out about her.”

Alexei held Luca’s gaze for a long moment before finally nodding. “All right. But I’ll blow the whole thing wide open if it puts Carina in danger in any way.”

“You mean if it puts the Bianchis in danger.”

“No.”

Luca sighed. “You know I’d never do anything to put the family at risk, Carina included. Everything is under control.”

“I do know that,” Alexei conceded. “But I care about Carina more than the rest of you.”

Luca shook his head as the men finished loading up the last crate and more emerged from the woods with shovels and covered in dirt. The passenger was an additional complication, but Luca would bet money on the fact that Gallo wouldn’t want the cops on this part of the island looking too deep into this, no matter how well he lined the pockets of the chief of police.

The accident, the theft, and the loss of weapons were a minor blow, but a blow nonetheless. If Gallo really was as worried about them as Restivo said, they’d consider this their warning shot.

It would be interesting to see how Gallo responded.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Curled into a corner of the couch and tucked under a blanket, Sienna scanned the documents she’d unearthed from her uncle’s files. She’d spent days digging through whatever she could find looking for mentions of Ciro.

He’d finally read her in on that super secret project, and it made her more suspicious of him than ever. He maintained the story that the goal was to fake attacks against their system in order to create better security protocols.

It wasn’t an unusual strategy. Hacking a system to clearly see the holes so you could patch them was a common tactic. But what Ciro and, by proxy, Drago, were asking for was far more than that. They didn’t just want a hacking report. They wanted her to actively skim data, though they wouldn’t tell her what kind.

Plus, the system he was having her work was complex. Whoever had designed it was good. Very good. She imagined anyone who got past those defenses wouldn’t have long before they triggered some kind of alarm and got kicked back out again.

Uninterested in putting herself in the crosshairs of whoever owned what appeared to be a series of shell corporations spread across Europe, she’d spent more time looking for dirt on Ciro than she did building the program he thought would be a magic bullet. She wanted to know why he was so cozy with Drago and how deep he might be in with her uncle.

So far, she’d turned up nothing on the criminal side. She considered her uncle might be referring to him using an alias, but that was a stretch, considering he hadn’t done it for a single man so far. What good was blackmail if everyone was tagged by a fake name?

After abandoning that angle, she’d started combing through front-facing employee records. Gallo Industries kept a detailed list of projects each employee contributed to, and Ciro had fifteen years’ worth of history.

On the surface, everything appeared on the up and up. The very project she was working on was listed as the most recent project for both Ciro and her. It was labeled as contract work for a company name she didn’t recognize but was traced back to a consulting firm in Paris.

Ciro had worked on three different projects for the same company in the last six months. Each business targeted was different, but all of them were categorized the same. Contract work to improve security systems. If she had to bet money on it, she’d say her uncle was trying to access someone’s company secrets. And he was persistent about it.

But Ciro was clearly in on the game. It was obvious from the way he’d asked her to join the project to the cagey way he’d avoided some of her more direct questions. Even if he didn’t know the extent of Gallo's plans—and he likely didn’t—he knew he was doing something wrong.

Which is why she’d spent the last half hour combing through his financials. Nothing stood out as overtly odd, and that was the puzzling part.

His pay had never changed on the Gallo side. He got his standard raises every two years, and a few times during his tenure, he’d negotiated a bigger pay bump. Every December, he received a hefty bonus, but nothing off the charts, nothing out of the ordinary for a man in his position with his experience. However he was getting paid for this corporate spying, he wasn’t depositing it into his regular bank account.

A comb through her uncle’s back door financials had yielded no results. Maybe she was losing her touch. Or it was just late, and she needed to finally give up and go to bed. The idea of sleep didn’t appeal, not with the nightmares she’d been having this week.

Pushing off the couch, she crossed to the kitchen and pulled a mug down from the cabinet. She’d make some tea, give it another hour, and then try to sleep again. Weeks like this one were when she missed the drug-induced sleep she had when taking painkillers after the shooting.

But they’d run out, and she’d gone into enough of a withdrawal that she decided not to seek more. She needed her head clear and her memories feeding her revenge. Especially the ones that kept her up at night. Maybe what she needed was another kill.

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