Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 52592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 263(@200wpm)___ 210(@250wpm)___ 175(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 52592 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 263(@200wpm)___ 210(@250wpm)___ 175(@300wpm)
Granted, Luc and Valentina will have loads of actual security at their wedding, I’m sure. Mafia bosses and their men see to it that big events like these are well guarded, especially ones that have valuable people at them. My presence here is more of a gloss or a varnish to the security protocol than it is actual substance. Which is fine with me because that frees me up to do some snooping around on my own. My focus will be on searching the crowd for any hint of him. Even just thinking about finding the mysterious man from that fateful night sends me spiraling right back into an obsessive frenzy. If I’m not careful, I’ll let myself wander too far down the rabbit hole to a place I can’t return from. I try to balance rationality with obsession, but lately, it’s become increasingly difficult.
As I head to the wedding, I take in the lovely late-afternoon Mediterranean sunlight. After the wedding, I’ll be heading right back to Vegas, as most of the esteemed guests, I assume, will be returning as well. Only a few of the high-profile players attending live in Italy; the rest of the families live in Las Vegas and own various pieces of the city in the form of casinos, hotels, or even storefront businesses that double as illicit cartel operations. I’m well-versed and familiar with how the mafia works, both thanks to my complex friendship with Valentina Ricci and from watching my father work as a detective in Vegas with questionable involvement with some of these families and their activities. To be honest, my father and I have a difficult relationship. And even though I may not know what all the kingpins and their families attending this wedding have done, I know who and what they are. It’s a fine line that I walk—balancing morals and politics in the city.
Whispers have been abounding lately in Vegas, and I wonder whether they will run rampant through this wedding too—whispers that speak of an underworld assassin who goes only by the name “The Ghost”. In my investigative circles, in conversations that I overhear on the streets, and even sometimes on the mouths of random passersby in the city, I will catch a word or two whispered in quiet voices about this man—this killer. Thus far, I haven’t been able to tie this rumored “Ghost” to a crime. I haven’t been able to complete a solid profile of him or figure out who he is or what makes him tick, and I want to. Others in my field office say that he’s not even real, that he’s a fictitious character created by some of the most powerful Mafia bosses in the city in order to throw the cops off their scent. But I disagree. I think this Ghost is real, and I want to find him.
Despite the fact that I’m frequently chided by others in my field office for not always aligning with the more conventional ways of doing things, I’m driven by my complex ethical code. I don’t feel the need to answer to anyone other than myself. And even if my ways of relentlessly pursuing the truth might risk my sanity and safety, I'm determined to find the answers that I seek. I’m not exactly the kind of girl who backs down, even if it’s to my own detriment.
Sometimes, I wonder if this “Ghost” might have any connection to the man who murdered my mother or the other man in the alley that night—the man whose eyes still haunt me to this day. Those eyes have followed me in my every waking and sleeping hour. When I close my own eyes, I see his stare looking back at me in the same way that he looked at me that night. My heartbeat thunders in my chest as I relive that horrific experience again and again. But the one thing that still wraps itself around my soul is the question of why he saved my life that night. If my memories are to be trusted, then the man with the evocative eyes was the man standing behind my mother’s killer.
When I arrive at the cathedral, I stand outside for a few minutes before going in. It’s awkward for me to be here for more reasons than just my heightened sense of alertness and my goal of multitasking this wedding alongside my personal goal of profiling the guests in attendance.
My friendship with Valentina is at best complicated and strained.
Part of me wonders whether she even wants me here today, or whether seeing me in the crowd will upset her. We weren’t always this much at odds. In fact, we used to be the best of friends. We had a lot in common back in our teen years when both of our fathers sent us off to an elite private academy in Vegas. I believe both of our fathers told us the academy would “nurture the brightest minds,” but Valentina and I both knew why they were sending us there. The private academy was also the perfect place for us to finish our educations while also hiding the dark secrets of our families. She and I would find common ground—me being the daughter of a respected detective with secretly questionable ties to mafia corruption and a wife who had just been murdered, and her being the privileged daughter of a mafia-aligned hotel magnate. We were both emotionally isolated, and because of that, we formed a bond.