Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 46899 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 188(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 46899 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 234(@200wpm)___ 188(@250wpm)___ 156(@300wpm)
Something told me this wouldn’t be a long meeting.
I made my way to the back table marked Reserved by a small red sign and sat. A single glass of wine waited for me. In front of it, a folded card read: Drink me.
Well. Shit.
Guess introductions were optional.
I drained the glass.
It tasted like a poor man’s Italian red blend—too sweet, no depth, the kind of wine meant to disguise something else entirely. My stomach clenched almost immediately. The room tilted. My vision blurred.
Ah.
There it is.
I collapsed forward, my shoulder clipping the table before I hit the floor. The last thing I saw was a man standing over me, black gloves pristine against the cheap linoleum.
Perfect.
Minutes later—or maybe seconds; time was fuzzy—I woke to ice-cold water splashed across my face.
“Wakey, wakey.”
The voice carried a heavy accent.
I cracked my eyes open, expecting one person. Maybe two.
There were at least twenty.
All in black baseball caps and long peacoats. Some wore masks pulled high over their mouths and noses. Anonymous by design. Careful.
“So,” I muttered, blinking. “Is this a costume party?”
A boot connected with my shin.
I hissed. “Rude.”
“Congratulations,” the accented voice said. “You passed the first test. Didn’t choke on your own vomit. Woke up faster than anyone we’ve had in the past year.”
Good. The poison I’d microdosed earlier had done its job.
“It seems,” he continued, “you either knew protocol… or you’re built of stronger stuff.”
I shrugged as best I could from the floor. “So, what’s the second test? Since I passed the first one with flying colors?”
His eyes smiled. The rest of his face stayed hidden behind the mask. He seemed young. Too young to be this comfortable with violence.
He tugged the black gloves tighter over his hands. “We’re very selective about who we trust. Lucky for you, you know the right people. You could be… useful.”
He crouched slightly. “Except for one small problem.”
Of course.
“How do we know you won’t betray us?”
I nodded once. Fair question. “I don’t know. Make me prove it? Like every other idiot with a gun?”
His gaze hardened—dark brown, sharp, dangerous. “If word gets out about what we do—what we’ve done—the entire system collapses. And we can’t have that, can we?” He glanced behind him. “Can we, men?”
Interesting. No women.
I stayed quiet.
“There’s someone,” he went on, “making it very difficult to move product through the Seattle port. Any guesses who that might be?”
I almost rolled my eyes. “Take your pick from the Five Families. But the Petrovs used to control Seattle, so my money’s on Andrei.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s what we thought too. Which was a problem, considering his ties to both the Russians and the Italians.” A pause. “But it turns out this particular port belongs to Dante Alfero.”
I didn’t react. Even though my pulse jumped.
“Which means,” he explained pleasantly, “we need him gone. Should be easy for you. Being married to his daughter and all.” His head tilted. “Snap his neck after dessert. Simple.”
This was bad.
Very bad.
I couldn’t kill her father.
He grinned beneath the mask. “I can see your mind working. So, I’ll do you a favor.” He straightened. “You have thirty-six hours.”
He reached into his coat and tossed something at my feet.
A photograph.
Dante Alfero stood in my house.
At his feet—
My little brother.
Dead.
Silence swallowed the room.
“Any questions,” the man asked softly, “or are we done here?”
I walked out of that restaurant a changed man.
The rain came down hard, soaking through my coat, pounding against my skull until everything felt distant—muted. Numb. The woman I married. The man I was supposed to kill. The weight of it all pressed down until breathing felt optional.
I kept walking.
I knew someone was behind me. It had to be Cassian. He never rushed. Never hid. He let inevitability do the work for him.
I didn’t stop until I reached a dive bar that had seen better decades. Flickering neon. Sticky floors. The kind of place people came to forget the rest of the world.
I slid onto a stool and tapped the bar. “Whiskey. Neat. Maker’s.”
I didn’t look up when the stool beside me scraped back.
“Same,” a familiar voice said.
“You knew,” I said quietly.
Cassian took the glass when it arrived and rolled it between his palms. “I had suspicions. I only ever got as far as discovering that the men at your house that day were there under orders to cleanse the De Lange family—and that they believed you were part of that cleansing.”
My jaw tightened.
“They got one shot off before they realized they’d made a mistake,” he continued calmly. “Dante Alfero made an error. One Nixon Abandonato was happy to help bury. Luca and Frank cleaned the rest. But one made man didn’t sit right with it. Said Dante should’ve known better, age or not. He walked.”
Cassian finally took a sip.
“When the Vescovis came into the picture a few years back, that man joined them. He talked too much when he drank.” A pause. “He never said Dante’s name outright. I narrowed it down to Dante, Luca, or Nixon.”