Page 41 of The Bond

Closing my eyes, I forced myself to think. To cut through the noise of my brain the way Valentina did when she came up with one of her cunning plans. That was when it hit me.

The bike was in the trunk of her car. That was why it was moving. Which meant, I could see where the car was headed. Where Valentina was at that moment. Shaking my head, I moved to close the app. It was messed up to invade her privacy and monitor her movements. As I got ready to close the app down, I realized that the car wasn’t going in the direction of the restaurant. It was going in the complete opposite direction.

Valentina wasn’t driving the car. Her driver was. Had she instructed him to go somewhere else? Why?

Could she have gotten control of the car to go where she really wanted to go? No. Valentina wouldn’t lie to me.

My gut was telling me that something was up. If Valentina hadn’t lied, then she couldn’t have been the one driving the car. The driver was.

Holy fuck. Could the fucking driver have been the one coming after us this whole time? Feeling sick to my stomach, I got up and sprinted to my bedroom.

I could always call her phone. See how she was. But if the driver had abducted her for whatever reason, there was a good chance that he’d force her to answer the phone and act like she was fine. I thought back to the way she had made my father believe that he had been texting with me while I had been recovering in the hospital.

Phones could be deceiving. I had to see Valentina with my own eyes.

I went through my room, methodically grabbing onto holsters and weapons. As I holstered several guns onto me, I refused to think about the odds of Valentina already being dead. She wasn’t dead. My heart would fucking knowing it. She was alive and I had to save her.

But I couldn’t face this threat alone. If I went alone and wound up hurt or killed, I’d be fucking useless to her. What I needed were reinforcements. Starting with a call to my father to get our men ready. Followed by a call to Valentina’s mother to tell her that Valentina was in danger and to get the Romano men into position. The poor woman was probably getting men ready since Valentina hadn’t shown for dinner. As much as I had decided to forgive Valentina’s father, I didn’t trust him. It was Valentina’s mother I trusted so I would go to Bridget. After getting every mafia enforcer ready for battle, I’d call the FBI.

I doubted my chances of convincing law enforcement to help us. But I’d do anything. If that meant raising an army that included my enemies, so be it. I would do anything for Valentina. I would move heaven and earth. I would tear the city apart brick by brick. Because nothing and no one was going to stand between me and my wife.

~~*~~

I TORE THROUGH THE streets of New York, my foot on the gas the whole fucking way. As I drove, I made orders over the phone, telling Romano and De Luca enforcers to make their way east. The car hadn’t stopped but I could see it was headed for some old dockyard warehouses.

As I sped through the streets, I got a call from Valentina’s cousin Frankie.

“Talk to me, Frankie. What do we know about this guy?” I asked, referring to the driver.

“Well, he gave us a fake name when we hired him. That’s why his background check failed to bring up anything we’d red flag. According to records, this Dave Byrne has been getting picked up for things like vagrancy, or drunken disorderly since he was a kid. That’s the name of a man who has been homeless for about twenty years now. The driver’s real name isn’t Byrne.” Frankie answered.

“What the fuck? So he stole somebody’s identity?” I asked.

“Yep. We were able to get another name based on a credit card Byrne used just this week,” Frankie said. “That name belonged to somebody named Sarah Payton. Sarah Payton is deceased. Died last winter.”

“Okay. Give me the simplified version of this,” I ordered.

“Sarah Payton was married to a Daniel Payton. We think that’s the driver,” Frankie explained.

“What do we know about him?” I asked desperately, hoping somehow that this guy would turn out to be harmless. That this would just be some kind of misunderstanding.

“Daniel Payton, medical records indicate he was admitted to emergency for multiple gunshot wounds last year,” Frankie said, sounding like he was reading off something.

“So he’s one of us? In our business?” I asked. “Assuming he got shot in a hit job?”

“No, he isn’t one of us,” Frankie answered. “Daniel Payton’s an ordinary guy who was caught up in one of our skirmishes.”

My eyebrows went up as I accelerated toward the outskirts of town. “What the fuck?”

“We figure he was a bystander who accidentally got clipped,” Frankie explained. “After the emergency stay, he gets a bunch of surgeries, accrues a mountain of debt, house is foreclosed on. Wife dies. Real tragedy.”

“We ruined this guy’s life,” I said.

“Not on purpose, but it’s looking that way,” Frankie said with what sounded like a grimace.

“That’s why he’s been coming after us. This has to be the reason,” I said. “And he’s probably taking Valentina out to the middle of nowhere to hurt her.”

“Enzo, I should confess...I let this guy into the building across the church during your wedding,” Frankie said. “He said he had to take a leak just like a whole bunch of us did that day. I thought nothing of it. One of our staff using the facilities, you know? I thought our security was airtight.”