Page 50 of The Beast Who Begged Me

“I don’t know any of that,” Strike protests, holding up his hands. “I swear on my mother’s grave, I don’t know anything. Not—not for sure.”

“Then what do you believe?” I ask.

He glances around as though this is even more top secret than the arrangements for my ascendancy. “I believed what your dad told me. That he did it. But,” he adds quickly, as I let a flash of temper cross my face, “only because I value my life. That was the story, so I nodded along.” He glances at Dami. “His dad, though? No fuckin’ way Cesar would’ve done him dirty like that. Vin Orsini was his friend. And Cesar would never turn on a friend.”

It must be difficult for Dami to hear this, but I need to keep pressing. I put a cautious hand behind me, find his, and squeeze it.

He squeezes back.

“So what do you think happened?” I ask Strike, but he just looks lost.

“No idea. Cesar told me himself that he killed Vincent Orsini. And then he never mentioned the man’s name again. I thought at the time it seemed, you know. Strange. But I wasn’t going to go against what Cesar said.”

“If not my father,” I say, trying to find some way to wring further information out of him, “then who do you think it could have been?”

“I never heard anything else. And that makes me think…well, if it’d been orders to another one of ours,” he says awkwardly, “it woulda got out. Someone woulda said something. They’d brag about a kill like that, you know? Vin Orsini was a big name.”

Dami goes still behind me, making me think I’d better shut this down before it goes much further. Because Strike really has told me all he knows. And all he knows is surmise and personal opinion and loyalty to my dead father, the belief that he would never betray a friend. “Tony Stuccio,” I say suddenly, and Strike pulls a face. “I always thought he was my father’s closest friend.”

“Stuccio’s a rat,” Strike says. “But before he turned tail, yeah. He sucked up to your dad. The old Don—he found him useful after he got into law. But I never saw Cesar enjoy himself around Stuccio the way he did around Orsini. Vin was always serious, except a few times when Cesar finally made him smile. Even laugh, once or twice. Jesus, it actually scared a few people.”

Dami’s hand is squeezing mine uncomfortably tight by now. “Okay,” I say. “That’s all. Keep all this to yourself, Strike.”

“Of course!”

“And if I have any more questions, I don’t want to have to pry the answers out of you like I had to today. Understand me?”

He bows his head. “Yes, Don Clemenza.”

When we get back into the car, I put the privacy screen up between Vito and us. “You okay?” I ask, looking straight ahead.

“I’m fine.”

He sounds anything but fine. “Vincent Orsini was your father,” I say at last. “And Cesario Clemenza was mine. So tell me, Dami: do you really think we should keep pulling on this thread?”

Because I can’t shake a sense of dread, the feeling that something terrible might come from all of this. Something that will be the undoing of us.

Dami is silent, brooding for a while before he replies. “We keep pulling,” he says at last.

“Alright,” I say. “Then we already know our next lead.”

He turns to look at me at last. “Which is?”

“Uncle Tony,” I sigh. “I’ll have to talk to him again.”

“Why so down in the mouth about it? You enjoyed yourself last time.”

Last time. In the bathroom of Maison Lumière, where I knelt obediently at Dami’s command afterward…

I feel heat in my cheeks and pull my mind back to the present. “The problem is, last time I told him he should hope he never saw me again. I can hardly turn up with a smile and ask for an appointment.”

Dami makes the most unexpected noise: a chuckle. “True. He’d be too busy screaming to be useful.”

“So what do we do?”

He’s grinning, shaking his head as he looks at me. “What happened to the master manipulator? That’s easy, golden boy. You call him.”

My heart gives a happy little twinge at his use of the nickname, but I try not to show it. “He’s no more likely to take my call than he is to see me in person.”