AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I hunted down one of her old colleagues at the diner. He said she called him from Sioux Falls a few days ago. With a name and a general location, she won’t be hard to find.”
Luca Abruzzo steeples his hands together, elbows on his desk. “And you couldn’t have told me this on the phone?”
I drag my eyes away from the asshole and out of his office window, focusing on the rest of the warehouse.No, because then I wouldn’t get to see where you worked.
But I pin him with a hard glare, one that makes him shift uncomfortably in his big-boy pants. “If you think burner phones are safe, you’re going to have a hard time adjusting to being a boss.”
He clears his throat, sits up straighter in his seat. “Yeah, of course. I knew that. I’m not a fucking amateur.”
Yeah, right.
I’m barely listening. I’m too busy trying not to put my fist through his jaw for what he’s been doing to Dahlia—or should I say, Lottie. She insists I call her Dahlia still, because she doesn’t want it to get confusing. Knowing this cunt gave it to her makes the name stick to the back of my throat.
The other part of my brain is assessing the warehouse, looking for clues.
I settle on breaking my own rules: asking questions that don’t pertain to the job in hand.
“Nice set-up you got here,” I say, nodding out to the floor of the warehouse. A few men are lifting boxes off the back of a truck, adding them to the piles against the walls. “You in the shipping industry?”
The dumbass doesn’t even look suspicious. Instead, he looks pleased that I threw him a compliment. “Uh-huh. Papa never ran a business, and I always thought it was weak as fuck. We’re exporting,” he says proudly. When I don’t reply, his lips twitch. “Guns.”
“Guns,” I muse, feigning interest. “I’m always in the market for a new weapon.”
“I bet. You must go through them like toilet paper,” he chuckles.
I grit my teeth.No, asshole, you only need to dispose of a gun if you’re dumb enough to get caught.Instead, I grin and say, “Exactly. You import them?”
“Nah,” he says, settling back in his chair, more relaxed now. He throws a thumb over his shoulder, “we chop replicas in the factory next door. I have the best men in the business. They can turn a toy gun into a lethal weapon in under thirty minutes,” he boasts. “From a Glock to an AK-47, they can replicateanything.We don’t raise any suspicion importing the replicas because we’re registered as a film prop company.”
“Interesting.”It isn’t.“Then you sell them on.”
He falters for a second, long enough for me to catch it. “Yeah—well. We will, just er, not yet.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s early days,” he flusters. “We want to get enough stock made before we find the right client.”
Oh, boy.I can tell you right now, there’s not a single one of my clients, on any continent on this earth, that would buy a modified replica gun when a real one is just as easy to come by. And even if by some miracle he found a buyer, he wouldn’t get it past the city walls. Every trade route on the East Coast is controlled by the Quinns, so unless this is averylocal service, Abruzzo is going to be fucked, real fast.
Why is Lorcan worrying about this dickhead’s next chess move when he’s still playing in the sandpit?
“Got it.”
There’s movement from the entrance of the warehouse, and I turn to see who has just entered. Abruzzo does too, scrambling to his feet. “Fuck,” he hisses under his breath.
Drinking in his reaction, I focus on the two men that have just walked in. Olive skin, tattoos snaking out of their shirt collars and over their knuckles. Everyone in the warehouse comes to a stop, looking towards Abruzzo.
He flusters, mutters another curse word. My hand rests on the grip of my gun. “Everything all right?”
It takes me a moment, but then I recognize them.
That’s Santiago Vargas and his eldest son.
Fuck. What are they doing here?
Off of Abruzzo’s silence, I rise to my feet and say, “I see you have visitors. I’ll leave you to it.” He nods, mutters something inaudible, then offers me a sweaty handshake. I’d have loved to crush his knuckles as I take it, but judging by Vargas’s arrival, he has bigger problems to worry about.
Wordlessly, I slip out the door attached to Abruzzo’s office, which leads into the alley behind the warehouse. Head down, I slide into the Tesla and peel off in the direction of the highway.
