Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (77 page)

“Yes, they can. Danny-boy’s worked with them for years.”

My face got red hot. I was ashamed of my ignorance and my naiveté.

He saw the prickly heat of shame on my skin and flipped the gun around. He handed it to me grip-first, blocking everyone’s view of it with his body. “Keep this, and pray for anyone who sneaks up on you.”

“I’m going,” I said, taking the gun.

“You are not. If you die, if you’re hurt, if you so much as cry again—”

“You need me. He’s the fucking district attorney. A mayoral candidate. How are you getting in? Because I’ll tell you how I’m getting in. He fucked me for seven years. I’m walking in.”

When would I stop being surprised at how fast he was? He had an arm carried by electricity, landing at the back of my neck in a fierce grip. “Are you trying to piss me off?” he hissed, his mouth kiss-close, bending my head until my face met his.

He didn’t scare me. Not one bit.

“Yes.”

“It’s not working,” he lied, the lead weight of rage heavy on his voice.

“His security detail knows me. From. All. The. Fucking.”

The dishwashers chattered in Spanish, and I realized our intensity was a lousy shield.

Antonio let me go. “
Dio mio
, woman. When this is over, I’m going to take you to a place no one knows, and I’m splitting you in two.”

“Take me,” I whispered, pausing before I finished… “with you. You’ll never get past security without me. And they’ll just walk in and take Valentina into a field and shoot her, if they haven’t already.”

He pressed his lips between his teeth as he always did when I was getting to him. “You are to stay with me at all times.”

“All right.”

“You do not let your attention wander.”

“Yes.” My god, every command turned me on.

“You do not use your weapon unless we get separated.”

“Yes.”

“I am your weapon.”

“Yes.” I was barely breathing.

“Say it. Say I’m your weapon.”

“You are my weapon.”

He put up his finger. “I don’t like this.”

“Yes, you do.”

theresa

hen Daniel and I had moved in together, he rented out his tiny condo a block from City Hall. Once the tenant’s lease was up, he returned to it. The proximity to the civic center made campaigning easier. He needed security, and he needed a place that was easy to care for. Antonio held the building’s brass-and-glass front door open for me. Zo came in after me.

“You sure you don’t want to wait in the car?” Zo asked.

“We’re going in together,” I replied “You don’t need to watch me.”

The lobby was a stark study in white and wood. Everything was in its place, but nothing was exactly right. I didn’t know what I had been prepared for. Nothing and everything. I was prepared to see his wife, alive and beautiful, a cinderblock wall shaped like a supple woman between Antonio and me. I didn’t want to meet her and I didn’t want to save her, but she was important to him, even if he wouldn’t admit it, and I didn’t know how he’d bear losing her again because of his actions. He carried things around. He held grudges and pain. I walked into Daniel’s building for Antonio, for his health, for his peace of mind. Because I loved him, and it wasn’t about me.

That aside, it was too quiet. The security detail I’d promised to get Antonio through was absent.

Zo lumbered behind me like a loyal puppy while Antonio moved like a cat, as if he was only checking territory he already owned. The front desk wasn’t manned, so all my talk of getting Antonio past it was for nothing. I stopped him with a
tsst
sound. He turned, eyes everywhere, and I indicated the closed circuit monitors behind the security desk.

They were off.

He nodded slightly, paused.

“I know what you’re thinking, and forget it.” I moved my lips but no more sound came out.
Live together. Die together.

His eyes lingered on my mouth. I didn’t know if he understood me, but my thoughts went dirty, and a weight of wetness dropped from my spine to the space between my legs.

“Let’s go,” I said and went toward the elevator. “We have a nice Italian woman to rescue.”

I didn’t have the key to Daniel’s place, but as we walked down the soft white hall upstairs, I saw a keypad outside his door. Zo checked his watch. Antonio touched his jacket under the arm, where his gun sat in its leather holster.

It was up to me. I didn’t know how many digits, and Daniel didn’t have a commonly used password for the daily business of getting into the easy stuff.

I put in his birthday.

Red light.

His childhood address in City Terrace.

Red light.

His social security number.

Red light.

His phone number.

Red light.

His mother’s phone number.

Red light.

His phone number backward.

Red light.

“Contessa,” Antonio said, “let me shoot it.”

I held up my hand. If we wanted to get in and out, we had to make as little mess as possible, and I wanted to prove my worth. Had to prove he’d brought me here as more than a burden, and I factored into the situation as more than a dead weight with a murderous streak.

I put in my birthday, just to keep my fingers moving.

Green light.

“Excellent,” Antonio said, pushing the door open. “What was it?”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want Antonio to get distracted by the fact that my birthday was the code to Daniel’s loft.

Zo pulled out his gun and held it up. Antonio reached into his jacket. I still had the hunk of metal in my waistband, and it was staying there. If this went down the tubes, I didn’t want to kill anyone else.

Antonio put his other hand on the knob. “You ready?” His voice was couched in a tenderness I sometimes forgot he was capable of.

“I’m fine, Capo. Let’s just get her and go.”

He swung the door open.

I smelled gunpowder. Antonio tried to hold me back, but I beat him into the big room. My footsteps echoed. Zo closed the door. Antonio checked the corners then leaned against the doorjamb to the bedroom. I swallowed, wondering if she’d be sleeping or naked. But he shook his head. There was no one.

The kitchen was open to the larger room, with a bar creating a psychological barrier. I touched the shiny marble surface. I heard a creaking sound. I looked around. Didn’t know where it came from.

I pressed my fingertips together. There was a white powder on the pads from touching the marble.

The creaking came again.

Antonio came toward me.

Zo checked the bathroom. Nothing.

I rubbed the powder on my fingers and listened to the interminable creak.

Slap
. A shoe clonked down onto the counter, and I jumped. I looked up to where it came from, and Antonio followed my gaze.

I screamed.

Daniel was hanging upside down from a beam in the ceiling, ropes around his calves, feet free but squeezed enough that his remaining shoe dangled from his toes, the other foot covered in just a sock. He moved back and forth slightly, the rope creaking against the beam. A silver rectangle of duct tape covered the bottom half of his beet-red face, and his hands were tied behind his back.

“Get him down!” I shouted.

Zo jumped onto the counter, but anyone could see it wasn’t high enough. The rope was still six feet above him.

“Antonio!” I shouted his name in supplication. I didn’t know what to do, but if I prayed hard enough to the right god, some answer would come. “Get him down!”

Antonio put a barstool on the counter and hopped on it.

No. That was too unstable and wouldn’t reach the rope.

I stepped back and yanked the gun out of my waistband.

“
Basta
,” Antonio cried. “Wait!” He grabbed Daniel by the chest and steadied himself.

I stepped back and aimed.

“Let me do it,” Antonio said, because I could as easily shoot Daniel as get him down.

But I was upset, and it was too late for sense.

I squeezed the trigger before worrying about it too deeply, and the rope that held my ex-fiancé by the ankles cracked. Daniel fell, and Antonio broke his fall. Both tumbled to the floor.

Antonio twisted out from under him, and Daniel rolled onto his back and I saw his face. It was swollen with blood, veins popping.

I didn’t think about what I was doing. Daniel had broken my heart. He’d soiled my soul. I thought I’d never trust another man because of him. But he drove me to Antonio. I’d loved Daniel for seven years. I’d given him everything I had, and he’d given as much as he could.

I burst into tears. I cursed through them, unaware of Antonio or Zo. I hated this. Hated what had happened to Daniel. Hated that I’d caused it in some twisted way. I couldn’t remember a bad thing about him, though I knew there was plenty to complain about. I only remembered being included, being validated, feeling as if I was part of a team with a larger purpose. I remembered all the good works he’d done, his compassion for the marginalized and underrepresented. I remembered him before he’d thought he had a chance to make anything of himself, and his wide-eyed joy at the thought that he could be polished into a man who could make a difference. All of that unknotted itself from the cheating, the manipulating, the double-dealing, and the strands of my vision of him separated. I saw him for the complex person he was, and appreciated what he was, what he could have been, and how very wrong he was for me despite all that.

“Contessa,” Antonio said gently.

“Get that shit off his face!” I clawed at the duct tape.

Antonio took the other side and ripped it off, leaving spots of blood on Daniel’s mouth. Daniel coughed as Antonio got his hands untied.

“Oh my god!” I said through tears. “Jesus, Dan! Dan.”

He rolled facedown on the floor, holding his head at the base of his neck. I looked at Antonio, who crouched with his elbows to his knees. I must have had a question written all over my face, because he answered it without me speaking.

“Blood’s flowing out of his brain. He’s got a headache you can’t imagine.”

“I’m going to kill them,” I said. “He could have died.”

“He still might, if there’s a blood clot. I never told you about my uncle.”

“Should he stand up?”

“I don’t think so. Give him a minute.” Antonio crouched on one knee, without jealousy or rage in his eyes, and slipped his fingers along my jaw. His touch was an embodiment of tenderness and strength, and though the facts remained, it helped me see through the tangle of my emotions.

I couldn’t just sit there. Zo was wiping down surfaces we’d touched. Antonio was hovering over Daniel to see if he would survive. I went into the kitchen and snapped open the door over the sink. He’d organized the cabinet the way I had when we lived together. His medicine was boxed by pain killers, cold and flu, skin care, etc., with a little plastic cup for water. I tapped out a headache pill for him. Four came out, I was shaking so hard.

When I’d said I wanted to kill whoever did this, I was serious. My feeling of bright white rage would only be relieved with the death of someone, or their howls of pain. Was that why Antonio felt he needed to right wrongs with murder? I got it. I really did. And if his life was cut short, I knew I would get myself killed avenging that death.

“Don’t fucking touch me,” Daniel said. He was on his back, hands over his eyes.

Antonio took his hand off Daniel’s arm just before I crouched down.

“Here,” I said, putting the pills in Daniel’s palm.

“This is so past anything I had in the cabinet.”

“I know.”

“Valentina,” he said. “Did you find her?”

Antonio and I exchanged a look.

“No, what happened?” I asked.

He groaned and tried to sit up, wobbled. I snatched a pillow from the couch and put it under his head. It was a bed pillow, I noticed, and the blanket was spread as if someone had slept on the couch the night before.

“They came in, Domenico Uvoli and another guy. I thought they were going to give me a hard time about the Bortolusi wedding, so I hid Valentina. But they were fixing this rig up, and she started screaming. They were really here for her. They kept asking… fuck. We have to get her.” Daniel wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to Antonio. “She went pale and fainted. She didn’t look right.”

“Not good. That’s not good,” Antonio said. He didn’t look alarmed as much as he looked as if he was controlling his unease. “You’re the DA. You should call the police.” His voice didn’t mock Daniel, but it had the weight of a rhetorical suggestion.

“I will. And in the time it takes me to explain it all, they’ll kill her.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Antonio asked.

I didn’t know if he was seething because Daniel had stepped on his territory with me or with his wife, and I didn’t care.

“Antonio,” I growled. “It’s not the time for a pissing match.”

Behind me, Zo’s phone buzzed. Meekly, he reached into his pocket.

“They have you on speed dial, Lorenzo?” Antonio said.

“Your burner don’t hold a number or do shit, so… it’s on me.” He shrugged and answered then immediately gave the phone to Antonio.