Ryder

 

Standing out in the cold, hugging his shoulders while Adriana struggled with the key to the gate that separated the Rainieri warehouse from the street at the edge of town, Ryder had to remind himself why this was worth it. It was so tempting to pull on Adriana’s shoulders and tug her back to her shitty apartment, where they could be naked together, cuddling under the blankets until dawn.

 

No, he berated himself, biting his lip as Adriana cursed and tried the next key on her chain. This is important. This is family business. We can’t give up until we find out what Dad wanted Adriana to know.

 

He played lookout, keeping his eyes peeled to every dark shadowy corner of the street in case any of the Rainieri foot soldiers were on duty tonight, watching the warehouse or following them or some combination of the two. He wasn’t as paranoid as Adriana was, ducking her head every time they passed someone on the street on the way over here, but he still felt nervous.

 

He didn’t even let his driver take them over here. After the events at his father’s funeral, Ryder didn’t know who he could trust anymore, except for Adriana. Looking at her in her little gray beanie and her big winter coat, he felt warmth in his chest, like there was a tiny little star where his heart used to be.

 

“Aha! Got it!” Adriana cried out, keeping her voice relatively low as she turned to beam at Ryder, her eyes alight with the glow of victory. “Gate’s unlocked.”

 

“That’s my girl,” Ryder said as he followed Adriana through the main gate, taking her hand in his as they walked into the warehouse and tracked down the safety deposit box that Paolo had willed to Adriana.

 

“You ready for this?” Adriana asked in a hushed whisper as she pointed to the correct box in the long row of boxes against the wall of the warehouse.

 

Ryder honestly didn’t know the answer to that question. He was about to get a message from his dad, from beyond the grave, and it wasn’t even intended for him. As much as his father had preferred him to Giovanni, putting him in charge of the business, he didn’t trust him as much as he trusted Adriana. That hurt, even though he knew that his father was probably justified in feeling that way.

 

“I can do it myself, if you want,” Adriana said softly when he didn’t answer right away. “You know, if you want to have plausible deniability in case this gets us into hot water with Mama Rainieri and Giovanni.”

 

“What?” Ryder asked, totally baffled. “Do you think I care about that? My reputation with my family? Seriously?”

 

Adriana shrugged, but she dropped her gaze to the floor, suddenly too bashful to look Ryder directly in the eyes. “I would understand if you did. It’s your family. It’s like, if someone told me I couldn’t look after my dad anymore, for any reason, I’d be upset by it.”

 

“Your dad’s not a murderer.”

 

“Doesn’t matter. They’re your family. Your mother and your brother. That counts for something, even if they are the worst people to ever walk on the face of the planet. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to turn back now and do what they say.”

 

Ryder shook his head, feeling slightly incredulous about what he was hearing. “You think I’m going to abandon you?” Ryder stepped closer to Adriana, who looked adorably terrified, like a deer caught in the headlights. “You think I’m just going to turn back and go back to my easy, cushy little life doing nothing but follow my family’s commands because I’m too scared to do what I really want to do?”

 

“What do you really want to do?” Adriana asked breathlessly, stepping a little closer until barely any distance separated their bodies.

 

“Be with you,” Ryder said without thinking, without a single moment of hesitation. “I need to be with you, Adriana. I thought that was obvious.”

 

“Oh.” Adriana looked away from him, her cheeks flushing visibly red even in the shadows of the closed-down warehouse. “I thought… never mind.”

 

“What? What did you think?” Ryder asked, suddenly feeling a little nervous that he’d overstepped an invisible boundary.

 

“I just suspected that maybe you didn’t see this as a serious thing,” Adriana replied with another shrug, but it felt forced and inauthentic, like she was trying to make herself look much more nonchalant and relaxed than she really felt. “I just thought maybe it was more casual, you know, like a lot of people choose nowadays.”

 

Ryder felt a flash of anger go up his spine, but it was really just covering up for the sense of hurt that struck him. Adriana thought he didn’t care about her? That he didn’t mean anything serious when he got her to sign the contract? It hurt him more than he’d have liked to admit, like she’d accused him of some terrible crime, something utterly unspeakable. His mouth had fallen open, ready to fire off a retort when he caught sight of Adriana’s eyes, worried and anxious, even as they were pointed at the floor under her feet.

 

Ryder sighed and stepped closer to Adriana, reaching over to take one of her hands between both of his, bringing her fingers up to his lips to kiss. “I understand why you might have thought that. I used to have sex with a lot of girls, just to let off steam. But it got me a reputation as a playboy, like that’s all I’m interested in. But I want to be very clear with you: when I had that contract drawn up, I wasn’t just fucking around. I don’t mean to freak you out, Adriana, but I mean business. Like, the long haul, actually trying to make things work. That’s what I want.”

 

Adriana’s voice, when she spoke, was tiny and scared, like a mouse trapped under a foot. But there was an unmistakable note of hope hiding within her words as she said, “Really? You mean it?”

 

“Yes,” Ryder replied confidently, kissing Adriana’s fingers again, slowly, one by one, passing back over them with his mouth, over and over again until she finally looked up to meet his gaze. “I mean it. I really, really mean it. I’m here with you. No one else. Okay?”

 

“Okay.” Adriana smiled a little before she leaned in to kiss him, pressing her tongue gently against his, their mouths locked together in a tight embrace for several long seconds before either of them summoned the strength to pull away. “All right, I guess it’s time we finally open it and see what old Paolo has to say. Ready?”

 

“Ready,” Ryder answered, and now that he had Adriana’s hand clutching back at his, he knew that he really was.

 

Adriana brought the tiny little key back out, shoving it into the slot at the center of the deposit box, turning it slowly before she pulled it out and yanked the box out of its place on the wall, revealing a thick stack of white papers nestled inside.

 

“What’s this…” Adriana murmured as she pulled the papers out of the box and slid the box back into its place on the wall. “It’s… Paolo’s stationery. He kept it locked in a drawer under his desk. You know that one drawer that doesn’t open? That was Paolo’s. We don’t know where the key is. Maybe he was keeping this stuff inside the drawer the whole time—until he had his will drawn up.”

 

“What does it say?” Ryder asked, stepping a bit closer and squinting to try to read some of the writing on the first piece of paper in the pile.

 

“Hold on, give me a second,” Adriana said, sitting down on the floor next to the wall of safety deposit boxes and rifling through the papers until she landed on something that made her look up at Ryder with her jaw dropped open. “Ryder. Get over here.”

 

“What? What is it?” Ryder’s heart began to pound in the center of his throat, some combination of fear and excitement gripping his stomach hard as he sat down next to Adriana and leaned over to read what she was pointing at.

 

“It’s a kill order,” Adriana said, biting down on her bottom lip.

 

“It looks… like a notice for recycling around the office?” Ryder said, totally confused.

 

Adriana shook her head and smiled sadly. “It’s code. Paolo was too smart to let anyone in the organization write anything incriminating down; otherwise, they’d just be giving the FBI a paper trail to work with.”

 

Ryder nodded slowly, staring down at the “recycling policy notice” in front of them. “So, you send this to whatever enforcer, and they know that the person named on the form needs to get whacked?”

 

“Essentially, yes. There are a few more steps in the process. You have to file it with Paolo first—to make sure that there are no issues before the hit is carried out. But it looks like this never got his approval. There’s no stamp on it. Paolo always used to stamp everything that came across his desk.”

 

“What does that mean?”

 

Adriana sighed and tapped her fingers on the piece of paper thoughtfully. “It means that, no matter how Paolo managed to get his hands on this, he didn’t approve the hit. Someone else did. In this case, it was Old Tommy. The guy who we thought died of a heart attack about six months ago? Well, it looks like someone wanted him gone and made it happen. But it wasn’t Paolo. I would’ve heard about it, and I would’ve seen this document before.” Adriana shook her head and resumed rifling through the papers in her hands. “Oh, Jesus,” she said under her breath a minute later. “Daniels, too?”

 

“What? What about him?” Ryder asked, vaguely remembering a senior member of the organization by that name who must have passed away sometime over the past year.

 

Adriana blew out her breath in frustration. “It looks like his little ‘heart attack’ was more than it seemed.” She kept going through the papers rather than stopping to peruse any one document. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Sal, Bobby, Harry? All died in the last year. I didn’t think anything of it, but Paolo figured it out. They were murdered, Ryder. All of them.”

 

“Shit,” Ryder whispered, leaning over Adriana to read the latest “recycling notice” that she found. “What does this mean though? Who could do this?”

 

Adriana gave him a pointed look, silent for a long minute before she finally spoke. “Who do you think, Ryder?”

 

“You mean… my mom? I don’t know. She’s known these guys for years—longer than I’ve even been alive. Why would she—” Ryder sighed deeply as he considered the reality of the situation. “Jesus Christ, you’re right. I mean, if she was serious about threatening me the way you say she did, then there’s no telling what she’s capable of.”

 

Adriana looked at Ryder with sadness, reaching over to grab his hand and give it a reassuring squeeze as she continued to look through the stack of papers. “There’s just a lot of administrative stuff. Boring shit, really,” she explained.

 

“Like what?” Ryder asked. He needed something to take his mind off the fact that his mother was a cold-blooded murderer, somebody who was probably taking out respected members of the Rainieri family organization just to secure her own power.

 

“Um, more coded stuff, papers that don’t look like anything special to the naked eye… Like here, there’s a supply order for ‘18 more Russian wrenches.’ That’s code for the sex workers we’ve got working in Jersey and in the city. Not sure what Paolo meant by including this, except maybe to say that your mother or Giovanni or both of them together were working to exert control in the business in other ways before Paolo’s death.”

 

“Let me see the paper,” Ryder said, taking the document from Adriana’s hands and perusing it quickly. “It says here that they want the wrenches to be small. What does that mean?”

 

Adriana’s brow furrowed, her face contorting like she’d just heard something horrible. “Where does it say that?”

 

“Here, in the fine print at the bottom.” Ryder pointed out the words on the page for Adriana to see.

 

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Adriana sighed out, banging her head back on the hard surface of the safety deposit boxes behind her.

 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Ryder said, rubbing the back of Adriana’s head and giving her a quizzical look. “What’s going on?”

 

“They’re underage, Ryder.” Adriana shook her head in disgust. “They ordered teenage Russian girls. At least, I hope they’re teenagers. Maybe they’re even smaller… oh, my God, fuck.” She sighed and buried her head in her hands, her shoulders heaving for a second as she fought to catch her breath.

 

“They’re trafficking in underage girls to prostitute themselves in the city?” Ryder asked, his stomach turning over as Adriana nodded. “My dad would’ve never agreed to that!”

 

“I know,” Adriana said, dropping her hands from her face to look at the paper again. “But that’s what it means. There’s… a ‘G’ stamped here on the bottom. That means it was Giovanni’s deal.”

 

“Fucking sick bastard,” Ryder groaned out, shaking his head at his brother. His dad taught them to respect women, to treat them like human beings, not playthings to fuck and ruin and discard. But Giovanni was apparently not his father’s son, at least not in any way that counted. He was a monster.

 

Adriana gave a deep sigh, tearing Ryder out of his angry reverie, and put the papers aside. “I don’t know what to do with this.”

 

“You could hand it over to the FBI. I’m sure it’d be admissible in court somehow,” Ryder said, even though he felt like he was going to throw up just at the concept of involving law enforcement in the family business.

 

But Adriana just shook her head. “There’d be no way to get the feds to agree to just take down your mother or Giovanni or the people on their side. They’d go after everybody in the organization, not just the people who have been killing their own flesh and blood. We’d have to sink the whole boat just to get at one or two of the passengers.”

 

“Fair point.” Ryder felt a little helpless and lost as he stared at the stack of papers on the ground next to Adriana.

 

“I don’t know what to do,” Adriana said, her voice sounding soft and hollow. “I really have no fucking clue.”

 

Ryder wished he knew what to say to comfort her, to guide her, but he was just as lost as she was. There was no easy way to solve this. It made him wish his father was still around. Paolo would know what to do. Paolo wouldn’t be this confused. He must be so disappointed in me, Ryder thought with a deep sigh.

 

“I wonder why Paolo never told you about this until now,” Ryder said after a long moment of silence. “I mean, he could have shared this with you any other way, rather than making you come out here in the middle of nowhere.”

 

“Maybe he wasn’t sure yet,” Adriana replied, biting her lip. “Maybe he didn’t know for sure that they were set against him, and he didn’t want to put them in danger unless…” She trailed off, looking up at Ryder with wide, sad eyes. “Unless they actually killed him.”

 

“And you’re sure about that?” Ryder asked, his anxiety peaking inside of him as he considered the unthinkable. “You’re really certain that they… did it?”

 

Adriana looked so solemn, her face falling with despair as she nodded. “I’m really confident about it, yeah. I guess I can never know for sure, but my gut is telling me it was them. Especially now that we have all of this to consider,” she said, gesturing to the pile of papers in her hand.

 

Ryder chewed the inside of his cheek, using the pain to distract himself as his thoughts floundered, completely tangled up. “I guess I really come from pretty fucked-up people,” he finally said, his voice sounding far away even to himself.

 

Adriana scooted closer to him, rubbing the back of his hand soothingly until he looked up at her and met her eyes, which were filled with some kind of inner light, some kind of new energy that hadn’t been there earlier that evening. “It doesn’t matter what you come from,” Adriana said softly but firmly.

 

“It does,” Ryder argued back. “It’s who I am. I can’t ever run from that, can I? I tried for over a year, just to bury myself in the city and ignore everything that was going on back here. But while I was away, my mother was killing off older men in the organization, men loyal to my father, so that she could take over as soon as she whacked my dad. How am I supposed to deal with that?”

 

“Right now, you don’t deal with it,” Adriana replied, shaking her head firmly. “That’s going to follow you for a really long time. It’s probably going to wake you up at night. It’s probably going to make you feel like there’s no point looking for any kind of hope in the world, any kind of salvation. It should make you feel that way. It’s natural. That just means you loved your father.”

 

“Yeah, well, what good does that do?” Ryder spat out, frustrated. “Honestly, tell me. What is the point of loving my dad if I can’t even do the one thing he needed me to do? I wasn’t even boss two days before they ripped it away from me.”

 

“So, get it back,” Adriana said, dropping Ryder’s hand and getting to her feet, brushing off the dust from her legs and straightening up to her full height. “Come on. We have work to do.”

 

Ryder stared up at her for a minute, feeling no urge to get up and follow her back out of the warehouse. Honestly, he felt perfectly content to just lay there in a pile of despair, committed to the reality that there was nothing he could do to fix the situation he was in.

 

“Seriously, come on, let’s go,” Adriana said, leaning down to speak directly to his face like a drill sergeant. “What, you’re just going to give up? That’s it? We finally get a shred of evidence against your mom and your brother, and you’re willing to throw in the towel?”

 

“It’s not like that,” Ryder replied on the defensive, even though he knew that she wasn’t stretching the truth very far.

 

“Then tell me what it’s like,” Adriana said, calling his bluff.

 

Ryder sighed and rubbed his forehead, willing the pounding in his head to fade away, to no avail. “Look, I buried my dad today, and then two seconds later, my mother and brother stole the company out from under me. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers to show how quickly things happened. “There was nothing I could. It’s like you said earlier. There are too many enforcers, too many people whose loyalties are aligned with my mother. Otherwise, she never would’ve been able to kill this many people.” He gestured to the papers on the ground beside him.

 

“We have to try,” Adriana insisted, leaning down to pick up the papers. “We can’t just give up.”

 

“Why not?” Ryder asked, even though he had a feeling he already knew the answer. It’s because of Paolo, he thought. Because of his legacy. Because of what the Rainieri family used to stand for. Loyalty. Honor. Respect. All of that deserves to be defended.

 

But Adriana surprised him by shrugging. “For your own goddamn piece of mind. You have to fight this; otherwise, you’re going to feel like your life got taken away from you, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. You’ll never be able to live with yourself if you don’t come with me right now.”

 

Ryder looked up into Adriana’s shining, brilliant, honest eyes, and he knew that she was telling the truth. All his life, he’d been searching for the control that he felt he’d never naturally had. He’d been compensating for what he felt he was missing; safely exerting power to prove to himself that he wasn’t weak. But now there was a real opportunity to show what he was made of, and he was cowering like a little boy. “How do you know we’re not just going to get killed?” he muttered.

 

Adriana surprised him again, this time by shrugging in a nonchalant manner. “I don’t. Now come on, come with me. If I’m going to get whacked, I’d rather it not be alone.”

 

Maybe because she was so flippant about it, maybe because he could sense the thread of fear in her eyes, maybe because she was just so damn beautiful that he would do anything she said—he got up and followed her out of the warehouse.

 

“What do we do now?” Ryder asked as they headed back towards her apartment.

 

“First, we sleep. We’re going to need our strength if we’re going to do this.”

 

“Do what?”

 

“Go to war,” Adriana said simply, filling Ryder with a calm confidence that he thought he’d lost forever.

 

Right, he told himself as he followed Adriana back to her apartment, back to her blissfully soothing bed. I can do this. I have to do this. I have to be strong.