“Okays, Daddy, I be good.”
“Promise?”
“Pinkies promise,” Cece replied as earnestly as she could in her childish voice.
“Pinky promises are the most serious promises, Cece.”
“I knows, Daddy. I be good for Ma.”
“You better.”
In the background of the call, Cross heard Catherine say, “Say goodbye to Daddy, baby.”
“Byes, Daddy!”
“Love you, bambina.”
“Loves my daddy, Daddy.”
A shuffle echoed through the speakers before Catherine came onto the phone.
“How was that?” he asked.
“Well, she’s already crawling into bed.”
“Yeah?”
“I think she just needed to talk to you again.”
Cross smiled to himself. Cece had been giving her mother a hard time about going to sleep, and Catherine thought to call Cross. He was happy to help.
Of course, he wouldn’t admit that it made him strangely happy to know his daughter was missing him, but that was only because he couldn’t have them home yet. After all, his deadline to hand Katya over to the Russians was now up. Catherine and Cece had only been gone for a single day.
Silence was a bad thing.
Cross was waiting for the shoe to drop.
“How’s things your way?” Catherine asked.
Their conversations were always vague and cryptic over the phone. It had to be that way for safety. He could easily hear her unspoken question, though.
“Quiet,” he answered.
Catherine sighed. “Wishful thinking, but maybe it’ll stay that way.”
“Wishful thinking, for sure.”
“I might not call tomorrow or the next day.”
“Why not?”
Cross didn’t like that at all. It was easier to get through his days without his wife when he at least got to hear her voice once or twice.
“I’m heading down to Mexico tomorrow.”
“Catherine—”
“It’s a last minute meet. My contact came through. I can’t turn it away just because I don’t have more time to plan, Cross.”
Jesus.
Every part of him that he swore was born and bred to protect Catherine wanted to rise to the occasion, but Cross knew it would do him no good. His wife was going to do what she needed to do, regardless if he thought it was unsafe.
“What about Cece?” Cross settled on asking.
“Miguel will have her handled.”
“Okay, then who is going with you?”
Catherine made a noise under her breath.
“What does that mean, Catty?”
“I was told I couldn’t bring anyone to the meeting with me,” she said quietly.
Cross clenched his jaw so tightly that his goddamn molars ached. He glared at the wall of his office, trying to just … relax. Anything.
“Cross?”
“Yeah, I’m still here,” he said gruffly.
“I can hear you’re not happy.”
“Why would I be? I think you going alone is incredibly stupid and dangerous. You don’t know anything about them, or how they do business. What if getting you down there and alone is some kind of trap?”
“What if it’s part of the way they do business, Cross?”
“Yes, except we don’t know that, Catherine, because—”
“We don’t know anything about them.”
“Exactly,” he growled.
“It’s a risk I have to take.”
Cross pressed two fingers into his suddenly throbbing temple. “Babe—”
“If this was you, and not me, I wouldn’t say a word, Cross. You’re only getting huffy and concerned because you think I can’t handle myself. I can.”
“I know you can.”
“They didn’t say I couldn’t come armed, by the way,” she added.
“Just alone, huh?”
“To the meeting. Not to Mexico.”
Cross heard her unspoken words loud and clear once again. “All right.”
“Someone will be close.”
“How close?”
“Close enough,” Catherine replied, offering nothing else.
“Call me—”
“Boss?”
Cross looked up his desk at the new voice in his office. An enforcer—one of two that he had watching the house—stood in the doorway looking at him with concern. The man’s worry wrote heavy lines across his brow.
“We got, uh, a problem,” the man said.
Cross held up a single finger to ask the man to wait, and went back to his wife. “Catherine, I’m going to have to let you go. Call me when you get back, or … right after the meeting is done. Got it?”
“Don’t get bossy, Cross.”
“Catty.”
“I’ll call you. Love you.”
“Love you,” he echoed before pressing the button to end the call.
Cross gave all his attention to the enforcer in the doorway.
“A problem, you said?”
The man nodded. “At Zeke’s place.”
“Zeke isn’t at his place,” Cross said slowly as though he were talking to a small child. “He chose to move Kayta to somewhere else given our deadline to hand her back over to the Russians is now up.”
“I know that, boss, but—”
“What problem can there be?”
“The place is on fire.”
Cross straightened in his chair, and then instantly got to his feet. “You’re serious.”
“Since Zeke wasn’t home, we were told just to do a drive by check on the place every so often. The boys and I were taking shifts to check on it. Marty just got back—said the place is lit up like a dried Christmas tree. Firefighters and cops are already there. Half the damn block was standing out on the road watching the whole thing go down.”
Zeke’s house was a twenty-minute drive away. Three blocks from Wolf’s—Zeke’s father—home. He could call Wolf to let him know his son’s house was on fire, and be at Zeke’s place in less than fifteen minutes if he broke a couple of traffic laws.
Cross snatched the keys for his Rolls-Royce Phantom from the side of the desk.
“Someone call Zeke.”
“Will do, boss.”
“And one man stays here to watch my damn house. You and another can come with me, but stay close behind in your vehicle. We don’t need more surprises coming our way.”
Cross had absolutely no reason to suspect the fire was caused by the Russians, except … Zeke’s house was brand new, just built a couple of years earlier, and up to code. New houses didn’t usually just burn the fuck down unless they were helped along a bit.
Given the deadline was up for the Russian’s demands, they had yet to act on any Donati man, and silence always came before a storm, Cross just knew.
This was them.
Of course, it was.
By the time Cross got to Zeke’s home, the place had been reduced to a pile of smoldering rubble. The beautiful, two-level detached home was flattened into nothing but blackened, smoking remains. Nothing was recognizable.
Nothing at all.
Wolf stood on the sidewalk with his arms flattened across his chest. The older man stared at the smoking pile across the street as Cross came to stand beside him. The enforcers who had trailed behind the boss didn’t bother coming closer than a few feet.
An illusion of privacy.
Everything in their life was an illusion.
Especially safety.
“They couldn’t save it?” Cross asked, referring to the firefighters that were rolling up hoses.
“Apparently not,” Wolf murmured.
Other than speaking, Wolf barely acknowledged Cross was even there. He understood why as events like this always came as a bit of a shock. Like an earthquake no one was expecting, and then the aftershocks that soon followed to shake a man up even more.
“She’s a lovely girl,” Wolf said quietly.
Cross looked to Zeke’s father, confused. “Who, Katya?”
Wolf nodded. “She’s quite lovely. I swore he was never going to settle down or find someone he cared enough about to just … relax a bit. And then he did, but look at it now. I can’t even enjoy the fact he’s found someone. I shouldn’t have to worry about these things now—it’s been years since I stepped away from the life.”
“I’m taking care of it,” Cross assured.
“I know you are, principe.”
Even as the Donati boss, a king finally sitting in his throne, his former mentor still called him a prince.
Cross didn’t mind.
Wolf was the only person he allowed that right.
“I heard the firefighters talking to one of the cops,” Wolf said, nodding in the direction of the officers down the street. A group of four stood in front of cruisers. The lights on top of the cruisers flashed, blinking red, blue, and white down the dark street. “I stayed back a bit so they wouldn’t notice me.”
“What did you hear?”
“I guess one of the neighbors heard glass breaking.”
“When?”
“About thirty minutes before the same neighbor smelled smoke, went looking, and then called nine-one-one.”
Cross considered that for a moment. “Do you think someone was inside the house?”
“According to the fire chief when he was discussing the fire with the cops over there, the fire burned too hot and too fast for them to do much to help or prevent further damage. He suspected an accelerant was used. Likely dumped all through the house.”
“But thirty minutes,” Cross said, “is too long to just dump some shit out and light it up.”
Wolf waved at the rubble. “Too late to look for something they might have took.”
Yeah.
Shit.
Less than ten seconds later, a familiar Mercedes pulled up. Zeke stepped out of the car, and grabbed onto the door so fiercely that his knuckles turned white. A lot like how the color drained from his face as he stared across the street to where his home once stood.
All of it.
Gone.
His entire life.
Gone.
Katya climbed out of the passenger side with tears already forming in her eyes. “Zeke.”
“It’s all right,” Zeke mumbled. “It’s fine. It’s all right.”
Yeah.
It wasn’t.
It definitely wasn’t.
Around the restaurant table sat men that had been important figures in Cross’s life over the years. Each of them had, in one way or another, set him on a path worth following. They gave him the tools he needed to sit where he did, or helped him in some other way.
Perhaps that was why he gathered them together now.
He needed to hear them speak. Men who had gone through their own situations with Cosa Nostra, and came out better for it. Men who had once stood in his position, and made these same choices.
“Katya has to be a priority,” Zeke said at Cross’s left.
“She is,” Rick replied from Cross’s right.
“She has to keep being one.”
“Why are you even questioning that at all?” Cross asked. “She’ll be kept safe.”
“You have the option of just going in on the Russians,” Wolf put in.
“That draws attention,” Dante pointed out.
Calisto leaned back in his seat across from his son. “Anything that draws a lot of attention from officials should be a last resort. We all know this.”
“Was it their last resort when they burned down my fucking house a couple of nights ago?”
“Zeke,” Dante started to say.
“Did they care that police would be all over my shit for God knows how long?”
“Exactly,” Calisto jumped in, “and now they know you can’t retaliate at this moment without drawing more attention to yourself. Officials will be watching.”
“They have been quiet the last couple of days,” Rick said. “And the streets, too.”
As an underboss, Rick often got word of issues on the streets with their men and guys from other families. He would know if any of the already thick tensions were growing because of problems. If he said nothing was going on, then nothing was happening. It was that damn simple.
“Cross,” Calisto said.
He looked to his father. “Yeah?”
“What are your thoughts right now about all of this?”
“I don’t like waiting to see what they’re going to do next,” Cross admitted.
“No one does, son.”
“But I have to consider that we’ve always done business in a clean and quiet manner, too.”
Calisto nodded. “That’s true.”
“So what, we sit back and wait?” Wolf scoffed. “I don’t like that.”
“Neither do I,” Cross said.
Dante cleared his throat from the end of the table. “You could always make a few calls, Cross. I am sure Andino and Johnathan would be more than willing to step in and close ranks for a short while if you needed them to.”
“This is a Donati problem,” Cross replied.
“I know that, but—”
“As it is, it’s bad enough when organized crime in New York is being splashed across the news. Their organizations tend to get passing mentions simply because we’re the trinity here—the Three Families. It’s a shitty nature of the business that we get lumped together. My attention is their attention, in a way. They know that. I have no business actually bringing them into the mess and pushing them under the spotlight even more.”
Cross waved a hand, saying, “Beyond that, I don’t want to cause problems for their families or their organizations as a whole. This will absolutely do that for them. It’s a Donati issue—I will not have other men clean it up for me.”
“Okay.” Dante sighed, adding, “The option is there, though. Should you need it.”
“So what the fuck do we do, then?” Zeke demanded.
Cross scrubbed a hand down his jaw, and allowed his best friend and consigliere’s attitude to brush off his shoulders. He excused Zeke’s behavior and mood because who the hell could be calm and patient at a time like this?
None of them.
That’s who.
“We focus on making people safe,” Cross said. “Those who need to be sheltered will be. The men on the streets doing business will have to be a little more careful for a while. We’ll put our effort there. Hopefully, attention will have calmed down a little from the police.”
“And then what is your plan?” Wolf asked.
Zeke looked to Cross, too.
Everyone did.
“If attention has calmed down enough, we’ll just … wipe ‘em out.”
“It won’t be that easy,” Calisto told him.
Cross shrugged. “It’s an option I tend to favor.”
“You’ll need inside information as to the organization, the men, addresses, and a whole bunch of other shit,” Dante pointed out.
“We’ll work on that, too.”
That was that.
For now …
“How did Catherine’s meeting go, Miguel?” Cross asked.
On the FaceTime screen of the iPad, Catherine’s right hand man and former handler flashed back in view again.
“She didn’t tell me much when she called the other day,” Cross said. “Just that it went well.”
Miguel nodded. “It did go well, from what I gathered.”
“No issues, then?”
“I think she wants to wait until she’s back home to give you the full details.”
Cross cocked a brow. “You can’t give me a heads up first?”
“You know how the reginella is.”
“Mmm.”
“Daddy, looks what Miggy got me!”
Miggy was the nickname Cece had given Miguel when she first started talking, yet couldn’t pronounce Miguel’s name properly. Now that she could say the man’s name correctly, it didn’t seem to matter. His nickname stuck.
Cece was literally the one and only person allowed to call him that, though. Anyone else might find themselves with a slit throat.
Miguel stepped back from camera view to let Cece see her father. She held up a sucker that was as big as her goddamn head. It swirled from the middle outwards with four different colors. The stick was as thick as her pinky.
“Wow,” Cross deadpanned.
“It’s so good!”
Cece’s squeal made the damn speakers crackle.
Catherine was right.
Their daughter was loud.
Miguel hummed in the background. “You know, in retrospect, I don’t think that much sugar was a good thing.”
“You know sugar is more addictive than cocaine, right?”
“That’s probably why my wife refuses to give our kids candy.”
“Well thank you for giving it to my child,” Cross said, chuckling.
Miguel shrugged his broad shoulders, and patted Cece on the top of her head. “Hey, as long as she’s kept happy, Catherine doesn’t care.”
“And safe.”
The man gave Cross a look.
Cross returned it, uncaring. “I said what I said.”
“Yes, Daddy says what he says, Miggy!”
Miguel scowled. “We all know exactly where she gets it from, don’t we?”
“This is not news.” Cross blew Cece a kiss when she gave him one. “Okay, I have to let you go, bambina. Grandmamma Emma and Aunt Cam are coming over to see me.”
“Me, too?”
Cross smiled. “We’ll see them together when you get back.”
“Oh,” Cece said with a frown.
“Daddy promises.”
“Pinkies promises?”
Cross held up his pinkie. “Pinky promises, and cross my heart.”
Cece squeezed her eyes shut, and blew him one more kiss. “Bye, Daddy!”
“Bye, baby.” Then, Cross thought to add, “Miguel, have Catherine call me as soon as she can.”
“Will do, Cross. Later.”
The FaceTime call blinked off, and Cross shut down the iPad. He headed for the kitchen to get a pot of coffee ready for when his mother and sister arrived. He didn’t even bother to look away from the slowly filling carafe as he heard a car pull into the driveway of the home.
Maybe he should have.
Brrrraaaaaappp.
Cross hit the floor as glass shattered. Hot coffee went flying as the carafe exploded. Bullets embedded into the cupboards above his head.
Repeated, fast pops from an automatic assault rifle kept ripping through the now broken windows at the front of his home. He kept low, and moved to a safe spot while the bullets kept coming. Hidden behind the kitchen island.
It had a special feature on the backside—a one-inch thick piece of metal that covered the entire back of the island, but was beneath the wood where it couldn’t be seen.
Another round of bullets ripped through the kitchen, and cold March air blew in right behind it. Cross really wished he had been in the living room where he had a fucking AK hidden up under the couch.
Then, all at once, the firing stopped.
A cupboard door fell down.
Tires screeched.
Cross didn’t move a fucking inch. He trusted nothing, not even his instinct to get up and run. Moving from his one safe position might mean his death. Silence echoed minutes after the bullets stopped coming. He could plainly hear people outside his house, the voices of his neighbors filtering in.
Then, a car, and another familiar pair of voices.
His mother and sister.
“Oh, my God!”
“Cross. Cross!”
He forced himself up off the floor, and headed for the front of the house. Even the windows of the front door had been blown out in the attack.
Catherine was not going to be happy about this.
Cross opened the front door to find his mother and sister parked in the driveway, and standing beside Emma’s black Mercedes. They looked as though they had just gotten out of their car.
Instantly, his mother burst into tears at the sight of him standing there. Camilla—the first time she had been back to New York since shortly before Christmas—let out a shaky breath before she too started crying.
“I’m okay,” he said.
They didn’t look like they believed him.
Really, he didn’t trust himself in that moment.
Something on the front door caught his eye because it flapped in the wind. He ripped the piece of paper off the door, and turned it around to see the image printed on the backside.
Black and white.
Dated and timestamped.
His wife and daughter.
In Mexico, by the looks of the ice-cream sign behind them written in Spanish.
Fuck.