All Chapters of Blood Vengeance; a mafia romance story: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

Tucker sends his update at four in the morning. Second subsidiary frozen. Regulatory filing accepted. Meridian Group's financial records subpoenaed. Edgard's lawyers filed a counter-motion at six am — dismissed by nine. He's running.I read it twice and set the phone down on my desk. Two subsidiaries down, one remaining.Edgard Azaeres, who built an empire on top of the rubble of my family, who shook hands with men he was planning to destroy and called it business, who looked at his own daughter and saw a tool before I ever did — I am coming for him, and I won’t hold back. This is the tip of the iceberg. …She's already at her desk when I arrive.I see her through the glass before I reach the floor, head down, screen open, still and focused. She's been coming in earlier this week. I've noticed. I notice everything about her, which is a habit I've stopped pretending isn't a problem.I go into my office and close the door.The coffee is on my desk, black, still hot. She times it p

Damien is waiting outside the dry cleaners on West 19th.I know it's him before I see his face. The shape of his shoulders, the way he stands with his weight slightly forward like a man perpetually ready to move, which I spent eight months interpreting as confidence, and now, it just looks like…restlessness. He's in a dark coat, hands in his pockets, watching the street with a careful expression plastered on his face.I shouldn't be here. I know that.I made an impromptu decision this morning when a fifteen-minute window opened up, and I told the driver I needed to stop for something quickly, and he pulled over two blocks from the address Damien left in his second message. The one he sent four days after the first, shorter, with a location and a time and nothing else. I get out of the car without second thoughts.He sees me when I'm ten feet away, and something moves across his face — relief first, then something more complicated than relief, then something more of apprehension of wh

The word still sits heavy on my chest when I wake up. Placed.I lie in the dark of my room and reflect on almost all the milestones in my life and how they possibly mean nothing now because none of them was ever my actual choice. I get up.I make coffee in my room from the coffee machine that appeared one morning, which I've been using without asking where it came from, and I stand at the window with the mug in both hands and look out the window.I stare into the sky while sipping the coffee.Another day to survive whatever this is. I get ready and get to work. I make his coffee and set it on his desk. He arrives a few minutes later, before eight, and today, he slows down a little by my desk before entering his office. Even though he didn’t look in my direction or speak to me, that subtle, slow pace beside my desk is a first. A couple of minutes later, when the floor had settled into its working rhythm, and Lucien is on a call, Kane downstairs, I open my partition because this is t

I'm at my desk by five forty.Sleep has always been a great hassle, so I take what I get.She arrives at eight, and I hear her before I see her; the echo of her heels against the marble floors. I'm at my desk, files open, when she enters with my coffee, placing it on my desk without sparing me a glance, then goes back to her desk without saying anything. At around nine, Kane comes in with the intelligence report, finally."Castello," I say."Two things," he confirms, then puts the report on the desk and sits. "He's been in contact with someone in your investor network. Preliminary, we're still running the trace, but it looks like he's been building a relationship with one of the secondary Whitmore Group contacts for the last three weeks."I look at him. "He's embedding himself in the business network.""Looks that way. Not aggressively, he’s doing it carefully so that he doesn’t get noticed." Kane holds my gaze. "He's not trying to come at you directly anymore. He's building adjace

The bag on my bed is small, because I didn’t pack much. Two days, Lucien said. Pack for cold weather, he said, and it’s Vienna in November so I packed accordingly; two suits, one dress for whatever the dinner situation turns out to be, just the essential things. I've been standing at the foot of the bed looking at the packed bag for ten minutes, and I know I have to pick it up and go downstairs, but going to a foreign country alone with Lucien makes me nervous. There will be no barrier between us, no desk, no Kane at his post, and no Ida’s kitchen to come back to as a soft landing, just the two of us and whatever might fill the spaces in between. I pick up the bag and go downstairs.Kane is in the lobby in his usual clothes, and a folder in hand that he hands to Lucien when we reach the ground floor. "Webb's been pulled back," he says, without sparing me a glance. "Completely this time, not suspended. Someone shut the contract down."Lucien opens the folder and reads. "Who?""Stil