I held up my hand and cut him off. “Forget the sales pitch. I’m in. They…” I gulped. “They’ve taken my wife. They’ve g-got Skylar because I fucked some of them up, and they’re blaming me for one of them dying. If I don’t win this fight tomorrow, first minute of the first round, they’re going to kill her.”
Kendall gasped and held her hand up to her mouth, while Jace’s expression only reflected an even greater focus.
“Fuck. Tomorrow night.” He drummed his fingers on the desk. “What time, exactly, is your fight?”
I shrugged. “It’s not set in stone. It’s the main event, the last fight of the night, but how long it takes to get there depends on how long the preliminary fights and the undercard goes. I guess at about eight thirty.”
“Fuck.”
Jace’s brow furrowed, and I could see his eyes staring right through the desk, twitching every now and then as he worked through the logistics of this problem, in a similar way to how I visualized every scenario of my fights. Kendall watched him silently, as if she knew how he worked.
“The Bertolini place still out on the east side? On Mortimer Boulevard?”
“Yeah.”
“OK. Do you know anybody working security there? Anybody that would be on your side? Or could be bought off without raising the alarm?”
I made a disgusted sound. “The closest I got is this guy named Ken Horn. He’s the one that brought me in to talk to Gavino this morning. I don’t think he knew what the Bertolinis had planned, but I don’t know. Other than that… I never got along with any of those assholes.”
Jace leaned back and laced his fingers together on top of his head as he rolled his eyes upward in thought.
“This is going to be a close one.”
“What, exactly, is going to be close?”
“Here’s what I’m going to do, in a nutshell. Tomorrow night, a small army is going to descend on the Bertolinis. Ken Horn is going to help us get in, or will mysteriously disappear before his shift starts. We’ll kill them all and we’ll get Skylar out of there.”
“Wait… what? You can’t just go in there with guns blazing. Skylar is there, they’ll just shoot her! Look, I’ll fucking win this fight, they’ll let her go, then-”
“No. I know how these motherfuckers operate, Austin. They aren’t going to let her go. They’ll keep on making you jump through their hoops, one after the other, until you stumble, and then they’ll kill her. They’ll never let her go after what you did. This guy that died, he a made-man?”
“No, but I just about took Renato Picolli’s lower jaw off with a baseball bat and turned him into an unmade-man.”
Jace shook his head. “I fucking love baseball. But they’re not letting her go after that.”
I could feel a cold sweat on my brow. This sounded a lot riskier than what I’d been planning, but what if he was right? What if they never let her go?
“So when do we go in?” I asked.
“You don’t go in,” said Jace.
“Fuck that, I’m-”
“Listen. You need to be at the event center, showing your face on live TV. That’s one of the things that’s going to keep your wife safe, you understand? There’s two things working in our favor here, and neither of them will last forever. First, they have no idea you’re my brother. They don’t think you have access to the kind of manpower and arsenal that I’m going to unleash on them. Second, is their penchant for theatrics. They gave you an ultimatum, and they’re going to stick with it even if they have no plans to release her. Things can go wrong, but the way you can buy me the most time to get everybody here from Port Magnus, as well as take care of Ken Horn in whatever way he needs to be taken care of, is to win that fight in the first minute.”
Something felt unspeakably wrong about a plan that put me so far away from Skylar when shit like that was happening. The world of hand-to-hand combat was my world, my specialty, but Jace gave every impression that whatever this was, it was his domain. Slowly, reluctantly, I nodded.
“You got a number for Ken? A way to get in touch with him?”
I nodded again and pulled out my phone, reading the number out loud to him, then giving my own number when he asked for that. Jace and Kendall stood to leave, and Jace pulled me close when we shook hands, speaking quietly to me.
“Win that fight, then come to the mansion. If it can be done, I’ll leave Gavino for you to deal with personally.”
Jace left Ross’ office and Kendall paused for a second, as Ken had done all those months ago when I first met Renato Picolli.