The F King: A Bad Boy Romance(57)

I dropped my eyes from Jace and leaned forward so that my elbows were resting on my knees. “I’m listening.”

“Second. Consider it a signing bonus. You might have noticed two guys in the back of the van with you? These are the guys who killed your mother. We didn’t get there in time to stop them… but we got there in time to pick them up. They are my unconditional gift. To you. They are your property. I have some places, and some tools, you might like to use if you want to… talk to them.”

Every beat of my heart was like the worst cramp I’d ever felt. I felt hot flushes and my hands bunched up into tight fists, shaking with anger. To know that the two men that killed my mother had been so close, they had been my makeshift mattress, really, was overwhelming.

The dreams I’d been having about that peaceful future on some nameless tropical island with Sarina, my mother living out her golden years in a nearby mansion… that was falling to the ground around me like a shattered window. There could never be peace, but there could be vengeance.

“What do you need from me?”

“You’re gonna have to relocate someplace where nobody knows you if you want to live a life any better than the chains the Acardis thought they were going to put you in tonight. I’ll set you up with a new lab, new staff, new accommodation. I’ll match what the Acardis were paying you and, if you don’t fuck around with me, I’ll give you the respect a man of your expertise deserves. That’s true, isn’t it, Dan?”

“All good, boss,” said Dan, not taking his eyes from the screens.

“So, do we have a deal?” Jace asked.

I swallowed down the lump in my throat, the grief for the life that could never happen, and cleared my throat. My mother was dead. Sarina… maybe dead too. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we do. You said the Acardis were going down tonight. How?”

I walked to the window, peeking between the blinds at the Acardi building across the street. Jace stood next to me.

“We’ve got the locations of about half the Acardis’ upper hierarchy in the city and nearby suburbs surrounded by my men, ready for a coordinated strike that’s going to tear the city out of their grasp in one fell swoop. Dan’s got control of all the money that can be reached electronically, and we have locations of billions more that they’ve got stockpiled.”

“You know… if you wait a couple weeks, the Acardi bosses all have a meeting right there in their building. You could have them all in one place instead of half of them all over the city,” I said.

“Alberico is scheduled to be out of town in a couple of weeks and, besides, Romano is already dead. They’re gonna know something is up when they find him, when they find the dirty cops that were going to bring you in. Things are in motion already, and that building is a fortress.”

“Hmmm. If we could get the bosses there tonight, I could give them to you.”

“Right, but we can’t. And when I said that building is a fortress, I didn’t mean it looked like a fortress or they just call it a fortress. It’s a fucking fortress. They can lock that shit down so tight you couldn’t get in with a tank before help or the authorities arrived. They have anti-aircraft guns on the roof.”

“We actually can get them there,” said Dan.

Jace and I looked over at the guy who had turned away from his computer screens for the first time.

“They know how safe that building is. They’ve outlined siege scenarios, remember? If they were threatened enough, the bosses would make a run for the tower. They’ll toss out everybody who doesn’t work for them and then lock it down.”

“OK,” Jace said. “That’s great and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re not wrong. Even I can’t sneak in the kind of firepower through the streets of Highston that we’d need once they close the doors.”

“I have a plan. The question is, can we threaten them enough? You said you’ve got teams around locations covering about half the underbosses?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“Pull them out, all except one, and send them to the money and weapon stashes instead.”

“Why?”

“I’ve got a plan.”





Sarina





The elevator dinged and the man, who had identified himself as a federal agent to people as he marched me out of Cumberland in a black hood, pushed me forward into the unknown. I very much doubted that he worked for the FBI.

In the darkness I heard a choked gasp, followed by the sound of someone collapsing into an office chair. The man kept urging me forward.

“She put up a fight?” somebody asked.