Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75616 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 378(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
And, oddly, I was looking forward to it.
CHAPTER SIX
Aurelio
She’d been on my mind constantly since the warning.
The gorgeous woman with the cuffs and the panicked, desperate eyes.
I’d racked my brain trying to figure out why she wouldn’t let me rescue her.
Until I opened my front door to find her standing there, eyes even more panic-stricken.
With a baby in her arms.
Then it all fucking made sense, didn’t it?
Of course she wouldn’t let me save her.
She had a baby somewhere that needed her.
It didn’t take much deducing to figure out that the baby was Warren’s. That he was keeping control over her by keeping control over her son.
As she followed me into my house, leaving a trail of blood that said she’d been walking with no shoes on her feet for a long time, I knew that she’d made a break for it.
And she’d come to… me.
It was clearly an intense situation for her, but I couldn’t help but feel a strange warmth in my chest at realizing she knew that she could come to me for help, that I wasn’t like that shithead she’d escaped from.
The longer she sat in my kitchen, the more fragile she seemed to get. As, I imagined, the adrenaline of the escape faded, and the reality of trying to figure out her next moves weighed down on her.
I wanted to tell her that she could stay forever for all I cared. But I knew that shit would make me sound like a goddamn psychopath. So I offered her my place as long as she needed.
It was another thing that I needed to discuss at the meeting now, though.
The docks were secure with the round-the-clock guard shift full of soldiers and even associates. We were demanding all hands on deck for this situation.
But the capos… we were all having a meeting.
About what to do about the Warren Graves situation.
About what had been found out about him.
Research wasn’t my strongest suit, but I’d done some basic digging that told me that I had clearly underestimated Warren if he was living in a mansion a few towns away.
But there wasn’t much anywhere that I could find about what he was into.
I hoped some of the other guys had hit the ground running, had reached out to our contacts to ask if they knew more about him.
I felt weird leaving Claire and Judah alone in the house, though.
Not because there was anything for me to worry about. I didn’t keep work shit around. The guns were carefully locked up in wall safes way too high for Judah to reach even if he could find them, hidden behind art.
But because it seemed like Claire really needed support. And leaving her alone with a baby who was going to make demands on her when she was already a little fragile felt wrong.
It wasn’t for long, I reminded myself.
And I needed to get them the things they needed to be able to stay with me.
I pulled up to Famiglia, taking a second to find and order a crib that could be picked up at the store after my meeting.
The rest of it could wait until I could walk around the store and pick shit out.
Normally, this was a task I’d leave up to Smush. But she hadn’t been as free lately. And, quite frankly, I didn’t want it getting back to my mom that I had a single mom and a baby staying with me.
The ideas she would come up with…
“Coming in?” Milo asked, making me jolt, not having seen him walk up.
“Yep,” I agreed, turning off my car, rolling up my window, then following my little brother inside.
It was a full house with even the injured Santo in attendance, sitting in a chair with his leg propped up on another chair. Both his pant leg and shirt arm were bulging in the areas over the wounds, likely wrapped up well with gauze and gauze tape. He probably shouldn’t have been moving around at all; Lettie wouldn’t have wanted him to risk making shit worse. But there was no denying he was a capo now too. With his own crew. He had to be here.
“Luca,” I said, moving in at his side. “Can I talk to you after the meeting?” I asked.
“Everything alright?” he asked, looking sleepless and tense.
“Yes. But… there’s a development. I want to discuss it with you before everyone else hears about it.”
“Okay,” he agreed, nodding, then going back to talking to his brother Matteo.
I went and found my own brothers at their table, giving them a nod as I sat down.
“You good?” Lucky asked, those keen older brother eyes seeing more than I wanted them to. “Seems like you’re not fully here.”
“I am,” I lied. “Just trying to figure out how all this shit went down.”
And, hey, that was true enough.