Page 58 of Wicked Mafia Beast
The elevator doors close and I ride down thirty-two floors in silence, my reflection staring back at me from the polished steel walls. The woman in the reflection has red-rimmed eyes and a jaw clenched so tight it aches.
Rule number one of investigative journalism: never become part of the story.
I'm so far past that rule I can't even see it anymore.
Kon is waiting in the SUV, engine idling, one arm draped over the steering wheel. He takes one look at my face and his expression shifts, the dark eyes narrowing, reading me the way he reads a room before entering it.
"That bad?"
"That confusing. Why didn't you come up?"
He's quiet for a beat, his thumb tapping the steering wheel in a slow rhythm I've come to recognize as him deciding how much to share. "Luca's team found movement at your uncle's warehouse. New shipment coming through the south side sometime this week. We needed to adjust the surveillance timeline."
"The warehouse I told you about?"
"Da." His dark eyes flick to mine. "Your intel was solid. We're using every piece of it."
The words settle in my chest with a weight I wasn't expecting. He's not just protecting me. He's acting on what I gave him. The information I traded isn't sitting in a folder gathering dust. It's being turned into a plan to take Seamus down.
"How close are you?" My journalist brain kicks in before I can stop it. "To moving on him?"
"Close." One word. Final. The kind of answer that means the conversation is over but the operation is very much in motion.
With that he pulls into traffic and lets the silence fill the space between us. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the passenger window and watch the city blur past, all sharp edges and hard lines, and wonder when everything I believed started dissolving.
My chest feels tight. My eyes burn. My hands are shaking in my lap and I fold them together, pressing my nails into my palms to stop the tremor.
I started investigating my family six months ago and that involved every mafia man in this city. Six months of building a narrative that made sense of the violence and the power and the criminal empire that touches every corner of this city. Monsters. That's what they were supposed to be. Every last one of them. Clean, simple, unambiguous monsters who deserved everything I planned to bring down on their heads.
When I wrote my wish it was easy to see pitting one enemy against the other in the hopes they would tear each other down.
And now I've held a scone baked by a woman with violet hair and watched the most feared men in Chicago make airplane noises and kiss their wives and hold their daughters.
They've killed people. I know they have. But seeing them today told me they do so in order to protect those they love. I didn’t have to ask a single question. They showed me without using words.
My framework is in pieces and I have nothing to replace it with where the Syndicate is concerned.
We pull into The Foundry's garage and Kon kills the engine. We sit in silence for a few minutes until I can’t keep my emotion flicked away any longer.
“I grew up in a brutal household filled with violence. I’ve witnessed my uncle kill men for looking at him wrong. My father never stood up to defend anyone so that makes him just as bad as my uncle. What I saw today rewrites every last thing I thought I knew about mafia life.”
With that I slide out of the car and make my way to the elevator that will take us to the top floor. I keep my steps slow and steadybut my heart and mind ar racing. My skin grows tight and the tears threatening to spill burn my eyes.
Kon is behind me, his footsteps measured, steady, the calm pace of a man who knows a storm is coming and is bracing for it. The ride up in the elevator is charged, the tension so damn dense you inhale the electric charges with every breath.
I step off the elevator and into the open living room before the last thread holding me together snaps.
"You could have warned me." I round on him, my voice cracking like a whip. "You could have told me what I was walking into."
He stops. Leans against the wall. Crosses his arms. "Warned you none of us are like your family? Would it have changed anything? Would you have believed me?"
"You set me up. Threw me into that perfect little domestic fantasy and expected me to, what? Melt? Fall in line? Stop asking questions?"
"I expected nothing." His voice is low, even, infuriatingly calm. "They wanted to meet you. I said yes. So did you."
I narrow my eyes on him. "Stop it."
"Stop what?"
