Page 78 of Wicked Mafia Mistake
I sit in his chair. The leather is still warm and the scent of his cologne rises from the cushion and wraps around me, and I shove the ache in my chest down where it can't reach me. Not now. I pull open the desk drawers and flip through files. Contracts by date. Financial disclosures by name. A separate drawer for Syndicate operations, locked, but the key is in the pen cup because even brilliant legal minds have blind spots and his is assuming nobody would go through his desk.
I find the Ferraro file in under three minutes. Luca's intel, I assume from what Massimo explained about who does what. It is all neatly compiled. Shell companies. Property transfers. Financial entanglements going back years. I pull it out and set it on the desk.
Underneath it sits a manila folder with no label. Thinner than the rest. I open it.
Photos. Surveillance shots, grainy but clear enough all fall out. In the first my father is heading into a nondescript building where I suspect the Society is holding one of their secret auctions. Another shows my father in a hallway lined with doors with a key in his hand. Then another where he is seated in what looks like a private viewing room with a drink in his hand and a smile on his face that I have never seen at any dinner table. All of them show naked women in the background. Some are in chains. Others wear leather collars.
My stomach clenches with nausea.
He’s part of Society 69. There’s no doubting it now. I did not want to believe it. I warred with myself all the way here, but the truth is right in front of me.
My hands go still on the folder. My heart aches beyond any pain I’ve ever felt before. My father sat in rooms where women were displayed and sold and watched it happen with a cocktail in his hand while his daughter was at home waiting for him.
And Massimo had this file. He's had it for days and never once opened his mouth to tell me.
I close the folder. Put it on top of the Ferraro file. Stack the financial records on top of both.
The fury winding through my veins is ice cold now. Quiet, focused, and aimed. Every man in my life has decided what I can handle. They were all wrong.
I tuck the files under my arm, grab my clutch off the kitchen counter, and walk with enough evidence to bring down anempire, and every man who thought he could make my decisions for me.
The cab ride takes twenty-two minutes exactly. I sit in the back seat with the files on my lap and my hands folded on top of them, watching the Chicago streets blur past through rain-streaked windows. The driver glances at me in the rearview mirror twice, probably wondering why a woman is riding to the west side at this hour looking like she's about to burn something down.
My pulse is steady. My breathing is even. I am calmer than I have any right to be and it scares me a little because I recognize this feeling. It's the same quiet that settled over me on the sidewalk outside my boutique when I found Savine and Callan dead in their car. The quiet that comes after the panic burns away and leaves nothing but clarity.
The building is unassuming from the outside. No sign. No markings. Just a plain door and a doorman with a neck thicker than my thigh who scans me from my victory rolls to my red heels and speaks into a radio clipped to his collar. His eyes linger on the files under my arm.
“Name.”
"Sloane Whitmore-Santoro."
A pause. Radio crackle. His expression doesn't change but his posture shifts, a subtle straightening that tells me my name carries weight in this building even if I've never set foot in it.
He knows about the contract out on me too. Great.
The door opens. A man in a dark suit escorts me through a lobby that smells like leather and cigar smoke and the faint, acrid tang of gun oil. We bypass the first floor, its blood-red carpet andglass walls visible through a hallway partition where two men in expensive suits sit on white leather with drinks in their hands and if I had to guess, murder on the mind.
I could be jaded though.
The private elevator requires my escort's thumbprint and a code he shields with his body as he punches it in.
The silver doors silently close. We ascend.
The doors open into a reception area with scrubbed air that smells like nothing. No cologne, no food, no human trace. Just clean, cool ventilation and the low hum of a system designed to swallow sound and secrets. The lighting is amber and low and the dark wood walls absorb it, making the space feel smaller than it is, tighter, like the walls are listening.
My escort leads me down a corridor lined with closed doors. I pass a sitting area where three men occupy leather chairs with drinks they aren't touching. Their suits are expensive. Their postures are relaxed. But my skin prickles as I walk past them. Their eyes track me, quiet and steady, not looking away when I look back. One shifts his weight when I pass and his jacket pulls against his shoulder. Hardware underneath. My creep-o-meter doesn't go off exactly, because these men aren't leering or posturing. It's something else. Something colder. The hair on my arms lifts and my heels click faster on the hardwood without my permission.
The corridor ends at a room with no windows and one door. My escort opens the door. I step in to find a man at the far end of a rectangular table. Broad shoulders straining the seams of a dark jacket, silvering hair cropped close, dark eyes that hold mine without blinking from the moment I walk through the door. Hisscarred knuckles rest on the table beside a glass of water and a stack of papers. The scars tell me he's ok getting his hands dirty and that tells me all I need to know right now.
He stands slowly, his expression giving nothing away. He buttons his suit jacket with one hand, the gesture unhurried, deliberate, and walks toward me. His stride is measured, each step landing with the quiet confidence of someone who has never had to rush because no one in this building moves until he says so.
He stops in front of me and extends his hand.
"Ms. Whitmore." His voice is deep and measured, filling the room without rising above a conversational register. "I have to say, I was surprised to receive your call."
“It sounded easier to come in on my own terms rather than be plucked off the street, Mr. Constantine.”
“Please call me Harlon. That is Santi and Cassius.” He points to the other two men in the room who take up the space on his left and right.
