Page 155 of The Mafia King's Reign
What surprises me is that it isn’t entirely performance. She is genuinely calm. Almost completely unbothered, except for the eyes. I recognize it immediately because I have been carrying it since last night.
Guilt.
Interesting.
I take the chair across from her and say nothing. Silence is a pressure most people cannot hold. They fill it with confessions, justifications, all the things they intended to keep to themselves.
Lindsay does not fill it. She holds my gaze like a woman who knows exactly what the silence is trying to do and has made a professional habit of refusing to cooperate.
“You should be afraid,” I warn.
She tilts her head slightly. “I don’t cower to thugs.”
“Hm.”
A beat. Then, clean and direct: “Why did you send Valentina to that warehouse?”
She isn’t here to negotiate. She’s here because she needs to know whether last night was my fault, and she is smart enough to go straight for it.
“I didn’t.”
The composure cracks. Not dramatically, she’s too controlled for that, but I watch it move through her. She needed it to be me. It would have been so much cleaner if it were me.
"You sent her." I lean back. "You found the location. You passed it along."
She closes her eyes. When she opens them, the guilt is no longer something she’s containing. “I thought her father was there. She asked me to find him. My source said,” She stops. “My source was wrong.”
“Your source was compromised,” I explain. “The information was planted. Someone knew you were looking and knew that if you found something convincing, you would tell her.” I let that land. “She wasn’t walking into one of my operations. She walked into a Volkov execution.”
The silence that follows is a different kind of silence.
“I know, the Russians,” she says quietly.
“Yes. They were settling their own account with Vladimir, one of my dock workers who had been feeding themintelligence.” I watch her absorb it. “Valentina walked into the middle of it. Whoever planted that information knew she would.”
Lindsay is very still.
“She could have been killed,” she says. Stripped of everything except the truth underneath it.
“Yes.”
She looks at the table. For a moment she is not a prosecutor or a politician’s daughter or a woman who does not cower to thugs. She is just someone who loves her best friend and nearly got her killed trying to help her.
“I would never,” she says. “Unlike you, I love Valentina. I would never have sent her if I’d known.”
“Unlike me? What makes you think I don’t love her? What is there not to love about that woman? I’m not the one who nearly got her fucking killed.”
She looks up. She wasn’t expecting that.
“You don’t have to choose between loving her and believing I do,” I tell her. “Both things are possible.”
She studies me the way she probably studies the witnesses. Looking for the lie. Waiting for the story to shift, but it won’t.
“This case you’re building,” I lean forward. “This chase. You will not get me. You will not get my men, my books, or anything that holds up in a courtroom. I have lawyers you’ve never heard of and judges who owe me more than you can imagine. That is not arrogance. That is a fact.” I lean forward. “But more importantly, every time you push, she is the one caught in the middle. I am done watching that happen.”
“I will protect Valentina at all costs,” Lindsay says. She means it.
“No.” I hold her gaze. “I will protect Valentina at all costs. That is not a competition. It is a statement of fact. Last night I walked into a building with Volkov soldiers because she was in it. Not because I fucked up, because you did. I will protect Valentina, your only job is not to put her in harm’s way again. Is that clear?”
