Page 144 of Fallen Rook
“Wait. This is not even the worst of it…” I admitted, reluctantly drawing attention back to myself. I wasn’t stupid enough to think this was the extent of their reaction to my sexuality, but they needed to know there was more trouble to come.
Luca stopped pacing and stared at me, wide-eyed. “What could be worse than dragging us into war for dick, Enzo? What?”
“I had an affair with Tom Rothwell. The Tom Rothwell. The FBI agent.” I took one quick breath to let the information sink in. The room was so quiet that no one else even breathed at this point. Invisible ants crawled all over my skin. “And today, he got me arrested so he could offer me a plea deal. He told me he’d stopped working on the Camorra case before we…um, got together. Turns out it was all a lie. They’re closing in on us, and they’ve got something planned. A big showdown.”
“Fuck!” Achilles tossed his chair to the other side of the room. It broke in two, the back skidding across the hallway and the legs collapsing against the junction of two walls. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“You. Let. A. Federal. Agent. Fuck. You?” Luca enunciated each word, driving the sheer level of my stupidity home. I had an eerily creepy feeling that his carefully elegant mask was melting away—for good now—and whatever we were going to find underneath would shock us to our core. He’d shown more emotions in the span of the last few weeks than he had in his thirty-something years on this planet.
“How… When…” Achilles started, then shook his head, groaning. “Isn’t he a fucking thousand years old?”
“Forty,” I said meekly.
Luca shot him a glare. “Who cares how old the asshole is? We need to kill him, and any evidence of the affair, first thing tomorrow morning.”
In Luca’s world, my sexuality was nothing but a mild inconvenience. It didn’t mean anything, really. He would still marry me off to a woman, shove me into the closet and lock the door, if need be, to keep his business afloat. Well, I wasn’t having it anymore.
I didn’t know how Tom and I had gone from spooning in his bed while he read the New Yorker and I read TMZ on my phone, still soaked in the scent of sex and waiting for our salads from DoorDash, to discussing with my family the prospect of offing him, but here we were.
“You’re not killing him,” I snarled. “We’re already in the hot seat with the FBI. You off him, and they reinstate the death penalty in New York just to fry your fucking brain.”
“This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done,” Luca growled. “And the list is fucking long, Enzo, so that says something.”
“We need to move past the revelation that Enzo enjoys federal cock,” Tiernan drawled, businesslike. “Because it is not the pressing issue and doesn’t require immediate attention.”
Jesus. Things were bleak when Tiernan was the voice of reason in the room.
Achilles arched an eyebrow, but seemed to take the advice. “Enzo, did your sugar daddy give you any more information about his plan for us?”
Well…at least he was making jokes. That was a good thing, right?
I shook my head. “All I know is that it could happen any day now, and it’s a done deal. They have an informant. Someone from the inside. I don’t know who it is, so everyone’s a suspect.”
Luca mulled this over. He looked…strangely calm. Like he had reached the threshold of excitement he allowed himself to feel and was now back to being the machinelike, rational motherfucker we’d all grown to dislike. “An informant, you say?”
“Yeah.”
“Who could it be?”
“I can think of one person who’d just love to see all three of us behind bars.” Achilles leveled his heated gaze on Luca. I swallowed hard. I knew what he was implying, and I didn’t completely disagree.
“Don’t say it,” Luca warned darkly.
“Sofia,” Achilles enunciated, ignoring the warning, “hates your guts.”
“No, she doesn’t.” Luca’s words rang out in all their pathetic glory.
“What if she’s Tom’s insider?” Achilles asked.
“Achilles!” Tierney chided.
“I’m just asking,” he said, softly now.
“She isn’t,” Luca spat.
“But what if she is?” I asked.
Luca shook his head. “No.”
