Page 94 of Captive Promise

“He’s not inner circle,” I say slowly. Even to my own ears, my voice sounds distant, muffled by the roaring static of my thoughts. “What could he even know that would be worth selling?”

Luca’s jaw clenches, a muscle jumping in his cheek. “Enough to paint a target on Dino’s back and to put your name on Russo’s hit list.” His eyes, when they meet mine, are hard as flint. “It doesn’t matter how low level he was, Nico. He had access, and he used it to betray us.”

I lean back in my chair, letting my eyes fall shut for a long moment and trying to process and sort through the snarled tangle of fury and confusion.

It doesn’t make sense.

But then again, it never does, in the end. The reasons always fall short, somehow.

Money or fear or blackmail or some twisted cocktail of all three. We’ll find out which it was, and it won’t change a goddamn thing.

William Caruso made his choice.

He sold us out, and Dino paid the price. And now it’s time for him to answer for what he’s done.

I open my eyes, meeting Luca’s gaze across the desk.

When I speak, my voice is low and carefully controlled, but there’s an undercurrent of anger beneath the words.

“Bring him to me.”

Luca nods, a sharp, satisfied jerk of his head.

He’s already turning back toward the door, his hand reaching for the handle.

Ready, as always, to carry out my orders. To do what needs to be done.

Luca’s men picked him up outside a bar in Sunset Park twenty minutes after I gave my order.

Two guys took him off the sidewalk before he’d even finished his cigarette.

By the time they walked him down into the cellar, his lip’s split, one eye’s already starting to swell, and his shirt’s torn at the collar from where somebody grabbed him and didn’t let go.

“I didn’t do anything,” he’s protesting over and over to anybody who’ll listen, which is no one. “I don’t know what this is, I didn’t do anything. Please, somebody tell me what I’m supposed to have done⁠—”

He in the old wine cellar under the west wing. Nobody uses it anymore.

Pipes leak, temperature control’s been broken for a decade, and the walls are thick old stone that swallow sound instead of carrying it.

It’s good acoustics for the wrong reasons.

Nobody up in the house is going to hear a thing.

It’s cold down here.

Cold enough that I can see my own breath, and Caruso’s shaking before anybody’s laid another hand on him.

Luca gets him zip-tied to the chair, right underneath the one bare bulb hanging over a drain in the floor.

Caruso’s crying by now, snot and blood trickling down his face, and he still hasn’t stopped saying he didn’t do anything.

That tells me something right there.

Someone who’s actually done nothing wrong gets angry and demands answers.

They don’t just keep saying the same four words on a loop like he’s hoping repetition turns into proof.

I shrug out of my jacket and toss it aside. It lands on the damp stone floor, but I hardly notice.