Page 43 of Heartless Sinner

No sign of the girl.

I went to the bathroom—nothing there—so I headed for the back.

The stripper who’d been on her smoke break earlier was gone. I couldn’t see anyone.

“Hello?” I called out.

Up ahead behind a large dumpster, I thought I saw movement.

“Hey, it’s okay! It’s just me!” I called out, hoping to gain the girl’s trust. “I just want to talk and see if you’re okay? You seemed upset?”

For a moment, all was still.

And then a piercing scream ripped the air apart.

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Chapter Nineteen

Vincent

* * *

It took a lot of inquiries but we’d figured out two things.

The first was that no sniper had been hired to carry out a hit, either a real one or one intended to miss as a distraction, which told me that whoever had killed Dmitri Preston had probably, personally, done the sniping.

That was both interesting and concerning.

The second thing we’d discovered was that the latest girl Dmitri had a fling with worked at the Cozy Bunny, a strip club frequented by a lot of men from the families, including my own damn brother.

Not that I thought Marco would be involved in this in any way. He wasn’t what I’d call the most discreet guy, especially when it came to women, but he wouldn’t be that stupid. Besides, there was a rumor circulating that he had a new favorite stripper and that she wasn’t the type to cheat on a guy.

In my opinion the fact that Marco had slept with a girl more than once was a miracle in and of itself.

Since all of the snipers were a bust, I decided to make a pit stop at the Cozy Bunny with Toby to see what was up and if we could talk to this girl. Her name was Sonya, although whether that was her stripper name or her real name I wasn’t sure. Strip clubs were, understandably, protective of their girls and wouldn’t necessarily give out their personal information.

We parked down the street and went into the strip club through the front. I saw a lot of men that I recognized, all young men from various families, although also all theoretically families that were allied to each other under the Russo umbrella.

If one of these men was the culprit, things were going to get really messy for me. I could hear the whispers now . . . the claims that Vincent Russo couldn’t keep his own house clean.

A few people noticed I was there. The non-mafia men were obvious, they were the ones who glanced at me and went back to chatting with their buddies or staring at the girls, not realizing anything was amiss. The mafia men were the ones who stared, and kept staring.

I wasn’t known to frequent strip clubs. And while the dinner had only been a few hours ago, I knew how the grapevine worked. Already people would be hearing through messages, phone calls, and verbal conversations that I was getting hitched.

I ignored the speculative stares. It wasn’t a problem. In fact, the stares were a good thing. Only an innocent man who didn’t know why I was here would openly stare. The guilty party would know and would pretend to ignore me.

People were stupidly predictable that way.

I made my way to the bar and nodded at the bartender. “Is Sonya working tonight?”

“Supposed to be, but she went into the back a while ago.”

“Thanks.” I headed for the back.

“Whoa.” The bartender raised her hand towards the bouncers. “What do you want with Sonya?”

“We just want to talk. We think she might know something about a murder, we’re trying to—”

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