Page 45 of Possessive Mafia Vows

Terry’s shoulders slump. “I hear you. If your mom finds out…” He leaves the sentence hanging. “But it’s not going to be thatsimple. I had a couple of my men on his tail yesterday after your mom met him. Don’t worry, she doesn’t suspect the truth.”

“She won’t find out,” Caleb mutters under his breath. “He’ll be long gone before that happens.”

Terry doesn’t react. “He went to Sienna’s apartment yesterday evening. He took flowers.”

I flex my fingers. If I thought he’d laid a finger on Sienna, I’d wring his neck with my bare hands before handing his corpse over to my brothers to bury.

“He didn’t stay long.” Terry must sense my overwhelming urge to cause the man some serious harm. “Fifteen minutes max.”

That’s fifteen minutes too long.

“They lost him after he left.”

“Lost him where?” I ignore my brothers’ eyes on me. They know how I feel about Sienna, and Caleb, more than anyone, will understand the instinct to protect.

Terry shakes his head. “That’s just it. My men said it was like he evaporated into the night.”

“What the fuck.” I’m pacing now, the way Sienna did when she was here earlier. “Someone is protecting him. Someone knows where he is.”

“We’ll find him, lad.” Terry motions with both hands for me to settle.

“Meanwhile,” Caleb says, “I got a report on Sienna’s father. Robert Carlton Hooch. Grade A loser who targets women with kids, uses them for somewhere to kip for a while and then moves on when his creditors catch up with him.”

“How much debt?” I’ve been so busy focusing on Nick’s past, I didn’t stop to check out Sienna’s long-lost father. “He was in the Rinse a couple of days ago. With Sienna. He didn’t seem surprised when I told him that it belonged to my brother.”

“He’ll have done his research,” Caleb says. “He was in the casino all night, throwing money at the roulette table.”

“Any trouble?”

“Nope. But it seems our friend Hooch has a string of debts with a casino run by a bratva family.”

“The Petrovs?” Ivan Petrov was involved in Sienna’s abduction earlier in the year. The family has apologized since, but I don’t trust him.

“A new mob,” Caleb says. “Does the name Bogrov mean anything?”

“It does to me.” All eyes turn to Terry. “They’re trying to run the Petrovs out of town.”

11

SIENNA

My father’sapartment isn’t much bigger than mine, but it’s in an area of Queens that I don’t know well, which, by my erratic thinking, will hopefully mean that I’ll be harder to track down.

He caught me off-guard outside the Wraith. He couldn’t have timed his exit any better if he tried; I literally collided with him as I was running away from Seamus.

“Hey, sweetheart.” He instinctively grabbed my arms to keep me on my feet and dropped them when I pulled away from him. “What are you doing here?”

I don’t remember what I said. I probably wasn’t making much sense at the time, and before I knew it, we were climbing into the back of a taxi and heading away from Manhattan.

It isn’t until I’m standing in his living room, watching him pick his laundry up off the floor and trying to hide some empty liquor bottles, that I realize how rough he looks. His face is sagging, his skin gray. His eyes are bulging, and when he turns to face me with an armful of dirty clothes, I can see that the whites have been overtaken by swarming red lines.

“I wasn’t expecting visitors.”

“It’s okay, you don’t have to tidy up on my account.”

I shouldn’t be here. I understand the mixed signals I’m giving him: one moment I’m telling him I want nothing to do with him, and the next I’m hopping into a cab and coming home for breakfast. But despite the grubby carpet, and the scorch marks on the arms of the threadbare sofa, I kinda feel like I’m on neutral territory.

At least here I don’t have to think about Kyle or Nick. So long as I make it clear to my father that I just need some breathing space, he won’t get ideas that we’re rekindling our non-existent father-daughter relationship.

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