Page 102 of Savage King

In the meantime, I need to occupy myself before I go crazy. I open my laptop.

A headline greets me:Trial on hold after juror found stabbed to death in her bed.

That motherfucking bastard. With a roar, I stand, swiping everything off the desk. Carlos sure knows how to intimidate. The four jurors he bought will get his message. This entire trial might be called a mistrial. Fuck!

"Antonio?" Scarlet sticks her head into my office, and I try to take a deep breath, but my fury is running too hot.

"Not now, Scarlet," I warn her off.

"Now seems like you need me the most. What happened?"

My jaw clenches hard enough to make getting a word out impossible. My eyes flicker to the laptop on the ground. With a frown, she picks it up. When she reads it, her frown deepens.

"They could have killed my dad." Anger sparks in her sapphire eyes.

"Not even Carlos would have dared that," I try to soothe her.

"That rotten bastard," she cries, causing me to arch an eyebrow; this is the closest she’s come to cursing.

She paces the floor. "What are we going to do?"

I can't keep my eyes off this beautiful creature. We!

I fill her in on my plan. On where Vito and Igio are and their orders.

"Carlos must already have an inside person if they killed a juror," she muses.

"That's the only way it could have happened," I agree, watching her in fascination. I'm pretty sure she would bark at this analogy, but she's like an onion; the more layers I peel back, the more there seem to be.

"So who is it?"

Good question; I pull out my phone to call my new friend, Marcello, when I remember he was shot. Fuck! That was a blow I hadn’t seen coming. And just when the bastard started proving himself useful. I'm not heartbroken over it, but I do hope he survives, cause otherwise the house Orsi is about to take a severe hit. Not to mention that the new side business Marcello brought in, pharmaceuticals, is turning out to be extremely lucrative.

Scarlet is still pacing. Amused, I watched her. "I thought you were some kind of museum mouse or something." I stop her pacing. "I didn't know you had a criminal mind."

"Please, my dad is a judge," she waves me off, making me chuckle. "He likes to discuss his cases with me. It was his attempt to scare me off the wrong path." She rolls her eyes. "It was sure more interesting than homework." She snaps a finger. "Can you get a list of all the hotel employees?"

"Sure," I grab my laptop. "As a matter of fact, I just received a full list this morning."

She sits down by my desk, and I pull the list up for her.

"You know, you really need a better computer system."

"What do you mean? This laptop is just fine."

"Yeah, for you maybe, but for this…" she points at the list, "project, it would be handy to have two monitors."

"Noted," I pull out my phone and text Anna, my PA, to arrange to have a state-of-the-art computer system set up at my house within the hour. Anna has worked for me for years on the legitimate side of the business. I'm pretty sure she suspects there is more going on than she knows, but she has been loyal so far.

In the meantime, I watch Scarlet pull up a website that bears the logo of the federal justice system.

"I didn't know your skill set included hacking," I remark.

"It's not hacking when your father is a judge and you know all his passwords," she gloats.

"I stand corrected." Will she ever cease to amaze me?

"So what are you looking for? You know it'll take hours, if not days, to go through all the local justice?—"

---