Page 67 of Little Deer
Wrong thing to say to Alessio. Lazaro and I share a look. Yeah, we might need to be ready to handle a bullet wound.
Alessio gives Nico a slow smile. “Ah, now, Boo Bear, you know that you don’t mean that,” he croons. “You weren’t saying that earlier when—” He ducks and Lazaro and I jump out of the way fast when Nico pulls his gun and fires a bullet above Alessio’s head. We all look at the hole and then back at Nico, whose eyes are full of temper.
“Alessio, get to work on searching,” Papa orders in exasperation. “Nico, you too. We don’t know what’s behind these walls and if you damage something and we can’t find it because of it, it’ll be me shooting you.” Then he walks into one of the many rooms on the floor, ignoring Nico’s furious glare.
Nico storms off, Dante following him with a cool expression. Davide and Caesar stare at Alessio like he’s lost his mind. Alessio shrugs and gets to his feet. “He’s touchy when I remind him how much he loves me.” Then he whistles as he heads into another one of the rooms, unfazed when Nico calls out a curse at him.
“He’s going to leave here with a hole in him somewhere,” Lazaro snickers. “I almost feel bad for him.”
“Is Amara coming up to help with this?”
“She’s still down in the salon with the girls. They’re going over things and making notes. They’re really getting into it.” He arches a brow at me. “You were with Lucy?”
I nod. I guess everyone has picked up on my interest. “Soren was hungry and she’s reading her mother’s journal.”
“She find anything?”
I shake my head. “Only that she was a selfish woman and she was also suffering at the hands of Leonardo and her sons. She says she can understand the pain as a mother, but the rest of it, she hates her for it.”
“Yeah. Amara hasn’t started her mother’s journal yet, but I don’t like that it could upset her. What if her mother was like the others? I mean, they were both forced into marriages that they didn’t want.”
“Amara is strong. So is Lucy. They’ll get through anything they find as long as we’re with them.”
Lazaro nods, but he still doesn’t look one hundred percent convinced. Instead, he says, “I’m going to take the room at the far end of the hall. Let me know if you find anything.” He heads off, and I take the room across from him.
It’s identical to the one that we found the fucker in earlier, but inverted and with a different type of fireplace. Maybe that’s the first place to look.
I don’t know how long I look, moving, pushing, and inspecting things, but I come up empty. Hell, I even yank the mattress off the bed to see if there’s anything under it. Nothing. I look at the room as a whole one more time, but again, I see nothing. Nothing that stands out, nothing that even looks out of place. It’s all completely normal.
I check out the adjoining bath, but with it being so small, it takes little time at all to realize that there is nothing in here either.
It’s a few hours before we all finally gather in the hallway. “Anything?” Nico demands.
“Nothing.” It’s a common echo from everyone, and the frustration is clear.
“The guy did say that it might not be in this wing but another one,” I remind them.
“But this is the one part of the house that no one would be around as often,” Dante reasons. “The other one is right in the middle of everything.”
“So was her office, though. Wouldn’t it make sense that her exit would be near there?”
“Would she really want to risk being spotted leaving from there?” Lazaro argues. “I mean, if I’m trying to sneak the hell out of somewhere, I’m not going to want to walk outside into the middle of the guards and everyone. The north end of the house faces the back end of the property, right? It probably wasn’t as heavily patrolled, and all she had to do was go through the maze or the trees.”
“Are we sure that she’s not talking about the passages we’re already using?” Alessio wonders. “I mean, they all come out to hidden doors and exits, and we already know one of them goesinto the maze, and out the side so she could have just used one of them. And they wouldn’t have had cameras then, right?”
“They were always full of cameras. Not great ones at the time, but enough that I don’t think she could have gotten through the tunnels unspotted. Unless she knew the precise moments the guards weren’t watching the feeds.”
“She could have paid them off.”
“My father’s men would never have taken money from her. They were too loyal to him and too scared of him. It’s more likely that when they had the house built, she bribed the builders to create these exits and hidden rooms and told him to leave it off the plans. It’s exactly why I kept the passages a secret after I found out about them and only Dante and I, and now Davide and Caesar, know about them and have access. I don’t want to chance my men using them and doing shit behind my back.”
“Jesus Christ, this is doing my head in,” Caesar mutters. “Who does this kind of shit? It’s complicated, and far too elaborate.”
“She managed to run an entire network and empire on her own for the majority of her marriage,” I remind him. “Networks that went through other territories and with alliances that normally don’t work well together.”
“Yeah, but this is a little much, don’t you think?” Caesar argues. “I mean, I know she was smart, but the more things like this that you put into place, the more chances that someone will discover it, even by accident.” He looks around the hallway critically. “The passageways run along the exterior walls for the most part, right?”
“Yes.”
