Page 36 of Angelo’s Vengeance (The Commission #3)

ANGELO

A-Hole Chat

Conall: Gallagher has something on that Long Island property. It looks hot. There’s definitely someone staying there. We have at least one person there, accompanied by perimeter guards.

Maxim: We should hit it.

Ilias: Agreed. If there is any chance that Renzetti or Carlotta are there, we need to take it.

Me: Agreed.

Maxim: One hour?

Conall: One and a half

Me: Done

I texted Bacco and Remo to update them, leaving it to Bacco to assemble a squad. It probably wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t want to take chances and discover that we didn’t have enough men.

The property was nestled deep in the woods of Long Island—the kind of place you had to know already existed to find it.

No digital footprint. No paper trail. It wasn’t listed directly under Valentino Cardoni’s name, but it was his.

Old money. Old secrets. Valentino had specified that this property had been in his family since his father’s days, when Carlotta was still around.

The property was under his aunt’s maiden name, which was quite clever.

I had given Val a heads-up yesterday that we’d be checking this place out. He replied that we had carte blanche with what we found and how we proceeded. I wouldn’t forget that. For all he knew, we were planning to blow the place up. Hell, Remo did bring enough C4 for that.

The house was set back behind twelve-foot stone walls, covered in creeping ivy and flanked by massive iron gates.

Private security patrolled the perimeter—not the usual rent-a-cop types, either.

These guys wore earpieces and moved with military precision.

I clocked at least four snipers in the trees and another six guards at the front and rear entries.

Maxim, Ilias, Conall, and I crouched behind the treeline with our teams. Bacco and Remo had protested that they weren’t here, but I’d sent them to another Cardoni property outside of Jersey, which had been a bust. The air was cold, sharp with the tang of pine and damp earth.

My gloved hands rested on the grip of my H&K. My pulse was steady.

“Looks like he’s been preparing,” Ilias muttered beside me, scanning the walls through a scope.

“Preparing to die if that fucker is in there,” Maxim growled.

Conall nodded at me. “Your call.”

“Let’s go.” I gave the signal. This was one of my favorite moments— the feeling right before the fight, just before we struck someone who was unaware we lurked nearby. My adrenaline surged, my heartbeat pounding, my friends at my back — it was thrilling every time.

Two of our men fired silencers at men who were stationed near the trees. The snipers were dropped without a sound. Another team took out the rear patrol. Then all hell broke loose.

We swarmed the gates, breaching with small charges that blew them open with a thunderous groan of twisted metal. I was the first through, my boots crunching gravel as we stormed the courtyard.

Gunfire erupted from the second floor. I dove behind a stone fountain, returning fire as Maxim's team flanked left. The bastards were entrenched, utilizing the balcony and upper windows for cover, but it wouldn’t save them.

"Suppressing!" Conall shouted, unloading a full clip.

I ran low along the wall, flung a flashbang through the main entrance, then barreled in after it exploded.

The front hall was chaos—a guard staggered toward me, half-blinded.

I dropped him with a shot to the throat.

Another lunged with a knife. I spun, disarmed him, and slammed his head into the marble wall.

Ilias followed behind me, with Kostas and Vaso. They were methodical, cold, and moved like a storm—no wasted motion, delivering clean headshots. The Anthakos brothers were a force I wouldn’t want to mess with, but I was glad we were on the same side.

"Clear the upper floor!" I barked into the comms.

We stormed the staircase. Maxim kicked in door after door. We found two more guards and a man who appeared to be a financier, attempting to delete files from a laptop. I shot the floor near him first. Then I turned the barrel to him.

"Where is he?"

"Gone, I don’t know, I swear?—"

I shot him in the leg. "Wrong answer."

"Basement! There's a panic room?—"

"Show me."

He limped down the hall, bleeding onto the wood floors. We followed a tight formation, weapons up. He led us to a nondescript door behind a wine rack in the kitchen. High-end shit. Climate-controlled.

"Biometric lock," he stammered, like that would stop us. This wasn’t the fucking movies where we needed some code breaker or a thumb print. Most walls were made just of 2x4s and crappy sheetrock.

Maxim didn’t wait. He shot him in the head and planted a charge on the doorframe.

We ducked back as it exploded in a fireball of plaster and smoke.

It was easy as pie to kick a hole big enough to walk through.

Sure enough, Renzetti cowered inside. His toad-like appearance was immediately recognizable.

He was huddled in a corner, armed with a Uzi that it was obvious he didn’t know how to use. He opened fire immediately, but the live rounds pinged off the walls. I ducked, rolled, and flanked hard right. Conall tossed a flashbang. We moved in.

I shot him once in the shoulder, then a second time in the thigh to drop him. He screamed, dropped the weapon, and tried to crawl.

"You think you can burn my businesses? You think you can touch my family?" I growled.

He coughed up blood. "Your mother—she lied to you. She used us both."

"Where is she? "

"I don't know. She's always ten steps ahead. She was here, but she's gone.” His face was pinched with pain. “I could help you. I could be useful.”

I believed him. Too bad Veronica and Kostas had already broken into his network and accessed the trafficking data.

They had enough to shut it down. Most of it had run through a computerized transactional site on the dark web.

Kostas would be sifting through names and locations that we might be able to go after, but we didn’t need this joker.

I shot him once more, right between the eyes—the silence after was deafening.

Conall exhaled. "One down."

"Not the one I want.” It made me grumpy.

“Man.” Conall kicked the body. “You’re so testy. You should be on Cloud Nine looking to have a smoke and a fuck after this, and you’re whining.” He shot me a wink. “Cheer up.”

We swept the rest of the property and found rooms full of maps, blueprints, and burner phones.

A wall displayed photos of me, Maxim, Ilias, and Conall.

On another board were high-value targets: Cora, Cora holding little Vasily, Francesca, Theodosia, Polina, and another woman turned away from the camera, her hoodie pulled up to cover most of her face.

It was chilling to see the detailed photos of the women in our lives, and the focal point that had been put on them.

I didn’t need to look at the others to know they were just as pissed as I was. As expected, it only took a moment before Maxim erupted, pointing at one of the pictures of his wife and son. “What the fuck is this?”

“Canvassing their targets most likely,” I said sourly. “Looking for weak spots.” I rubbed a finger over my lips, thinking, before tapping the woman with the hoodie and turning to the others. “Who’s this?”

“Galena. Even they couldn’t spot her. Good girl.” Ilias began to remove the photos from the board methodically. “Go see what else you fuckers can find.”

Maxim gave Ilias a dirty look, but followed me out of the room. “So, your half-sister seems a little wily.”

“Yeah, I checked on her years ago. Things seemed good. She was living with her mother and a new stepdad, an all-around good guy. There was no reason to get in contact with her at that point. She knew nothing of the bratva life, and her mother seemed to be keeping it that way. She has been going to school and work. Fuck, she even walks to school. I didn’t want to disrupt it.

Once we decided to go forward with the blood oath,” he hesitated, but I knew immediately what he meant.

“I knew it’d have to change, but I thought she could be normal for a while. ”

He’d hoped somewhere deep down that maybe Galena would get to skip out on being tied back into the criminal world we inhabited. Maybe she’d be able to breathe free, but that wasn’t meant to be. Her fate had been written twenty years ago.

“Look at this.” I poked at the walk-in closet. High-end women’s clothing. Italian designers. Expensive. Classic. My mother’s taste. A half-drunk glass of red wine on the nightstand. A cigarette still smoldering in a crystal ashtray.

She’d been here. Probably less than an hour ago.

Maxim stood beside me, arms crossed. “What now?"

I stared at the clothes. At the wine. “We’ll keep looking. We’ve taken one of her toys. We just need to keep kicking the cans. ”

“Agreed.” He stared glumly at the ashtray. “She had pictures of Cora, and it looks like Galena is on the run, which means she knows something is up.” He ran a hand over the back of his neck. “I was stupid to think she could have just a few more years of normal life. I’d thought maybe she’d …”

“She’d what?” I snapped. “She’d get married? Then what? She was already promised. You knew that.”

“I know. She was just happy. She was a happy kid with regular parents living in a little house that seemed normal. Nothing like ours. It was nice. Quiet. Why shouldn’t she have that? I thought maybe Ilias would dig his heels in, maybe refuse.”

It wasn’t a ridiculous fantasy, but it was still a pipedream that made me irrationally angry. “Let’s go tell the others what we found. We need to regroup and call in the cleaners.” I ground my teeth together and forced myself not to say anything to him about Galena. It wasn’t my place anyway.