Page 58 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Daniela

Vinny preferred to discuss murder during mealtimes.

He’d sip glasses of Chardonnay and tally up the bodies of rivals he wanted killed that week.

The men themselves typically received the usual treatment: a bullet or two to the brain.

Bada bing. The real fun for him came when their families and loved ones were thrown into the mix.

How many ways can you make a bastard suffer? Vinny liked to ponder that question aloud while he cut into his steak and dabbed the blood from his lips.

He especially enjoyed using women to cause a man pain.

Their daughters. Their wives. If they were lucky, he’d merely slit their throat while the unlucky “motherfucker” was forced to watch.

If he was in a mood, he might sell them off to the highest bidder and send the man photographic evidence as a little reminder never to fuck with Vincent Stacatto.

I was used to the splendor that came with plotting destruction—but Lucifer and his fallen brethren apparently chose to discuss such matters in a dimly lit bar, their faces grim, their voices clipped.

Forsaking the bar counter, they stand huddled around an empty pool table, treating it like a makeshift battlefield.

The blond woman left the moment Lucifer returned with me in tow. “Go and make me some fucking lunch, baby,” Mack had told her, slapping her ass on her way out. But I saw her eyes as she scurried for the door; she wanted no part in this.

“I say we hit the fucker where it hurts,” Arno proposes, slamming his palm down against the green felt. “All-out, full-frontal assault.” His eyes gleam at the thought of taking Vinny on, guns blazing.

I want to laugh, but Lucifer beats me to the punch.

“No.” His guttural tone takes all the “fun” out of our lethal game. The devil isn’t playing, he’s strategizing. “Taking him out in the open would be suicide—”

“So says the Kitty,” Mack counters with a glittering smile. “Prison’s made you even more skittish than before.”

If the insult breaks through his skin, Lucifer’s expression doesn’t reveal it.

He merely glares down at the surface of the pool table, his mouth thoughtful.

Pensive. He’s a scholar of war, planning his every move with the thoughtful care of a general.

Arno and Mack scoff and sneer at his silence, but even I know that they’re waiting until he finally glances up, his eyes alight with manic fire.

“We take him apart piece by piece,” he says. He jerks his head in my direction and cuts me into slivers beneath the intensity of his gaze. “ She’s going to tell us how.”

“Bullshit,” Arno scoffs.

Mack is less dismissive. “Unless it’s while she’s spreading her legs for my clients, I don’t follow.”

Lucifer merely smiles, and...in all the times I’ve watched Vinny relish in the thought of bloodshed, I’ve never seen him look so... desperate for it. “Tell them what you told me,” he commands.

I stiffen. I told him lies—snatches of conversation and rumors. I told him what little I was able to remember in the few moments when fear hadn’t clouded my thoughts. I told him whatever Vinny allowed me to hear.

But Lucifer’s gaze is steel, reinforced with something vague that makes my chest tighten.

Is that trust? I study it and try to match the word to the definition of the term I learned in school.

Faith was a synonym for it—that same emotion he seemed to want me to feel in the arena.

My faith that he would win his battle somehow translates into his trust that only I can “take down” Vinny.

“He...he has three things,” I start to say.

My throat feels dry. Swallowing hard, I try to combat it, and I wind up scanning the length of the pool table until I find the shelf built into the side of it containing the small colored balls used to play on it.

My fingers slip into the crevice, and I pull out three to juggle them in my hands.

I pick a yellow one, marked with the number 1, and allow it to drop onto the table first. “His ‘palace,’ the hotel.” I drop another ball, a blue one this time.

“His money.” The red ball I save for last, twisting my fingers around it.

When it finally falls, it rolls into the other two, sending them darting toward opposite ends of the table. “His name.”

As Vinny would say, Bada Bing ; those are the three prized possessions of any self-appointed king.

“You use his name to destroy the other two,” I say. “That’s what matters most to him.”

“How do we do that?” Lucifer demands, but he isn’t curious, merely prompting—it’s like the man is already aware of the thoughts circling my brain. I can feel him inside my skull, creeping through the darkness, at home in the decay of my sanity.

“My video,” I say. “Put it everywhere. The internet. Everywhere. C-caption it...Lynn Stacatto, Vinny’s soon-to-be fiancée.

” The move would make him angry, but it wouldn’t be enough.

Anger was his favorite weapon of all the ones in his arsenal, and that alone would be enough to fuel his hunt for me.

..but impatience would make him reckless.

“While he’s...distracted, we launch a true attack on this .

” I follow the edge of the table and pick up the blue ball again, eyeing it carefully, as though it really did contain all of Vinny’s millions inside it.

“His money?” Arno asks from somewhere behind me.

“His business ,” I correct, watching the ball rock back and forth on the flat of my palm. “He deals in drugs, but...I want to hit the women. He traffics them from overseas. We strike him there, and the rest will crumble.”

“Hmph,” Mack grunts thoughtfully. “Interesting proposal, princess. How exactly does one bring down the multimillion-dollar prostitution ring of a crime boss? Do tell.”

I shake my head. It’s simple, really. Lucifer must have already seen the memories lurking inside my head, decoding them with all the cunning of a wolf while I was too afraid to. Think, he told me. You’ve fantasized about this.

“My last maid. Maria... She was too...too fresh. She talked too much. The first day, she mentioned something about a b-bridge and hearing the ships come in at night.”

“The harbor?” Lucifer guesses. “Somewhere near the marina, or maybe the port if she heard them at night.”

“The shipping docks,” Mack admits—reluctantly if his narrowed gaze is anything to go by.

“I’ve been scoping out the competition for a while now, but you haven’t seen security until you’ve seen the setup he guards his merchandise with, princess.

There’s no way we could even get close to them without a tank. Trust me. I’ve tried.”

“ We don’t have to get close,” Dante says. “Not if we use a proxy...”

“The police.” I know I’m right when I see him nod, though grudgingly, as if in shock. It’s like my thoughts connect with the pieces he lays out, assembling them as easily as if they’d originated inside my own head. “We use the police to— ”

“No.” Mack stands fully upright, flexing his massive fingers into even more intimidating fists. “No fucking police. That’s your true game, isn’t it?” He lashes out from across the table, seizing me by my chin so harshly that my jaws snap together.

Just like that, all of the air leaves the room. Gasoline replaces it. One tiny spark is all that’s needed to blow everything from the pool table to the people gathered around it sky high.

Lucifer says nothing, though his eyes go to Mack with the intensity of a wolf gnashing its fangs.

He pauses when my bloody hand meets the sliver of the table in front of him though.

Slowly, his gaze settles over the bloodied fingers, and I face Mack alone, staring deep into his eyes.

His gaze isn’t a mystery to me like Lucifer’s.

I can read each violent emotion clearly—greed and jealousy are a universal language Vinny educated me in so well.

“Why not?” I ask.

He laughs, and his grip tightens hard enough to grind new bruises onto my already battered jaw.

“Little girl, you don’t even know the half of it.

Not even fucking half. Your beloved fiancé owns the goddamn police.

We go to them and I might as well just give that fucker the keys to my own little kingdom. ”

I attempt to shake my head, but I can only jerk my chin, trapped by the force of his grip. “He owns half the police,” I admit. “But...the rest...”

“They answer to the public,” Lucifer says softly.

He frowns and rakes one of his bloodied, bruised hands through his hair—something that I notice he does when he’s thinking.

“Nobody gives a damn about a drug scandal. But women...girls. A story like that would trigger a larger investigation that even Stacatto couldn’t shut down even with every judge in the city in his pocket.

It would start a fire that the city couldn’t contain. ..”

“Hmph, and how the fuck do you propose we do that?” Mack demands as his fingers relinquish their hold on me.

“We bait the trap,” Dante says as if it’s obvious. “We find a way to lure him out of his hiding spot, and then we hit him where it hurts.”

“Those are pretty words and all, Dante,” Mack counters. “But I’m gonna need something a little more concrete.”

“We tip off the police about the girls. When they go to warn Stacatto—”

“He won’t give a shit because the police are in his fucking pocket, like I’ve said,” Mack interjects.

Lucifer merely smiles. “Not all of them. You get one nosy pig on his trail and that’ll force him to at least try to cover his tracks. When he does, we’ll be waiting...to steal a little bit of his merchandise.”

“Hmm.” Mack takes his time drinking in the plan. There’s a rough cruelty even in the way he thinks to himself, rubbing absently at his chin. “I get the girls when we’re done—”

“No.” My fingers release the blue ball, and it bounces twice across the table’s surface. “ I get them.”