Page 72 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

“Do you want me to give you to him?” My voice is hard. Hard with rage. Hard with a promise. All she has to do is say the fucking word and he can have her. “Do you?”

She holds my gaze, her chin pointed toward the ceiling, her eyes unreadable. Then...she breaks. “N-no.” Real, cold fear spills out of her, and I jerk back, rising up on my knees. “I don’t want to go to him.”

“Then don’t fucking ask me about it.” I climb from the bed and snatch a fresh shirt from the pile Darcy brought. After ripping the old one off, I pull the new one on, but it’s not enough to erase the bitter sting clinging to my skin.

Trust Vinny’s whore to be a good damn liar on top of everything else. Sometimes I can almost believe the little act she puts on: the stuck-up mob bitch too hardened by pain to truly fear what might come her way next.

Seeing her stripped of that illusion isn’t any better than watching her hide behind it.

It isn’t until I hear the mattress shift behind me that I realize I’m standing here, glaring at the wall.

My head hums. My fingers flex, on fire. My jaw aches.

I want to punch something. I want to fucking pummel.

But it’s not that little bitch I want to destroy.

Trust the fact that only the threat of her precious, beloved Vinny is enough to make Danny rip her pretty little mask off.

“I want him dead,” she’s said. For just a second, I join in on her little fantasy; I’ll kill the prick myself if only to see how she’ll react without being haunted by her quest for revenge.

After Arno, and Dino, and Mack...

I’ve had enough of fucking revenge.

“No! Wait!”

Her voice stops me dead in my tracks before I even register heading for the door. My hand is on the knob, already in the process of wrenching it open, and when I glance over my shoulder, she’s on her knees.

“N-no.” She shakes her head, sending that black hair flying. “No one else... I don’t want to go to anyone else.”

She’s telling the truth this time. It’s too damn bad that what she wants doesn’t really fucking matter.

I enter the hallway and slam the door behind me.

In five minutes, I’m out of the garage, marching toward the bar up ahead.

Inside, I find Arno sitting on a stool at the bar, but he’s not drinking for once.

He glances over his shoulder as I cross the room but doesn’t greet me.

Overnight, he’s reverted to the shitty little punk I met in the streets, cursed with the stigma of being Dino Mulligan’s bastard.

“Where’s your little toy?” he wonders nastily when I take the stool beside his.

I feel my eyes narrow. “Fuck her. ”

“I’m sure you have, more than once,” Arno sighs, but before I can react, he lifts his free hand above the counter, revealing the bottle he had hidden on his lap. He shoves it in my direction, and I rip the cap off and take a sip without even looking at the label.

It burns. It’s shitty, cheap vodka, but it washes the taste of her from my mouth.

“Feels like old times,” Arno says, glancing around the bar, his jaw set. “You and Mack fighting each other for scraps. The cage. All we need is Dino dangling the meat over your heads and it could be the good old days again.” There’s a hard note in his tone that I don’t miss.

The “good old” days weren’t very good to Arno.

His father may have been a stone-cold criminal, but he didn’t do the fathering too well to the kid who actually carried his blood.

Scrawny and weak, Arno wouldn’t have lasted a day in the cage.

It was only after Dino died that he grew claws of his own and honed his own bite.

“Something’s up,” I suspect, noticing the way Arno curls his hands into fists. He isn’t one to dwell on nostalgia for the hell of it. The puppy only brings up the past when he’s itching to beat out a new future in pain and blood. “What is it?”

“Mack.” Arno snatches the bottle from my grip and downs a fourth of it in one go. “The bastard... He’ll take it all. Stacatto’s empire. What remains of the Saints. Everything. And I...I fucking handed it to him.”

I grab the bottle before he can take another swig, but I don’t drink from it myself. I stare down into the dark liquid instead, watching it swirl within the glass. In this lighting, it’s the same color as her eyes. Those fucking eyes. All that’s missing are the hints of green and specks of gold.

“It’s not too late,” I say, but I don’t elaborate.

Arno can build his own damn kingdom. “Scared little kitties” don’t do well in groups once they get released from the pound.

After this is all over, I’ll find some place to lie low.

Some way to carve out a new name for myself, away from the cage or the violence—and I try not to give a damn as to where Stacatto’s little whore might factor into that.

“It’s not too late,” I repeat, slamming the bottle down in front of Arno—and, this time, he doesn’t reach for it. “Mack’s not the only one with ‘friends.’”

Arno chuckles. “You make some connections in prison?”

“Something like that.”

Arno doesn’t react when I stand. It’s only when I hold my hand out that he has the nerve to look interested.

“Got a phone on you?” I ask.

Shooting me a wary look, he reaches into his pocket and pulls a cell phone out. “Yeah. Why?”

I don’t answer, and he slaps the phone onto my palm anyway.

I toy with the keypad as I cross over to an empty section of the bar, just out of Arno’s earshot.

It must be busy at the police station this early.

I sense that the dial tone is about to cut over to voicemail when a tired voice finally answers.

“Fourth Precinct.”

“Can I talk to...” I inhale sharply and spit the name out. “Dick— Richard —Van Hallen?”

There’s a slight pause from the other end, and I can hear papers being shuffled.

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“Tell him it’s his long-lost nephew.”

“Just a minute.”

Nearly three pass before a new voice answers the line. “Van Hallen.”

“Hello, Detective,” I say coldly. “This is how we’re going to play this game. I’m going to speak. You listen, and only if you have something worth saying do you talk back. Understood?”

“Vialle?” The detective sounds gruff, pre-coffee. “What the hell are you playing at— ”

“Vincent Stacatto,” I say, cutting each word short. “That name ring a bell?”

Van Hallen grunts. After almost a minute of silence, he finally spits a reply out. “Go on.”

“What if I were to tell you that his human-trafficking operation is about to take a nasty hit. Tonight. Would your men be able to stop tailing me to be around to catch the fireworks?”

He’s silent, wondering whether or not I’m yanking his chain. “Stacatto runs a multimillion -dollar operation, Vialle. That wouldn’t be fireworks we’re talking about. It would be an explosion.”

“I want to see him burn.” Well, the little thrill-seeker will get her fucking wish.

“That doesn’t answer my question, Detective.”

“Ah...yes—all right. I could spare a few men if your tip was fucking credible.”

“Next question. Stacatto kept a woman around him. Young. Foreign—”

“You’ve just described just about every missing adolescent girl in the international database,” Van Hallen snarls.

“Not this girl. Speaks English. Her name is Danny...Daniela—”

“Manzano?”

I assume it’s a last name. Daniela Manzano, Vinny’s pretty whore.

“He’s kept her close,” Van Hallen says, but now, he’s even more cautious than he was before.

“What do you know about her?”

“Humph... Stacatto barely lets her out of his sight. She was his neighbor, they say, growing up. They lived in the same building. She’s young, like you said. About twenty-two...twenty-three. Family came from Brazil, I think.”

I don’t like how quickly Van Hallen settled on the right woman. He wasn’t lying about having a hard-on for Stacatto, at least. “Do you know anything about a murder case connected to her?”

“Terrible, terrible crime,” Van Hallen says softly. “Poor kid lost her whole family. The photos of the crime scene haunted the precinct for weeks.”

“Next question. Detective Andrew Sosa. Know him?”

“No,” Van Hallen says carefully. “But I do know of a Chief Andrew Sosa.”

Chief. Apparently, being a prick in Stacatto’s pocket could make a man rise through the ranks within the course of five years.

“What do you know about him?”

Van Hallen hesitates. “I know that he writes my departmental performance reviews.”

“Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you that I know for a fact that he’s working for Stacatto.”

“That’s a very stupid accusation to make, Vialle,” Van Hallen warns, but he doesn’t trash the notion outright. Smart bastard.

“He worked on the Manzano case, right?”

This time, Van Hallen takes almost a full minute to answer. “Yes...”

“Then take some words of advice, Detective. He’s Stacatto’s man—but that’s your problem.

Last question: If... if I could get you someone like this Daniela Manzano.

..could you smuggle her out of the city?

You . Not your fucking corrupt police chief.

Not any one of your little rookie cops. You.

” I know that it’s a stupid plan before the words leave my mouth.

Fuck, I don’t know why they leave my mouth.

My neck itches and I have to reach up to scratch at it while Van Hallen takes his sweet time digesting what I’ve said.

“Vialle, if you could get me someone like Daniela Manzano, the only place I’d be able to put her is on the witness stand. She could sink Stacatto’s entire operation with her testimony alone. Or at least turn the public against him. ”

“Well, that answers that question.” I rip the phone from my ear, prepared to hang up.