Page 129 of My Dark Ever After

Three cars followed in a procession behind us, unmarked black SUVs filled with loyalsoldati. Burette had sent his men down from Florence to fortify the villa while we were absent.

I trusted the man because he had proven himself again and again to me, even when I had publicly set down his daughter at the fundraiser in Firenze in the summer. He was a seasoned capo who would guard my family like a dragon its treasure hoard.

Leo had headed north, which was no surprise. I had already alerted Damiano, thecapo dei capiin the south, to be on the lookout for Leo, and the region was filled with many more camorristi than the north.

We found his car abandoned in Pistoia, the doors open, a fire crackling in the interior where it was parked in a narrow alley on the outskirts of town. Dawn was starting to turn everything from black to grayscale.

“Ludo, can you check surveillance in the area? I have to believe he headed this way for a reason. Even if he stole a new car, his center of operations has to be somewhere here in the north.”

“Yes,” Ludo said, his computer in his lap, fingers flying. “But it will take me a minute.”

I did not tell him we did not have a minute to spare. Instead, I drove us down the street to an all-night café where we could regroup. As Carmine ordered us coffees and Renzo argued with Ludo about which intersections to check out first, I tried to think about what I knew of my best friend.

His parents had died when he was just a baby, leaving him in Tonio’s care, but I thought they might have lived somewhere close.

I pulled out my phone to search the shared family album Mamma had made a few years ago, filled with old, scanned photos, until I came across what I was looking for.

“Maria, Cristo, and Leo Rizzo,” it read on the bottom of the yellowed photograph that depicted the couple smiling in front of a tiny house.

“Can you run a search on that house?” I asked Ludo, sliding my phone across the counter to him.

He nodded, mouth tight as his fingers worked and his eyes swept the screen.

“Leo stole a car near the train station,” he said a moment later. “But he started heading east, not north.”

“Toward Venice, maybe?” Carmine suggested, setting the coffees down for us. “Donatella’s people might harbor him.”

I moved over Ludo’s shoulder to watch in real time as he ran a search for the little house from the photograph. Images opened and collapsed across an open map until finally it pinged somewhere on the edge of Tuscany and Umbria.

Right near Fattoria Casa Luna.

I thought of running into Leo at Imelda’s winery even though he had no reason to be there, of the break-in they’d experienced in the summer.

“Do you think Imelda’s involved?” Carmine asked, shocked.

“No.” Of that I had little doubt. Imelda was one of the women who had benefited most from my takeover after Aldo, who had notoriously felt a woman’s place was in the kitchen or the bedroom. “But call her. Tell her we are on the way and to look out for Leo.”

She was waiting outside the main building of the vineyard when we arrived, arms crossed and brow furrowed.

“He hasn’t been here,” she said as soon as I alighted from the car. “But I checked the security tapes, and he’s been visiting a few times a month for the past year. Sometimes he meets with Wyatt.”

The Britishstronzowho had not noticed we were being defrauded by the Chinese import company. Not noticed or, more likely now, colluded with them to steal from me to fill Leo’s pockets.

“No one lives in the house,” she told us as we walked en masse around the building to the back garden and the path that led around the outside of the vines to the little yellow house fifteen minutes from the main cluster of buildings. “Cristo and my husband were cousins,so we gave them the house when Tonio cast Maria out for marrying beneath her.”

“Tonio kicked her out?” I frowned because I had never known that. “He always told Leo about how much he loved his sister.”

Imelda scoffed. “That old fart is cold as ice. He told Maria he wouldn’t support her if she went through with marrying a common vintner.”

It was not uncommon for the patriarch to use his unmarried family to strengthen ties with other clans and mafiosi, but I had not known Tonio had tried to do that.

“He wanted her to marry Alfonso Greco,” Imelda added.

Alfonso Greco.

The man who had banded together with the Venetian to come after me. That history explained why Leo might have thought to join forces behind my back.

As we came up on the house, I pressed a hand to Imelda’s hip. “Wait here. Do you need a gun?”