Page 7 of Sin City Obsession (De Salvo Empire #1)

Chapter four

Overboard

Rocco closed out of his email as he accepted Alessa’s call, and he did his damnedest to ignore the pang in his chest at her name on the screen. It was infuriating the way just thinking about the woman messed him up.

He needed to find an excuse to get closer to her.

“Miss me already?” he teased by way of greeting.

She huffed and a car door shut in the background. “I need to take advantage of you.”

Rocco grinned and leaned back in his chair.

“You have a copy of those lists, right? With the usurers’ names?”

“I do.” He glanced at the time-stamp on his monitor. It was nearing noon, but even if she hadn’t taken a single break since he’d seen her at breakfast, she couldn’t possibly have gone through all the local names so quickly.

“We’ve run down about half a dozen—twice literally—and the only thing we’re getting out of most of these sleaze bags is that we should be concentrating on the operations in the West Las Vegas area.”

Rocco tucked his phone against his shoulder and rolled closer to his desk, navigating swiftly to where he’d saved the lists in question. “Does make some sense,” he said.

“Chatty says it’s not your best neighborhood, so I’m inclined to agree with the logic,” Alessa replied. “And I figure if five out of the seven assholes we’ve flushed so far are singing the same tune, it’s more likely true than any grand conspiracy.”

Rocco couldn’t help grinning when he realized what—rather, who —she had been referring to as chatty.

Ignazio really wasn’t their most conversational character.

Then the rest of her words connected with his brain and the grin slipped from his face.

Instinct, and probably years of a similar life, told him he was missing something.

“Did the other two sing a different matching song?”

Alessa made a sound like a snort. “One guy tripped over his own damn feet trying to literally run away and cracked his head, knocked himself flat out. I didn’t feel like hanging around or trailing him to the hospital. The only thing I do know is that he thought we were Feds.”

Rocco’s lips twitched.

“The latest guy was a pig,” she continued, annoyance slipping into her tone. “Spat on me and declared he wouldn’t tell me shit even if I sucked his dick. So I figure—”

Rage seared with an unexpected fury through Rocco’s blood. “ Who? ”

Alessa hesitated. “Excuse me?”

“Who fucking s pat on you?”

“Lambert,” Alessa replied slowly, as if his obvious anger surprised her. “Are … you okay?”

Rocco dragged in a breath to keep the growl from his voice and switched the call to speaker so he could text Ignazio. The question he asked was simple enough. He just needed to know if Lambert was still breathing. “Yeah. Sorry, what was it you needed?”

“Right, of course.” Alessa barely paused, but her tone slipped into something more professional as she continued.

“It would help a lot if someone on your tech team could narrow the list down to who is currently, and was as far back as two years ago, operating out of that neighborhood. I want to tighten my search. I’ll take any names on the prison list with active connections, too. ”

“You’re underequipped to do a door-to-door in the Westside,” Rocco said, though he shifted back to the computer to draft the request anyway.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m saying you need more manpower and more artillery. And at least one other car.”

“It’s not like I’m planning a raid. ”

“And if the SUV gets jacked while you’re questioning someone?” Rocco challenged. “If an armed gang of five or more punks pops out of a side-alley and surrounds you? Ignazio’s big, and capable, but he’s not a fucking ninja.”

Alessa drew an audible breath.

Ignazio’s response came in.

Lambert is fully functional.

Rocco ground his teeth.

“I happen to need a change of shirt, and I’m getting hungry,” Alessa said simultaneously. “I’ll delay starting in the next zone until those needs are met. If you could get me the updated information, I would even be grateful.” She disconnected before he could respond.

He might have laughed at her brazen behavior if he weren’t still seething. Instead, he closed out of everything, pushed to his feet, and practically stomped from his private office.

As usual, Em was sitting back in a carefully positioned chair, giving him a birds’ eye view of the wide walkway leading up to Rocco’s workspace. His head snapped Rocco’s way when the door opened and he was on his feet before it shut. “Rocco? What’s going on?”

Rocco didn’t break stride. “I have to pay a visit to a dead man.”

Alessa was nearly to the casino-side entrance, her mind still more than a little distracted from her conversation with Rocco, when she thought she heard someone shout up ahead.

Two males were fast-walking toward the parking lot, angled to walk right past her, both with ear-splitting grins on their faces. Neither looked like they could be even as old as she was, but they were walking steadily and appeared generally sober.

Behind them, the shouting voice grew louder. Distinctly female and vaguely familiar. “Littering is a sin! He’s watching, you know!”

The two twenty-somethings snorted with laughter and one of them clicked a key fob, triggering a reaction from a shiny newer-model Mustang with rental plates.

Alessa watched them for a moment longer, then swiveled her focus forward and felt her brows leap up in recognition. It was the strange woman from the hallway earlier that morning.

The woman stood at the edge of the curb; an empty Frappuccino cup gripped tightly in one partially raised hand.

“Shit.”

Alessa nearly jumped out of her skin at Ignazio’s sudden, verbalized curse. She whipped around, glancing up at him before sweeping her gaze over the parking lot beyond. She’d gotten so used to him just grunting or nodding that she had to assume an actual spoken word meant trouble.

Except she didn’t see any of the usual tell-tale signs.

No vehicles raced through the aisles. No swarms of shady men rushed at them. She heard no squealing tires, no gunfire. She saw no swerving vehicles with tinted windows. Not even a hastily dropped corpse .

Just Ignazio, typing out a hurried text. He was using both thumbs this time.

Alessa let herself relax again, opened her mouth to ask him about whatever the hell that had been, and someone latched on to her opposite arm.

She pivoted in place and raised her free hand in a warning fist—then came up short.

Not because she wasn’t wholly willing to punch the woman out, but because she honestly hadn’t expected the strange woman to have been the one to grab hold of her in the first place.

“Oh, I thought I recognized you,” the woman said. She had one of those smiles that felt placating and demeaning. “Sweet girl, you really need to get away from him.” Her gaze cut for a half-second to Ignazio before she took a small step back and gave a tug on Alessa’s arm.

“I—”

“He’s a demon,” she said, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “He’ll poison you!”

Alessa blinked, for a heartbeat leaning forward with the tug before managing to straighten herself. “A … what?”

Ignazio made a more familiar grunting sound.

The woman’s one-handed grip tightened and she tried again.

“A demon, yes!” She turned a shockingly hateful glare on Ignazio and smacked the Frappuccino cup still in her other hand against his chest so hard the plastic crunched and little bits of blended mocha-colored something splattered the air.

“He has the spirit of Hell in him, this one!”

Alessa couldn’t help but to gawk at the unexpected sight.

Just for a second. But she caught the woman’s wrist before her newly freed hand could join in tugging on Alessa’s arm.

“ Ma’am ,” she said, forcing out the polite word, “if he has anything like that in him right now, it might be because some random woman just came up and assaulted him with a used Frappuccino cup. You don’t get to claim religious high ground, or any high ground, for that. ”

The woman’s eyes went wide for a beat. “Oh, no,” she said on an exhale. “What have they done to you?” She sucked in a breath immediately and kept going. “No, it’s not too late. You haven’t been here long enough for this soul-sucking place to ruin you. There’s still—”

“Clarisa,” Ignazio finally said, growling the name.

The woman—Clarisa, Alessa assumed—froze.

“You’ve overstayed your welcome. Get the fuck off the Cavallo’s property.”

Clarisa drew a sharp breath and her arms shook. “I do not heed the Devil,” she whispered forcefully. “I do not heed the Devil.” She snapped her stare back onto Alessa. “Don’t let the devil’s sons ensnare you. You are a daughter of our Lord. I can see it.”

Oh, fuck. Clarisa was that type.

Alessa tried to rear back and Clarisa didn’t fight it, and a strange, brief moment of pause hung between them.

Then Clarisa said, “And clean yourself up, dear. You’re a mess.” She crinkled her nose, eyes riveted to a spot on Alessa’s shirt, before turning and striding away.

Alessa’s mouth fell open, but too many seconds passed before she found her voice.

“That bitch.” She dropped her gaze down to her own shirtfront, anyway, despite knowing Lambert’s loogy would still be visible on the cream blouse.

It was her fault for wearing such a stainable color on a workday, anyway.

“That was pretty tame,” Ignazio said as they resumed walking. “At least she didn’t threaten to beat you over the head with her bag of Bibles.”

“I think I’d have shot her.”

“Don frowns on that in public.”

Alessa shrugged. Technically so did her boss, but she was pretty sure, in the situation she was imagining, she could talk him into siding with her. Probably it was best she didn’t have to test the theory.