Page 12 of Taken By the Enforcer

“Good,” I say, and mean it. “If the eyes slide off, they won’t catch her until I do.”

Marcello’s phone buzzes. He glances, mouth curving. “Rafe says he’s already in the municipal feeds and three private networks near the church. He also says you look like shit when you’re in love.”

I bare my teeth. “I look like a man who had his woman in his bed and then found air.”

“You’ll have her back,” Faustino says simply. He lifts his chin at the door. “And there’s a rat scratching.”

A knock that isn’t a knock. The kind that belongs to someone who mistakes familiarity for safety.

“Entra,” Marcello calls, amusement threaded through the syllables like wire.

Aldo steps in. Smarmy in a suit. He wears a tux again tonight, no blood on it this time, face still faintly marked from the backhand I laid on him in the warehouse. The skin there probably sings when he shaves.

I hope it burns.

“Boss,” he says, trying to pitch his tone to loyalty and landing on obsequious. “You wanted me?”

I turn toward him and let silence spread, a red carpet laced with razors. Then I say, “Tell me where your bride is.”

His mouth does something I don’t like—a curl he thinks he hides and doesn’t. “My bride?” He almost laughs and swallows it at the last second when he recognizes his own stupidity. “I haven’t seen Paolina since—” He stops again. Good choice. The wordssince I was inside her best friend in the confessionalwouldn’t do anything but get him hurt fast.

“You haven’t seen her since you failed to keep her,” I say. “Where is she?”

“I don’t?—”

“Stop,” I tell him, voice flat. “Lie again, and I take things you value.”

He blanches. Men like Aldo don’t value truth, but they do value their tongues, their hands, the parts of themselves that make them dangerous and make women glance twice. He closes his mouth. Opens it. Shuts it again. Then throws his father-in-law under the bus because cowards always need someone to land on.

“Corsetti told me to stand down,” he blurts. “Said it wasfamigliabusiness if she ran. Said they’d find her, and I wasn’t to show my face at the church again today.”

I step close enough to smell his cologne—expensive,anise bitter, the kind boys wear to feel like men. “And did he?”

“To my knowledge?” He tries for insolence and reaches petulance. “No. She—She humiliated us. She’ll come crawling back when she realizes what leaving means.”

“She won’t crawl.” My hand closes around his tie and brings him forward until his shoes lift just enough to make his calves shudder. “But you might.”

His eyes go wide. His hands stay down. He knows better than to reach for me. A muscle twitches high on his cheekbone. “With respect, signore,I had nothing to do with?—”

“With my woman running?” I suggest. “You had everything to do with it. You taught her exactly what she didn’t want. I should thank you.” I release him with a flick that almost makes him fall.

He catches the desk with a palm, breath flaring. His gaze skitters to Marcello, then to Faustino, hunting for an ally and finding wolves who eat weaker wolves for fun. He doesn’t dare question my possessive claim of his fiancée. Punk.

Marcello smiles like a winter day. “You’ll go back to the warehouse, Aldo,” he says, conversational. “You’ll supervise the new intake, and you’ll pretend you don’t know why your access levels changed. If you fart out of line, the system notifies me, and my brother will practice a new kind of surgery.”

“I—”

“Saysì, Capo,” I advise.

He swallows it whole. “Sì, Capo.”

“Fuori,” I add, and he’s smart enough to obey.

The door closes. I roll my shoulders once, easing tension out of muscles that would prefer to break things. Faustino pours a drink he knows I won’t take and leaves it, anyway.

“I want every ferry manifest in the next hour,” I say, picking up the hunt again because the only cure for wanting is motion. “Every rental car lot flagged for a woman paying cash and not giving a surname. Every shop where a bride might ask for scissors.”

“Subito,” Marcello says, already sending the order to soldiers who deal in paper and pixels instead of knives. “Rafe’s building a live board. He’s overlaying shop grids with our camera maps and the church’s fallout radius. He just pinged a cash-only thrift onVia Etneathat sold denim and a black tee twenty minutes after your timestamp. Baggy sizes. The clerk says the woman wore her hair up and paid with crisp euros. She left in a baseball cap and sunglasses with a plastic grocery bag, your duffle, and—” He pauses, reading. Then he grins. “She asked for a pair of scissors and a garbage bag.”