I nodded once.“Did you see anything?”
She glanced around nervously, lowering her voice.“Three men.Big.They covered her face.”
My stomach dropped into something dark and violent.
“Do you know who they were?”My voice was too calm.
She swallowed.“No.But it was fast, not amateurs.”
I gripped the railing hard enough it creaked.“What did they look like?”
“Not Italian.”She shook her head.“Blond.Pale.Maybe… Eastern European?I don’t know.”She pointed to the end of the street.“They shoved her into a dark van that had no plates.Headed that way.”She pointed in the direction they’d driven off, even though it was useless.By now, they could be anywhere.
My entire body went cold.
A van.Three men.Eastern European.
Which meant this wasn’t random.It wasn’t a mugging gone wrong.It sounded like a retrieval.
“Did anyone call the police?”I asked.
She nodded, eyes softening.“They don’t come here.Many times we’ve called about vandalism and stolen cars.They don’t prioritise this side of town.”
Something ugly twisted inside me.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
She nodded, sensing something dangerous in my tone, and stepped back inside without another word.
“What haveyou gotten yourself into this time?”Gianni asked as he came up beside me an hour later, his eyes already scanning the street like he expected it to bite.
“Everything okay with Mikayla?”I asked without looking at him.“The scans good?”
“She’s fine.Angry, hormonal, and threatening to emotionally destroy me, but medically?Perfect.”
I nodded once.It was the only acknowledgment I gave him before I spoke again.
“I need to find a girl.”
The words came out flat.Hard.Final.
Gianni didn’t answer right away.He followed my line of sight instead—taking in the small, worn house, the peeling paint, the narrow porch, the crushed garden beds where something had been trampled into the dirt.Then he looked down the too-quiet street, reading the wrongness in the air the same way I had.
I could see the question building behind his eyes.
What the hell was the Don doing in a place like this?
And more importantly…what had happened here?
“That’s all you need to know,” I added before he could open his mouth to ask.
My tone left no room for curiosity.No room for arguments or anything except the order I’d already given.
He exhaled loudly.“You know Marcello’s going to take this apart piece by piece when he hears?—”
“He won’t hear,” I snapped.“Not from you.”
Silence.Then he added, “You have my word.”