Filed to story: Submitting to My Bestie’s Daddy Read Online >>???
She shook her head and brought her voice up to a high-pitched coo. “But we shouldn’t be talking about that in front of little Elio.”
I swallowed. “Right.”
She nuzzled his hair. “Whaddya say we play a new game, huh? I learned some great ones while you were gone.”
Elio clapped, and I nodded mutely.
As Dahlia pulled the table out of the way and moved Elio to the floor, I realized with total certainty that I didn’t want Sal hurt. He might be a Russian spy, and he might be a shithead who ran out on my mother and me until we were useful to him, but he was still my dad, whatever that meant anymore. I couldn’t picture him injured, much less dead. I’d rather he ran away again, leaving him the opportunity to come back and hurt us again someday.
What kind of person did that make me?
*Giovani*
Tallon paused at the door to the office to allow me in first. I unlocked the door with a small smile. Gabriele mentioned a few months ago that he’d sat down Alessandro’s whole team for a lesson on manners, and it seemed to have stuck with one brother.
I marched in ahead of him and took my seat. He shut the door quietly behind him and took his position in the middle of the room. In his brightly colored suit, he looked surprisingly official for a kid of barely eighteen.
“Report,” I said.
He nodded. “Gabriele said we weren’t to contact you until you got home, but something else happened last night.”
I grimaced. I knew as I promised Olivia that something like this might happen, but I couldn’t rush her out of Naples, not when she looked at me like that… and not, if I was being honest, when I thought she might be an early target.
Tallon handed over a manila folder simply labeled with yesterday’s date. I flipped it open to a few pictures of nothing more than ashes and a few crumbled walls.
“The Zaytsevs weren’t sure we knew we’d been caught,” I guessed. “Any casualties?”
“Two.” He grimaced. “That’s the third-best warehouse uptown. Alessandro thinks they just don’t know about our better ones, but my instinct leans toward a warning.”
I leaned back in my chair. They’d totally torched the thing, and with men inside. A warning would be smaller than that. I was inclined to agree with Alessandro, but I liked how steady Tallon seemed. I didn’t want to crush him.
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“If you’ll flip to the next picture.”
I turned the first layer of pictures over to reveal a single, full-color, letter-sized print of the bronze plaque next to the door that used to bear the name “Abramo,” the first name of our first Don masquerading as a last name. A new legend had been added to the bottom, carved in perhaps centimeter-tall cyrillic.
“I picked up a little Russian when Dmitri was last a problem,” Tallon said. “That there says, ‘Thin ice. One step forward.'”
“Two steps back,” I finished automatically.
He grinned, then gathered himself once more. “A cop wouldn’t look twice at it, but I was at the warehouse a couple of days ago. It’s definitely new, and I think the message is unmistakable.”
I peered at Tallon. Operators twice his age and skill would’ve missed something like that, and we would’ve blundered forward thinking the Russians only had a partial scope of our power. Hell, the kid learned Russian when I was barely handing him a loaded piece.
Somehow, between all his jokes and his garish clothes, he’d grown into someone worth keeping an eye on.
I nodded. “I think you’re right. We’ve got, what, six warehouses on that side of town?”
“Eight if you count the partials,” he added.
“Third best is too good to be a fluke.” I looked back down at the picture. “And they attacked so aggressively to show us they mean business, but they could be fronting more strength than they’ve got, trying to scare us away. If they had a significant presence in the city, we would’ve heard about them before Salvatore showed up at our gate.” I ran a hand through my hair and closed the folder. “Alright, take your brother and—”
Tallon cleared his throat. “My report’s not quite done.”
I eyed the teenager, looking for signs of disrespect. Even more so than when he walked in, he stood straight and tall. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said he was proud about the next part, but he didn’t have Alessandro’s cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. He simply looked pleased, and he hadn’t moved from his spot in the middle of the room.
I inclined my head and gestured for him to continue.
“Since we couldn’t reach you, and our team was leading this particular charge, I made a call.” He nodded. “You can turn to the next picture.”
Another set of images of ashes and rubble greeted my eyes. For a moment, I thought I was looking at the same pictures, but then I noticed that while the last pictures were taken in the dead of night, the sky in these showed the barest hint of sunrise on the horizon.
“That is the home of Stefan Sorokin, the man who caught Marcello in the first place. He shared it with his whole crew and no one else. Well,” Tallon said as he rubbed the back of his neck, “there was also a live-in cleaning lady who we’ve already cleared of any Russian involvement beyond her heritage, but I got her out before the fire started.”
I exhaled a little in disbelief. This boy, whom I’d watched grow up in front of my eyes, had selected nearly the exact same course of action I would have without a single word from me, and minimized innocent casualties in the process. I kept my eyes bent on the pictures until I could be certain the shock wore off my face. I was impressed, more so than I would have expected, but I didn’t want to let him know that.
“Casualties?” I asked. “And how sure are you?”
The thing about fire that up-and-comers like him didn’t always realize was that casualties weren’t guaranteed.
He swallowed. “Five in total, counting Stefan, and pretty sure. I took a three-man team in with me and left another outside. We worked down from there, and the ground team cleaned up any runners. I personally checked the pulse of every member of his crew we identified, and either Russians have some new heartbeat tricks we don’t know about, or they’re dead. I sent them away with our clean-up guys before we even torched the place. News is running a deathless fire.”
I nodded slowly. Even if they’d been alive, our clean-up guys did stuff with acid that turned even my stomach.
“Business impact?” I asked.
“It seems like they were cooking something in the basement, but we had to take it apart or risk exploding the place.” He shrugged. “Looked like meth to me, but you never know.”
I dropped the folder back to the desk and looked up at him. He’d done such an efficient job that I could barely come up with any notes to give him for next time.
“Done with your report now?”
He flinched a little. “One last thing. Final picture.”
I found another large, full-color image. On the concrete steps, another message was carved in wobbly, much larger cyrillic. I quirked an eyebrow at him.
“Mine. I let the moment get to me.” He grimaced. “It says check your own ice.”
It was a little reckless, the first breath of a mistake he’d made. An extremely clever and not very pocket-motivated cop could put the two together. But the chances of that in our city were so small as to be laughable. What was more likely was that the Russians would see, as I would have wanted to, that for every piddly hit they managed on us, we’d hit back far harder.
I closed the folder and nodded. “Alright.”
“We’ve seen new tails sniffing around us since then.” He shrugged. “It looks like the war might be back on, as much as they can manage.”
“Tallon,” I said slowly.
He shrank slightly into himself.
“This is good work. You made a logical decision and you acted on it before the enemy could think we were weak when I left town.” I tapped the folder. “And good reporting as well.”
He visibly exhaled.
“Next time, I don’t want you to hesitate around me either.”
