Chapter 29
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
SINCLAIR
“ W hat the fuck do you mean, it was empty?” Aurora shouts, slamming her hands on the conference table and leaning over to bark into the phone we have on speaker. Luc’s voice comes back through angry and failing to curb his own emotions at the situation.
“The fucker torched it. There’s nothing here. Whatever he was using it for, he’s moved on. He went full scorched earth.”
“You sweep every square inch of that property and the surrounding areas and call me back in one hour. I want to know what he was doing there,” Aurora demands.
“On it, Don Bianchi,” Luc replies before hanging up.
Aurora stalks back to her desk and drops down into her chair, rubbing her temples in small circles. Benny pushes away from the table and follows after her, standing at her back and kneading her shoulders.
“If he’s torched the place, then we’re hurting him. He wouldn’t have destroyed that location if it hadn’t been important to him.”
“That’s not why I’m upset, Benny. If he’s destroyed it, then it’s likely that anyone he was keeping there is already dead.”
I nod in agreement. “It’s highly unlikely it was simply a drop off location if he’s felt the need to torch it.”
“Bingo,” Aurora replies.
“Fuck,” Benny says as he realises that in discovering this location and interrupting Charles’s delivery, we probably sentenced other people to death. Charles not only confirmed the address when we interrogated him, but how many women had been delivered to it in the last month.
“We have to take him out,” Enzo says to my left. “We must have enough intel on his organisation by now to be able to cut the heads off the hydra in one fell swoop?”
“We have a lot, but we’ll need everyone in on this,” I reply.
“Luc’s got us covered for weaponry, Gabriella has the intel, and every one of the capos has the numbers to help us coordinate a strike on multiple locations,” Enzo says.
“Okay, so what’s our primary target?” Aurora asks, rolling with the suggestion.
“Hit them where it hurts. Take out the highest earning branch,” Nico says.
“Hit The Knights?” she queries.
“Yeah, coordinate attacks on their primary warehouses,” Enzo suggests.
“But what about the drug houses he’s absorbed? It’s a tidy little revenue stream. They bring in enough to help bankroll anyone with half an idea of taking over. It would take longer, but it would definitely be enough.” Aurora’s questions take the air out of everyone's sails. Everyone in the room slumps back into their chairs like week-old balloons. I wish she was wrong, but she has us there .
“We don’t have the resources to hit that many targets simultaneously. Not effectively anyway,” I confirm, resting my elbows on the table and realising it's my turn to rub my temples.
“We need to come up with another way to take out his other revenue streams,” Aurora says, tapping her index finger to her bottom lip.
It’s a cute little habit she’s picked up when we’re holding meetings. It’s usually the precursor to her throwing out an irritatingly clever idea that I kick myself for not thinking of first. I pride myself on being ten steps ahead of everyone, whereas she’s just happy to be running circles around me.
“What are you thinking, colibrì ? I can see the cogs turning from here,” I say.
“Not sure yet, maybe something and nothing,” she muses in a playful voice. Suddenly she stands and crosses back to the table, leaning over to get her phone. Dialling and flicking it to speakerphone, she tosses it back on the desk.
“Don Bianchi,” comes Stefano’s low rumble over the line.
“I'm calling a meeting. Round up the capos and get them here in two hours.” Her orders are short and to the point.
“Anything else, boss?”
“Get me an update on the girl from Doc Em,” Aurora adds. The end of the line goes quiet, which sets off Aurora’s bullshit detector. “Is there something I need to know, Tiero?”
“There’s no need to last name me, boss.”
“Explain,” Aurora says, brooking no more stalling.
“The girl isn’t at the hospital. She was released yesterday into the care of… Luc Romano.”
“That sounds like a piece of information I should have been made aware of, Stefano.”
“I agree, which is why I’ve just spent the last ten minutes arguing with Katerina as to why she didn’t tell us yesterday. ”
I struggle to hold in my laugh when I catch Doc Em’s loud and angry response to Stefano’s words. I don’t catch everything but there’s a ‘she’s a grown ass woman’, ‘she was fit to be discharged’ and ‘she’s safer with him than on her own’.
“Hand the phone to Doctor Mancini. Now ,” Aurora orders.
There are some muffled voices before a rather contrite-sounding, “Don Bianchi.”
“I don’t know what the fuck is going on over there, nor do I care, but when I entrust the safety of a patient into your care, I expect the courtesy of an update when there are changes. Do I make myself perfectly clear?”
“Yes, Don Bianchi. I should have called you yesterday. It was my mistake. I assumed you’d tasked Luc with her safety and that was my error and I still should have reported back to you.”
“Thank you. Can you hand the phone back to Stefano?”
There are more muffled noises before Stefano comes back on the line. “Sorry, boss.”
“It’s fine. Just get everyone here, including you.”
“On it,” he says. “Anything else?”
“Yeah. You and the doc aren’t fooling anyone.” Aurora smiles and ends the call before he can say another word.
“You going to fill us in on the plan?” I ask.
“I don’t have a plan… I have a vague idea of a plan that refuses to solidify into a tangible thought. I think we need everyone to be able to hash this out. It’s foolish not to utilise the talents of the people I trust, not when the stakes are so high.”
She’s met with a sea of heads nodding in agreement because she’s not wrong. It will take more than just us to successfully annihilate Max De Luca.
“Everyone, pipe down,” Aurora says as she rises from her chair at the conference room table. “You’ve all had some great ideas so far, but we need to nail down the details.” She takes the notepad from Enzo’s hands, giving it a quick once over. “Right, the plan is to hit The Knight’s most strategic locations simultaneously. Leandro’s men will take the warehouse. Luc, you’ll take the Knight leader’s compound. I want the warehouse destroyed, but Gabriella’s intel has an estimate of twenty to thirty women currently being held there. I need their safety to be one of your top priorities, Leandro. Vittoria, it will be your job to get them to safety. Use any of our safe houses for as long as you need them for.”
There’s not a shadow of doubt in the faces before her. Luc is quick to agree, but he still has a face like thunder. When he arrived, the first thing he did before the meeting started was request a private audience with Aurora. It seems they’ve made peace about Luc’s heavy-handed approach with the woman we rescued and she’s granted him permission for Miss Willow Hunter to remain in his care. I need to ask Aurora later what’s going on there.
“Gabriella will coordinate with all teams to assign additional resources where needed. That will be Dante and Dom’s men. You’ll split your men into roaming teams that can be deployed as necessary to back us up. Myself and my team will be going after Max. It’s likely that as soon as he’s alerted to our attacks, he’ll deploy his men to the warehouse first, but he’ll hang back so we need something to draw him out. And that’s me.” Aurora lays out her plan with unwavering conviction.
The dipping heads stop in one collective snap of focus to the end of the table. There’s a brief moment of silence before every one of them starts strenuously objecting. Voices are clambering over each other, getting louder and louder until she holds up a hand and they all fall silent .
“Shut the fuck up, the lot of you. I’ll take Enzo, Nico, and Benny to one of the drug dens to draw Max out. We need to stagger it. He needs to think we’re throwing everything at The Knights' locations and that I’m easy pickings.”
“Even if we target the smallest of his labs, that’s not enough manpower to take it down. He’ll know it’s a trap.”
“Whether he does or doesn’t, it won’t matter. The temptation will be too great. He’ll risk it. And that’s where Stefano’s men will come in.”
Everyone around the table turns to Stefano. “My men will stand back until Max is on site. His team will be stretched thin if you’re all doing your jobs at the other locations. The Knights are his highest stream of revenue. He’d be a fool not to send the bulk of his men to protect it.”
“He’s not exactly the most reasonable of men,” Vittoria snorts derisively. “We’ve all seen the pictures from the pig farm. The volume of bone fragments we’ve found already in the pigsty is a testament to that.”
I catch the shadow that passes over both Aurora and Enzo’s faces at her outburst and I take it upon myself to respond to her before she finds herself on the receiving end of both of their wrath. “ Don Bianchi is fully aware of Max De Luca’s state of mind. I think you’ll find it’s her call, not yours. Unless you have anything else you would like to add to the conversation?”
Vittoria blanches and recognising her mistake instantly. Flicking her gaze down to the table in deference to Aurora, she speaks in a hushed tone, “Apologies, Don Bianchi. I meant no offence.”
“Whether you intended to offend me or not is irrelevant. What Max De Luca cares most about is not his father’s legacy. His organisation affords him the freedom to explore his depravities, but what he wants, what he needs more than anything else, is someone who can withstand him. He needs me.” Her voice is steady and I know she’s right, but the idea of risking her in any way creates a pit in my stomach that’s threatening to crack me wide open.
“That’s a weakness we can exploit to our advantage. Not only am I going to make sure we take him out, but I will cripple the entire De Luca operation too,” she declares, making eye contact with every capo at the table.
“What about the rest of his assets?” Etta asks. “Aren’t there multiple smaller laboratories, and what about the weapons side of his operation?”
Gabriella takes this one. “That’s where I come in. Once we’re clear of all De Luca locations, I’m going to send everything I’ve got on the narcotics side of things to the authorities, with back ups to the press to make sure they follow through. Etta, it will be your job to be thorough with the clean up so when the feds dismantle the supply chain we can’t be tied back to it.”
“And the weapons…” Luc chimes in. “I’ll be absorbing them and raiding the warehouses, while the cops are busy dealing with the fallout from the raid on The Knights.”
Everyone goes quiet. There’s a few exhales of breath and the odd hand gripping the back of a neck before Leandro summarises. “So we hit the big targets hard and fast, lure a psychopath into a trap, rescue thirty women, do this all in record time so as not to alert the authorities and then coordinate a hostile takeover of his remaining weapons stores, while destroying the largest drug supply chain in the city?”
“Yes,” I say at the same time as Aurora, Enzo and Stefano.
“And when are we doing this?” Dom asks.
Looking down at her watch briefly, she then looks him dead in the eye and says, “In six hours.”
For a moment, I worry they’ll all start shouting out the myriad of reasons why this can’t be done, but to my surprise, they all leap into action. Some are pulling out phones and calling their deputies, mobilising them into action. Gabriella is already opening her laptop and barking out orders to each capo so she can coordinate their teams. Dante stands and drags his chair across to me.
“You and I need to hack The Knights’ accounts,” he says, dropping down beside me. I raise an eyebrow at him, wondering what he’s thinking. “If we’re going to be funding and rehabilitating their victims, then those fuckers can pay for it. Plus, if any of the pricks make it out alive, I want to make sure they have nothing to help them claw their way back into the game.”
Looking over to Aurora, I’m entirely unsurprised to notice that she’s been listening to Dante’s suggestion despite the loud chatter going on around her. She nods her agreement and Dante and I get to work.
Aurora stands, everyone stopping what they’re doing and looking up at her. “You have five hours to make this happen. Tonight we end this.”