Page 106 of Freed
I stop at the window and look out into the dark grounds below. Security lights cut across the garden in pale white bars. Somewhere upstairs, Elizabeth is lying in my bed frightened, thinking God knows what of me.
My jaw tightens.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” I say.
Cesaro says nothing. He only waits.
“First, I want every call made from this house in the last seventy-two hours. Staff, guards, kitchen, drivers. Personal phones, burner phones, I don’t care. Pull them all.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Second, I want eyes on Marino. On his daughter. On every man in his circle who has the kind of pride that rots into spite.”
Cesaro nods once.
“Third—” I turn back to him. “We tell no one Elizabeth is stable.”
His gaze sharpens. “You want them uncertain.”
“I want them sloppy.”
A slow understanding settles over his face.
“If whoever ordered this thinks they failed,” I continue, “they’ll either try again or they’ll panic and reach for the person paying them. Either way, they move.”
“And when they do?”
I smile.
This one reaches my eyes.
“When they do, I close my hand.”
Cesaro’s expression hardens into something almost pleased. “A trap.”
“A hunt.”
I move back behind the desk and pull a sheet of paper toward me.
“Spread word through the wrong channels that the doctor is worried,” I say. “Say she’s weak. Say the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Say I’m furious and distracted.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Especially distracted.”
Because men only strike a second time when they think the first blow landed.
I start writing names.
Federico.
His daughter.
Two Marino cousins with more ambition than sense.
Three intermediaries who move gossip between old families and new money.
And under that, one final name.
