Page 62 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
Ivan glared. Just glared. The kind that flattened the air for two seconds.
"Okay." Alek tapped the table once with two fingers. "Sit down."
I sat. I tugged the collar higher with what dignity I had left and folded my hands on the table. The coffee pot steamed between us. No one poured. Everyone was waiting on Alek.
Alek waited until the room was completely his.
"We found them."
The words went in flat and then bloomed. Heat moved up the back of my neck before I had decided to be angry. It crawled into my jaw. It sat behind my eyes. The face I had been chasing in the dark of my own head for weeks finally had a name attached to it, and the name was being spoken in this room, in this voice, by my brother, who did not say anything he was not sure of.
I did not interrupt. I let him finish. I kept my hands flat. The skin at my temple where the small scar sat went tight the way it always did when blood found its way to the wrong places.
"Ivan."
Ivan stepped to the table. He did not sit. He never sat when he was about to deliver. He set the folder down, opened it, and went through it the way a butcher goes through a side of beef. Methodical. Unbothered.
"Marchetti," he said. "Cesare. He calls himself a businessman out of an office on Avenue Z. The wine in the front of the office is real. Everything past the back door is not."
The name landed in me the way I had known it would. Cesare Marchetti. I had not had it before this morning. I had it now. It was not going anywhere.
"His cousin Nicolo holds the money. Soft hands, hard ledger. Six nights out of seven he sleeps in a brownstone on Brighton Fourth Street. The seventh he sleeps next to a woman named Renata who believes his name is Nico Romano."
"His nephew Dario holds the muscle. Twenty-six years old. Twitchy. He is the one who drove the car the night they came for you. He was not the one who pulled the trigger. The one who pulled was a Polish hire named Tomasz Krol. We will get to Tomasz."
My hand became a fist on its own. I opened it again. Slowly.
"Cesare's wife is Lucia. She has never touched a gun. She does not need to. She runs the house on Manhattan Beach and she keeps the calendar in her head. If you want to know where any Marchetti will be on a given afternoon, the answer lives behind her teeth."
"Three houses. The Brighton brownstone is the money. A garage off Gerritsen Avenue is the muscle. A townhouse on Ocean Parkway is where Cesare sleeps when he is not at the beach. We have eyes on all three. We have ears in two."
Mikhail let out a low whistle. "Three houses for one cockroach."
"Quiet," Alek said, without looking at him. "Let Ivan finish."
"Two cops on the payroll. Detective Russo and Detective DeLuca out of the Sixtieth Precinct. They make calls go quiet on the Sheepshead side. A third name keeps coming up on the same envelopes. Detective Hartigan. He takes the cash and does nothing with the work he was paid to bury. We think he is federal."
"Shipments are counted, not dated. The next is small arms. Seven moves from now. The one after that is the one thatmatters. Twelve from now. They will not move it through Red Hook the way the manifest will say. The real warehouse is on Coney Island Creek. Red Hook is the decoy."
He closed the folder. He pressed the cover down with his palm the way you press a lid on a pot you want to forget for a while.
"That is what we have."
My jaw hurt. I unclenched it.
"When do we get even?"
The table went still.
Ivan looked at me. Not unkind. Just looking.
"That is not your personality, Daniil. You sound reckless. You sound like Mikhail."
"Reckless my ass." Mikhail's hand smacked the table flat. "That's bravery."
"That is stupidity." Alek's voice did not rise. It did not need to. "Daniil, usually you are the one who tells us to slow down. You sit in that chair and you make us plan. That is your seat. That is what that seat does."
"I am not in the mood to be that man tonight." I heard my own voice and it came out lower than I meant. "I lost too much."
