Page 10 of Wicked Villain

Corrado stops by his desk and regards me with cautious eyes that flick down to the gun in my hand.

I grin back at him, slide the gun in my pocket, and position myself a few paces away. I want to get a good look at him and make sure he doesn’t have any tricks up his sleeves. I also want him to loosen up enough to tell me what I need to know.

Cassian and Konstantin stay by the door, leaning casually against the wall.

“What do you want?” Corrado grates out, pressing a tight fist into the side of his leg. It’s an attempt to hide the tremor. A failed attempt I notice straightaway.

The problem with his question is, I want everything. Death, justice, retribution, all of it.

My gaze hardens as I stare back at him. Where do I truly begin?

Spineless motherfucker.

To the world at large, he’s a private wealth manager and investment adviser with reach in property and real estate development. But in the underground world, he’s a financial fixer for powerful crime families.

He’s the guy you get when you want to hide your offshore companies, launder money, smuggle illegal shit, handle off-the-grid investments, and keep your books clean so the Feds can’t see your filthy dealings.

Sadly, that all means old Corrado here has more access than he should to your secrets. And that is exactly what he used to rip my world apart.

He was the enabler. The fucker who opened the door to death’s harbinger but is guilty all the same.

Corrado continues watching me. Waiting.

I’m ready to speak now. “What do I want?” My tone carries a sing-song edge to it that makes him flinch. “I think I mostly want to destroy you.”

“Please don’t.” He holds up his hands.

I smirk and drag in a slow breath, smelling the air tinged with the scent of fear. “Please don’t, what? Tell the Camorra you’ve been selling their financial intelligence to the Feds? I could start with that. We could talk about how you were responsible for the Romanos’ underboss’s twenty-year sentence.”

“You don’t understand⁠—”

“Stolen assets and drug shipments worth millions, freight attacks that blocked the Irish from doing business for months.” I laugh. “Remember them? The Devlins? My cousins?”

Corrado’s skin grows paler, and his eyes round to huge saucers.

Truthfully, I don’t care about anyone else. Not even my so-called cousins. But it’s ammunition to weaken him. Let him know just how much I’ve unearthed and that he’s trapped. The only fucking way out is my way or the grave.

“Lev—”

“My mother and sister.” I retrieve my gun, cock the hammer, and point it at him. His gaze drops to it, dark and wary. “That was you, too, Corrado.”

“That was an accident.”

At least he knows there’s no point denying it. I shake my head. “How was that an accident? Explain it to me. I’d love to hear it. Tell me how my mother and ten-year-old sister ended up shot dead in cold blood. Tell me how I ended up left for dead, then in a coma for over a year. I missed their funerals.” Fuck, I hate the emotion that sneaks into my voice on that last sentence. But I can’t help it. I guess that part of my heart still works. It’s not often I feel it, but there we go.

“Things got out of hand.” He sniffles. “None of that was supposed to happen. None of you were supposed to be there.”

No… we weren’t supposed to be there.

We were all on vacation in Russia, visiting relatives. We returned to New York earlier than planned because Celia missed our new puppy. That was it. The reason. Something so simple, innocent, and ordinary became the classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the wrong place was never supposed to be home.

Corrado was hired by Micah Moretti, a fucking international black-market broker and criminal intelligence dealer. That’s the real motherfucker I’m after.

Moretti needed a way into our home to retrieve a microchip that came into my father’s possession. It contained identities of Moretti’s most powerful clients and proof of the secret alliances he’d arranged for them. In the wrong hands, like my father’s, it would have exposed powerful people who relied on him, and collapsed the network protecting him.

The thing about that was, no one knew about Micah Moretti until the intel we found days ago. Since then, I’ve been searching for him. But the bastard is like a ghost. No one can find him. Not even me. If I could…

Fuck, if I could, he’d already be ashes in the wind and I would have killed Corrado and everyone with the surname D’Auria.