The Life - Rebirth (The Life 4)

“Oh, no thanks, help yourself.” I felt my anger cool as she took her first big sip before emptying the glass and going back for more. She finished off half the bottle before I left. Any longer in there, and I would’ve strangled her with my bare hands. She had become very maudlin, and as if sensing doom at her door had had quite a lot to say about how unfair life is. I’m sure that by this evening, no later than tomorrow, she’d feel even more so.

As predicted, the house was full again in the evening. I did my part, making sure I was seen. I was amiable and non-intrusive when Felice’s friends, including Teresa and her husband along with Carlo and his wife Michele, even Bruno and Luna showed up with her husband.

Since Sal was the only one here I cared about, I made sure he was okay ensconced as he was in the corner of the room with his cronies. It was easy enough to slip away to my room before leaving the house under cover of dark. I had to get to Antonio and Teresa’s place to switch the wine bottles in case the cops went sniffing in that direction later.

The hardest part of the trip was the B and E, and that too was easy. I made quick work of doing what I came for before heading back to the palazzo. I made sure to remove the spyware before breaking both bottles and tossing them away as far away from their place as possible. A couple grand wasted since the bottles themselves are worth just as much as the wine, but whatever.

LYON

“Mouth says the screw-up is home right now, getting ready for another trip. He’s had cabin fever since the lockdown, and now that things have been lifted, he has the need to trod the globe.”

“Tell her to keep him stateside for now. Is this kid good-looking?”

“He’s alright.”

“Doesn’t matter; as long as he’s got a Y chromosome, he’ll do.”

We’d just landed in the backwoods of bumfuck Alaska after damn near a whole day. “How the hell did this kid make it all the way out here on her own?” Tyler came to stand next to me while the others got themselves together, what with stretching and groaning like women in the throes of labor.

“Tyler, my boy, don’t fuck with women. They get wet without water, bleed every month without being injured, can make something soft without a bone hard, and they create life, don’t fuck with them. It’s obvious her coming all the way out here was a big fuck you to our boy Gabe. He musta really pissed her off.”

“Damn, another one then.”

“Yeah, and another bitch made delinquent will soon be on the hook if we bring her in.”

“How sure are you that this jealousy thing would work?”

“If you knew someone was sniffing around your woman, the woman you still loved but sent away for her own safety, how would you feel? What would you do? Okay then.”

He’d puffed up like a pufferfish at that one. Oh, to be young and dumb again, no thanks. What am I saying? Age has no place in this fight. I’ve been married to Kat for damn near ever, and I still don’t want assholes in her vicinity. “You bunch ready? Looks like the terrain isn’t so bad. The jeeps should make it okay going in. Cord, are we ready? Elena, Daniel, you’re with me.”

I wanted to send them back to the island, but Elena had the bright idea that a woman might be needed when we make our approach. I’m thinking any eighteen-year-old who chooses to come here has given up on fucks to give and isn’t necessarily scared of anything.

Add the fact that she’s a Lyon female who looks like Mengele, and well, maybe we should be the ones afraid of her. But Ma wasn’t hearing it, and since I don’t feel like being nagged to death on a mission, I gave in. The damn air’s been filled with weed smoke since we stepped off the plane. I don’t even want to know how they snuck that shit here, but the pothead assured us that weed was, in fact, legal in both Virginia and Alaska. He would know, damn.

It hadn’t been as easy as we thought finding the exact location, and I kinda found myself being proud of this kid. The landmass was huge, and she could’ve been in any one of the hundreds of little inlets, which would’ve taken us forever to search out and find, but the name she was now using had popped up in a hospital database that listed her address.

I wasn’t sure what we were going to find all the way out here. Some of the places we passed were not looking their best, but the surrounding beauty alone more than made up for it. I tried to imagine what Mengele would’ve done in her shoes, and I know for damn sure that Gabriel kid would be dead or missing a limb, and my little darling would be sitting pretty behind bars.