Collateral (Collateral Damage 1)

That night two years ago, he’d told me to give a message to my father. To warn him that he’d be back to take something precious.

I hadn’t, though.

I hadn’t gone to my father.

If I had, would he have been able to stop this?

What I did instead was look up Stefan Sabbioni and learn everything I could about him. But nothing I found gave me any clues as to why he’d come after me or my father.

The Sabbioni family is a mafia family from Sicily. From what I learned, they essentially owned the island and had some territory in the states, New York mostly.

But just as their power here was growing, Stefan’s older brother, Antonio, had turned over evidence against his father about which I could find nothing online. The father was extradited to the states and Antonio taken into protective custody. Stefan’s father, also named Antonio, was killed shortly after in an American prison. He never even made it to trial.

The family was weakened considerably, and Stefan Sabbioni was on a sort of house-arrest. At least, he wasn’t allowed to leave the island of Sicily under threat of arrest and extradition to the states.

So how was he able to get here tonight?

I know they’d been regaining their power over the last two years but it’s not like the mafia posts their business on Google, so I don’t know any details and have no clue how powerful he is or what he’s capable of.

Well, I have one clue.

I mean, tonight is a pretty big clue.

I shake my head, still trying to wrap my brain around this. Around why and how.

Footsteps on the stairs have me up on my knees. I quickly put the drawer back in place and rush into the bathroom. It’s the only room with a lock, so I lock it and switch on the shower before sitting down on the closed lid of the toilet.

I touch the dusty tissue paper for the first time in two years and unwrap it, tearing it a little where the tape is stuck.

I kept the broken necklace in a nest of paper, this gift Stefan gave me on my sixteenth birthday. I don’t want to touch it. I never cleaned off the crusted blood. I didn’t have to. I know what it is. I knew the moment after he left when I tore it off my neck to study it for all of two seconds.

The Marchese family crest.

Yes, we’re that pretentious.

My father wasn’t the one who built the shipping empire, but he did grow it to what it is today. The company isn’t his technically, even though he took the Marchese family name when he married my mother. She’s the blood Marchese.

The keeping of the Marchese name is a requirement of the inheritance that’s always passed down to the first-born on his or her twenty-first birthday. My father is a sort of warden until I come of age, even though I’m not first-born. My brother, Gabe, is in no condition to run a company like this. To run much of anything.

I know how my father has grown it into the empire it has become. His hands are in no way clean.

What does that make me if I live off that money?

I think about that a lot and as much as I know how powerless I am, as many times as my father has proven he will drag me back kicking and screaming when I try to run, I’m still guilty.

“Gabriela?”

I startle at his voice. My father is just on the other side of the door.

“I’m having a shower,” I call out.

“I’ll wait.”

“It’ll be a while.”

“I’ll wait.”

Fuck.

I get up, stash the necklace in the cabinet under the sink and strip off my clothes to shower. I don’t hurry, hoping he’ll get tired of waiting, but when I’m finished a full half-hour later, my hair towel dried and wearing a bathrobe, I find my father sitting on the chaise looking uncomfortable among the too-delicate, too-feminine furnishings, none of which I chose.

He gets to his feet and comes toward me. I try to read him but can’t. I’ve never seen him like this.

“There’s a full month before the wedding has to happen,” he says.

To hear him say that word, it’s almost surreal.

“I will find some way to stop it,” he promises.

“Why is he doing this?”

He raises his head a little and his lips tighten. That’s guilt. Well, not that he feels guilty. It’s more acknowledgement that yes, he did something bad and whatever Stefan has on him, is bad.

“What happened to McKinney?” I ask because he’s not going to answer that first question.

“Sabbioni owns the docks now.”

“What?”

“He took over McKinney’s territories.”

Abe McKinney owns docks in several ports where my father’s ships land. He and McKinney had reached an agreement several years ago that made him the powerhouse he is today.