Stefano had also called in the LA cousins. Emmanuelle had been shocked. She wasn’t even sure it was legal as far as the council went. She knew Eloisa would never approve, and most likely, the council wouldn’t, either. Elie hadn’t protested, but then Elie liked a fight, especially a dangerous one. The worse the odds, the better he liked it. He also loved Emme and her family, and this one was for her. He detested traffickers, so adding that all together, even if later, his family called him on the carpet, he would still side with Stefano.
She had seven cousins, all excellent, experienced riders from LA. Severino, the oldest, ruled his family with an iron hand, much in the way Stefano did. There were six brothers and one sister. Velia, like Emmanuelle, was the youngest, and her brothers tended to watch over her. Stefano directed them up to the roof to get rid of enemies above them, first on the garage and then on the house. From there, the seven would work their way down to the balconies and kill all guards who might spot Valentino’s army moving on the house. They would then enter the rooms from the upper balconies and kill anyone in the rooms, room by room, upstairs. Their job was to ensure everyone on the upper story was dead.
Emmanuelle, Nicoletta and Mariko were to secure the girls and boys. They were to first kill the guard in the room with each girl or boy, then calm and assure her or him that they were there to rescue them but they had to stay where they were until the signal was given that they could be safely brought out of the mansion through the rear exit.
Stefano and Emmanuelle’s brothers would aid Valentino’s men inside as much as possible, but Giovanni and Vittorio would break off at Stefano’s command and help Geno, Salvatore and Lucca clear the street of Tommaso’s men.
Valentino was responsible for getting the teens checked out medically and turned over to the authorities he could trust to get them safely back to their homes. Bernado would check backgrounds as soon as he could identify who the teens were, in case they were taken off the street and had nowhere to go and no family to take them in.
“Going in now, need your four,” Stefano said softly, using the code agreed on ahead of time with Val.
“Four” meant Dario and Severu, two of the men Val put his faith in. The other two were Levi and Axel Carson, brothers, two more of the ex-military, ex-mercenaries Dario had found and trained. They were Valentino’s men, not part of the family in the way Severu was, but dedicated solely to Valentino and Dario. Stefano wanted the four men to deal with the bodies in the garden area the Ferraro family would leave behind.
“Street is not clean. Street cleaners have not yet been employed. The roof is still dirty.” Stefano continued with his report. He meant there were still enemy eyes on the rooftop and on the streets, so the four would have to be very careful.
“Copy that,” Valentino replied.
Emmanuelle’s heart reacted to the soft sound of his voice. She’d kissed him. Told him she loved him. Tried to prepare him for what Tommaso and his uncle had done to Greta’s home. There was no way to prepare anyone for this kind of depraved nightmare. There was an army in the house, and he was going in. That was just terrifying, because Valentino wasn’t a man to hide behind his bodyguards.
“Be safe, everyone, in twos, watch each other’s backs. They’re armed. We need to do this in silence. Fast. We’re outnumbered,” Stefano reiterated. “Go.”
Emmanuelle stepped into the shadow that would take her past the guard at the gate and up the drive to her designated starting point. She was to take out every roving patrol in the section of acreage in the rose garden—gazebo, fountains, the flowering shrubs and trees that formed a beautiful arching tunnel she’d secretly hoped to get married under one day. This was one of the many places that anyone in the house could easily view from the windows and balconies. The way the house was built encouraged those inside to do just that. Having an auction taking place with food, drink, drugs and anything goes with the waitresses might have meant fewer guards watching the grounds from above.
She stopped just inside the mouth of the shadow tube, allowing her brain to acknowledge that her body was in one piece. Normally, riders would have studied the pattern and timing of patrols in an estate they were going to penetrate, but there was no time for that. There was also no real discipline to the way the guards were behaving.
Stefano told them, in the briefing, that it appeared Tommaso was using most of his own men inside, but had hired others for the guards outside in the street and grounds and even some in the house. It wasn’t a brilliant move when any of those men could have gone to the cops and told them who was peddling young teens—unless Tommaso planned on killing them all afterward. She wouldn’t put it past him to do so.