Sticking my head out of the door, I made sure Avi's door was still closed before shooting across the hall.
It wasn't half a minute later that there was a quiet knock at the door, making me rush toward it, thinking Santi wanted to tell me something.
Only it wasn't Santi at my door.
It was Brio.
With a shit-eating grin on his face.
"So, I wasn't sure if maybe you might need this," he said, his arm raising. And there, dangling from his fingertip was my simple black bra.
"You're a child," I declared, reaching out to snatch the bra away, tossing it behind me into the room.
"Hey, man, I'm not the one leaving my delicates around the common room," he said, shrugging. And, damn him, he had a good point.
"Hey," I said, leaning forward, looking past him to make sure Santi wasn't nearby. "I know you're in your element today," I told him. "But this is new for Santi."
"What are you trying to say to me, babe?"
"Watch out for him," I demanded.
"Always," he agreed, nodding. "No need to worry about us."
As it turned out, he was right.
I didn't need to worry about them.
But I guess they should have worried about us...
Chapter Fifteen
Santi
"Spit it out," I demanded, feeling Brio's gaze on the side of my face as I drove away from my parking spot.
"She's a good woman," he declared.
"I agree."
"It's fine to have fun," he told me. "So long as you don't fuck her over."
"Is that a threat, Brio?" I asked, surprised.
"I like her," he said, shrugging. "If she came to me saying you fucked her over, I would have to find some way to punish you for it. And then I'm in hot water with your brother. It'd be a whole fucking thing. So what I'm saying is, there are women you fuck around with, and there are women you give a fuck about. Don't confuse the two."
"Trust me, Brio, you don't need to have this conversation with me. I've been thinking of all the ways this could go wrong for weeks."
"And?"
"And I've decided to see if maybe it can go right," I told him, shrugging.
To that, he nodded. "I can get behind that. So, you gonna have extra fun with this fucker for her?"
"She'd be pissed if I did," I told him.
"Nah, man. That shit's romantic," he declared, nodding as he looked out the side window.
And, I guess, to someone with wires crossed like Brio, it was.
What was more romantic than a severed toe?
"Did your brother say what the connection is?" Brio asked as we drove. "Lombardis or Espositos?"
"He said he'd leave it up to us to figure out the details," I said, stomach twisting a bit all the ways Brio might extract information such as that.
Certain other images made those potential ones more tolerable, though.
Bullets ripping through Avi's mom, her hot blood splattering across my face.
The way my son's face crumpled when I'd told him his mom was gone.
The way he broke down at the gravesite.
Then the image of Avi in the hospital covered in Alessa's blood.
The image of her in that big bed that made her seem so small.
The images of her wincing in pain whenever she tried to move.
Yeah, I was starting to think we should have stopped for a coffee for Brio so he had the energy he might need to have some 'fun' with the bastard who put all those images in my head.
"Did your brother say how they finally found the fucker?" Brio asked, tapping his fingers on his armrest.
"Some random fucking tourist video they came across being taken in the area. They were able to trace it from there."
Right up to a three-floor walk-up above a bar.
Which worked out. Because it was early in the morning. And the bar was still shut down.
"Nah, next corner, man," Brio directed when I tried to park. He was the expert at this sort of thing, so I just followed instructions without comment.
Five minutes later, we were walking up the stairs to the apartment. Brio looked around for cameras while I just stared ahead.
I wasn't sure what I should have been thinking right then, what others thought or felt when they knew they were about to kill someone.
I guess I should have been thinking about turning around, not doing it. But my moral compass had never pointed due north. And while time and space from the incident had dulled some of the rage that had been coursing through me in the days and weeks following Brit's murder, but the lion's share of it was still there, simmering under the surface.
I'd lost my mom young, thinking she was gone forever, so I knew how that feeling of loss ebbed and flowed. I knew Avi would be experiencing it in varying levels of intensity for the rest of his life.
This bastard had to pay for that.