Prologues
Leo
I’ve got a whiteboard with pictures from Dario Ferrano’s wedding. I’ve got all the members of the family on the board. I’ve decided on a couple ways to get back at Tommy Ferrano for cutting me out of the Fete action. Things haven’t been good since my uncle died. A lot of people in Vegas are showing me disrespect and it has a lot to do with the fact that Ferrano refused to back Ben Goldberg’s club unless he cut me out of the action. Fete won’t get far off the ground if I have my way. And the people who get in my way always pay.
John Lewis will get his just desserts for siding with Ferrano. Maybe I’ll pick up his hot and horny wife and fuck that bitch with a switchblade. And the Ferrano family? The guy keeps his sweet young wife under lock and key but his sister, the widow, is a pretty young thing. She should fetch a decent ransom.
Or maybe she won’t be ransomed. Maybe she’ll fetch a price a different way.
Zack
I’m in the relationship game. I make strategic relationships that help me help my clients. Sometimes my clients aren’t the good guys. Sometimes, like this time, I’m helping multiple sides with both good and evil traits at the same time.
The task force that hired and then later blackmailed me into getting involved in researching the ties between Tom Ferrano and a whack of human trafficking connections was pushing hard for me to get both Ferrano sons fully on board. I was having luck with one. But the other? Not so much.
I’d worked hard at earning their trust and it took time but I became friends with both of them.
I read people.
Dario is a good guy, he’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s just 25 and he and wants out of the wiseguy grey area his family is in. He’ll go dark if need be, but deep down he wants to live clean.
He thinks strategically and can hold his shit together. He’s gonna be invaluable to the task force in bringing down the people in Kruna because he won’t let them see behind the mask he puts on for them. No one sees behind that mask unless he wants you to see it.
There are a lot of places just like Kruna. Always will be. The poor want money and rich that already have it? So what do they want?
They want power. The richer the average rich guy gets, the more he wants. Not because he needs more material shit but because it’s basic human nature to always aspire to having more. The super-rich people that Kruna are made up of and cater to are people with everything they need and want. It’s like some of them are so over-privileged, so entitled and out-of-touch, that they become monsters and use their money and their connections to live out their hedonistic fantasies and exert their power.
I’d like to believe I’d never go to those extremes, no matter how much money and power I had. But I’ve seen power and money go to people’s heads and I’ve seen what an abundance of power can do. Power can corrupt the best of us; I’ve seen it happen repeatedly.
The Kruna organization was started by a couple of people in the 70’s and one of them is from the Frost family. A family with generations of rich and power-hungry people, including a politician named Sylvia Frost who paved the way for many other women in politics.
She’s a 67-year-old senator who has made a lot of enemies but she’s oblivious to the fact that there are a lot of people who want to take her down.
She’s cold and calculated and thinks she’s got the world under her thumb. Her head is so far up her own ass she is clueless. She wants to run for president and there are people who are out to make that happen for her as well as those who are determined to stop that from happening. She would be extremely dangerous.
There are also a few people who know about her involvement in some shady shit, including that she and her now dead husband were seed partners in Kruna. She hasn’t been involved in ten years and one of the goals of this task force is to connect her to Kruna.
The task force leader, Barrington “Barry” Dresden, is also someone who has a good deal of power and he has a serious hate on for Sylvia Frost. He wants Kruna taken down and his hidden agenda is that he wants her to be implicated as being involved. He’s not afraid to involve some very powerful players to make it happen. He assembles teams to get shit done.
I also assemble teams so by involving me, he has a better chance of getting what he wants.
There are multiple teams attempting to infiltrate the Kruna organization and I’m only one small player in the bigger game. I was tasked with gaining the trust of the Ferrano brothers in order to get to their father.
Their father wasn’t an original partner, he joined later, but he’d been friends with the senator for twenty odd years. Dario Ferrano marrying a Kruna slave has worked out in the favor of the task force along with Dresden’s plans to take Sylvia Frost down.
Tommy Ferrano, aka Thomas Ferrano Jr., he’s a harder nut to crack. I managed to earn his trust and he’s not happy to find out that he was wrong about me. Neither is Dario.
But, where Dario is gonna be willing to play ball to a degree because of the fact that his new bride was hurt by that place and he wants to end the association, Tommy is gonna be a challenge at every turn. It’ll be like pulling teeth. From a rabid dog. A rabid dog who wants to pay me back for my deceit. Great. As if I needed another enemy.
Somehow, I gotta get things done. My reputation and my trade secrets depend on it. My trade secrets keep me in this game and they are also what keeps me from having a price put on my head.
The task force believ
es that this upcoming Kruna Partner Summit, with Dario and the blushing bride Felicia Ferrano, aka Angelica Macleod, in attendance is just the ticket.
Alessandro Romero
Rocco came into my office on a Tuesday morning and sat down in the leather chair in front of my desk. I looked up from my computer screen and gave a jerk of my chin.
The chin jerk didn’t get him talking. He looked nervous. Rocco doesn’t get nervous.
“What?”
“I dug, like you asked. Zachary Jacobs is nosing around for information because the son of the late Tom Ferrano took possession of a Kruna slave whose sister was kidnapped from Alaska.”
That got my attention.