Free Long Live the King (An Italian Mafia Romance Duet #2) by Ws Greer

a towel to dry off. With my hair still wet and water dripping down my back, I open the door to find Dominic tossing his phone onto the bed in frustration. The pleasure-filled smile from a minute ago is gone, replaced by pure annoyance.
    “Hey, what’s wrong?” I ask. When he looks at me, I can see two emotions: anger and worry.
    “I gotta go back to the Lumiere,” he says.
    “Really? What’s wrong?”
    “Remember the truck I told you about, with Victor’s one-point-two million dollars in it?”
    “Of course. What about it?”
    “It’s missing.”
    “What?” I reply as my heart surges and feels like it may explode any second now.
    “It’s gone,” Dominic says, his voice low and stressed. “Someone stole it.”

Dominic
    T he confusion and frustration I feel as I approach the conference room is over-fucking-whelming. How the fuck could Victor’s truck have possibly gone missing? Jimmy had it parked in an alley behind the carwash he uses to launder money. That place is surrounded by wise guys virtually twenty-four-seven, so how the fuck does something like this happen? How could Jimmy have let this happen?
    As I push the doors to the Lumiere conference room open, the sight of them pisses me off. There are three captains in this family, and for all of them to have sent their crews out to look for a big ass eighteen wheeler and come up empty sends hot venom coursing through my veins. It’d be less of a problem if I didn’t have to call up Victor Fronzo and tell him that we lost his truck. That sounds so ridiculous to me, so I know how it’ll sound to him, especially when he already thinks Jimmy may have taken the truck on purpose. We already don’t like each other, so this stupid shit might be the last straw.
    I bypass the usual greeting and take my seat at the head of the table. Frankie, Tommy “Two Nines,” and the three captains take their seats as I light up a Cuban and puff the smoke towards the ceiling, trying my best to remain level-headed.
    “Alright,” I begin. “Maybe one of yous would like to explain to me how this truck went missing, because I’ve been thinking on it, and for the life of me I can’t come up with one good answer that fully explains it.”
    They all stare at each other like they don’t know how to speak English all of a sudden, and it makes my blood boil.
    I slam my fist on the glass table, startling every man in the room. “Wake the fuck up! What the fuck is the matter with all of you? I told Victor we’d settle this by paying interest on the stolen truck. Frankie and I just went to Chicago and dealt with Victor and that fucking ogre, Giovanni, and now you’re all looking around like there’s a fucking alien in the room. Pull your head out of your asses and tell me what the fuck is going on. Jimmy, you had the fucking truck, so how did you lose it?”
    Jimmy seems to look at everything in the room before he gets to me.
    “I don’t know what to say, Dominic,” he replies. “We had it behind the carwash, and everything was ready to go, but when I went to put in the extra half-a-mil and drive to Chicago, it was gone. There was broken glass on the ground where the truck had been, and whoever took it had to break the glass because I made sure the doors were locked. There’s no way I would’ve just left the truck unlocked knowing it was Victor’s. And I had my crew look everywhere. We all did, and nobody could find it. I’m sorry, Dominic.”
    His words don’t help me feel better, they just make me even more pissed off. I don’t have time for apologies. Victor isn’t going to want to hear any soft ass apologies. Losing this amount of money means war between the families. In one big swoop, everything we worked for is about to go up in smoke.
    “Do you hear how that sounds?” I ask, looking around the room at everyone. “Does that not sound like bullshit to any one of you? Because if I’m that fucking senior citizen, Victor Fronzo, and you took my truck and found