"You're wrong," Alfie said. "I've made it my business."
Umberto's expression hardened. "His father wants a word."
Alfie turned to Dante. "You got anything to say to your father?"
"Nothing."
"Then I guess his father is just shit out of luck," Alfie said. "So why don't you run along and go pass that on to your boss? Tell him his son has nothing left to say to him. If he has a problem with that, he can take it up with the Brazzi family."
Umberto hesitated before lowering his gun, his eyes on Dante. "You're making a mistake."
Dante didn't respond, watching as Umberto slipped into the back of the car. It sped from the garage, leaving Dante intact. He glanced at Alfie as the others disappeared into the darkness. "You just saved my ass."
"You dying would hurt my Gabby, which means we have to try to keep you breathing… you know, just until my little girl gets sick of your existence."
Chapter Twenty
"Where the ever-loving fuck could it be?" Genna muttered, looking through a dresser drawer in the master bedroom. She shifted things around, yanking out old clothes and tossing them behind her, onto the destroyed bed. Despite going through the rest of the place and fixing things up, making it more of a home, they never bothered with this room.
Admittedly, it freaked her out. She still wasn't sure what kind of people had lived there, but she'd never forgotten Chris's words from the garage, about the creepy reclusive lady living out there. Many days since then, while Matty worked and Genna stayed home, she imagined what that would be like—living there for decades, isolated, becoming an urban legend more than a genuine person.
The thought terrified her.
Once that drawer had been rifled through, Genna shut it, moving on to the next one to do the same thing. She raided the entire dresser before moving on to the bedside stands, giving up eventually and turning to the closet. Besides the clothes hanging up and the pile of shoes strewn beneath, a few small boxes were stacked together on a shelf, the last of the untouched leftover belongings.
Genna scowled at them.
Fuck it.
She stood on her tiptoes to pull the first two down, finding nothing of importance. She reached for the third box, yanking on it, her grip slipping as the cardboard tore.
"Shit!" she yelped, jumping back as the box came crashing down, everything spilling out. A loud clatter, followed by the sound of something rolling, like marbles scattering along the wood. Glancing down, Genna's heart nearly stopped, her jaw going slack.
A few inches from her bare foot lay a silver gun, the metal dull. Genna had no idea what kind it was. Despite growing up in the family she had, she knew little about guns. In a pinch she could pick one up and squeeze the trigger, maybe even hit something if she got lucky, but she wouldn't bet her life on it.
She didn't much like guns.
Genna stared at it for a minute, her eyes glossing around the rest of the box's contents, surveying the stray bullets that had scattered when it fell. Not finding what she wanted, she backed out of the bedroom and left the mess.
Not even going there.
She scanned the other bedrooms, knowing she'd find nothing. She'd already been through all of it, cleaning and organizing—nesting, as Matty called it. If she had come across it, she would've remembered.
She headed downstairs next.
No luck in the living room.
No luck in the dining room.
No luck in the kitchen.
What the fuck?
Sighing, Genna paused in the foyer, frustrated and out of places to search. She spotted the small stand near the door that held the telephone, eyeing the small drawer on it. Huh.
"Please, please, please," she whispered, tugging the drawer open, a frustrated groan escaping her. Empty. "Oh, fuck you!"
Slamming the drawer shut, she stomped through the house, giving up as she headed for the back door to storm out. It was around sixty degrees outside. Cool for the desert, maybe, but being as it was the middle of winter, snow likely covering every inch of her former home, it still felt almost like summertime to her. It was hard to gauge the passing of time when the weather seemed to only have two settings: hot and hotter.
The hard ground scraped against her filthy bare soles as she approached the Lincoln. For months, she'd slaved over the thing, rebuilding carburetors and rewiring systems and replacing parts and then redoing most of it when she