a long while. And since they live in the same house, it was cause enough to worry. I flew down there, only to find she was right. My sister was gone. And no one seemed to know where she'd gone to."
"I'm sorry to hear that, sweetheart, I really am, but this has nothing to do with me."
"I'm giving you context," she snapped, wounds raw. Understandably. I might not have known where Matteo was the vast majority of the time, but I couldn't imagine the fear and anxiety of him being truly missing.
"Alright. How'd you get from there to here?"
"By asking around town, finding some people who claimed that trafficking had picked up recently. That young women and girls around town had been going missing at alarming rates. I did some more digging, and it seems they are being trafficked out of the country. To the States. On shipping boats. In containers."
"Romy, no one could survive in a shipping container," I told her, shaking my head.
"They can if they cut breathing holes up near the top corners, hidden just well enough that no one would notice, giving enough air to keep the women inside alive for the trip."
I wouldn't claim it never happened. It happened. With trafficking on the rise in damn near every country in the world, traffickers found innovative ways of moving live bodies without tipping off the police all the time. Even, yes, in shipping containers.
That said, we didn't deal with human cargo. We might not have been moral men in the most traditional sense. We allowed numerous different sorts of contraband—for a fee, of course—come through our pier unchecked. That included guns and stolen goods and even some drugs since New York needed the supply, but my father had drawn a line in the sand when it came to people. Even when the local skin trader in the area offered him an exorbitant amount of money to look the other way.
Some things are a matter of humanity, Luca, he'd said to me about the issue once.
And I happened to agree.
"Okay, let's suppose they do drill the holes and get these people on a ship unseen. They are not bringing them into Navesink Bank."
"Yes, they are. I was specifically told this pier. Not the one in Miami or Georgia or South Carolina or Virginia—all of which would have been closer. None of those. This is the one. This is where I was told she would show up."
"We don't let people bring people in here, Romy. We let a lot of things come through here. But not people. All of the people who work with us know this, respect it."
"I think we can all assume that criminals are not the most trustworthy group of people. Someone might be doing it without you knowing."
"If that is true, they won't be doing it for much longer," I told her, already itching to get out of here, get back to Angelo, to look into the matter.
"No," she snapped, holding her hand up. "No, you can't stop it right now. I have... I have to find her."
"How long ago were you told she was put on a ship?"
"There was no date for it. It was just a tip to get here and check the containers from Venezuela. I was told that sometimes girls get held for a while before making their way to the U.S.."
A slow sigh escaped me, mind on a dozen things at once. The possibility of being screwed over, the repercussions of that should any of our enemies find out, if New York found out and wanted to take it over, if the commission got together and gave any one of those families permission to carry out the orders, what we could do about finding out who these people were who were supposedly using our port without permission, what we would do to them when we found them.
And, of course, along with all of that, there was the issue of Romy. And her sister.
"What's your sister's name?" I asked.
"Celenia."
"Okay. I need to figure some shit out tonight, Romy. And you need to come with me."
"I can do that. Can you show me the containers I missed earlier? Because you moved them to make a trap for me?" she added, brow lifting.
"Yeah. We can do that. Come on," I added, leading her toward the stairs.
"What's going on, Luca?" Michael asked.
"We have a situation. Call Lucky. Get him back from whatever bed he crawled into last night. And call my father. Tell