Athena
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Luciano was gone. My brows knitted in a frown and I looked back at the bathroom door behind me. I hadn’t even taken that long in the freaking bathroom! How had I not noticed him leaving?
“Hold your horses, he’s most likely in the kitchen or something,” I told myself, clutching the towel tight around me. That had to be it right? A piece of paper on the bedside drawer where his phone used to be told me I was being delusional. I hurried towards it quickly, snatched it off the bedside drawer, and read the note scribbled on it.
“I have business to attend to. Take care, Cara…Bah! Who’s this bastard kidding?” I scoffed, laughing dryly to myself. If he had gone to the office, there was no need for him to act like some sort of ghost and disappear like that. Pressing my lips into a fine line, I stormed out of the bedroom, my feet hurriedly taking me to the land phone in the living room. There was one way to confirm if he had truly gone to the office.
I swiped the phone and dialed the receptionist’s desk number. A lady replied in a voice that was too damn cherry early that morning. “Hello this is the-”
“Have you seen Mr. Morettti this morning?” I asked to cut her off. I knew what desk I was calling, I didn’t need to be told. Besides, there was no time to waste! I had barely spent ten minutes in the shower and considering he must have left around that time, then he was about ten to fifteen minutes away. If I knew where exactly he went, I could figure out how to get him.
Yes, I was going to follow him. I was so fucking tired of sitting around waiting for information to drop into my precious laps. That was not happening. I had to find it. And the only way I could do so was by becoming Luciano’s shadow.
“No,” The receptionist had lost her bubbly tone and replied in a dry, desert kind of tone. “Mr. Moretti hasn’t been spotted-”
I dropped the phone and raced back to his room. Fuck, Cole was right. There was a secret way to leave the penthouse. That would explain how Luciano was able to leave quietly and unnoticed. How the FBI couldn’t apprehend him.
Hell, I could imagine them asking the receptionist every damn day and night, If Luciano had left the building and because she hadn’t seen him leave, she would have said ‘No’ of course.
“But where is It?” I whispered, sucking air through my teeth as I scrutinized the bedroom. I ran my hands over the walls, feeling for a less dense area.
For the first time, I actually paid attention to the room. It was huge of course. A mix of gray and white walls. But it was also… minimalistic. There was sparse furniture beside the bedding. There was a funny-looking shelf but even as I approached it, I knew it could not be there. Luciano was smart. The shelf was an obvious choice and it would easily mislead anyone into thinking that was the door to his secret getaway route.
After verifying that it was just a shelf, I placed a hand on my hips and scrutinized the rest of the room. Where was the fucking secret door?
“Who says it has to be a door?” My mind countered. Ah shit, that was true. It may not be a door. Then what was it? Tired, I tossed my head up in anger and stalked to my room to get dressed. Yanking on a pair of black trousers and a shirt, I considered dropping by the office.
Though Luciano was too damn adamant and kept insisting he didn’t want me to return yet. I was going to lose my mind if I had to spend one more day in his lonely home. Hell, I would do anything just to be able to banter with that bodyguard of his. At least I got more information out of him than I could garner out of this damned house anyway.
Sighing deeply, I glanced up at the ceiling of my room. Unlike Luciano’s, it had some weird medieval design on it. Pretty cool if you ask me. There was the depiction of a horseman trying to reach for a cloud woman. Perhaps if I was into artistic shit like that, I would be much more impressed. I turned to look away and paused in my tracks.
Luciano’s ceiling was built in a different manner. It had sections. Rectangular sections. With a frown hedged on my forehead, I marched back to his room. I hadn’t closed the door thankfully. It would have been a damned chore trying to mimic his eyeball or something weird like that just so I could give access to his room.
I had been right. His ceiling was in sections. Rectangular sections. Rubbing my jaw in thought I glanced down at the ground. There could not be an underground escape route because his home was the penthouse. But in the ceiling? Now that was intriguing, wasn’t it?
“How does he reach the ceiling though?” I whispered, eyeing the ceiling warily. “It has to be a rather efficient means of escaping or I would have heard him leave.”
The shelf caught my gaze and slowly it dawned on me. The shelf was built like steps! That was his ladder! All he had to do was climb each step, push aside one of the rectangular sections in the ceiling and he would leave.
Eyes wide in awe at Luciano’s cleverness, I climbed the shelf. It took a while to figure out how to slide open the ceiling but soon I found myself crawling through an opening and reaching the top of the penthouse. The whole of New York lay spread below me like tiny ants and my eyes fell on an elevator toward the back of the building.
“Bingo!”
***
The elevator led to an underground passageway in the basement of the building. I suppose the whole ceiling thingy was because they couldn’t construct an elevator leading to the basement in his room.
Whatever the reason was, I didn’t care. What I cared about was that I was finally getting somewhere in this damned investigator. I trekked the long passage, walking lightly and rapidly. It wasn’t dark and creepy like I had expected at first. It was well lit and there was a discarded helmet on the floor.
A motorcycle?
If he needed a motorcycle then the passageway must be really long. Drawing in a deep breath, I paused for a while then took off in a Sprint. I had to figure out where the hell this place led to. It was the only way I could return later without being spotted.
After what seemed like an eternity, I finally reached the end. The passageway led out of a tunnel to a…a dock.
A laugh escaped my lips at the sight of the sky, the sea, and the boats lined up. This was it. This was the secret mafia location! I had found it at last. Whipping out a small device from my trousers, I tossed it behind a rock nearby.
“Let’s hope Cole can track this place down before anyone notices that-”
A loud piercing scream in the distance cut me off and stunned, I took off in the direction of the scream. There could be only one explanation. The mafia had picked a victim.
Hiding behind the boats, I walked around gingerly, looking for the source of the scream. The sight that lay before my very eyes was terrifying.
Two men held a man down by the arms. An older man, he had to be in his fifties. They had gagged him with a piece of cloth and behind him stood a shirtless man, wielding a burning iron with the M insignia on it.
Luciano.
I had never seen him look like that. So fucking formidable. A chill broke out on my forehead and I shuffled behind the boat, trying to hide myself further.
I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I knew his eyes were dark. He looked at the man squirming before him, a bored expression on his face.
A predator monitoring his prey. Beside him were burning coals in a coal stove. And the iron in his hands glowed red hot. Grabbing his victim by the hair, he sunk the branding iron down the man’s back, and another peal of scream rang in the air.
Covering my hands over my mouth I swallowed the gasp that threatened to slip, fighting the tears that gathered in my eyes. The old man screamed until he couldn’t anymore. The sickening scent of burning flesh filled the air and I felt nauseous.
Luciano released the man then, whipped out a gun at lightning speed, and lodged a bullet in the man’s head. Unable to hold it in, I gasped in horror.