All I Believe (Firsts and Forever, #10)(71)
“You’re being awfully nice to me, considering you were prepared to shoot me less than an hour ago,” I managed.
“I wasn’t going to shoot you. I was just going to threaten you so my stubborn brother would get on a plane with me and come home. I never intended for anyone to get hurt.”
“If you don’t want anyone to get hurt, maybe don’t point loaded guns at people,” I said as I pulled off my glasses and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand.
“I know I made a huge mistake. Several, actually. I’m so f*cking sorry,” he said. “I had no idea. I thought the thing between you and Luca was just some fling. I was even arrogant enough to believe my brother insisted on seeing you just to spite me. I didn’t know you two are in love. If I’d had any idea what you meant to each other, I would have handled this differently.”
“You still wouldn’t have approved.”
“Well, no, but I would have been wrong. I never in a million years expected Dante and Vincent Dombruso to be so reasonable. I thought my brother was walking into a viper den.”
We were soon to find out his fears weren’t entirely misguided.
*****
Luca came out of surgery after three and a half hours. He awoke briefly, then slept for the next several hours as I sat by his bedside. I’d intended to stay awake, but I awoke in the evening with my arms and head on the edge of his bed. He was awake and stroking my hair gently, his hand trailing cords from an IV.
“Hey,” I said, taking his hand carefully and brushing his dark hair back from his eyes. “Are you in pain? Do you need me to call the nurse?”
His mouth was dry when he tried to talk, so I quickly poured him a cup of water from the little plastic pitcher on his bedside table and held the straw to his lips. He took a couple sips, then asked, “What happened?”
“Your brother accidentally shot you. He would have accidentally shot me, but you got in the way of the bullet.”
He thought about that for a few moments, then said, his voice a raspy whisper, “There was a car, a black one. It crashed into the furniture store.”
“Right. That was my cousin Jerry and a few of his men. They came running when the alarm to the store was triggered. When they saw everyone with their guns drawn through the glass wall, they decided to create a diversion.”
“Is everybody okay?”
“We’re all fine.”
“Where’s Andreo?”
I tilted my head to the upholstered chair in the far corner where his brother was sleeping and said, “I think he’s pretty jetlagged, he’s been sleeping since you got out of surgery and the doctor told him you’d be okay.”
Luca seemed groggy, probably because they had him on a steady narcotic drip. He asked after a moment, “Is he giving you problems?”
“No. We reached an understanding.”
He looked relieved at that, and murmured, “Good,” as he closed his eyes.
A nurse came in a few minutes later and took his vital signs, then told him, “I’m supposed to call the police station now that you’re awake. They want to ask you about the shooting. Do you feel up to that?”
When Luca nodded, she left the room and I filled him in on the story they’d put together to keep Andreo from being arrested. The same officer showed up about twenty minutes later and took Luca’s statement. When she finished, she handed me a business card and said, “Seems pretty straightforward. Tell Mr. Dombruso he can pick up his weapon at impound tomorrow. I don’t anticipate any further investigation.” Andreo, who’d awakened when the officer arrived, waited until the woman left before letting out a sigh of relief.
*****
Dante and Vincent returned around midnight, after being gone several hours. Both men were tense and on high alert. They’d left after Dante received a text that seemed to concern him. “We’ve got trouble,” he told me.
“What’s going on?” I asked as Luca’s grip on my hand tightened slightly.
Dante said, “It’s Jerry. Apparently he didn’t buy my story about Andreo’s identity, so he did some digging. Our family has files, too, on a lot of people we’ve done business with, and on everyone we’ve ever identified as being a part of the Natori organization. That includes a couple old photos of Andreo. There are hundreds of pictures in the files, which is probably why Jerry didn’t remember Andreo when he first met him. I guess he still looked familiar though, or maybe our story was flimsy enough to make our cousin head for the archives. Now that he knows the truth, apparently he’s furious that we lied to him.”
“Shit,” Andreo mumbled.
“It gets worse,” Dante said. “He wanted to know why you were in town, so he traced your men to the Oberon Hotel.”
Andreo stood up quickly. “How?”
“He’d noted the license plate of your SUV and has a contact that can hack into all the traffic cams in the city. I guess they were pretty easy to track down, because they were parked on the street right in front of the Oberon. Once he found them, he went to their hotel with a bunch of men and roughed them up until they started talking. One of them folded like a house of cards, apparently. He told Jerry you’d come to San Francisco to get your brother Luca, because you were afraid we’d find out he was a Natori and kill him.”