Gabe woke up again with a strange sense of déjà vu. He’d been in a similar hospital room, only he’d been sitting in the chair and Dani had been lying in the bed. Now the situation was reversed and it pissed him off no end. He should be the one taking care of her.
“You’re awake,” Dani said softly. She reached over to brush his hair back from his forehead.
“How long have I been here?”
“You got out of surgery about an hour ago. We’ve all be waiting for you to come around.”
Shit. Surgery? That didn’t sound good. He hadn’t bothered to check to see if he was missing anything. “Um, what’s…what’s the prognosis?”
“You’ll live. Your left shoulder was torn up and you lost a lot of blood, but the bullet didn’t hit anything vital, grazie a Dio!” Tears started to roll down her cheeks and he reached over with his right arm because his left wouldn’t move. “Hey…”
Dani wiped her tears away. “Dang it, where’s a handkerchief when I need one?” She smiled through her tears. “It’s okay. Really. I’m fine.”
“Look, I know I got Novak, but I don’t remember much after Stolar drew his gun on me. What’d I miss?”
Dani let out a burst of laughter, but it didn’t sound right, especially since she was still crying. She sounded like she wasn’t quite in control.
“Tell me,” he said fiercely.
“Tell you what, amico?” Marco entered the room along with Dante.
“I asked Dani what I missed and she fell apart,” Gabe said.
“You missed a lot,” Marco said, his normally jovial face looking way too somber. “Santo is dead, as is Fausta. She killed him and then took her own life.”
“Wait a minute—what?”
Dante proceed to tell him what had gone down, how Santo had it in his mind to form some kind of unholy bond with Dani, and how Fausta had gone ballistic over it. Turns out she had made a devil’s bargain with him back when Agnese was only sixteen and she expected Santo to fulfill his end of the deal. When he refused, she made him pay the ultimate price.
“Santo admitted that he did…rape me,” Dani said.
Gabe could tell it cost her to say it out loud, but he also detected an underlying strength to her admission. He took her hand. “I know. It seems like ages ago, but yesterday while you were visiting Dante, I paid a visit to the doctor who examined you that night. He’d kept the results of the kit but his family was threatened and he was too scared to report what he knew. I was going to tell you after all this blew over.” He touched her cheek. “The important thing is, you weren’t imagining things.”
“No, I wasn’t.” She squeezed Gabe’s hand. “I’ll bet this is the one and only time the victim of such a crime is relieved that something really did happen.”
Marco and Dante filled Gabe in on other details and it made him sick to hear his cousin was present when the killings occurred. “How is Agnese doing?” he asked.
“She is heartbroken,” Dante said. “Despite Fausta’s twisted ambition, Agnese loved her. She’s with my…with the Mother Superior now. Considering everything she’s had to deal with, she’s doing all right.” Dante looked down and then gave them a half smile. “We’re getting married as soon as this all simmers down. I told her we could wait, but she insists. She says we’ve wasted too much of our lives already and she wants you and Dani to be there.”
“Congratulations, amico. That’s great news!” Gabe said.
Marco kidded Dante about joining the Italian equivalent of the “ball and chain” club and Dante grew serious. “I only hope I can support her when all of this pasticcio hits the media.”
“It’s a mess, all right,” Marco agreed.
Dani’s voice was strong. “But we agreed it was worth it for Stella d’Italia to take a hit if it meant putting Santo away.”
“You know, I still don’t understand why Santo did it,” Gabe said. “How’d he get involved with those scumbags to begin with?”
“I think it was a combination of greed and lust,” Dante said. “I checked through his vacation travel records and it turns out about five years ago he started visiting Thailand as a sex tourist.”
“A sex tourist?” Dani asked.
“Yeah, it’s really perverse,” Gabe said. “Certain countries even offer package deals for men to come over and have sex with underage boys and girls.”
Dani shuddered. “Oh, that’s…that’s horrible.”
“Well I’d use slightly different language, but you’re right.” Gabe frowned. “But what’s the connection between a sex holiday and hooking up with the Azure Consortium?”
“A Thai businessman by the name of Somchair Mookjai,” Marco said. “The task force has known about him for a while, but he’s as slippery as the olio d’oliva he puts in his hair.”
“He’s a businessman. So what?” Dante asked.
“Well, he’s more a broker of sorts. Sets up interested parties to create the sex slave version of an underground railroad, like the network the United States had during the Civil War. A secret way to move people—in this case young women—from point A to point B with nobody knowing about it. Like I said before, the potential for profit is astronomical. No doubt Mookjai got a fat commission for bringing Santo and the consortium together.”
“My uncle was always looking for a way to make Stella d’Italia more consequential,” Dante mused. “He was never satisfied with the status quo.”
Gabe gazed at Dani as she subtly hid a strand of hair behind her ear. It reminded him of something. He turned to Marco. “You remember I mentioned that tattoo Ines told Dani and me about? The one behind that woman Mirela’s ear? Anything surface on that yet or was it just a coincidence?”
“No coincidence,” Marco said. “Turns out the fat guy, Moroni, is a real chatterbox, hoping we’ll go light on him. He says that was the way they identified the women they were going to ship. They couldn’t afford to accidentally kidnap someone like Ines who knows a lot of people. So goons like him and Goran Novak would check for the tattoo. The butterfly you described was actually part of the Azure logo. I’ll bet the Ukranian girl they were trying to move has one, too.”
“I knew I’d seen it someplace. It was on one of the forms I found when I was researching all those sham companies,” Dani said. “I wish I’d made the connection sooner.”
“Cases are like that,” Marco said. “Sometimes it takes a while before you can see how everything links up.”
“Speaking of connections, this has been bugging me,” Dani said. “How did they know I was at the opera the other night? Had they been following me?”
“Yeah, apparently since your interview with Ines and Dobra,” Marco explained. “Dobra copped to dropping a transmitter in your jacket pocket when she hung it up.”
“Huh,” Dani said. “I remember taking the thumb drive Stolar gave me out of my pocket along with a little disc. I thought it was a battery or something, so I just left it.”
Gabe was having trouble processing everything that had happened and blamed it on the drugs that were dripping through his IV. He tried to get a handle on it. “So Santo goes into human trafficking and uses Stella d’Italia hotels to launder the so-called shipments. The consortium puts the pressure on him to expand, and Dani’s father balks because it doesn’t smell right. But having his own brother killed? I mean, that is downright evil. And then his wife? How did Ornella figure into all this? Was she going to blow the whistle on him?”
“None of the above,” Marco explained. “Moroni said Santo never wanted Armando killed—the consortium just went ahead and did it to speed things along, as well as to let Santo know they meant business. But Santo did order Ornella’s death.” Marco glanced at Dani. “We may never know his true motive. Could be he…uh…got it in his head about that time to remove any barriers between him and Dani getting together.”
“It doesn’t get much sicker than that,” Dante said. “How’s the company going to survive such a blow to its reputation? I don’t see how it can.”
Dani spoke up, sounding surprisingly upbeat. “Stella d’Italia will survive because it’s a well-run company that provides excellent service to its guests. Yes, we’ll take a hit in the short run, but it will only last until the next celebrity scandal.”
“You’re pretty optimistic,” Dante said. Gabe could hear the skepticism in the man’s voice.
Dani looked at Marco. “I’m not sure how much we’ll be able to shape the story from your end, but I’m thinking, if Agnese can tough it out, we could explain it as a jealous housekeeper who found out her boss, who had promised to marry her, reneged on it once his wife died. When you think about it, that is essentially what happened. We just don’t bring in all the other sordid details. And when the story comes out about the trafficking, we keep repeating that Stella d’Italia is fully cooperating with authorities to root out the evil.”
“I don’t see a problem with that approach,” Marco said. “As far as publicity goes, the task force would prefer to keep as much as possible under wraps. The less we show our hand, the better.”
“What about the victims in all this?” Dani asked. “Any chance you can track them down?”
“We scored a lot of logistical information on that raid, so yeah, I think we stand a good chance of returning many of those victims to their families.”
Gabe laid his head back down as he listened. It felt like his shoulder was on fire.
Dani leaned over and kissed him. “I am glad you came back to me,” she whispered. “I promise I will read you more of the riot act later.”
He smiled and didn’t remember much after that.