Truth or Dare; The Dominator II (28 page)

I had no intention of continuing to be the kinda guy to fuck someone’s life over out of revenge if I could help it but by the look on her face I didn’t know if that was pre-Kruna mindset or post-Kruna or both but it was good to see that smile because sometimes tough choices had to be made. And in my position right now I had some major work ahead of me to get my freedom from the mess my Pop left us. Seeing her reaction told me she’d probably be okay with my decision to have to go to the dark side on occasion, if needed. And to get us out of the mess that was my life right now, that might be more than necessary.

Tommy

Tia was crying when I found her shortly after reading Zack’s email and I didn’t have it in me to be supportive at that moment. I stood over her in the bed and said, “Tomorrow morning you get up and you phone Mia and you call her off.”

She nodded at me, tears in her eyes.

“I need to do some serious fucking damage control, Tia. Thanks a fucking bunch.”

She’d covered her face, sobbing. I stormed out of the bedroom and went to the rooftop to beat the fuck out of the punching bag. And I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t sleep because if a goddamn teenager could find us then so could my enemies and that meant that I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t feel safe, so I stayed up all night stressing about it.

The next morning after prepping from me and some more harsh words that she probably didn’t need to hear, she called Mia from a burner phone on hands-free and I listened.

“Hello?” the female voice answered.

“Mia? It’s Tia.” Tia sat on the sofa, hands fidgeting in her lap. She looked like she hadn’t slept much either.

“Tia? Holy shit. Tia?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

“Wow, Tia. Are you okay? Are you still in Costa Rica?”

“I’m fine. What’s new?”

“What’s new? You’ve been gone since grad and you ask what’s new? What the hell is new with you?”

“I’m, uh, on my honeymoon.”

“Your honeymoon.”

“Yes. I’m on my honeymoon and…”

“And you’re calling me out of the blue three hours before I’m supposed to leave to come to where you are? Right.” She was full of skepticism.

“Right. I need you to not come to where I am, Mee.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m on my honeymoon.”

“Your honeymoon. Your honeymoon with Tommy Ferrano jr., son of murdered businessman by the same name. You can’t see my air quotes around the word businessman, Tia, but I say that knowing that the businessman your new husband is was your ice cream hottie and that he has kidnapped you and is holding you against your will. We are going to get you out of this. Got me on hands-free? Your darling demonic husband there listening? Listen you sonofabitch, you let her go. I have connections, too, and we are going to get her out of there and your Italian mafia ass is gonna rot in jail.”

“Mia!” Tia shrieked. She looked at me, mortified.

I shook my head, eyebrows raised, and folded my arms.

“Tia, we are going to get you out of there. Ferrano? You listening? Let’s negotiate. I have leverage, believe me when I tell you I have fucking leverage.”

“Mia I am happily married. Happily. I’m on my freaking honeymoon. I don’t want you to rescue me. I am deliriously in love. What on earth? You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, Mee…”

“Tia, Beth
heard
Rose and Cal talking to the cops. We later found out your father is in jail. We know that you were kidnapped. We know a lot about the Ferrano family.”

“We? Who’s we?”

“Me, Beth, Ruby, Nick. We’ve been working together. Nick’s uncle works at an IT security and online forensics company and he’s been interning there. They’ve been watching for you.”

“Oh my god, Mia. You’re so off base it isn’t even funny. Don’t come here. Don’t worry about me. I’m on my freaking honeymoon. I’m in love. I’m happy.” Tia looked frantic. Her hands were in her hair and she was looking pleadingly at the phone sitting on the sofa between us.

“Oh, alright…” she let that hang, “I won’t rescue you. I can hear how happy you are. I’ll just back off.” She was full of shit.

Tia took the phone and took it off hands free, giving me an index finger, “Mee, you’re not on hands free anymore. I am serious. Things aren’t always what they seem, okay?” She listened for a second, her eyes on me.

“No,” Tia continued, “I
am
serious. I’m in love. We’re happy. We’re just on our honeymoon. You don’t know the whole story.” She glanced at me and chewed her lip, “I don’t know yet. It’s open ended.” She shrugged, “No, you can’t come here. Listen Mee, if you follow us, there are people who could follow you and put Tommy and me in danger…”

“Fuck, Tia!” I hissed. She winced. I grabbed the phone from her.

“Mia? Tommy Ferrano,” I said, giving Tia a shake of my head. She paled.

“Tommy Ferrano?” she said, “I’d say nice to meet you but I’m sure it’s not. We are onto you, you motherfucker. You hurt a hair on her head and you will go down.”

“Listen Mia, Tia and I
are
on our honeymoon but there are people we don’t want to know where we are. You come here you could be followed. You might have compromised her safety already and you’d definitely compromise your own safety. I need you to not fly here. I’ll have you reimbursed for your ticket and whatever other expenses…”

“You seriously expect me to believe that you forced my friend to be with you and that she’s okay with this? I know she was forced. I know this for a fact. I visited her father in jail and he enlightened me. He also gave me his login for Facebook and I saw the message Tia sent him after grad.”

Fuck. Fucking Greg.

“You think you know everything but you only know the half of it. You don’t know what you’re dabbling in here and if you care about Tia’s safety you need to stand down.”

“You’re threatening me?”

“No. I’m telling you that I don’t want you putting her in danger. Stand down.”

“I don’t believe she’s okay and I won’t believe it until I see it with my own eyes. I’ll cancel my flight but only if you produce her. I need to see her and talk to her so I can determine for myself whether or not she’s actually okay. Get on a plane today.”

“Fine.”

“Fine?”

“Not today but I’ll get her on a plane soon,” I said.

“How soon?”

“We are not dropping things and running back there. You’ll see us in a couple weeks.”

“Three days. And I get twice daily phone calls from Tia until then so I know she’s okay and you haven’t done something to her. Morning and night.”

I gritted my teeth, “Fine. I’m sending someone to meet with you today to find out everything you know and where you got the info. You need to share this so that we can determine whether or not you’ve put us in danger. Got it? He’ll meet you at your place in two hours.”

“Who are you sending? One of your wiseguy thugs? Sending someone to rough me up?”

“No. Zack Jacobs. Look him up. He’s a PI. You’ll need to meet with him today so he can do damage control.”

“Fine but in public. Give him this number and I’ll meet him in public and I won’t be alone. Tia calls me tonight before midnight my time and then tomorrow by this time or I’m on a plane, Mr.
Caruso
.”

Yep, she proved she knows exactly where we are.

I got off the phone and glared at my wife. Then I got on the phone and sent Zack over there.

Dare

Lisa walked into my office looking as put together as she always did but this time her face was solemn.

I invited her to sit on the sofa with me.

“What’s wrong, Leese? You got morning sickness?” I gave her shoulder a squeeze.

She shook her head, “No. I’ve just…” she swallowed hard, “Since finding out you know … and finding out about Felicia … I’ve just been thinking a lot. It brought stuff back to the surface for me. I guess I’ve buried a lot and now um…” She paused.

“You’re facing it?” I tried to help her along.

She shrugged, “I’m thinking about therapy maybe. I feel stressed, panicky all the time, I’m not sleeping. I don’t think it’s good for the baby.”

“Let me arrange the counseling. Due to the sensitivity of the issue it has to be someone we trust.”

She nodded, “I’ve been thinking about Tess and Luc and what they’d think if they knew…”

“Hang tight, please. Tommy and I need to talk about how to play this.”

She nodded, “Why did you wanna see me?”

“Angel and I, she’s decided it’s Angel, as you know, we’re giving things a go together and…she’s not handling things so well. I wanna help her. I was gonna ask you to talk to her. And I was gonna ask you some questions that might help me know how to be with her. Did you have trouble adjusting when you got here? Did you have panic attacks or anything like that?”

She snickered, “I’m having more trouble adjusting now, now that I’ve been thinking about it. They program you, Dare, they do it in a way where you just go on about your day, do what you’re supposed to do. If she’s showing you she’s broken it’s because the truth broke her. The truth being that she’s not a Kruna slave any longer. It’s almost easier to function on autopilot, I’m starting to figure out. You’ve gotta imagine how she feels. She probably feels like a fish out of water, not sure how to act.”

I nodded, “I figured that. If I’d been what she thought she was getting she’d have functioned as well as you did?”

Lisa nodded, “When I got here I just did what I was told. And I was so grateful for being here, so grateful at how kind your father was to me. I felt like I was so lucky.” She shrugged, “Dare, if she’s having trouble she needs you to be decisive and guide her. Wean her into making her own decisions slowly.”

“That makes sense.”

“That’s how it sort of worked with us. As time went by your father gave me more and more freedom. Not because he seemed to be hanging onto control with me, more like he was helping me adjust slowly. They had me in a training program to transition me from slave to wife and that helped. It was a lot being in public after all that time at Kruna. When I first got here I spent over a month in a hotel suite just seeing him when he had time. Then he started to take me out in public slowly, then he put me in culinary school, and you know the rest.”

I nodded, “I just took her right out of there. They wanted her in a wife training program but I said No. Said I’d train her. So maybe this has been too hard on her. Too much too soon. Can you see her tomorrow? Come by the condo?”

“Yeah, she’s shell-shocked for sure. She doesn’t know who I am, does she?”

“No. I should talk to her first.”

She nodded, “I think so. I don’t think you should make me blindside her. Handle her with a firm hand and that’ll help.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning she might need more direction from you. You have a lot of power, whether you want it or not, and it doesn’t have to just apply to the bedroom. Your power can help her. Your words, the way you treat her.” Lisa shrugged, “This might not make much sense but praise from a Master means a lot. She’s going to take all her cues from you.”

“I get it. Thanks, Leese.” And I did get it. The way she’d acted when she was afraid or stressed, she looked to me as her protector. She’d done that probably both because I was her “Master” and because I’d taken her from there.

Angel

Dare came back after work with a pizza. We ate on one of the sofas together while watching the news and then I hesitantly asked if he wanted to take a walk as he was coming back from putting our paper plates in the garbage.

“I need to talk to you first,” he said as he pulled me onto his lap, “My brother Tommy’s coming home tomorrow and staying for a bit. He’s got stuff to handle plus he’s gonna help me sort out some business shit our Pop left us with. And while he’s here we’ll strategize on what to do about our Kruna shares. They’re having a partner summit in a couple weeks and he and I have gotta talk about how to play things. See, I’d been hoping that within a few months from now I’d be totally out of most of the business my Pop dealt in. I had plans to start fresh, get my pilot’s license, decide whether or not to fly commercial, be a bush pilot, something. Something different for a while.”

I nodded, feeling a little pang of fear. I was trying to listen to what he was saying but I was stuck on the partner summit bit. I hoped he wouldn’t go to Kruna. I hoped he wouldn’t take me back there. Before the panic had a chance to set in he continued talking, “Tommy’s new bride, Tia, I want you to know a bit about her. I also wanna tell you about something else.”

He had my attention again. I shifted on his lap and put my arm around his shoulder.

“Tia’s father was an enemy of my father. Tia’s mother was my Pop’s first love. Pop went on a revenge spree and screwed Tia’s father over a period of two decades in order to break the man because Tia’s mother chose him over Pop. His last ditch effort was forcing the guy to give Tia to my brother as a payment for his debts. Tia and Tommy are happily married, newlyweds. It didn’t start out happy, especially not for her. I told you I delivered her to him. I never let myself think deep on it but from the start didn’t think it was okay to pay a debt with flesh unless it was your flesh, you know, not deciding that for your kid. Anyway, I went along with what Pop said because that’s what I did. I was loyal to him even when I didn’t agree with all the things he did. It’s how we were raised. Pop was demanding and loyalty to him was first. My brother and I had plans to take the company legit once Pop retired so I was biding my time. I went through the motions and tried not to overthink things. We knew we were in gray areas and Tommy and I were fully entrenched in a lot of it. I’m no choir boy. I’ve done shit I’m not proud of. Turned a blind eye to shit I knew was wrong more often than I can count. But we were planning on transitioning it to something cleaner when we found out Pop was playing way dirtier in the world than we’d ever realized. Through a series of events after a shit storm that put the whole family in danger we decided to break away from Pop. His actions cost Tess her husband and my nephews their father, made Luc go into early labor and almost cost us baby Nicky, and my father’s actions almost cost Tommy and Tia everything. We’re talking kidnappings, shootings, a lot of bad shit. Most of the world doesn’t know that at the end, just before Pop died, me and Tommy forced his hand. He pushed back because he saw our mutiny as the ultimate betrayal and it didn’t end well.”