Emmanuelle, Nicoletta and Mariko were to secure the girls and boys. They were to first kill the guard in the room with each girl or boy, then calm and assure her or him that they were there to rescue them but they had to stay where they were until the signal was given that they could be safely brought out of the mansion through the rear exit.
Stefano and Emmanuelle’s brothers would aid Valentino’s men inside as much as possible, but Giovanni and Vittorio would break off at Stefano’s command and help Geno, Salvatore and Lucca clear the street of Tommaso’s men.
Valentino was responsible for getting the teens checked out medically and turned over to the authorities he could trust to get them safely back to their homes. Bernado would check backgrounds as soon as he could identify who the teens were, in case they were taken off the street and had nowhere to go and no family to take them in.
“Going in now, need your four,” Stefano said softly, using the code agreed on ahead of time with Val.
“Four” meant Dario and Severu, two of the men Val put his faith in. The other two were Levi and Axel Carson, brothers, two more of the ex-military, ex-mercenaries Dario had found and trained. They were Valentino’s men, not part of the family in the way Severu was, but dedicated solely to Valentino and Dario. Stefano wanted the four men to deal with the bodies in the garden area the Ferraro family would leave behind.
“Street is not clean. Street cleaners have not yet been employed. The roof is still dirty.” Stefano continued with his report. He meant there were still enemy eyes on the rooftop and on the streets, so the four would have to be very careful.
“Copy that,” Valentino replied.
Emmanuelle’s heart reacted to the soft sound of his voice. She’d kissed him. Told him she loved him. Tried to prepare him for what Tommaso and his uncle had done to Greta’s home. There was no way to prepare anyone for this kind of depraved nightmare. There was an army in the house, and he was going in. That was just terrifying, because Valentino wasn’t a man to hide behind his bodyguards.
“Be safe, everyone, in twos, watch each other’s backs. They’re armed. We need to do this in silence. Fast. We’re outnumbered,” Stefano reiterated. “Go.”
Emmanuelle stepped into the shadow that would take her past the guard at the gate and up the drive to her designated starting point. She was to take out every roving patrol in the section of acreage in the rose garden—gazebo, fountains, the flowering shrubs and trees that formed a beautiful arching tunnel she’d secretly hoped to get married under one day. This was one of the many places that anyone in the house could easily view from the windows and balconies. The way the house was built encouraged those inside to do just that. Having an auction taking place with food, drink, drugs and anything goes with the waitresses might have meant fewer guards watching the grounds from above.
She stopped just inside the mouth of the shadow tube, allowing her brain to acknowledge that her body was in one piece. Normally, riders would have studied the pattern and timing of patrols in an estate they were going to penetrate, but there was no time for that. There was also no real discipline to the way the guards were behaving.
Stefano told them, in the briefing, that it appeared Tommaso was using most of his own men inside, but had hired others for the guards outside in the street and grounds and even some in the house. It wasn’t a brilliant move when any of those men could have gone to the cops and told them who was peddling young teens—unless Tommaso planned on killing them all afterward. She wouldn’t put it past him to do so.
Three men stood just outside the back of the house, staring into one of the wide, curved windows of the kitchen. There was a bank of windows surrounding the kitchen, making it light and airy and giving those inside views of the flower gardens as well as the vegetable and herb gardens just around the curving landscape.
One of the men stepped closer to the window, breathing heavily. “Damn, that’s hot. Wish I was assigned inside. How did they manage to get that assignment and we got stuck out here?” He lifted his hand high and flipped whoever it was inside off. “He’s fucking her face and flipping me off. What a dick.”
The other two guards moved closer to the window to see the show. Emmanuelle shadowed them. She made certain her image didn’t appear behind them so their buddy couldn’t see her as she moved into position. She caught the head of the third one, the one not so eager to see, between her hands and jerked, breaking his neck, murmuring “Justice is served” as she lowered him to the ground and immediately was on the second guard.
They were so intrigued by what was happening in the kitchen that they weren’t paying attention to anything else around them. The first guard had unzipped his jeans and was stroking his cock. She broke the second guard’s neck, lowered him to the ground and waited a moment until the man in the kitchen was fully engaged in what he was doing, too far gone to care or know what was happening outside, before she killed the first guard. She left them for Valentino’s trusted crew to put in the garage where no one would find the bodies until everyone was far away from the premises, with alibis that couldn’t be broken.
Hearing voices, she stepped into a shadow that was wider and longer, an easy one that was more like a highway, one she could leisurely navigate, allowing her to take a look at how many guards were in the section of the grounds she had been assigned to clear. Mariko had started on the other side of it. They would meet in the middle. It was a large section.
Emmanuelle counted five more guards just in the area around the kitchen and vegetable garden. Thankfully, they were spread out. Two had met near the tomato plants and were talking in low voices, warning her someone was close, but these men were taking their job much more seriously than the other three had.
She left them to their conversation, giving them time to say whatever they thought was important. Hopefully, they would split up, making her job easier. She went after the other three who were patrolling alone. She took them, one by one, softly reporting where she dropped each body, giving the location to Dario, although not using names, only a coded location of the bodies. She went back to locate the other two chatty guards. They had separated. She needed to get to both before they came upon the three bodies she’d dropped.
She had to depend on her cousins to do their jobs and get rid of any eyes on the roof and balconies. Not wasting time looking up took discipline. She had to use every ounce of her radar for her immediate section of the grounds to be cleared. The guard she stalked was closer to the street than she would have liked. The street wasn’t cleared yet and wouldn’t be for some time. That wasn’t a priority yet. They needed the rear entrance clear, the roof and balconies and then the house. At the same time as the house, the street would be cleared. It was all a matter of precise timing. She sighed. Anything could go wrong.
“With you,” Valentino’s voice whispered in her ear on their private channel.
He’d heard that sigh. She was never certain their channel was really private. Giovanni had assured her it was, that no one, not even Val’s geeky, techy, whiz-kid friend could penetrate the encoded channel, but she still worried. She didn’t want Valentino to look less than he was in front of his men. She was coming to understand that appearances of strength were everything in his world. They could even mean the difference between life and death.