Vincenzo de Santi didn’t react. He remained in his chair, his hands loosely clasped in his lap. Her father favoured big gold rings, but this man wore no jewellery. He was austere as a monk. Except monks generally did not have eyes that glittered like polished onyx; he reminded her of a great black panther about to pounce.
Time was going faster and faster, and the fear was harder and harder to contain. She gripped on to the strap of her handbag for dear life, her nails digging into her palm, the slight pain holding panic at bay.
This was obviously deliberate, this silence he was giving her. Hoping to rattle her possibly. Well, she wouldn’t be rattled and she wouldn’t panic. She’d got this far and she couldn’t allow herself to fail.
Failure was her mother dying in a pool of blood after trying to protect her from her father’s wrath, and she couldn’t let that death be in vain. She wouldn’t.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘I am throwing myself on your mercy.’
The young woman—it was difficult to tell her age, given the quantity of dark hair covering most of her face, but he thought she was a woman rather than a girl—was plainly terrified, yet trying very hard not to show it. The knuckles of her right hand where it clutched the strap of a ratty brown leather handbag were white, and her skin was very pale. Her eyes behind her glasses were very large and an indeterminate colour between brown and green, and she wore a shapeless dress of the same muddy colour.
Vincenzo eyed her. Silence was a useful interrogation tactic and so he used it often. People didn’t like it. It made them uncomfortable. It made them want to fill the dreadful quiet any way they could, letting slip all kinds of interesting information.
Not that Miss Lucy Armstrong was someone he was interrogating.
At least, not yet.
‘Mercy,’ he said, tasting the word, because it was strange to hear it used in conjunction with himself. ‘I’m afraid if it’s mercy you’re wanting, Miss Armstrong, you’ve come to the wrong place.’
Her gaze, for all that it was trapped behind two pieces of thick glass, was startlingly direct. In fact, he couldn’t recall a woman—or, indeed, anyone—staring at him the way she was staring at him. People were generally too afraid to look him in the eye, and with good reason.
She should be afraid too. Especially being Michael Armstrong’s daughter.
He’d tried to take down that particular piece of scum for years now, but the man had evaded all Vincenzo’s attempts to bring him to justice. And Vincenzo had tried very hard to bring him to justice. A couple of centuries ago, when crime families warred against each other, the war was carried out physically and brutally, and the authorities left well alone if they knew what was good for them. It had a certain...efficiency about it.
These days though, the battles were conducted on twenty-first-century battlefields; online, in the financial markets, in numbers and money. In shell companies and tax havens.
Vincenzo had tried many times to shut down the lucrative money-laundering business Armstrong had going on, since money and all the ways to hide it was a relatively easy way to take down someone’s illegal empire. Yet every time Vincenzo thought he had Armstrong, the man managed to get away. It was puzzling.
Armstrong wasn’t a subtle man and Vincenzo was almost positive he didn’t have the kind of understanding required to evade Vincenzo’s team of financial forensic specialists, yet somehow he did. One would almost suspect that Armstrong himself was far more sneaky than anyone thought, but Vincenzo didn’t think he was. What Armstrong had was help. And Vincenzo thought he knew who that help might be.
The woman standing in front of his desk right now.
There had been many rumours throughout the European underground about Armstrong’s daughter. That he guarded her closely, jealously, because she was the secret of the success of his empire. She knew numbers and money, was a genius with computers, could hide anyone’s digital tracks with ease...
A dangerous woman. Yet she didn’t look very dangerous. She looked very small, her body hidden away behind that awful, shapeless dress and thick, dark, frizzy hair hanging over her face. Her features were mostly hidden too, behind those thick glasses, but he thought he could see a scattering of freckles over her nose.
Not dangerous, perhaps. Just very, very unremarkable.
Interesting, though, that she should come here. That she should blunder through his doors seeking him. His security had informed him of her presence the moment she’d set foot in his family’s auction house and despite his inclination to have her instantly taken and imprisoned, since her arrival was the kind of windfall he couldn’t pass up, he’d decided to let whatever she was here for play out.
Raoul needed the practice in dealing with difficulties anyway.
Lucy Armstrong took another step forward, still holding his gaze. There was a certain ferocity to her, a determination that on another day he might have admired.
But he wasn’t going to admire her. She was Armstrong’s partner in crime, fully complicit in his evil empire, and so he would use her instead. Get her to reveal all her father’s secrets, and once Armstrong was in prison, where he belonged, she would join him.
‘Mr de Santi—’ she began yet again, her voice low and slightly husky.
‘Don’t worry, Miss Armstrong,’ he interrupted. ‘Your father’s men won’t even get through the front door. My security is excellent.’ And it was, because it needed to be.
When you were conducting a crusade against the most powerful crime families in Europe, having people try to kill you was an everyday occurrence.
It didn’t bother him. If people were trying to kill him it meant he was doing something right.
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘He will—’
‘No.’ Vincenzo didn’t raise his voice, didn’t put any emphasis on it. Just let it cut across her, cold as an icicle. ‘He will not.’
Her mouth opened then closed. It was, Vincenzo couldn’t help noticing, a rather full and soft-looking mouth.
‘Now,’ he went on, dismissing the observation and nodding at the chair near his desk. ‘Sit.’
She frowned, a deep crease between two straight dark brows, and he thought she might be working herself up to argue with him. But, clearly thinking better of it, she did as she was told, holding her worn handbag protectively in her lap.
He tilted his head, studying her. She was still very afraid. He could almost smell it on her. He was a connoisseur of fear. He knew how it worked and what it did to people, and how it could be used to manipulate them. He himself didn’t use it that way, since that was an approach he loathed above all others. But he wasn’t averse to people letting themselves be manipulated by their own emotions. And he was constantly amazed by the fact that they did.