The Explosion

Gathering valuable information by playing dumb was my thing. I was an expert at gazing at the world with wide, clueless eyes, but really my brain was processing everything and then some, so when the politician filth finally came through with what I'd told him to do with the guaranteed vote, I could only smile in satisfaction.

The television volume was almost at seventy percent capacity, and I was happily sipping at the whiskey in the rocks glass that I'd stolen from Marco's kitchen the day before. If he was going to keep me confined to this prison cell eight or so hours away from the house, I might as well enjoy myself, right? Right.

I was watching intently as the man stood up on stage delivering his speech where he vowed to crack down hard on criminal activities, promising to never so much as think about sparing them. He promised to free the people from the 'tyrannical rule of the Mafia!' Please. I rolled my eyes at him. Classic case of pot calling the kettle black. Politicians were all the same.

Still, it was amusing to see someone try and justify himself. Secretly, that disgusting piece of crap was probably losing sleep from thinking about how he was going to try and weasel his way out of my blackmail, and the thought made me smile as I twirled the whiskey around in its glass. Unbeknownst to him, I had him cornered in every way possible. Funny how quickly people sold themselves out whenever a little pressure was expertly placed on the precise points.

I still had the phone I'd taken from Lina, and for now was taking complete advantage of it to do my stealth work. After all, how could I blackmail people if I didn't have means of communication? That would never do. While my poor soul was stuck in a hostage prison in Italy, I fully intended to use every resource to my advantage, and by the time I was done, everything would all be mine.

"It feels good to be victorious," I grinned and sipped my whiskey again. Maybe victory was being sung too early, maybe not, but in my eyes, team Katarina had already claimed victory. After all, if not I then who could take over the Italian drug ring? Nobody.

From here, a drug raid would be scheduled to ransack the DiBiancci house, which would definitely work considering how many clues I'd given the politician to scatter around. There was no way the cops wouldn't take the bait, and from there, the rest is history. Fabulous, fabulous history. I couldn't wait to see how it would go. If my calculations were correct, the raid would happen by the end of the week.

The phone vibrated on the bedside table so I took hold of it to see what the notification was about. It was a text from Lina letting me know that everything was set in place and ready to go. Perfect. Now it was time to get in touch with my father.

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(Marco's POV)

"I think you were being too harsh," my mother looked at her nails before returning to the arduous task of filing them. I'd heard the same thing come out of her mouth every single day for the past week and it was getting old. Kicking Katarina out of the house was the best thing to do because she was getting into everyone's heads. Apparently I was the only one who could see it.

That girl was a slick as she bragged to be, maybe even more, and even though I'd never stopped being cautious about her, I never noticed the way making her act as my personal maid during was beginning to backfire on me. I started to see small things about here that nobody else would have noticed, like the way she would scrunch up her nose whenever she could tell that someone was lying, or the series of moles in the shape of a crescent moon on the base of her neck that matched the beauty mark on the left above her top lip.

I even noticed the way she could tell the difference between periwinkle and lavender. See what I mean? Backfiring. It's not that I was beginning to like her, I was beginning to get used to her. That was worse than liking her, and I had to nip it in the bud before it grew too much. She hadn't done anything specifically to me, but there was still a lurking suspicion from the way she had been handling the situation with the prisoners she made me get for her,

It came as a surprise to me when she let them go. It came as an even bigger surprise to me when I saw the, returned to their daily lives. The politician, for example, had gone right back to running for an electoral position, and the lack of life ruining from Kat's part made me think that maybe she had managed to manipulate him into doing something for her.

Still, she probably didn't do that considering the fact that she wouldn't be able to hide it from me. She had nowhere to hide it in the first place. I was watching her like a hawk, and I even knew that she had found the Mockingbird Surveillance System keypad behind the painting in my room and behind her bed. I also knew that she had snuck into my father's office to try and find what it would open. I knew she plotting to kill me, too.

I knew every single thing Kat had been doing in this house, including the way she crushed aspirin in my breakfast omelet in an attempt to poison me or something. It was cute, the way she was already trying to find ways to kill me, but it wouldn't work at all because I had eyes everywhere. Even in her current room in the hostage compound, I was watching her closely.

"I did what was best," I insisted, deciding it best not to argue with my mom. She was stubborn and had already grown to like Kat, so she would never see my side of the story. That was baffling to me, because I knew that of Katarina had her way, she wouldn't hesitate to kill my mother too. Women. I would never understand them.

"No, you did what felt comfortable to you. I really think you should've kept her around. She would have made a good partner for you."

"Are you forgetting the blood feud?"

"So you admit you've thought about it," my mother smiled but didn't look at me. Damn, she had me there.

"Doesn't matter. She's gone now." I turned up the volume on the television and settled back to text someone as the news played in the background. I wasn't paying attention to the news at all, so my mother gasping and telling me to turn it up caught me by surprise.

If that caught me by surprise, the news of the explosion of one of our warehouses was going to fucking floor me. It did. It was even worse than I expected because not only had one of our warehouses exploded, an entire block of them did. We lost hundreds of millions worth of drugs and people with them.

"The police have inspected the sites and the remains of the items within the warehouses and we can officially confirm that this was a drug factory and human trafficking station. Evidence suggests foul play. Could it be that the mafias are at war with each other?" The reported was looking solemnly into the camera. My chest felt void and cold. "Authorities are reporting that nearly eight hundred millions euros worth of drugs was lost in the explosions. The ordeal began in the building directly behind me, and it seems to have caused a chain reaction for the other warehouses. More news on this later, back to the studio."

My gut was telling me that I knew who had done this. I wanted to investigate, but the scene was crawling with police so I had to stay put. If they so much as found a scrap of evidence linking the warehouses to my family, it would all be over very quickly. "Salvador caught up with us."

"What? It can't be him," my mother was looking pale from her seat, and her legs were beginning to be restless. She always twitched and moved her legs when she was nervous. "No, no, it was a gas leak or something."

"Read the news!" My hand flew out and knocked a vase to the floor from its perch on top of the coffee table. "They are literally saying that there's evidence of foul play!"

What the fuck were we going to do now?