Submitting to My Best Friend's Dad by Scarlett Rossi
Chapter 482 -

*Giovani*

Tallon paused at the door to the office to allow me in first. I unlocked the door with a small smile. Gabriele mentioned a few months ago that he'd sat down Alessandro's whole team for a lesson on manners, and it seemed to have stuck with one brother.

I marched in ahead of him and took my seat. He shut the door quietly behind him and took his position in the middle of the room. In his brightly colored suit, he looked surprisingly official for a kid of barely eighteen. "Report," I said.

He nodded. "Gabriele said we weren't to contact you until you got home, but something else happened last night."

I grimaced. I knew as I promised Olivia that something like this might happen, but I couldn't rush her out of Naples, not when she looked at me like that... and not, if I was being honest, when I thought she might be an early target. Tallon handed over a manila folder simply labeled with yesterday's date. I flipped it open to a few pictures of nothing more than ashes and a few crumbled walls.

"The Zaytsevs weren't sure we knew we'd been caught," I guessed. "Any casualties?"

"Two." He grimaced. "That's the third-best warehouse uptown. Alessandro thinks they just don't know about our better ones, but my instinct leans toward a warning."

I leaned back in my chair. They'd totally torched the thing, and with men inside. A warning would be smaller than that. I was inclined to agree with Alessandro, but I liked how steady Tallon seemed. I didn't want to crush him. "What makes you think that?" I asked.

"If you'll flip to the next picture."

I turned the first layer of pictures over to reveal a single, full-color, letter-sized print of the bronze plaque next to the door that used to bear the name "Abramo," the first name of our first Don masquerading as a last name. A new legend had been added to the bottom, carved in perhaps centimeter-tall cyrillic.

"I picked up a little Russian when Dmitri was last a problem," Tallon said. "That there says, 'Thin ice. One step forward.""

"Two steps back," I finished automatically.

He grinned, then gathered himself once more. "A cop wouldn't look twice at it, but I was at the warehouse a couple of days ago. It's definitely new, and I think the message is unmistakable."

I peered at Tallon. Operators twice his age and skill would've missed something like that, and we would've blundered forward thinking the Russians only had a partial scope of our power. Hell, the kid learned Russian when I was barely handing him a loaded piece.

Somehow, between all his jokes and his garish clothes, he'd grown into someone worth keeping an eye on.

I nodded. "I think you're right. We've got, what, six warehouses on that side of town?"

"Eight if you count the partials," he added.

"Third best is too good to be a fluke." I looked back down at the picture. "And they attacked so aggressively to show us they mean business, but they could be fronting more strength than they've got, trying to scare us away. If they had a significant presence in the city, we would've heard about them before Salvatore showed up at our gate." I ran a hand through my hair and closed the folder. "Alright, take your brother and-"

Tallon cleared his throat. "My report's not quite done."

I eyed the teenager, looking for signs of disrespect. Even more so than when he walked in, he stood straight and tall. If I'd had to guess, I'd have said he was proud about the next part, but he didn't have Alessandro's cat-who-ate-the-canary grin. He simply looked pleased, and he hadn't moved from his spot in the middle of the room.

I inclined my head and gestured for him to continue.

"Since we couldn't reach you, and our team was leading this particular charge, I made a call." He nodded. "You can turn to the next picture."

Another set of images of ashes and rubble greeted my eyes. For a moment, I thought I was looking at the same pictures, but then I noticed that while the last pictures were taken in the dead of night, the sky in these showed the barest hint of sunrise on the horizon.

"That is the home of Stefan Sorokin, the man who caught Marcello in the first place. He shared it with his whole crew and no one else. Well," Tallon said as he rubbed the back of his neck, "there was also a live-in cleaning lady who we've already cleared of any Russian involvement beyond her heritage, but I got her out before the fire started."

I exhaled a little in disbelief. This boy, whom I'd watched grow up in front of my eyes, had selected nearly the exact same course of action I would have without a single word from me, and minimized innocent casualties in the process. I kept my eyes bent on the pictures until I could be certain the shock wore off my face. I was impressed, more so than I would have expected, but I didn't want to let him know that. "Casualties?" I asked. "And how sure are you?"

The thing about fire that up-and-comers like him didn't always realize was that casualties weren't guaranteed.

He swallowed. "Five in total, counting Stefan, and pretty sure. I took a three-man team in with me and left another outside. We worked down from there, and the ground team cleaned up any runners. I personally checked the pulse of every member of his crew we identified, and either Russians have some new heartbeat tricks we don't know about, or they're dead. I sent them away with our clean-up guys before we even torched the place. News is running a deathless fire." I nodded slowly. Even if they'd been alive, our clean-up guys did stuff with acid that turned even my stomach.

"Business impact?" I asked.

"It seems like they were cooking something in the basement, but we had to take it apart or risk exploding the place." He shrugged. "Looked like meth to me, but you never know."

I dropped the folder back to the desk and looked up at him. He'd done such an efficient job that I could barely come up with any notes to give him for next time.

"Done with your report now?"

He flinched a little. "One last thing. Final picture."

I found another large, full-color image. On the concrete steps, another message was carved in wobbly, much larger cyrillic. I quirked an eyebrow at him.

"Mine. I let the moment get to me." He grimaced. "It says check your own ice."

It was a little reckless, the first breath of a mistake he'd made. An extremely clever and not very pocket-motivated cop could put the two together. But the chances of that in our city were so small as to be laughable. What was more likely was that the Russians would see, as I would have wanted to, that for every piddly hit they managed on us, we'd hit back far harder.

I closed the folder and nodded. "Alright."

"We've seen new tails sniffing around us since then." He shrugged. "It looks like the war might be back on, as much as they can manage."

"Tallon," I said slowly.

He shrank slightly into himself.

"This is good work. You made a logical decision and you acted on it before the enemy could think we were weak when I left town." I tapped the folder. "And good reporting as well."

He visibly exhaled.

"Next time, I don't want you to hesitate around me either."

His eyebrows shot up. "What?"

"You were worried I'd be upset about the graffiti," I said.

He nodded. "And some other things."

"Don't." I crossed my arms. "If you can't stand here and tell me you did something with total confidence, don't do it. Other than that, I want my reports without the flinching." I eyed him. "If you flinch here, you flinch there. Break the habit now." "Of course." He nodded enthusiastically. "I just didn't want to "

I shook my head. "Don't explain yourself like that either. Not until I ask."

He lapsed into silence.

I stared at the folder and let him sweat a little. I'd probably have hit a warehouse, but their team had been tailing personnel, so they made do with what they had. The hit was clean, precise, and clear in its intent. Lorenz, or whoever the hell ran their operation, couldn't miss it. And I didn't have to give up my vacation to make it happen, either.

I'd been relying on Alessandro for a long time, but he retained some difficult personality quirks. Perhaps Tallon could be a promising way forward for that team.

"What would you do next?" I asked. I wanted to see his mind work in real time.

"We can keep hitting these low-level guys forever." He shrugged. "But it's like playing whack-a-mole. It's never going to end. I think we have to go top down." He swallowed. "And we have to be sure we've cleaned house this time."

It made sense, but it wasn't perfect. The Zaytsevs were like vampires. Leaving low-level guys meant they, too, might come crawling back someday.

"You and your brother were in charge of taking out Lorenz," I said as I leaned back in my chair. He took small criticism well, but I wanted to see him really squirm.

He shoved his hands in his pockets and dropped his gaze. "I know. That's why I'm going to work double-time to take him down now. I owe the family until he's gone."

No apologies. No explanations. He learned quickly, at least.

"That'll do," I said. "Thank you, Tallon."

He nodded.

"Contact Alessandro and Gabriele. Tell them we need to meet tonight. Here." My gaze drifted off the folder to the lopsided clay penholder Olivia made me on her brief foray into pottery. "I have a few things to handle first." He turned on his heel and left without another word.

I flipped the folder back open and stared at the remains of the Russian house. Mob wars weren't pretty. They looked like this, scorched land and blood and eye-for-an-eye moves. If I looked at the situation from purely a Don's perspective, I knew exactly what I had to do next.

Information always came at a premium, especially information on the sort of high-level people Tallon wanted to target, the high-level people anyone smart would want to target-people like me.

And that meant my first move should be to take out the spy I'd identified. With open war on the horizon, any leaks could be deadly.

But I couldn't step that far back. The spy I'd identified was Olivia's father, however angry she was with him right now. My fingers itched to pick up the phone and just send a few guys to his house to find out what he knew, but I had to be more careful.

If she gave the word, and said he should be hurt or killed, I just knew her tender heart would bleed. Hell, if she found out about it after the fact, I didn't know if she'd ever get over it.

So, how did I eliminate a spy before his information got me killed without touching him?