Chapter 6 - A Visit From Vincent Basso
I hadn't expected Vincent Basso to come to me directly, but three days after we recovered the storage facility's contents, my head of security informed me that Vincent had requested a meeting — alone, unarmed, at a location of my choosing.
I chose a private room at a restaurant I trusted completely, Marco and two additional men positioned discreetly nearby, though I doubted, given the circumstances, that Vincent intended anything beyond conversation.
He arrived precisely on time, a lean, sharp-eyed man in his mid-thirties who carried himself with the particular tension of someone still proving himself in a role he'd inherited rather than earned.
"I want to be clear before we begin," Vincent said, settling into the chair across from me without waiting for an invitation. "I didn't order the attack on your nurse. I didn't know Anthony Ricci was working against my operation until after he was already dead."
"Convince me."
"Ricci was my father's man, not mine. I inherited him along with everything else eighteen months ago, and frankly, I never trusted him. When I learned he'd been feeding information to federal investigators, my first instinct was to eliminate the leak. I sent men to retrieve him quietly. I did not send men to shoot a hospital nurse in a parking lot."
"Then who did?"
Vincent's jaw tightened. "That's what I've spent the last week trying to determine, and what I found should concern you as much as it concerns me. My men who approached Elena Carter that night weren't acting on my orders at that specific location. Someone redirected them, using channels that mimicked my authorization closely enough that they didn't question it."
"Someone inside your organization."
"Or someone with detailed enough knowledge of my operation to manipulate it without actually being inside it," Vincent said. "I've been doing my own investigating, Domenico, ever since I realized my father kept information from me for years — information about your father's murder that I only recently learned existed."
I studied him carefully, searching for the deception I expected but, to my genuine surprise, struggled to find.
"You know about Ashford."
Something shifted in Vincent's expression — surprise, quickly masked. "You found the storage facility."
"Ricci made sure of it, before he died protecting a woman who had nothing to do with any of this."
Vincent was quiet for a long moment. "My father kept that evidence for leverage. I found references to it in his private files after his death, but I never located the actual materials until I started investigating who manipulated my men into targeting your nurse. The trail led back to Ashford's people — specifically, to a man named Curtis Doyle, who has worked as Ashford's chief of security for the past decade."
"Doyle discovered Ricci was compiling evidence."
"That's my theory. Doyle likely traced Ricci's movements, realized what he was gathering, and orchestrated an attack designed to look like Basso involvement — eliminating Ricci, retrieving the evidence, and simultaneously reigniting exactly the kind of rivalry between our families that's kept both of us too distracted to look toward Ashford directly, for twenty years."
The strategy's brutal elegance settled over me with cold clarity. Ashford had killed my father and framed the Bassos once, decades ago. Now, facing the possibility of exposure, he had attempted the exact same maneuver — using violence against an innocent woman to redirect suspicion toward old enemies while eliminating the threat to his secret.
"Why come to me with this?" I asked. "Why not simply eliminate the threat yourself and let the old rivalry continue undisturbed?"
Vincent leaned forward. "Because I'm tired of inheriting a war I never actually chose, built on a lie neither of our fathers lived long enough to fully unravel. I have no interest in continuing a rivalry manufactured by a man who murdered your father and manipulated mine into believing your family was the enemy. I would rather end this properly — expose Ashford, clear both our families of decades of unnecessary conflict, and move forward as men who at least understand the truth, even if we never become allies."
It was, I thought, either an extraordinarily sophisticated deception or the most honest thing anyone connected to the Basso name had ever said to me.
"If we do this," I said slowly, "Elena needs absolute protection throughout. She's already been shot once for a truth she never asked to carry."
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"Agreed," Vincent said without hesitation. "And Domenico — for what it's worth, I am sorry for what happened to her, regardless of who ultimately ordered it. No one should be caught in the middle of a war that isn't theirs."
We spent the following two hours mapping out a careful strategy — one that would require both Basso and Morelli resources, working together for the first time in twenty years, to expose Gregory Ashford's twenty-year deception before he could eliminate the last remaining threats to his carefully constructed empire.
