As it turned out, there was a whole lot for Joanette to be told about Saverio Alcunze. The history between him, Marco DiBiancci and Katarina Montenegro was nothing if not complex. The man had a victim complex, she deduced, and was now aiming for the jugular after being slighted by both halves of the Italian-Spanish couple.
None of it was surprising, but it caught Joanette off guard either way. She didn't know the magnitude of the clusterfuck she was walking into, but it was becoming apparent that whatever was going on behind the scenes after Saverio disappeared was bigger than it had been when the late Valencia Don died.
What he was trying to do, gunning for Cressida DiBiancci, would start a world war. It didn't really matter which of the DiBiancci children he decided to kill, the outcome would be the same.
The Italian-Spanish alliance was something exponentially influential. They had powerful allies, the most powerful of which being each other. To top it off, they were a family. Joanette didn't see any strain of probability where acting against them wouldn't end in Saverio's demise by being ground into dust, but that was just her. She could've been wrong, though she highly doubted it.
In fact, she hoped she wasn't. Because if Joanette Bordeaux was wrong in a calculation, that meant that whatever Saverio had was more powerful than the two big league Mediterranean players. Perhaps it was even big enough to uproot the entire system of the underworld and bend it to his will.
That probability was the worst of them all, and it was also what Joanette had to prevent under any and all circumstances should push come to shove. She'd been sent to protect Cressida, but if push came to shove and she had to make a choice— well, she preferred not to think about that.
"Come on, let's try this store!" The little girl was pulling her in the direction of a casual outlet store, rambling excitedly about how she wanted to find something to wear for a birthday party that was coming up. Joanette only half listened, leaning into the sinking feeling in her stomach that hadn't left her alone since she'd woken up that day.
Something was going to happen. She didn't know what, when, or where, but her experience as an agent was extensive enough to have accurate premonitions.
Joanette grimaced, following Cressida around and trying not to let her negative feelings bleed out onto the perceptive child. She was obliviously wandering down the aisles, taking her nanny and bodyguard with her, but otherwise not paying attention to her surroundings. Everything was putting the agent on edge. She was tense. Too tense.
She wished Ken was with her. At least then she'd have someone to hypothesise with and help her look out for any potential threats. As it was, Joanette felt like she was on the border of having a heart attack. Never in her life had she felt so anxious, even when she was on missions by herself.
"What do you think of this one, Erica?" Cressida held up a dress to her body, looking down at it with a little expression of disappointment. "I thought it would look better on me than it probably will."
"Nonsense," She reassured the little girl, caressing her head affectionately. "This dress will look just fine on you, you just have to size up. Try this one." She pulled another garment from the rack, identical to the one Cressida was holding, but two sizes bigger. "The oversized look is all the rage these days."
"It is?" Big brown eyes blinked up at her so hopefully that Joanette nearly felt her heart break. Her charge was growing on her, it seemed. A strange development she didn't see coming by a long shot. Developing any type of bond with a child was a foreign concept to Joanette.
Actually, developing any type of bond with anyone besides professionally was a foreign concept to her. Loyalty was what she knew, but there were usually no feelings beside the normal dose of panic and dread behind it whenever something went completely sideways.
Now, she was feeling both panic and dread, but also a sliver of sadness. The thought of anyone wanting to hurt the two children she was pretending to nanny was a gut wrenching thought for her all of a sudden. They were both unique. She grew to like things about them and in the process, she supposed, she ended up liking them as a whole. The ever bickering DiBiancci siblings.
What a monster Saverio Alcunze was. She couldn't wait until his threat was eliminated.
According to what Jean-Louis had told her, the Agency in France was working in conjunction with Katarina and her aunt, Francesca, to get ahead of the issue before it caught up to them in irreversible ways. Apparently, as she had been told, Katarina had never had the open opportunity to kill Saverio, or else she would've done it. She'd been looking for openings and had even killed his mother, her half-aunt, but he never gave her the chance to strike at him.
It seemed he always had multiple barriers protecting him. The coward.
"What do you think?" Cressida was standing in the dress she'd picked out for her, looking pleased with the results she was wearing. "You were right, I needed a bigger size."
"I'm not a supermodel for nothing, sweetheart." She winked at her, causing the girl to erupt in giggles. It was a strange thing, to be pleased by hearing a child's laughter. She wondered if that was how mothers felt.
Yikes. No. Backtrack, backtrack.
"Are you getting it?"
"Yes, I think so." The girl nodded her head and turned back to the change rooms. "Will you pick something else out for me, please?"
Unease gnawed at Joanette's stomach. She shouldn't leave the girl alone, she knew that very well, and she had absolutely no intention of doing that. But when Cressida blinked those doe eyes of hers, Joanette felt herself becoming simultaneously annoyed and moved.
"Fine, but hurry up. I don't want you alone for long."
"Okay." She smiled and left for the cubicles while the agent-slash-nanny continued looking through the racks of clothes, trying to find something that would suit the girl and also be fast about it. Fashion was not a hasty process, it would not rush or be rushed for anyone no matter how badly they wanted it, so when she finally found something she thought Cressida might like, a few more minutes than she would've liked had gone by, but she was relieved.
"Cress?" She called down the hall of the changing rooms, expecting to hear the small voice in reply. "I found something else for you."
"Over here," she called out and Joanette followed the voice to a stall at the very back of the hall. Why Cressida had chosen such a secluded spot, she had no idea, but her mind wasn't completely consumed by the odd choice when a bad feeling was making her want to curl up in a corner and hurl. "I think—"
Joanette saw the blast before she heard it, instinct making her jump back until her spine hit the door of the changing room where her charge was. She had virtually no time to react, letting her training guide her as she dropped to her knees and rolled under the gap of the door, into the space where Cressida was wide-eyed, pressed against the wall and trembling in fear.
"Shit." She pushed on her glasses and pulled out her phone, quickly using voice dictation to send Ken a message. The explosion could've been anything, a complete accident, even, but Joanette knew that it wasn't.
Too much of a coincidence, and she didn't do coincidences to begin with.
"E-Eri?" Cressida squeaked, watching her fiddle with her electronics. "Wh-what—"
"Shh." Joanette crouched in front of her and placed a finger to her lips. "There is no time to explain right now but I think somebody's trying to get to you."
With hurried movements, she yanked the rest of Cressida's clothes on and ordered the girl to jump and wrap herself around her body as tight as she could like a koala.
Using her jacket as a harness, she closed it around the small girl's body and sat back to wait, fiddling with her gadgets, trying to detect anything strange through the commotion of screaming and panicking by the civilians. They were still on the ground level, which meant that if the blast had broken the walls to the outside, whatever was out there could enter through the gape.
Fuck, she had to get them out of there, but how?