Matteo
The compound my brothers follow me out of is nothing but a ruin of smoke, ash, bodies, and silence. We tore through another Adami-friendly zone, the twelfth tonight, and there is still no sign of Azra.
Dante butts shoulders with me. His chest is heaving, and his face is pale beneath the soot. He’s killed dozens of men tonight, yet he eyeballs me like he’s bracing for me to break. Or worse. For me to slit his throat.
Silent apologies have been pouring out of him all night, but I’m not ready to listen to them.
“Not yet,” I tell him before he can utter a single apology blistering through his remorseful eyes. “Don’t apologize for something that hasn’t happened. Just help me get my wife back.”
My voice cracks on the last word, so Giovanni grabs hold of the reins I’m barely clasping.
“Where to next?” he asks Elio, who’s been guiding our raids across Carlisle for the past six or so hours. Azra is still here. I can feel it in my bones. My fear just isn’t allowing me to pinpoint her exact location. “Just point. We’ll burn the whole fucking city to ash if we have to.”
Everyone is here. My brothers. Our cousins. Even my father.
He surveys the wreckage of our latest bloodbath with a grim expression. “This was the last Adami-friendly zone. We need to think outside the box.”
He’s right, but my fear is eating me alive. I can’t think or breathe, but there’s one thing I definitely understand. I can’t lose her.
I won’t survive it.
I won’t be my father.
I won’t move on after losing the love of my life.
Azra is it for me.
If she isn’t here, I won’t be either. It is that simple.
“Still nothing on the livestream?” I ask.
Nico shakes his head on Elio’s behalf since he’s too focused on the laptop balanced on the hood of the SUV to answer me.
“Nothing yet—”
“Hold on,” Elio interrupts, raising his pained eyes. “I’ve got new footage.”
We crowd the screen, and my heart stops.
Azra’s dark locks sway against her back as she moves through freestanding black curtains, her steps unsteady.
“She’s outside,” I say when stars flicker above her like a twisted stage set.
As she staggers across a painted concrete floor, I drag my eyes down her body. Restraints mark her wrists and ankles, but the rest of her appears relatively untouched.
Thank fuck.
“No, no, no… la mia tigrotta…” I whisper when she drifts toward the edge of a rooftop.
I’ve seen this footage before, multiple times over the past week, as we tried to piece together Hattie’s suicide. Azra isn’t wearing a soiled white nightie like her best friend, but her sways and the lifelessness in her eyes are identical.
Fear grips me as I fight to push past it. “Where have I seen that structure before?”
Large columns flank half the screen. They’re Romanian and disclose that Azra’s location is one of the many old relics in Carlisle. We could go for another six hours before we find her. That’s how many structures like this are dotted throughout the region. But this one registers as familiar.
Someone responds with the most obvious answer. “They feature in Hattie’s suicide video, but we don’t know where she committed suicide. It’s never been disclosed.”
I sling both my eyes and my gun to the side when the voice registers as unfamiliar. It’s accented and brimming with as much anger and frustration as mine has held all evening. “Who the fuck are you?”
A large man with wide shoulders, a dark mop of hair, and an arrogant smirk pushes himself into the family circle. “Ahmet ?ahin. Azra’s brother.” He gestures to three men lighting up our chests with the red dots of assault weapons. “That’s Kemal, ?mer, and Rüzgar. We’re here to help.”
To show good faith, he signals for the men to stand down.
I’m too angry to appreciate the gesture. “Help? Like you did when you sat in the front row, ready to watch your sister marry a monster?” I spit at his feet. “Get the fuck out of here before I help your sister bury more than her ex this week.”
Ahmet laughs. “Let me just say, if you hadn’t shown up when you did, Antonio would already be dead.
We were just waiting for her to marry the prick so she could get back her family home.
” Snarling, he looks me up and down. “We also thought she’d be safe with you.
” He pffts. “Didn’t even take you a week to prove us wrong. ”
I fist his shirt and drag him forward at the same time my knuckles crack his nose. Blood pisses out of the split down the broad bridge of his nose, but all he does is smirk.
Fucking psychopath.
My fists are itching to play Whac-A-Mole with his face, but the sight of the red ooze sliding down his face reminds me of the last time we undertook a bloodbath.
“They’re the same columns from the property where Lucia was almost gang-raped.” My chest heaves as utmost certainty smacks into me. “We couldn’t be fucked carrying the perps down the stairs.” I twist to face Nico. “So we tossed them into the truck parked under the open roof space.”
I can see the exact moment recognition dawns on Nico’s face. “Yes. That’s it. How the fuck did we not realize? We would have walked that rooftop a hundred times that night.”
Bittersweet relief almost buckles my knees.
We have Azra’s location.
Finally.
“Let’s go,” Giovanni shouts, already in the driver’s seat.
Minutes later, memories of the fear etched on Dante’s face weeks ago flash before my eyes as I take the stairs of a multimillion-dollar property two at a time. My lungs burn, and my heart slams against my ribs, but I don’t slow down.
My brothers fan out behind me, clearing rooms and shouting confirmations of the empty spaces. They’re accompanied by Azra’s brothers, whose faces are just as murderous.
I veer my steps straight for the rooftop.
That’s where Azra is, so that’s where I need to be.
My worst nightmare comes to fruition when I burst into the open and spot Azra balancing on the thin lip of the roof, swaying uncontrollably. Her movements are slow and dreamlike, as if she’s not fully here.
“Azra…” Ahmet says, catching up to me. “Hey, prenses. It’s not safe up there, so I’d really like it if you hopped down.”
“Shut the fuck up,” I snap out when his words inch her closer to the edge.
Niceties aren’t what she needs right now. Coddling someone during a crisis only pushes them closer to death. She wanted revenge. Her entire existence for the past several years was based on that. Snatching that away from her, even unknowingly, is worse than stealing a binkie from a baby.
“That’s our sister,” Kemal barks out, as if he might reach her before his charge forced her to jump.
If that were true, I’d already be sprinting across the painted concrete floor.
“She’s my fucking wife,” I yell back. “That means I know her better than you, and I love her more than you ever have. So stand the fuck down or watch your sister fall to her death.” You have no idea how hard it was to say those words. A batch of vomit accompanied each word.
Although his jaw twitches, Ahmet gestures for Kemal to stand down. His eyes silently warn that he’ll take his time killing me, that I won’t stop suffering for weeks if I fuck this up. I don’t mind. Death will be a walk in the park if I don’t know Azra as well as I think I do.
I moisten my throat with saliva to make my words come out with indifference. “Do you really think this is the answer? What would Hattie say when she learns you gave up on her and the promise you made? You’ve been working on making him pay since the day she died. Do you really want to give up now?”
Both our brothers look at me as though I’ve lost my mind.
Maybe I have, but I know my wife.
I know what she needs, so I continue.
“If you want to take the easy way out, fine. Jump. But if you want to make him pay—really pay—then stand your ground and show him you’re stronger than he ever believed.”
The pride in my tone isn’t rewarded with a twitch or a flicker.
I get nothing. But desperation is a beast I’ll never slay without taking every motherfucker in the realm down with me.
“Or maybe you finally know the truth. Hattie took her life because she wasn’t strong enough to be a part of the Cosa Nostra.”
Nico hisses. “Matteo, what the hell are you doing?”
I warn him to stand the fuck down with a stern finger point.
It could be a muscle spasm, but Azra reacts to my taunt.
Her balled hands tighten as a blood vessel in her neck throbs intensely.
I take a breath and then go for the jugular. “I also heard she liked dick a little too much to be a good, traditional Cosa Nostra wife.”
Azra hisses.
Finally.
It isn’t enough, though, so with a cruel, deliberate attack, I push harder.
“Perhaps if she’d closed her legs a little more often, she wouldn’t have placed herself in a predicament to get hurt.”
I know what this location is. I know what they used it for, so it now makes sense why Hattie made the decision she did. She isn’t the first victim of the gang-rape attacks that the Adamis organized to believe suicide was her only option.
“It’s a little hard to withdraw consent halfway through a hundred men.”
When Azra’s fingernails dig into her palm, our brothers finally understand what I’m doing.
She can’t hit me from the ledge.
She’ll need to stand toe-to-toe with me to ram my lies back down my throat with her fists.
“She didn’t give consent, nor did she open her legs,” Azra whispers, her voice hoarse. “They forced her.”
I pfft her. “Not what I heard.”
She cranks her neck back to face me, and fury blazes through the fog in her eyes.
I’ve never seen eyes so lifeless, and I held my mother when she died.
“It doesn’t matter what you heard,” she snaps, seething. “I know what happened.”
I shrug dismissively. “Your word doesn’t mean shit if you don’t have proof.”
Defeated playing a game that was never meant to favor her, she shifts her focus back to the front, leaving me no choice but to pull out the lowest trick in the book.
“Just admit it, your friend was a whore who took on more than she could handle.”
That does it.
Without an ounce of fear in her steps, she storms for me and slaps me so hard that my head rockets to the side. While screaming like a deranged witch, her fists then slam into my chest so forcefully they remind my heart that it can commence beating again.
She’s safe.
I can’t offer the same guarantee for myself.
“She wasn’t a whore. She was so strong!” Azra screams while beating the living fucking hell out of me.
“She begged them to stop, and they wouldn’t.
She held on for as long as she could, but he didn’t tell them to stop even after they broke her soul!
He watched them hurt his wife time and time again while snickering as if she deserved it. ”
Her voice breaks, and that’s when I swoop in.
Wrapping my arms around her shuddering torso, I pull her into my chest before attempting to Band-Aid the hurt I caused. I fucking hate myself for how I’ve hurt her, but that’s how blinding my fear was. I would have given anything to save her—even my last chance to see my mother again.
“He won’t get away with what he did to Hattie. I promise you he will pay,” I whisper into her hair. “But I need you here, with me, to do that. I need you at my side. I can’t do this without my little tiger. I can’t make him pay unless you’re there with me.”
As our brothers disperse in all directions, confident I’ve got this, Azra collapses against me. She sobs, shakes, and clings to my shirt like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. “You called the kindest person I know a whore.”
“I didn’t mean anything I said. I just needed you here, fighting me.”
Her wet eyes bounce between mine before she whispers more in confirmation than confusion. “You don’t hate her.”
She’s not asking a question, but I still answer as if she is. “No. Never.” I wipe at her cheeks, each tear scarring my heart. “I said what I needed to say to make you react. If there is one thing I know about my wife, it is that she comes out swinging when she knows someone is wrong.”
I don’t know what I did to deserve this level of loyalty and faith, but she believes me without default.
Hiccupping, she drags the sleeve of her long-sleeved dress under her nose. “It hurts.”
“Where?”
“Everywhere. It hurts everywhere,” she whispers.
I stop searching her body for injuries my panic may have made me miss. I realize she means she’s emotionally hurt, not physically, when she rubs her knuckles over her chest.
“It’s okay, baby. I’ve got you.” I sink to the ground, taking her with me. “Let it out. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere, and I won’t let you go.”
She trembles violently as her tears soak my shirt. “Promise?”
“On my fucking life.”
As I rock her gently, I repeat over and over, “I’ve got you. You’re safe. I swear to you, Azra, you are safe with me.”