Chapter 78 Antonio
The air in the warehouse is thick with the smell of rust, stale water and something else, something metallic and coppery that makes the back of my throat tighten.
Dust motes dance in the slivers of pale, sickly light cutting through the grime-caked windows high above.
My footsteps echo on the concrete, a solitary drumbeat in the vast, hollow space.
They’d taken my phone, my wallet, my gun. Patted me down with rough, impersonal hands at the door. I’d come alone, as instructed. A lamb to the slaughter, but a lamb with a singular, burning purpose: get Grace out.
Three men stand in a loose circle under a single, dangling bulb that does more to carve out pockets of darkness than to illuminate. My eyes scan them, assessing threats, calculating angles, and then my blood runs cold.
The man in the centre turns. He’s older, his face a roadmap of hard living and cruelty, but I’d know that predatory smirk anywhere. The cold, intelligent eyes that have haunted the periphery of my world for years.
Lucas Fucking Asher.
The name is a silent curse in my mind. He’s a predator, a paedophile, a man we excommunicated from the Brethren years ago. The only reason he wasn’t eliminated entirely is the virtue of his blood, him being a Founder.
“Antonio Macrae,” Lucas says, his voice a low, gravelly thing that seems to absorb the light. “Punctual. I appreciate that in a man who’s about to lose everything.”
I don’t grace him with a response. My silence is my weapon, for now. I just stare, letting him see the ice in my gaze, the promise of what will happen when I get my hands on him.
He smiles, a thin, bloodless line. “You’re not in charge here, but you already knew that. Come. Your wife is eager to see you.”
He leads the way toward a heavy metal door set into the far wall. One of his brutes pulls it open, revealing a set of stairs descending into utter blackness. The coppery smell intensifies, mixed with damp and decay.
We go down. The stairs are narrow, iron, clanging with every step. The basement is worse than the warehouse. It’s a dungeon. The air is cold and wet, clinging to my skin. The only light comes from a string of bare, low-wattage bulbs that run along the ceiling, casting a jaundiced glow.
And then I see her.
My breath catches, seizing in my chest. The world narrows to a single, horrifying point.
Grace.
She’s in a cell. A cage of floor-to-ceiling iron bars, like something from a medieval nightmare, and she’s naked.
Curled into herself on a thin, filthy mattress in the corner, her arms wrapped around her shins, her face buried in her knees.
Her skin is goose-fleshed and smudged with dirt.
Her beautiful hair is a matted, and bloodstained mess.
A low, animal sound builds in my throat. I take an instinctive step forward, my hand reaching out as if I could tear the bars apart with my will alone.
Lucas’s hand slams against my chest, stopping me dead. “Ah, ah, ah. Not so fast, Macrae. Like I said, you’re not in charge right now. You look. You listen.”
My eyes are glued to Grace. She must have heard us. She flinches, uncurling slightly, and lifts her head.
And the entire world stops.
Her face is a mask of tears and grime, her eyes wide with a terror, and then I see it. The blood. Dark, rust-brown smears down the sides of her neck, tracing cruel paths over her collarbones. The wounds themselves are hidden by her hair, but the evidence of their butchery is painted on her skin.
A whimper escapes her, a broken, shattered sound that doesn’t sound like her at all. It’s the sound of a soul being systematically dismantled.
“An, Antonio…”
Her voice is a rasp, a ghost of the melody I love. It breaks the paralysis holding me. Rage, white-hot and absolute, floods my system. I turn on Lucas, my body vibrating with the need to kill.
“What do you want?” The words are a snarl, ripped from a place deep within me I rarely let surface. “If you want me dead, then kill me. Get it over with, but she has nothing to do with this. Let her go. Now.”
My demand is met with a chorus of low, mocking laughter from the men flanking Lucas. It echoes in the damp chamber, a sound of pure evil.
Lucas just looks amused. “Nothing to do with this? Antonio, you’re not thinking. She has everything to do with this.” He takes a step closer to the bars, and Grace shrinks back, a fresh wave of tears spilling down her cheeks. “You married her. And, as we recently discovered, you knocked her up.”
The words hit me with the force of a sledgehammer, and all the air leaves my lungs. The roaring in my ears drowns out everything else. Pregnant?
My eyes snap back to Grace. I stare, desperate, searching her face for a sign, for the truth. She’s still plump enough that it’d be hard to tell, and she has been gaining weight these last few months, weight I wanted her to put on…
Life. Our life. Growing in this hellhole.
I feel dizzy. The concrete floor seems to tilt under my feet. A child. My heir.
No. It’s not possible. She was put on contraception, they ensured it before the auction. “You’re lying,” I rasp, but the conviction isn’t there. The truth is in Grace’s eyes, in the way her hands instinctively, protectively, move to cover her belly.
Lucas barks a laugh. “See for yourself…” He says, handing over a bit of paper. No, not a paper, a sonogram.
I barely glance at it. I can’t take my eyes off of hers.
“…We needed to be sure, of course. We did a test to find out who the father was, seeing as you were so generous, letting everyone have a turn with her.” His voice drips with vile insinuation.
My fists clench so tight I feel my nails bite into my palms. “But you’ll be pleased to know it’s you. Congratulations, papa.”
He says it like it’s a joke. The greatest punchline ever fucking told.
“That,” he continues, his smirk vanishing, replaced by a cold, businesslike ruthlessness, “makes her infinitely more valuable. She’s not just your wife anymore, Antonio.
She’s the carrier of the sole heir to the Macrae fortune.
The next in line. A full fucking legacy, right here.
” He gestures toward her with a flick of his wrist.
A low growl rips from my throat. I take a step toward him, but two of his men are on me instantly, grabbing my arms, holding me back. I could fight them, maybe take one or two down, but it would be a death sentence for Grace. For our child.
“You’re running out of time, Macrae,” Lucas says, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper.
He gestures toward Grace. “A woman’s body can only endure so much.
The stress, the malnutrition, the excitement.
It’s a fragile life on board. Very fragile.
She’s already almost it. Do you want to be responsible for causing her to miscarry your son?
Your daughter? Do you want to hear her scream through that, too? ”
His words are meticulously chosen poison, each one designed to eviscerate me. He’s right. I can see the tremors wracking Grace’s body. She’s hanging on by a thread. The slightest push could break her. Could break them.
I look at her. Really look. Past the dirt and the blood, past the terror in her eyes.
I look at the woman I love, carrying my child.
Trapped in a cage because of me, because of my name, because of my fucking life choices.
A profound, devastating helplessness washes over me, so powerful it threatens to bring me to my knees.
But if they wanted me dead, they would already have pulled the trigger. No, it’s not my death, not yet anyway. These bastards want something else. I can see it in their faces.
I swallow the bile rising in my throat, fight to keep my brain rational, coherent. I’m the fucking Kingmaker. I can do this. I can beat this, beat them.
“What do you want?”
Lucas’s smile returns, wide and triumphant. He knows he has me. “You know what we want. You’re the only one who can get close enough. You alone have his trust, his ear. You alone can do this one, simple task.”
He leans in close, his breath hot on my face.
“Kill Konstantine. Put a bullet in our dear Grand Master’s brain. Do that, and you can have your wife back. Do that, and all of this…” he waves a hand around the dungeon, “…stops.”
Kill Konstantine. It’s not just a murder; it’s a coup. It’s the end of everything I’ve built, everything my family has built for almost a millennium. It’s the ultimate betrayal.
Before I can even process the enormity of it, a sound shatters the tense silence.
A scream.
Not a whimper. Not a cry. A raw, blood-curdling shriek of pure, unadulterated terror.
My head whips around toward the cell.
Three men. They’ve appeared from a dark corner of the dungeon I hadn’t even noticed. They’re masked, their features hidden behind grotesque black fabric and they are naked, their bodies pale and threatening in the low light.
They are inside the cell with her.
Grace is scrambling back, trying to press herself through the solid concrete wall, her screams escalating into a continuous, piercing plea. “No. No, please…”
They descend on her. Hands grabbing, pulling, violating.
“Cry for your husband.” One of them taunts as he holds her legs open.
“No.” The roar that tears out of me is inhuman. I surge against the men holding me, a frenzy of pure, unthinking violence. “LET HER GO! I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL ALL OF YOU!”
But they hold fast, their grips like iron. I am dragged backward, away from the bars, away from her as the world reduces to a tunnel.
They pin her down, and one of them starts grunting, groaning as he starts rutting away.
“Come on now,” Lucas says. “I thought you enjoyed sharing her, thought you enjoyed watching your wife getting fucked by other men…”
Grace screams louder, her cries so high pitched that I think she might tear her vocal chords again. And then I realise the man has his teeth around her nipple, he’s biting right into her breast.
He jerks his head, then spits something at me and it flies through the bars, landing at my feet. I stare down, horrified as I realise it’s the piercing, her nipple piercing. He bit it out with his bare teeth.
I stare back at my wife, seeing the blood streaming from her breast. “You bastard…” I bellow, losing it, losing the last of my control.
Only, I am hauled back towards a metal door, up the clanging stairs. Her screams follow me, clawing at my back, shredding my soul.
As the door swings shut, cutting off the worst of the view but none of the sound, Lucas’s voice shouts after me, clear and cold over the cacophony.
“Kill Konstantine, Macrae. You do that, and all of this stops. You have until the end of the week. Think of the baby, Antonio, think of your child…”
The heavy door booms shut. The sound is muffled, but it’s still there. A distant, echoing agony.
I am shoved forward, stumbling into the vast emptiness of the warehouse. I fall to my knees on the cold concrete, my body convulsing. I don’t vomit, I don’t cry. I just kneel there, empty as the sound of my wife’s destruction echoes in the vast, hollow space inside my skull.
It doesn’t fade. It brands itself onto the deepest part of me. A soundtrack to my damnation.
Kill Konstantine.
The words are now the only thing left in my head, echoing alongside her screams.