Chapter 10
TEN
TOMA
Lucie Ventura is going to be mine.
There’s no other way.
Because now that I know what she looked up online last night after our encounter, I can’t let her go. It’s selfish, but I don’t care.
This will work. Like everything else, I’ll take it a day at a time, and protect her with my life.
Not much different than what I already did, except I’m about to know what she tastes like when I kiss her, what she sounds like when I make her come and how broken her voice can be after I make her scream for me.
All on her own terms. She’s going to walk into my trap and thank me for it.
She’ll be craving me like I crave her.
But first, I have to get rid of the incompetent fucks serving as bodyguards.
I don’t know how she did it, but Lucie must have drugged them, for them to miss how she sneaked away. They don’t deserve to be called a protection detail and certainly not to live after such failure.
If I hadn’t been here, the man I stopped last night could have hurt my little rose.
He was about to take what was not offered.
I saw him in the shadows. Then, I saw him again when he moved on to another target.
He reminded me of Petar, taking from innocent people, with no consideration for anyone but his twisted pleasure. He deserved to die.
And she called a cleaning crew. Not an ambulance or the police or even for help.
She helped me clean up my mess, like the born and bred mafia queen she is.
Lucie says she wants out of this life, but she’s deluded.
She can’t escape me and certainly not her fate.
Her moral compass is too tarnished already.
I smile at that. Imagining my girl blood-thirsty and vengeful is a heady combo, going straight to my head, an image of mayhem in our wake sending a thrill through me. God, we’d be fucking fire together. My cock twitches and I adjust myself, groaning when I squeeze it hard through my pants.
Dante might have an aneurysm if I don’t tell him what I’m about to do first. He loves to cling to the illusion of power, that one, even though it’s his wife who deals with most of mafia business nowadays.
I can’t blame him. I know what it’s like to be made to feel insignificant, powerless and desperate.
I dial his number.
“Tell me they’re fucking dead,” he says as a greeting. We both know who he’s referring to. He must know I’ve been here since the school year started. I’m not the only hacker and tracker on his team after all.
“Hello to you to, asshole.”
“Don’t play dumb, Kova?. If you’re calling me at seven am on a Saturday morning after not showing up here for weeks, have the decency to own up to your shit. Are you in Edinburgh?”
I roll my tongue over my teeth, a slow smile spreading on my cheeks. I’m not much of a strategist, playing games and lying have never been very high on my repertoire of skills. I choose to ignore his question and ask him one of my own. “Do you really want them dead?”
“They failed a mission. One of the most important fucking missions I could ever give soldiers. The sentence is their lives. Shoot them through the head and bury them in the Meadows for all I care, they’re done.”
Dante Ventura is a man who’s always surprised me. When I first came to London, he welcomed me with open arms and a mouth full of jokes. This side of him is a reminder to never underestimate him, or his love for Lucie.
“It’ll be done. Are you going to send someone else?”
We both know it’s unnecessary, but again, it’s more of a political question than a real one. No matter how many men he sends to watch over his cousin, Lucie’s mine to protect and he knows it.
“Since you’re there already, and you probably follow her like a dog, make sure she’s safe.”
“I always do.”
“Be discreet. Don’t let her see you. She’s been adamant that she didn’t need protection in the first place.”
“And you’d rather lie to her?”
He ignores my question, and I have a feeling it’s because he knows she’d hate the lies even more.
“We have intel that the Moscow Bratva is moving and looking for new allies. Your brother is moving, too. We’ve managed to infiltrate his operations, but it’s… Fuck, Toma, your brother is a sick fuck.”
“I know. Is this going to come to bite you in the ass, Dante?”
“Hopefully not. We’re forming our own army with The Morettis at our side. For now, it won’t come to us, but we need to be careful. Lucie can never know.”
I close my eyes and shake my head though he can’t see me.
Witholding information is the same as lying and it feels wrong to keep Lucie in the dark.
She’ll hate it. I tell Dante as much but he’s inflexible.
Lucie is meant to live her life as far away from this clusterfuck of a war brewing in the European underground.
According to him, the farther she is, the least likely she’ll be a casualty.
I agree but it’s one more white lie to the long, growing list of secrets we all keep. All in the name of protecting her.
“Make sure she has fun, that she studies,” he says. “No boys. And no older women. She has a thing for older women.”
He doesn’t need to tell me that. No one but me will get close.
And her new friend. Even if Mina Chadha is the daughter of a major player in New-York and already engaged to the son of the New-York Irish mob boss.
That complicates things but I’ll monitor the situation.
I just hope Mina didn’t befriend Lucie as a power play.
It would devastate my thorny little rose.
She doesn’t seem to have any other friends and the assholes she used to surround herself with in France don’t care much for her.
“Do I need to look into her friend?” Dante asks.
“No. She’s harmless.”
But her family and fiancé aren’t. Just one more hateful secret I keep to protect Lucie’s happiness.
If Dante knew who Mina is, he’d make arrangements to have her sent back to New-York and right now, Lucie only has one friend.
No one else ever texts her, no one from her past life, which threatens to send me into a violent rage.
It doesn’t look like Lucie was looking at her new friend’s identity online so she probably don’t know she can’t escape the mafia even when she tries.
Instead, it was all reserved for her kinky mind and her desire to be protected and taken by a masked man.
I’m that man. I’m the one for her, even if I have to hide my face and pretend she doesn’t know me.
The way she smiled when she saw my note and the pathetic little flower I left for her last night is something I need to study up close, to devour directly from the source with my own lips.
“I have to go,” I tell Dante.
“Kova?, you’ll meet the same fate as Milosh and Gemma if anyone touches a hair on Lucie’s head,” he threatens, voice low and menacing.
“If that happens, I’ll demand you slit my throat. But no one is getting past me.”
“Good. And you better pray to any God who will listen if you break her heart.”
He hangs up. I believe him. But I’d tear my own heart out before I’d hurt my bright Lucie.
So she can never know that her desire to party and be a normal girl just cost two people their lives. Protecting her also includes protecting her from guilt.
I check on my phone where Lucie is. When I’m sure she’s safe in her flat, I make my way to Milosh and Gemma’s. Across the hall, the woman who haunts me is probably nursing a nasty hangover but I have a task to carry out. One I won’t take any pleasure in.
I’m actually surprised Milosh and Gemma didn’t flee or report this morning. Valium or whatever drug Lucie used shouldn’t be in their systems anymore, especially with the sort of poison training I know Dante puts everyone through.
I don’t wait before opening the door as silently as I can then twisting the silencer of my gun into place. It won’t completely make the kill silent, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
Except I won’t need it.
My arms fall by my side, the gun hanging loose on my fingers.
The walls of the small flat are covered with blood.
Flies already buzz above the two corpses laying on the floor in the middle of the living space. The stench makes me gag. I have to cover my nose and mouth with my elbow.
I take a step forward and my boots land on a pool of blood so dark I mistook it for a rug. It sticks and squishes.
I don’t go further, observing the scene in front of me with disbelief. This isn’t just a hit. This is a display of horror.
Both Milosh and Gemma are missing their eyes, their tongues. Fingers are spread through the space like the killer used them as fucking confetti. Even in my worst memories, there’s nothing as vile and bloody.
I put my weapon into my holster at my thigh and pick my phone from my pocket, but my eyes snag on a small detail by the couch. A single word has been written with a string of entrails.
Split.
Rage is a poison spreading through my veins slowly. Of course this is my brother’s doing. Hate is too gentle a word for what I feel for him.
Before I dial Dante again, I check the cameras I have placed in the building.
Speeding through the recording of last night, I find what I’m looking for.
Around ten pm, the video goes blurry for a second.
And then again around ten forty-five. That was around the time Lucie was at Mina’s flat, and I watched her from the other side of the street, hidden behind a tree that could barely cover my whole frame.
Fuck.
They managed to find and compromise my cameras. I’ll have to do more digging at home to see if I can recover the footage and see if they entered Lucie’s flat.
I look down again, at the two people I was about to kill. I’d have never done anything like this. They may have failed their protection mission, but they deserved dignity, even in death. Not this show of violence and darkness.
I have a choice to make.
If I call Dante again, he’ll remove Lucie from Edinburgh whether she wants it or not, and lock her up in his castle. That’s the most logical option.
I glance behind my shoulder as if I could see her through the walls.
You’re a monster, born in Hell, destined for Hell. Remember that.
My father’s voice echoes in my head, steeling something inside me once more. There is no place for sentimentality or hesitation where duty is concerned. After all, that’s what the Venturas are all about.
I can become the monster that will protect her. My soul means nothing if I can’t make sure she leads the life she wants. And she doesn’t want a tower of bulletproof glass to protect her. She wants to be normal, away from mafia life. Here.
I cannot fail Lucie.
If I’m not a monster, a demon of death and retribution, she won’t be protected. All I do is for her.
I straighten my shoulders, my decision made. I’ll add more cameras, be more vigilant. And get closer to her so I can make sure she’s truly safe. It’s the only way.
I call Dante who sends me a team. When they see the blood and the corpses, they send me wary looks and give me a wide berth.
Better they believe it was me. I don’t tell Dante about who truly killed Gemma and Milosh.
I don’t bring them to the pig farm, either.
I ask the clean up crew to prepare the bodies for burial and to give me the keys to their car. They don’t hesitate to obey.
Making sure I keep an eye on Lucie’s tracker the whole way through, I drive Milosh and Gemma’s bodies to a plot of land near a lake, and bury them with as much respect as I can.
I don’t know any prayer but I stand vigil for longer than I realise when the sun starts to go down behind the canopies of trees.
I’ve never grieved for anyone but my mother. But today, I wish things had been different for Gemma and Milosh. I wish I didn’t have to lie.
But guilt has no place in my life.
Only Lucie does.