Chapter Twenty-Six
Matteo
R occo’s inability to make me react evaporates in a breath, thrown out the window the second I find him on top of Valentina, his face inches from hers, his hand raised to strike her. Violence takes over until all I feel is the sweltering, crushing heat of my rage.
I was able to swallow my anger and be patient when it came to offenses committed against me, but her ?
Dead. He’s motherfucking dead .
Rocco screams like a rabid animal being put down—an outraged, enraged howl rips from his throat as his body recoils from the second shot.
He still has Valentina trapped beneath him.
“Get the fuck off her.” My left eyelid twitches dangerously, a drumbeat to accompany the rapidly spiraling hold I have on my sanity.
Knowing this was going to happen doesn’t make actually catching my brother in the act of killing Valentina any easier to witness. I may have been braced for impact but I didn’t expect said impact to max out the Richter scale when it hit.
“What the fuck are you doing, Matteo?” he roars.
“Get off her,” I repeat, my voice deceptively calm. “You won't live to hear me ask it a third time.”
Well, I aim for deceptive calm but hear my tone land somewhere between madness and hysteria.
Rocco grimaces, his face twisted in an awful rictus. He waves at her with his uninjured hand.
“This little cunt—”
My vision goes bright, bloody red. He screams when the third bullet buries itself in his other hand.
This time, his body jerks back just enough for Valentina to free her arms from under him. She shoves at his chest, pushing him violently off of her. Rocco reaches for her as she starts to scramble away, so I fire a fourth bullet, enjoying seeing his index finger completely sever from his hand and fly off.
Rocco bellows, screaming his agony into the night. I keep my gun trained on him as my eyes track Valentina. She crawls away, and all I can think is she’s likely scraping her palms bloody. I’m going to draw out every second of Rocco’s death.
My heart is like a ticking time bomb rapidly approaching zero—-the beats seem to grow progressively faster and closer, going from a measured gallop to trampling recklessly over one another, until it feels like the organ is going to explode in my chest.
Then she gets to her feet and runs towards me. Hair whipping about her cheeks. Arms flailing. Desperation fueling her steps.
A cavernous hole opens up in the center of my chest when I see her face. She’s covered in blood and spittle, with dried tears on her cheeks, a bleeding cut on the right side of her face and a massive bruise emerging beneath it.
Beneath the blood and bruises, the relief on Valentina’s features is unmistakable.
Apprehension draws up her shoulders when she gets closer and sees the seething, uncontrollable emotion on my face. She’s taken aback by the unhinged savagery on my features but it doesn’t hinder her approach—she runs until she reaches me and then she flings herself into my arms.
Her hair flies into my face, surrounding me with her scent. She buries her face in my neck and clings to me. Something heavy settles in my ribcage at having her safely in my arms. If we were in any other place, under any other circumstances, I would growl contentedly at her trust in me.
“Are you alright?” I question, hoarsely.
Valentina fists the fabric of my shirt, clutching it fiercely, and nods silently. I cup her nape with one hand, keeping the gun pointed at Rocco with the other, and press her into me. She’s shaking uncontrollably, leaning her entire weight into me, so vulnerable it’s triggering a frenetic rage inside me that’s likely to level all of London if released.
I rip my jacket off my shoulders and drape it over hers, rubbing her arms to bring her warmth. Tipping my head down, I search her face, desperate to make out her expressions, but she keeps them carefully blank.
“ Cara …”
“I’m fine,” she croaks. There’s no mistaking how murdered her vocal cords sound.
With a snarl, I fire a bullet into Rocco’s other shoulder. He’s writhing on the ground before I’ve even processed that my brain gave my hand the order to shoot.
“Have you lost your fucking mind, Matteo?” he bellows.
Red warps my vision, my hearing, my thinking. There’s nothing in my mind or body except a primal need to protect what’s mine.
“Stay here,” I order Valentina, my tone uncompromising.
I walk over to Rocco and crouch next to him. He flinches when I bare my teeth at him in something resembling a smile.
“I know cotton balls roll around unencumbered in that vacant skull of yours, but are you really so fucking stupid that you thought you could touch her and live?”
He blanches. “You won’t kill me.” His voice wavers, bordering on a question instead of a confident statement. His eyes ping back and forth between mine. “You won’t kill me just for a puttana —”
This time, I blow the kneecap off his left leg.
“Ahh! Fuck!” he roars, clutching at his knee with his mangled hands.
“Watch your mouth.”
Tears stream down his face, the pain too much even for him. I never cried, not once, through the years of torture he put me through. No matter what he used to burn me, no matter how long he did it for, no matter how much it hurt. I’m not surprised to see him sniffling like a coward.
Killing Rocco now is going to throw the Famiglia into upheaval, but I have no other choice. I can’t find it in me to care that I’m imploding my plan with my actions. I have no mercy for anyone who touches her.
“This is where you draw the line?” he questions between angry jerks of breath, his eyes full of rage and hate. “Years of me taunting you and you’re letting a whore break you?”
The second kneecap goes as easily as the first. I shoot another bullet into that knee to pulverize it down to dust, then press the barrel of my gun into his forehead.
“I really don’t like when you insult her, Rocco.” Slowly, I lower the gun until it’s pressed against his crotch. “I’d strongly suggest you stop if you don’t want me to shoot off your favorite organ next.”
“Who are you?” His face is a mess of snot and saliva. “This isn’t you. The brother I know would never do this.”
“That’s what you think. You just never found something I cared enough about to fight for. Until now.” I fist his collar, yank his limp body off the ground, and roar in his face. “You should never have fucking touched her.”
“You won’t kill me.” The tremble in his voice reveals he doesn’t believe his words.
Seeing the fear in his eyes is a balm to my soul. It feeds a monster inside me twenty years in the making. Its sharp jaws snap together excitedly in anticipation of his death.
The pungent odor of urine filters through the air. I look down at Rocco’s crotch and laugh.
“Did you just fucking piss yourself?”
“Fuck you,” he spits.
“I shouldn’t be surprised to see you have as little dignity in death as you did in life, but I am.”
I shove him back down to the ground, enjoying the dull sound his head makes when it bounces off the asphalt.
“You should scream, Rocco,” I stand and aim my gun down at him. I’ve waited for this moment for years and it’s tasting just as sweet as expected. “It won’t save you, but I like to work with music.”
My finger curls around the trigger.
“Stop.”
I glance over my shoulder at Valentina. Thoughts of Rocco and a long awaited revenge take a backseat to how strong the pull is to check her for injuries, tug her into a protective embrace, and shield her from any further pain, whether emotional or physical.
Her body is battered, the violence my brother unleashed on her clear in the emerging bruises I see on her arms. Despite her brutalized appearance, she stands proudly, her shoulders back and her head high. Pride hardens my cock even as my gaze catches on the strap of her bra hanging loosely around her bicep.
It’s such a small detail, but it undoes me.
My eyelid twitches again, my jaw turning to granite thinking of what Rocco would have undoubtedly done to her if I hadn’t appeared.
I frown at her. “You want me to spare him?”
Valentina shakes her head. “No, but I… I need to ask him a few questions.” She walks past me and picks up what looks like a square piece of paper from off the ground. A look of true sorrow crosses her features as she turns it over and stares at it, her thumb rubbing affectionately over the face it reveals. She extends it out to me. “I need to find out what happened to her,” she whispers softly, and even though she’s covered in bruises, even though her voice shakes and tears well in her eyes, she’s never looked stronger to me.
I don’t know who the woman is, where the photo came from or why it matters, but I don’t need to know. Not when Valentina is silently begging me for help. Cupping the back of her neck, I pull her against me and drop a lingering kiss to the top of her head.
“Go ahead, cara mia .”
If she could see into my thoughts, she’d realize how much power she holds over me with just one raw look in my direction. It’s a power most would kill to have, but I don’t think she’d be interested in wielding it even if she knew of its existence.
Valentina is unflinching as she walks over to Rocco. She doesn’t cower away from merciless violence when any other sane woman would. Whoever she is, whatever her true identity might be, she’s seen bloodshed. That makes me even more desperate to find out everything about her.
She takes the same position I occupied minutes before, crouching next to Rocco and extending the photo between them.
“This is Adriana. Nearly two years ago, she walked through the doors of Firenze and she never left. You took this picture of her that night, before you—” The words catch in her throat and her shoulders tighten. “Before you murdered her.”
It’s as if a high suction vacuum opens up in my stomach and siphons out my guts. The frail vulnerability in her voice as she finally says the words that help me understand why she’s here kills me.
FUCK .
I never stopped to ask myself what happened to her friend. If I had, even for a moment, I could have guessed Rocco was responsible.
No wonder she doesn’t trust me.
My heart bleeds for her, for the pain and loss she’s experienced, and yet I find myself thanking whatever deities looked after me that night that I inadvertently kept her safe.
Rocco doesn’t even look at the photo. He’s prone on the floor, covered in piss and bleeding from all four extremities, and he still manages to wrap his sadistic superiority around him like a cloak.
“Fuck you,” he hisses.
Alright, he wants to die. I click the safety off, raise the gun and storm towards him.
“Don’t,” Valentina begs, raising a hand between us to stop me. It’s only the desperation in her eyes that makes me listen. “Tell me what you did to her. Tell me where you put her body.”
“I’m not telling you shit.”
“What if we promise to spare your life?” The raw, uncontrollable urgency in her voice reveals her despair, and Rocco doesn’t miss it.
“You want to know where I buried your friend?”
She drops to her knees next to him, clutching the photo so fiercely it folds in her hand. “Yes.”
His eyes shine cruelly. Even as he bleeds out from half a dozen bullet wounds, he still chooses evil.
I holster my gun.
“If you save me, I’ll tell you,” he promises.
I close the distance, grab Valentina by her upper arms and tug her to her feet.
“Wha—” she exclaims as I walk her backwards a few steps. “What are you doing?” she demands, eyes wild. “He’s going to tell me where her body is!”
“No, he’s not.”
“He just said—”
“He’s lying to you, cara ,” I say, gently. She would see it too, if she wasn’t so emotionally involved. “He’ll never tell you where she is, not now that he understands how much it means to you.”
She shakes her head and pushes against my chest, refusing to hear me. “No, he will. He has to.” She tries to step around me but I move to the side. Glassy eyes whip back up to mine. “He has to!”
Clasping her face in my hands, I bring mine level with hers so she can see the sincerity in my eyes. “If I thought there was even a one percent chance he might tell you the truth, I’d drive him to the hospital myself, see that his life be saved, and I’d face the consequences for attacking him. But he’s just toying with you, Leni. Giving you hope just so he can snatch it away and revel in your pain is the type of shit he gets off on, trust me.”
“No…” she moans brokenly.
“I’m so sorry. I wish it could be different—”
“Your friend screamed the entire time I slit her throat,” Rocco crows from behind me.
Valentina’s face fractures, her features screwing in heartbreak. My heart feels like it’s being put through a food processor as I watch her crumble before me. I’m spinning around before he’s even done, roaring, “ Shut the fuck up .”
“She screamed for her mummy and daddy, even as her blood spurted out of her. There was so much of it, it was fucking awesome.”
I cover Valentina’s ears, mouthing so she understands me, “Don’t listen to him.”
The tears waterfall down her face. Her breathing is wild, like she’s on the verge of a panic attack.
I want to reach into her chest and breathe for her, I want to reach into her mind and quiet her pain, anything to calm her down. Whatever it takes.
“I can handle it,” she assures, removing my hands. “I can listen to every gruesome detail if he tells me where he put her. Maybe that’s what it’ll take for him to tell me.”
I hear him make a strangled groaning sound behind me. He doesn’t have much longer to live at this rate of blood loss. Likely less than an hour.
“No.”
“But—”
“I’m going to cut it out of him, cara . I’m going to make whatever he did to Adriana look like a spa day compared to what I’ll do to him. I’ll take him apart piece by piece until he tells you everything you need to know, I promise.” The words tumble out of me in an urgent oath. “But I can’t—”
“Don’t ask me to leave,” she interjects. “I’m staying.”
Everything in me wants to tell her to go, but the fiercely determined look on her face tells me that I have a better chance of asking her to wait for me on the moon.
Suddenly, Valentina’s eyes shift from my face to over my shoulder and grow wide with terror. Her face goes white, losing all color in an instant, and a startled cry leaves her lips.
I whip around. Rocco is sitting up, adrenaline having given him a final burst of superhuman strength. His fingers close around a gun at his ankle.
I’m precious and costly seconds behind—Rocco is already turning the gun towards me, a twisted expression of triumph on his face. There isn’t time for me to react except to spread my arms and shield Valentina behind me.
They say your life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die. That doesn’t happen to me. There’s no fear for myself, there never has been. Only for Valentina and what will happen to her once I’m dead.
Something sharp flies past my ear, piercing the air with an ominous whoosh . At first I think it’s a bullet before I realize it’s traveling in the wrong direction. Away from us instead of towards us.
The object spins through the air in a blur of silver before burying itself deep in the center of Rocco’s throat.
The force of it counters the momentum he had sitting up, keeping him momentarily frozen. His eyes go wide with shock, his mouth opens, and an obscene choking noise rips from his lips as the knife goes through the front of his windpipe.
Finally, he falls backwards to the ground. His fingers slacken and the gun skitters off to the side. He gurgles grotesquely one final time before the noises abruptly stop and unearthly silence falls over us.
Just like that, with as little impact in death as he had in life, my older brother and the heir to the Italian Mafia, dies.
When I turn, I find Valentina to the left of me, having chosen to step out from behind the protective cover my body offered her. She’s frozen in motion, her arm extended in front of her, her fingers spread as if searching for the weight of the deadly knife that was once held between her thumb and forefinger.
The raw panic that made her act is still clear on her face. She must have reacted immediately, without taking the time to think, without hesitating, a split second decision made to beat Rocco who had a head start on the both of us.
She looks magnificent, forged by her bravery and fearlessness into a warrior queen. My equal in every way, one I’m not sure I’d be worthy of keeping by my side even if I had the choice to.
Her gaze shifts to me, her expression melting into one of immense relief when she finds me unharmed. A smile starts to appear.
It’s only there for a second before her features falter. Her brows pinch together, her eyes widening in horror. Behind her relief, the realization of the decision she was forced to make slowly creeps in.
Her hand lowers slowly down to her side. Her head tilts downward and her other palm opens. She stares quietly at the photo of Adriana, smoothing the crinkled edges with absentminded but gentle fingers.
She killed Rocco to save me.
She killed him to save me, and ended any chance she had at ever getting answers only he could provide.
Her chin wobbles slightly, and then indescribable pain fractures her features. Her shoulders curve inwards and she drops into her haunches, burying her face in her hands with a loud, pained cry.
My heart jerks into my throat.
Somehow, her cry hurts me more than any bullet ever could. I crouch next to her and pull her into me, letting her sob freely into my chest, realizing that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do to stop her pain.