Chapter Fifty-One
Enzo
“D rive faster!” Matteo roars at me.
Panic warps his voice. His hands shake so hard he drops his phone on his lap. It bounces off his knee and hits the floor of the car.
“Fuck!” he yells, snatching it up and calling Valentina’s number for the thirty seventh time since we heard her cry out in pain before the line went dead. Like every time before it, he goes straight to voicemail.
With an enraged bellow, he rains blows down on the glove compartment until it dents. His hands come away soaked with blood, but he doesn’t even notice as he scrubs his palms down his face.
He taps her name and tries a thirty eighth time.
I’ve unintentionally been keeping count because every time he’s sent to voicemail, he gets progressively more furious. Worse than his fury though, is his terror. Fear practically pours off him, so suffocatingly thick that I roll down the window to suck in a breath of fresh air.
“Valentina,” he pleads, leaving her yet another voicemail. “Please pick up the phone, cara mia . Pick up, okay? Just… pick up.”
I flatten the pedal to the floor and blow through a red light, just narrowly escaping a collision with another car. Dread clamps my gut in a vice. I know why she’s not picking up and deep down, I think Matteo knows it too, he just can’t let himself face it.
“Enzo.”
I rip around a corner and down a side street, now only five minutes away from Firenze . “I’m driving as fast as I can.”
Matteo tries calling again, his entire body shaking. His legs jerk manically up and down and he shoves his fingers through his hair to calm his twitching hands.
“I can’t get a hold of her,” he shouts, his voice worn raw.
We were already in Matteo’s garage before the call with Valentina cut off. The second she said she was meeting him, we were out of our seats and running.
Someone must have cloned Matteo’s phone and lured her to Firenze to kidnap her. It’s not hard to guess who. It’s partially the guilt eating Matteo up. If Guido took Valentina, it’s our fault.
A sound pierces through my racing thoughts.
Sirens.
And they’re getting closer.
I look in the rearview mirror and see cop cars appear.
Two of them.
Behind them, there’s three fire trucks.
“You don’t think…”
My gaze goes to Matteo. He’s white as a sheet with violent undertones of green.
He looks like he’s going to be sick.
“No.” I say it with an assurance I don’t feel.
“No,” he repeats tonelessly.
The sirens chill my blood to ice. This isn’t a typical emergency response team. It’s the kind of convoy you send for a major incident.
The cars pass us and I fold back into the lane right behind them, sticking close to take advantage of the cleared path.
“Leni—” Matteo starts before I hear the beep followed by a robotic voice announcing he’s reached her voicemail and it’s full. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, FUCK !”
Matteo slams the phone down on the glove compartment. I hear the screen crack but when he flips it over, it still works.
He stares through the windshield at the firetruck in front of us with a look of such despair in his eyes, it twists my stomach. We’re closer than brothers and seeing the pain ripple off him infuriates me.
“They’re still in front of us, Enzo.”
Firenze is to the left, down one block, and to the right.
“They’ll turn right here, you’ll see,” I assure him.
Instead, I watch helplessly as first the cop cars and then the fire trucks turn left. As the last truck turns, it reveals the view it had previously obscured from us. My stomach sinks.
Dark plumes of thick smoke rise up into the sky and filter through the puffy white clouds. The contrast between the two is straight out of a horror film, the beauty of the setting sun at odds with the dark, deadly smog. It gets darker and thicker as we get closer.
“What the…” Matteo’s voice trails off into anguished silence.
The weight in my stomach turns to lead when the emergency cars then turn right and the truth becomes unavoidable—they’re headed for Firenze .
I smell it before I see it.
Based on the way he jerks back, Matteo does too.
It’s unmistakable.
A spiciness in the nose that stings the nostrils. Not a smell I usually dislike and yet it sends a wave of nausea hurtling up my throat.
We turn onto our street and see it. Shock strangles us both into silence.
Fire.
Firenze is on fire.
Plumes of smoke roll through the roof. The windows are still intact somehow but the flames loom large and full of life just behind them.
There’s a barricade of other emergency vehicles and a smattering of horrified bystanders with their hands over their mouths.
“Holy fuck,” I hear myself whisper.
The sound of my own voice jolts me back to my senses. I look over at Matteo to see him frozen solid like a statue carved from ice. He doesn’t move, he doesn’t even blink as his eyes stay fixed on the horror before him.
I curse under my breath.
He’s completely paralyzed by his fear, his entire body rigid down to the extremities. Sweat beads visibly at his temple, terror squeezing out of him and rolling sharply down his face.
A single eighth note clatters shrilly through the air.
Matteo erupts out of his paralysis when he sees Valentina’s name flash across his screen with a new message.
Relief melts his features as he opens the text.
“ Cara —”
He stops.
A beat goes by and I watch him turn a ghostlike shade of white. “What is i—” I start, pulling the car over.
He flings the door open and lunges carelessly out of the car while it’s still moving. “Matteo!”
His phone drops onto the seat behind him.
“Holy fuck,” I curse, slamming the brakes and bringing the car to a screeching halt in the middle of the road.
Matteo hits the asphalt hard, but rolls out of it to lessen the shock to his body. He trips over his feet as he stands and stumbles to the ground. His limbs are heavy and uncoordinated, tangling with one another as his panicked brain seemingly fires off more orders than his body can process at once.
I watch through the open passenger door as Matteo hauls himself back up to his feet, stares up at the blazing fire before him, and lets loose a throat-ripping cry of four syllables so full of raw fear, they strip the lining from my stomach and tear straight through.
“ Valentina !”
The scream sounds like it comes from the bottom of his gut, from the very dark, vulnerable depths of his soul, the part I’ve seen him expose only to her. It’s a heartbroken howl, like that of a dying animal.
He doesn’t look at me as he runs past the car, fast and desperate, and runs towards the thing he fears the most.
His feet pound the pavement but he doesn’t look back and he doesn’t hesitate.
I snatch his phone and flip it over.
Open on his screen is a text from Valentina, except she’s clearly not the one who sent it.
It’s a photo of her, passed out.
Her head is lolled to the side, her long brown hair flung partially over her face in her unconscious state.
And she’s gagged, her arms and legs tied to a chair.
The bottom falls out of my stomach when I recognize the bar area and the velvet chairs behind her.
The VIP room.
She’s inside Firenze .
The windows shatter and people shriek. Shrill screams echo as the flames burst through the frames, instantly sending a wave of blazing heat into the atmosphere.
“Fuck!”
I exit the car and run after Matteo. I try to catch up with him, but he’s too fast, too far, moving at a speed that I’ve never seen towards the doors of the burning building.
“Valentina!” I hear him scream again.
I watch as he bursts past the cop who puts a hand up at the tape to try and stop his advance, and subsequently clashes with two firefighters who bar his passage. They grab his arms and shove him back to try to stop him.
Matteo takes only one step back before he rips his right arm out of its hold and clocks the firefighter still holding his left, sending him sprawling to the ground.
“Stop him!” I shout at the remaining firefighter when I realize what he’s about to do.
It’s instinctive. Ever since he saved my life when we were kids, I’ve always protected Matteo.
This time, I’m too late.
The flames are monstrous, the heat nearly unbearable this close to the fire.
A blur of desperation against the growing inferno, Matteo doesn’t slow and he doesn’t hesitate. With Valentina’s name like a battlecry on his lips, and without a care or a sign of the fear that’s haunted him for twenty years, Matteo runs right into the flames to save the love of his life.