Chapter Fifty-Two
Matteo
A s I erupt into Firenze, the change in temperature slams into me like a truck. It sends me stumbling back a step, my forearm coming up to shield my eyes from the nearly blinding brightness of the massive fire.
Flames eight feet tall and climbing gather in an unnatural circle in the center of the dance floor and extend to the far sides of the club. They lick up the walls with astounding violence, all at once beautiful and destructive.
This is no accident.
Those perfect circles indicate an accelerant was used.
The fire consumes everything in its path with insatiable hunger. Tables, chairs, chandeliers, sconces, drapes, they all clash with the flames and lose, turned to scorched ashes in seconds. My stomach weighs down in fear seeing how little resistance the club puts up to its destruction, how quickly the fire moves.
Valentina is on the second floor.
I ignore the survival instincts telling my body to run away and push deeper into the building. Those instincts pale in comparison to the primitive fear crashing through my veins knowing Valentina is in danger.
And as deeply instilled as my pyrophobia is, it’s nothing compared to my love for her.
The chaos outside is deafening—alarms blare and firefighters shout and bystanders scream their distress—but, as I take a few steps forward, the fire immediately puts out those sounds and engulfs me in its own orchestra of terror.
Rocco always tortured me using small sources of flame, so I never thought about how loud a fire could be.
There’s the popping sound of burning furniture as it meets the crackle of flames. Wooden beams stretch and groan. The drapes hiss as they get consumed. Glasses at the bar shatter. Sconces and chandeliers explode, sending deadly shards crashing noisily to the floor.
It’s as if the club itself is screaming in pain.
If terror was ever defined using a sound, it would be this one.
Wind howls in through the broken windows and collides with the flames. It too is sucked of life, the oxygen stripped away and the remains turned into noxious fumes.
I go lightheaded thinking about Valentina trapped in this death house.
There was a thin trickle of blood coming out of a cut just beneath her eye in the picture.
I couldn’t tell if she was alive.
A bottomless abyss opens in my chest. I can’t bear to think it. A devastated cry erupts past my lips and I run for the stairs.
“I’m coming, Len!” I shout, hoping she’ll hear me over the swelling fire. “Don’t be scared, I’ll be right there, I fucking promise, cara .”
She’s alive.
She has to be.
She has to be.
My feet pound against the steps. I take them two at a time, for once propelled forward by my fear. I stay close to the railing, the fire having rejoined the bottom step and now working its way up the walls. Paintings fall off their hooks, the oil paint only adding more accelerant to the flames.
When I reach the top step, I pause and look back. The bottom half of the stairs are no more. The fire destroys everything in its path, stalking after me like a predator with its prey.
I have to fight against the panic rising in my chest.
Finding Valentina is the priority.
I’ll figure out how to get us out of here once she’s back in my arms. I’m not a religious man, and I’m an even less of a deserving one, but I find myself praying to God for a miracle.
Let me find Valentina alive and I promise I’ll never let her leave my sight again. I’ll tie her to me if I have to .
“Len—!”
A coughing fit keeps me from being able to finish her name. I’m choking on the smoke and suffocating from the inside out.
I take my t-shirt off and press it to my face.
My eyeballs are dry from the lack of humidity in the air. It’s completely dark on this floor except for the light the fire casts down the hallway.
I fan a hand at my forehead, tuck my chin against my chest and start down the hallway. My breaths are jerky and hollow but I try to control them as best I can.
Panicking will make my heart race and up my consumption of oxygen. It’s threadbare up here. Death by suffocation is the most lethal way fire kills, not the actual flames. I need to conserve energy.
The first door on the left is the men’s room. I try to open it, but the doorknob is jammed.
With a frustrated growl, I take a step back and throw my shoulder into the middle of the door. It shakes in its hinges but resists. I hurl myself into the door again.
And again.
On the fourth try there’s a loud cracking noise and then it splinters and flies open.
At the sink, I run the shirt under the jet of water until it’s completely soaked through. When I emerge from the bathroom, it’s tied around the bottom half of my face and I can breathe marginally better.
A rushing noise sounds behind me. I turn just as jets of water shoot through the window and hit the blaze.
I realize with a sinking feeling that it won’t help.
The water comes in with a frightening amount of pressure and yet gets immediately swallowed by the flames. They’re no match for the spreading inferno and it’s clear the only way this fire is stopping is once it’s demolished the entire structure.
Firenze was opened by the Famiglia almost forty years ago and renovated multiple times since to stay relevant with the changing times. Before that, the building had been used for a number of different Mafia businesses going back almost two hundred years.
It’s an institution and an iconic landmark for the Famiglia , and yet I can’t get myself to give a shit as I’m faced with its inevitable destruction.
“Leni!” I yell, charging down the hallway towards the VIP room. That’s where she was in the photo that was sent to me.
I’m going to kill Guido for hurting her.
I know he’s behind this even though he was too much of a bitch to openly own up to it. But that’s always been him—the lesser, jealous cousin, bitter that he was overlooked his entire life and with just few enough brain cells to take me on by coming after my fucking wife .
When I’m ten feet from the VIP room, the floor collapses underneath my left foot. It comes down on the slats and the wood gives way, the fire having burned through it from underneath. I fall and my momentum almost sends my entire body tumbling through, but I catch myself just in time. It takes all of my upper body strength to hold me up as both my legs dangle beneath me.
The floorboards are boiling beneath my forearms and the jagged, blazing edges dig into my chest. The familiar smell of burning flesh reaches my nose, triggering traumatic flashbacks.
I squeeze my eyes shut and shove them aside with a furious, animalistic snarl. One thought powers superhuman strength into my palms as I start to drag myself painfully slowly back up.
I can’t die without having gotten Valentina to safety.
A determined scream of rage tears from my throat as I’m able to get my knee over the edge. I use it to hoist myself up and roll onto my back on the floor. I don’t feel the heat at my back, the scarred flesh having lost almost all nerve function.
No matter how fast I try to move, it feels like I’m stuck in molasses.
Like I’m not going quickly enough.
Like I’m losing her with every passing second.
I’m back on my feet and running, closing the final bit of distance to the VIP room entrance, and roaring at the top of my lungs, “ LENI !”
I push at the doors, but they don’t budge. I try shaking the handles and slamming my shoulder directly into the door, to no avail. They must be barricaded from the other side.
And then I hear it.
“ Mhmm .”
It’s faint, but I’d know her anywhere.
The mumble filters softly through the din around me and sweeps fresh life into my chest. It’s a muffled, incoherent sound and yet I recognize it instantly as Valentina calling my name behind her gag.
“Len—? Leni! Leni !” I cry, pounding my fists against the door. Doubling and tripling my efforts. I throw my entire weight into the door in attempts of devolving desperation, but it holds. “I’m almost there, cara .”
I choke on a relieved sob, inhaling my shirt into my mouth with every breath. She’s alive.
She’s alive and she’s just on the other side of that door.
Like a bird fighting for freedom from its cage, my heart crashes into my ribcage with every beat.
“I’ll be right back,” I call reassuringly.
At the opposite end of the hallway, I find the glass emergency case. I jab through it with my elbow and turn away as shards fly off and rain down. I rip the axe off its stand and run back for Valentina.
In the minute since I’ve been gone, the fire encroached almost an entire foot onto this floor.
I don’t waste another second.
Hoisting the axe above my head, I bring it down with violent savagery and a ferocious roar. It strikes the center of the door and splits it in half. I jerk it back to release it and swing it immediately back down, connecting two blows together.
Again and again, I hoist and swing the axe until the wood splinters off. Through the slit, I make out the bottom half of a body. Feet in shoes I know well, ankles I’d recognize anywhere from having had them on either one of my shoulders. Legs. An ass.
With a bellow, I toss the axe aside, shift my weight into my back foot and drive my front one into the weakened wood.
It shatters on impact.
The remnants of the doors fly open, and I burst through.
The force of my kicks sends me sprawling to the floor on the other side. Pain shoots through my side but I ignore it, crawling instead on my hands and knees to Valentina.
Staying low helps me avoid the black smoke that billows into the room and rises up to the ceiling.
Finally, after what feels like a hundred excruciating lifetimes, I reach her and my heart jumps into my throat.
She stares up at me from the floor, her face streaked with tears, her lips stretched cruelly by the gag between her teeth. Then her eyes find mine. Relief explodes in them before it disappears behind a fresh sheen of tears.
An emotional grunt erupts past my lips and I lunge at her.
With one hand, I rip the restraint off her mouth. The other wraps around her waist and crushes her to my chest in the same heartbeat.
“Valentina,” I cry, breathing again. “ Valentina .”
I realize it wasn’t just the fire making it impossible to get air into my lungs.
“Matteo,” she whimpers, her face turned into my neck, her voice muffled against my throat.
“Oh, thank fuck . Thank fuck, cara . Thank fuck you’re okay.” There’s a raw desperation in my voice that echoes around us. I run a comforting hand through hair, holding her tightly enough to suffocate. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”
I yank the shirt around my face down to my throat and find her mouth. The kiss is hard and messy, a clash of desperate lips and greedy tongues and frantic hands as I cling to her like a drowning person does to a life raft.
“Leni.” A strangled sob wrenches from my throat, surprising me. The emotion pours out of me now that she’s back in my arms. “I love you,” I murmur against her lips. “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Each declaration is punctuated with bruisingly hard kisses.
Valentina shakes in my arms but her voice is strong when she whispers against my mouth, “I love you too.”
Feeling her body against mine calms a beast I didn’t realize was loose until the moment it feels her presence and settles down.
I hate having to release her for even a second, but she’s still tied to the chair and I hate that more. I free her ankles first. When I reach behind her for her hands, I find them covered in blood. A blade is clutched between her fingers and there’s a fraying in the rope where she must have been sawing at it.
“Brave girl,” I murmur, holding her hands without hurting her bleeding palms.
Valentina shakes her hands free and throws her arms around my neck with a sob. Her hands claw at my nape and her hair flies into my face. She smells like soot and fire, but right beneath it there’s the familiar scent of her.
“I thought I was going to die,” she admits shakily, burying her face back into my neck.
My arms tighten around her and I pull her desperately closer, wishing I could fold her into my body and keep her protectively there while I figure a way to get us out of here.
“Not on my fucking watch,” I growl.
“I knew you’d come,” she cries, wetting my neck with tears. “I knew you’d come for me, I just didn’t know if you’d make it in time.” Soft lips find my pulse point and then she’s pressing open-mouthed kisses up the column of my throat and along my jaw.
The animal inside me wants to beat its fists on its chest at her words. My girl knew nothing would keep me from her.
“He underestimated how desperate I’d be to get to you.” I cup ner nape and turn my face to press my lips into her hair. “Idiot.”
I stand, carrying her with me in my arms. She slides her body gently down mine as her feet search for the floor.
“It was Guido,” she explains.
Anger rises swiftly inside me and my features darken past the color of the toxic smoke. “I know. Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” she admits. “All I remember is him punching me unconscious. When I woke up, I was tied to the chair and he ran off shortly after that.”
There’s an ear splitting noise and then the far wall starts to collapse. The flames appear and multiply before our eyes.
I rip the wet t-shirt off from my neck and tie it over Valentina’s face the same way I’d covered mine. Her hands come up to touch it as she looks worriedly back up at me.
“What about you?” she asks, concern thick in her partially smothered voice.
“I’ll be fine, don’t worry about me,” I assure her. Taking her hand in mine, I tug her after me. “Come on, we have to get out of here.”
When we emerge back into the hallway, she screams and places her body protectively in front of mine.
The flames are everywhere.
They’ve taken over the entire end of the hallway, forcing us deeper into the club. We have no choice but to go up, going further into the building that’s burning down around us.
They billow up to the ceiling, searching for more, monstrous in their greed. More to consume, more to destroy.
Valentina screams in terror. I glance down at her to find her panicked eyes already pinned on mine.
“You shouldn’t have come for me!” she cries.
The flames reflect brightly in her eyes, burnishing the hazel until the flecks of gold look like they’re also burning.
“I’ll get us out of here,” I yell over the sounds of the fire and the jets of water. “I promise.”