Chapter 9 Massimo
MASSIMO
Waiting for a target to move into position was always tedious. Today, waiting for the high-and-mighty Michal Vargas to finally visit the institute had been especially mind-numbing.
I spent the day following up on my other jobs, and the most important thing: researching the steel mill in Castel Amaro, and Fabio Carrozzo, who, the story went, had ties to organized crime.
I was no stranger to the Cosa Nostra, though I’d never swear allegiance to any one family.
I worked for the highest bidder, and that was that.
Unraveling Fabio’s past seemed paramount to moving my search for my mother’s final resting place forward.
If only the fucker hadn’t died so fast. I’m sure I could have tortured something useful out of him.
The next questions I had were which family he’d been affiliated with and who else might have helped him organize my mother’s hospital stay.
I had a dim memory of a logo on the letter the hospital had sent me with her final effects, but nothing else.
Maybe they would remember more about it than he had.
I returned to Hallow Hall when all the festivities had died down.
I couldn’t afford to be hanging around when the director was here.
After all, I wasn’t who I was supposed to be, and the unholy trinity thought I was here at Centrium Group’s request. My cover story was flimsy but would hold long enough for me to get my job done.
My business was with Vargas. After tonight, I’d have no reason to stay here in this cursed place.
Except for her.
Last night, holding Katarina Dmitrova as she’d cried her heart out on my lap was stuck in my memory.
She was like the stray cats I fed whenever I found them.
An unwanted creature. Just like me. Did she feel it, too?
Was that why she’d sought comfort from me?
Who turned to a devil for comfort? She was distracting.
I put all personal thoughts aside and prepared for work. I checked my bag for gloves, rope, a gag, sedative. All the tools to cover a few different scenarios, should things go sideways. Next, I tucked my loaded gun into a holster at my hip hidden beneath my cassock, and a silencer into my pocket.
Vargas had an apartment on the top floor of the building, and sure enough, when I made my way up there late at night, he was home.
I knocked and waited an unreasonably long time for him to open the door.
Finally, it swung open. He looked flustered, his face flushed and clothes askew.
“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” I asked when he invited me inside.
“No, no. It’s fine. It’s good to meet you, Father Lucciano. Benedict told me that you’d finally arrived. It’s been a while since Centrium sent us anyone to train.”
“Likewise. I’ve heard so much about you,” I said with a smile, and took his outstretched hand. Where the fuck they thought I was going to go and use their sick and twisted therapy training, I had no idea. This whole place was fucked.
We shook hands, and Vargas looked around.
“Let me fix us a drink and we can talk about what brought you here to Hallow. Sergei mentioned that he has someone here on a day-to-day basis keeping us honest.” Vargas smirked at me like the very idea was an inside joke.
I nodded, playing along. “That sounds ideal.” Luckily for me, my cover was holding. Christoph had been the ideal person to bump off and steal a position from.
But now, none of that mattered. After this, I would go back to the shadows and try to forget this place ever existed.
I waited until Vargas turned to his bar, then came up behind him and locked an arm around his throat.
He thrashed a little, nothing that could dislodge my arm, however, and then went limp.
It was almost too easy. Disappointing, really. Since coming here, I’d had to restrain myself from killing far too much, and it was wearing on my nerves. Pavol and Benedict were begging for it, but I’d ignored the urge so I could carry out my job.
I lowered Vargas to the floor and reached for the rope I’d coiled into my pocket.
The client wanted him hanged; they were very insistent.
There was probably some allusion to Judas in there somewhere, but I didn’t care.
Or maybe they wanted him scorned in the eyes of the Church by having his death ruled a suicide?
Regardless, dead was dead, and I was good at any which way that was achieved.
Since suicide was specifically requested, I held off leaving my usual calling card . . . a broken hourglass.
Rigging the rope up didn’t take me too long, and soon I balanced Vargas’s inert body on a stool to take his weight. I wanted him awake when I killed him. I wanted him to know what was happening.
Yes, Mrs. Vasco, the most unfortunate public school teacher in the borgo, I did find my calling in your class. Thank you.
I sat at the opulent table and lit a cigarette, filling my lungs with nicotine.
I looked at Vargas. He was a man with secrets, and I wondered how many of them were born right here in Hallow Hall.
The place was still a mystery and not one I was particularly eager to unravel except for where it concerned her.
Katarina Dimitrova was complicating things.
She wasn’t going to be easy to leave here, or forget.
I pondered it as though I hadn’t already decided to take her with me.
Then I heard it. A whimper. The sound of pain muffled by a gag. I’d heard it a hundred times, but never from someone who wasn’t my victim.
Fuck.
Someone was here.
I rose slowly, senses on high alert. Since leaving the Col Moschin, I’d built a reputation for myself. That of a fearsome assassin, the man who could get to anyone, L’Ombra. The Shadow. They’d even given me a nickname.
But my ability to enter anywhere and get close to anyone was rooted in the fact that very few knew my face. As soon as my anonymity was lost, it was all over.
I couldn’t afford to leave loose ends, and witnesses were exactly that.
I coasted around the room, approaching the wardrobe from the side, making it harder to see me coming. If the person inside had any kind of survival instinct, they would attack me first.
I reached under my cassock for my gun. It fit my hand like an old friend. I rolled the silencer on, took the safety off, aimed it toward the doors, and opened them.
The person inside launched at me, a blur of white and red. I leveled the gun at them. They had too much momentum. They weren’t lunging. They were falling.
I backed up, gun pointed at the person as I finally made out who they were. Who else needed to die tonight.
She landed on her side, her hands over her face. Despite that, I recognized her.
A little stray cat getting into places she shouldn’t.
Her clothes were bloodied, her hair wild. Her focus landed on me, and her lips moved around a thick satin gag. I stared at her, surprise rooting me to the spot.
What had Vargas been doing when I’d interrupted him? Had she seen me attack him? She only had to glance to the left and she’d see my suicide setup in progress.
Katarina had just made herself a witness, and I didn’t leave witnesses. Ever.
I crouched before her and reached out for her gag. She flinched away from me, afraid. Her gaze fixed on the gun in my other hand.
I tugged the gag down. Her mouth was ringed with blood, her eyes red. She looked like she’d been to hell, and now she was staring at me as though I’d come on cue to collect her soul.
“Don’t, please don’t kill me,” she whispered, staring at the gun. “Don’t shoot me. Please. Please, I beg you.”
I sank back on my heels and considered how to handle this unexpected development.
“You’re somewhere you shouldn’t be, Katarina.”
“I didn’t see anything, I didn’t.” The way she kept her eyes from the left side of the room, where Vargas was bound and ready to be hanged, told me otherwise.
“You’re a terrible liar. Try again,” I suggested.
She swallowed. “Fine, I saw. I don’t care. I won’t tell anyone.”
“You won’t tell anyone? What about when the police question you? What about when Benedict and Pavol question you during therapy, maybe when you’re floating on whatever they give you?” I shook my head. “It’s not a risk I can take.”
“I hate him, too, though. I hate him so much—”
“I don’t hate him,” I interrupted her curtly. “I don’t give a fuck about him. To me, he’s just a paycheck.”
I waited for her reaction to that confession. I was a contract killer. It was a bit of a conversation stopper, in my experience.
She wet her lips, and I watched her, unabashedly curious about everything that concerned her. Her and her unkissed lips. A virgin mouth at twenty-five years old in this day and age? Unheard of.
“I’ve killed a lot of people, and I haven’t stopped to ask why . . . so many, I’m a millionaire many times over. My hands are as blood-soaked as your angel’s voices told you they are.”
She swallowed hard, and I could see those words sink in. She was afraid of me. Of course she was. How could someone so sweet and pure not be afraid of a man like me?
“The only rules I live by are get the money first and leave no witnesses. You, my little stray, are putting me in a difficult position.”
A low moan sounded across the room. Vargas waking up. I pressed my gun into Katarina’s temple for a moment.
“Stay here,” I commanded, and rose.
Vargas slowly lifted his head, looking around in a daze. He hadn’t registered the rope around his neck yet.
I sauntered over to him.
“Good evening, Father. Thank you for not keeping me waiting too long.”
“What’s going on? Where—” Vargas glanced down and saw the rope. “Wait! What’s happening?”
“We’re playing a game.” I pointed the gun at him. “Now, stand on the chair, nice and slow. Be careful, you wouldn’t want to fall.”
Vargas blinked at me, my words taking a long time to penetrate. I jerked the gun.
“Hurry it up.”
He moved, carefully balancing on the precarious stool. It had three spindly legs. He had turned white as a sheet.
“What game is this?”
“Truth or dare. Which do you choose?”
“Truth, I choose truth,” Vargas cried.
“Why is Katarina in this room? Tell me the truth.”
“I had her brought here to discipline her. She embarrassed me in front of the director, and I’m sick of her. She’s clearly off her meds and running wild.”
“Did you hurt her? Where did you touch her?” I asked, my tone conversational, which was quite a feat, considering how much my blood boiled.
“I didn’t. She just woke up. I stuffed her in the cupboard so you wouldn’t see her, I swear.”
I glanced to Katarina for confirmation and stilled.
She was gone.
I turned to find her, and it was like the world slowed for a second. A second that lasted for an eternity.
She’d gotten herself up and moved around behind me, coming at me from the opposite side and taking me by surprise. I brought an arm up to defend myself, but it wasn’t necessary.
I wasn’t her target.
With a cry built of pain and blood and hate so deep—I recognized it as the twin to the feeling inside my own heart—she lunged forward.
I thought for a second she was going for Vargas. She was going to pull my rope system down and I’d have to start all over again.
I was wrong.
She lunged for the stool, throwing her entire body weight at it.
It skittered across the floor, and Vargas fell.
The drop wasn’t long enough to snap the neck, and that had been by design.
Few suicides got the distance right. Also, it was too quick.
Only friends deserved a merciful death, and Vargas was no friend.
He swung, his face blooming red, a gargle coming from spit-flecked lips. He tried to push his fingers beneath the rope. But it was no good. I was a master of my trade, and I dealt in death. There was no escape once the contract was out.
Katarina stared in fascination, never taking her attention off the man who technically she had given the final push.
I couldn’t look away from her. She watched him, and I watched her.
In the dark, decadently decorated room, she seemed to shine.
Her pale blonde hair and fair skin and white, stained clothes.
A light in the dark. A light who had just killed someone. An avenging angel.
I’d thought I was attracted to her before. It couldn’t even compare to now.
She observed him losing the little air he had left in his lungs, hyperventilating with panic and running out even more quickly. She unconsciously bit her lip.
She stepped closer when he jerked, and his eyes fluttered to her.
“For Mira,” she murmured, and held the dying man’s gaze until the final throes of death had passed over him and he was gone.
Then, she pressed her arms around her rib cage as if merely standing were killing her, but the sight of Vargas dying had been worth it. She turned to me and raised her chin like a queen. No, an empress, peering upon her loyal subjects.
“Now,” she said heavily, pushing her hair off her bloodied forehead, “you’re my witness.”
Fuck.
I think I just fell in love.