Chapter 29
Matteo
One Hour Ago
“Jesus Christ, Antonov. You’re going to kill him,” Lucian barks as I stand over my opponent in the middle of the boxing ring at Lucian’s Gym.
“My bad.”
I’ve had a lot of pent-up aggression lately with no outlet. Leysa keeps luring me in and then escaping under my nose. I’ve lost too many good men, going after her, and she thinks it’s a fucking game.
I have two ways I keep my emotions in check—fighting and fucking.
With Dani being pregnant, I’ve been trying to be gentle when we have sex—despite her saying she’s not going to break. And since she won’t let me fight underground, the tension in my body is wound so tight that I feel like I’m going to snap at any second.
“I—”
My words are cut off by the sound of my phone ringing.
It’s Kaleb, one of the men who works for me and who has been actively looking for Leysa.
“What’s going on?” I ask, knowing he only calls when it’s important.
“We have her.”
A rush of adrenaline courses through me.
“Where?”
“Eric Vanderbilt’s house. She’s in there with one of her men.”
I bark out a laugh. So fucking predictable.
We framed Vanessa’s mom, Ilene, for the murder of Eric Vanderbilt, but then I had an idea.
With the DA in my pocket, I asked him to do me a favor and spread the word that Leysa Santiago was considered a suspect.
He submitted several pieces of fabricated evidence, linking that bitch to the crime scene, and then I told my men to wait and watch.
And sure enough, she took the bait.
“On my way.”
Without bothering to change, I throw on my shirt and shoes and run out the door, needing to get to this psycho before she realizes she’s been set up.
Twenty minutes later, I pull up to Eric’s ostentatious mansion. Kaleb texted that she was in the west wing, most likely scouring for the evidence that she thinks might convict her for the murder of the mayor.
We have the house surrounded, but I told Kaleb not to touch her.
After the shit she’s pulled—having my wife kidnapped, having my sister damn near raped, sending men to attack the women at the spa, and having the warehouse where we house our underground fights shot up, just to name a few—I want to look this bitch in the eyes when I kill her myself.
I pull my gun out, prepared for anything, even though Kaleb said she’s alone, and have it aimed to kill.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” I call out.
The house is quiet, and she and whoever’s with her could be anywhere, but I have all the time in the world to find them.
I search each room, expecting her to pop out and shoot me, but after I get through the entire house and she’s nowhere to be found, I start questioning if she isn’t fucking with me again.
And then I hear someone.
I stop and listen.
Rustling.
I take a step forward and then pause when the scent of something burning hits my nostrils.
I try to place it. It smells familiar.
And then it hits me …
Gasoline.
I glance around, and then I see it … liquid all over the floor.
She’s going to blow the place up.
Fuck!
I should leave, but I’ve come this far, and fuck this bitch for thinking she can outsmart me.
More rustling.
And then a scream.
I run toward where the sound came from when a loud boom sounds.
With my ears ringing, I don’t stop until I get to what I assume is the garage door.
Only when I open it, it’s not a garage. It’s some kind of basement.
Florida homes typically don’t have basements because the sea level is too high. I went over Eric’s blueprints when figuring out how to frame his wife for his murder, and this room was not on them, which means he either built it after the fact or did it without permits.
The room is already an inferno, but I can make out the woman screaming in agony as the blaze surrounds her, licking up her body. She’s trapped.
And then I look closer and find she’s sitting in a chair, not even bothering to move. Another look, and she’s tied up.
This doesn’t make any sense.
I step forward to try to save her, needing to know why she’s given up, when the fire intensifies, forcing me to take a step back.
Leysa’s face disappears in the flames, and since I won’t risk my life for answers, I run out of the house, voice-texting my men to get away because the house is burning down.
I’ve only just made it out of the house when an explosion hits, causing the ground to shake. Windows blow out, glass flying everywhere.
“What the fuck happened?” Kaleb barks, damn near as invested as I am in finding Leysa.
“She set the house on fire.”
“You saw her?”
“In some makeshift basement. Looks like it was a suicide mission.”
Kaleb’s eyes go wide. “You sure you saw her?”
“Yeah!” I bark, watching as the house burns to the ground. “I locked eyes with her.”
“What about the guy she was with?”
“I didn’t see anyone but her.”
“Why the hell would she do this?” he asks, shaking his head. “And where the fuck is the guy she was with? We’ve had eyes on the house, and nobody’s come out.”
“I don’t know. Maybe she thought, with her being framed for the mayor’s death, she was done for. I only saw her in the fucking basement.”
My phone vibrates in my pocket, and I press play on my earbud.
“Incoming text message from … Unknown: I handled your little problem. Now you owe me. I’ll be in touch.”
Sirens sound in the distance.
“We need to go,” I say to my men. “We can’t be here when the fire department arrives.”
They nod, and we take off down the back street, away from the direction the fire trucks are heading. While I drive, I call Eddy, asking him to pull up the cameras since we have access to all of them.
“Fuck!” he barks. “Someone is trying to override them.”
I can hear him typing away on his keyboard, but my mind is stuck on the text message I received.
“I handled your little problem. Now you owe me. I’ll be in touch.”
It doesn’t make any sense.
Unless the guy that was with her turned on her?
I call Hughe, the DA.
“Antonov.”
“The mayor’s house is going up in flames.”
“Shit,” he hisses.
“There’s a woman in the basement—”
“Florida homes don’t have basements.”
“This one fucking does,” I bark. “And there’s a woman in it. I think it’s Leysa Santiago, but I need proof.”
“On it.”
We hang up, and I drive around, trying to wrap my head around what the fuck just happened.
After an hour or maybe longer, Hughe calls me.
“Yeah.”
“You were right. A woman was in the basement. The firefighters pulled her out before I called, trying to save her, but they were too late.”
“Anyone else in the house?”
“Not from what they found.”
“Is it her?” I ask.
I sent him a picture of Leysa weeks ago, when I told him that she was coming after my family because we wouldn’t allow her to traffic women through our port, and he assured me that he would have his men keep an eye out for her.
“We won’t know for sure until a DNA test is run, but it looks like it could be her.”
“And how the hell do we test the DNA of a dead person who’s never lived in the US?” I ask.
“Shit,” he says, clearly not having thought that one through. “We need something with her DNA.”
I think back to when Kaleb visited her mom in Colombia, trying to see if she might know where we could find her eldest daughter, only to learn that Leysa had allowed her to believe she’d been dead this entire time.
Shit, according to Kaleb, the woman even keeps a shrine of her things in her old room.
And then it hits me. “We can get her things from Colombia. Something has to contain her DNA. My guy said her mom has kept her room as is.”
“Perfect,” Hughe says. “Come by and see the picture of her. I really think it’s her. The photo you gave me damn near matches the woman who died in the fire. But if we can get a DNA sample, we can run it to confirm.”
“I’m on my way.”
Ten minutes later, I’m standing in the DA’s office, looking at a picture of the same woman I saw in the basement. She’s got burns all over her face, but there’s no denying she resembles the woman in the photograph.
I don’t know who did this—and based on the text I got, it’s someone who wants me to be indebted to them—but for now, I’m going to take it as a win.
Because, ding-dong, that bitch is finally dead.