64. Ariana
64
ARIANA
We’re on the highway speeding towards Rome. It’s no longer dark out, the sun glowing on the horizon. We’re driving in convoy, our SUV in the middle, flanked in the front and the back by the hired guns who have been with us since we landed.
Our plans are in place.
I’ve turned into a brunette student—thick glasses and ponytail, loose-fitting low-flung jeans and a T-shirt so tight, I feel exposed. It sells because with a slouched posture, aided by my heavy backpack and worn-out Converse, an annotated copy of Herodotus’s The Histories in my hand, I’m almost a carbon copy of my neighbor’s granddaughter.
At a first glance, whoever keeps track of the comings and goings in the apartment block would mistake me for her. It helps that my elderly neighbor always blurts out her granddaughter’s plans for the summer, and I know she’s working the American summer camp circuit to improve her English. They started planning for it already in February.
Dominic is sitting next to me, my hand in his as he stares out at the passing landscape. He doesn’t look like himself, either, and I’ve done such a good job of his make-up, looking at him makes me shudder. The shading and contouring, the extra temporary tattoos on his neck and arms to match Franco’s, the nose…everything to make him look like Franco at first glance. He’s in plumber’s coveralls and has rolled up the sleeves to expose more tattoos. There’s one problem universal in Rome—the plumping in those old buildings is a disaster. Something always blocks.
I’m not aware of the whole string of triggers he’s put in place with Benedict and Franco’s phone—I just know ‘Franco’ has messaged Pietro Garlini, and Benedict is communicating with my old team lead. He’s in charge of luring Pietro to my apartment, under the guise that Emilia Korhonen holds documents there both Franco and Pietro need. Documents related to Randazzo and his assets. A meeting time has been set for ten in the morning, and now we’re on a ticking clock.
Pietro Garlini has been keeping an eye on my apartment block since my passport tapped back into the country. We got this confirmation from Dominic’s team which has been stationed there overnight. It takes one to know one, but hopefully, Pietro’s team won’t spot ours. Dominic got the feeling that Pietro’s position is weakened, now that he can’t tap into Franco’s network to help him with his shady dealings. I in turn gave Dominic all our little tells, and it irks me to think I’m being watched for as if I’m the enemy.
Pietro will come early. I know his type, and we’ll be waiting in ambush. We timed this right to align with Mass. As it’s Sunday, my neighbor will be at church, and her Sunday ritual usually takes her two hours. Things I know that I’d never thought would come in handy.
As we enter Rome and head ever deeper into the heart of the city, traffic tightens, and so do my nerves. We’ve gone over this plan twenty times. We won’t fail. It isn’t even an option.
Dominic drops me off at the bus stop where one of the bodyguards is already waiting. It’s busy, despite it being what should be a lazy Sunday morning. Tourist season never wraps up, and as some of the cheaper hotels and youth hostels are in this area, people are out and about already.
For a moment, I just stand, taking in the familiar scenes of my city. Pigeons, cobbled streets, constant honking coming from somewhere, and there… the lovely stench of trash nobody’s collected in weeks. Yep. I’m home.
I don’t make eye contact with my bodyguard as I get onto the bus, and when, four stops down, I get off again, he is behind me, following me to the apartment block. I spot Dominic, now in a marked cheap-and-chirpy plumber’s van, as he gets out of the driver seat. He already has his worker’s gloves on, hiding the give-away pinkie that had me in tears last night. Two broken people, fitting together perfectly to make a whole.
I ignore everybody as I put the code in the door, walk into the apartment building, and hold the door just a second too long so the bodyguard can get in, then I go straight for my neighbor’s postbox where she’s got a key stuck to the box’s ceiling. I take the stairs to the second floor, with effort not glancing around, looking for anything inconspicuous as I’ve been trained to do.
I unlock the apartment and walk in, praying Paula won’t be home and has stuck to her usual routine. The familiar smell of her morning espresso, wrapped in stale cheap perfume, hits me, and it’s like a blanket of comfort wraps around me. I’m in my element. I can do this.
With a deep breath, I pause in the dark apartment, waiting for Dominic’s go-ahead. He was following me with his tools in hand. First, he’s going to use a signal jammer to block any hidden cameras in my apartment from taking footage. We have about three minutes to get into the place before he’ll have to switch the jammer off. It’s after all illegal in Italy, and we don’t want anybody to get a whiff of what’s going on here with a simple outage complaint.
Dominic’s message pops onto the screen of the phone I’ve been commissioned, and now I have to move fast. Paula and I share a balcony, and I open the door, go on my haunches to hide from the outside world, and crawl over the few potted plants that separate our spaces.
Once on my side of the balcony, I peer into my own apartment through a small slit in the drapes. I can’t see anything. I fumble for the key, right where I left it underneath one of the pots, and unlock the door. I slide it open, crawl in through the door, and close it again, then listen intently where I’m on the floor.
Nothing.
Nobody.
I exhale, and with speed, rush over to the front door where Dominic knocks twice, pauses, and twice again. I open for him, and as soon as he’s slipped in, he pulls me to him for a quick kiss.
“Closet,” he says, and I get into the narrow closet by the front door, the only space for winter gear and other random stuff, and wait. In the apartment, Dominic searches for any hidden cameras and shuts them down.
“There were only two,” he says through a crack in the closet door. “And they’ve run out of battery now. Definitely not the tech we have.”
“Now we wait,” I whisper.
“Garlini’s on his way.”
Of course, Pietro Garlini has a tail now, but whether he would notice or not is the question. Pietro has always been outwardly calm, but I bet with Franco going off on his own tangent, he might be getting nervous. He would like to see the man eye to eye and figure out what the hell he’s done with me.
A body. That’s what Pietro Garlini would want to see. It’s him or me.
Through the thin slit of the closet door, I watch as Dominic waits. He’s getting real-time updates from his team and is in on the messages ‘Franco’ and Pietro are sending each other.
“God help this fucker,” he murmurs under his breath. “He’s walking into it as if he’s fucking blind.”
Pietro is so arrogant, he won’t imagine Franco would double-cross him. Maybe Franco wouldn’t, but Franco is dead.
“One minute, sweetheart,” he whispers, and it seems to become eerily silent in the apartment.
I’m blocking out all other sounds, trying to listen to Pietro’s familiar gait. When a knock sounds on the apartment’s door, I pull in a sharp breath and freeze. Of all the things I’ve imagined since learning about his duplicity, the reality of facing him was very real…but now that the moment is here, I’m petrified.
Dominic opens the door. He only has a few precious seconds to drag Pietro into the apartment before Pietro realizes he isn’t Franco and he’s been duped. I can’t see anything, but I hear the scuffle, moans, something ripping, then bones cracking as Dominic forces Pietro in an armlock that goes too far.
Holy hell…Dominic isn’t messing around. Through the gap, I watch as he drags Pietro deeper into the apartment, kicking the door closed in the process. I’m not sure which move he pulled on him, but Pietro’s body has gone limp, and blood is already dripping to the floor.
Dominic is almost superhuman in the way he hauls Garlini around, a gag already stuffed in his mouth, the fight twisted out of him in an arm that hangs useless. His hair?—
I push open the door with a trembling fingertip and watch in horror at a rip of hair that’s been torn straight off his skull. My stomach turns as vomit pushes to my throat, but I harden myself. This man is responsible for my team’s butchering, and now he gets to experience it first-hand. How many other agents have died because of his duplicity? I bet enough to fill a graveyard.
I step into the short space between the living room and the front door and wait, breathless as Dominic has Pietro slumped on a dining chair, restrained with cable ties in seconds.
Inside this man, this beautiful broken man, with hands that touch and love so gently, a dark monster lurks. And he lets him out only to protect those he loves, with precise and efficient brutality like I’ve never witnessed before.
“Don’t look, Ariana.” His voice comes quietly, without strain, as if he didn’t just manhandle someone into a chair. “It’s the stuff of nightmares.”
But it’s like a car wreck, and I find I can’t look away. “This is personal.”
“Yes. It is.”
He slaps Pietro in the face, but the man seems to be stunned into shock. I’d also be, and yet after the third slap, he bobs his head back and stares up into Dominic’s demon eyes because I swear, he’s become possessed.
“Have something to say?” Dominic asks softly, his hand on Pietro’s throat, squeezing.
Pietro drags in a haggard breath through the gag and a nose that’s bleeding, eyes glazed over.
“Want to tell us what happened to Ariana’s team? What your plans were for her?”
Pietro’s head sways, and I meet his gaze across the short expanse of the room.
“Are they dead?” I whisper.
He nods and attempts a shrug, already knowing his own fate.
“How could you?” I step closer, crossing my arms protectively over my body. “And me, too? At Franco’s hand? Do you even know what type of monster he is?”
Pietro closes his eyes, not even looking at me anymore, and fury splits me in two. How dare he?
We don’t have time for this. We need to wrap up the job and get the hell out of here.
“Talk,” Dominic growls as he plucks the rag from Pietro’s mouth. His fingers are gripping Pietro’s throat with just the right amount of pressure, he can only croak.
“You’re—” Breath. “Not—” Breath. “Franco.”
“No. I’m fucking worse, and when you get to Hell, spread the fucking word. I’m not the weakest link. You are. Who else is in on it?” Dominic demands, gripping his throat. “Who the fuck else in the DIA is in on Randazzo’s ring?”
Pietro’s eyes roll back, and Dominic gives a little.
“Massimo Eposito. And Enzo Caruso.”
So fucking weak. So quick to talk. The bile that sat in the shadows of my stomach wants to push to the light. The head of the DIA in Napoli and in Milan respectively. I’m trembling now, my whole body in a lock of shock. For all I know, it wasn’t Randazzo who had Elena Bianchi assassinated, but someone in the DIA.
“Anything else we need to know, before you leave us?” Dominic asks.
“My daughters?—”
Dominic kills off any further comment by choking him to the point where Pietro’s eyes pop.
“You’re a fucking psycho,” he hisses as he leans into his face and shoves the gag back into his mouth. “Allowing vermin around other people’s kids while you have your own safe at home, playing both sides for the money. You’re a rat, and you will die like one. Your daughters will be better off never knowing who their father really was…unless—” Dominic shoots me a glance. “Unless Ariana here decides to tell.”
At the mention of his own daughters, something snaps in me. Here I am watching Dominic basically being a ruthless, brutal killing machine, draining a man’s life from him, but in my mind’s eye, a string of girls of various ages that stayed at Mancuso’s house in the time I was there walks past.
Now here is this man, supposedly working to protect women, to stop human trafficking, but he played both sides to enslave innocent women for his own financial gain. He killed my team and had instructed Franco Fiore to end me.
I walk over to the small kitchen where I reach for a serrated knife. Pietro Garlini doesn’t deserve a clean cut. As I take the few steps to where Dominic has tied Pietro up in the middle of my small sitting room, I have every intension to hand him the knife.
Dominic is holding out his hand, ready to do what needs to be done. A broken man who has killed so many times, I bet he’s lost count. A broken man, who fits my broken pieces perfectly, making us whole again.
There is only one way to show my commitment to him, to our future, and to lock my fate with his.
Instead of handing over the knife, I nod at him, indicating with my chin that he should expose Pietro’s throat. Dominic doesn’t hesitate and holds Pietro’s head back, giving me access. Pietro protests as much as his position allows him to, and I might have never killed before, have never been tested like this, but there’s a demon in me, too, one I never knew existed until I saw the truth.
With a few decisive saws, I slice him open, blood fountaining from his neck at such speed, his body goes limp in seconds.
I stare at my handiwork, numb.
No. Alive.
Dominic drops Pietro’s head and reaches for me.
“Brave, so very brave.” He leans in and kisses me deeply, love so incongruous with the scene right in front of us. “Welcome to the family, sweetheart.”
There’s no turning back. I’ve crossed sides back to where I’ve always belonged.
Nothing has ever felt this right before.
I lean into him, seeking his strength to hold me together. Dominic hugs me close, and it’s a gift, a promise, and a future all in one.