30. Nina
I woke up quickly. It was a dizzying, blurring distortion of all my senses, and I panicked when I couldn’t immediately tell where I was, what was happening, and who was to blame for this attack.
My vision was cloudy and limited. My tongue felt heavy in my dry mouth, and as I rolled to my side, my stomach roiled and threatened to send bile up my throat. Worst was how my head pounded at the tender ache on the back of my skull. Lifting my hand to touch the massive lump forming under my hair, I realized how shaky and uncoordinated I was in moving my arm.
This was no instant rebound. I was sluggish and so confused. But I knew enough that I would be all right. Once I figured out where the hell I was, I’d get out of this scrape. I knew it. Or I wanted to believe that sort of optimism and confidence.
I had to get out of this dark warehouse I’d been transferred to. I had to. Because I had to get back to Dante. We’d only just begun our lives together, and it was far too soon to lose him. To lose what we could be.
The determination to get back to Dante was all the motivation I needed to shove back the nausea and discomfort from falling.
Without sitting up, I opened my eyes and looked around at this old, dirty place. Old beer signs lay broken and busted in a heap in the corner. A mountain of empty liquor bottles sat at the other end of the wall opposite me. In the distance, I heard the telltale music and chatter combination that signaled I was at a bar.
Maybe?
Despite just being knocked out, I could easily piece together what happened.
I’d heard those men on the second floor at the gala, talking about kidnapping me so Vanessa could have Dante. I witnessed Stefan arguing with Dante that I had to go back to Reaper and be handed over to the MC. With those clues, I figured that this had to be their building, maybe their clubhouse, where they met and partied. It would explain the rowdy sounds of a bar nearby.
He’ll find me. I clung to that fact as I heard men walking and talking in this dark, dirty room. It wasn’t a warehouse, but more like a storage space. And in the darkness, I did all that I could to bring me back to Dante, to facilitate my coming home to him.
He would notice when I didn’t come home. Franco would alert him too. There was no way this could turn into a missing persons case. Dante was too possessive of me to have to sleuth out how to locate me.
Grabbing my derelict phone, I tried to help. I couldn’t be sure it worked. It was mostly malfunctioning, but I prayed that pressing and holding the button on the side would open the camera app. And once in there, that one swipe of my thumb to the left would choose the video option. Groping in the dark, not wanting to move too much to give away that I was awake and recording them, I pressed my finger at where I hoped the record button would be on the screen.
“I don’t know, man,” one said. “Reaper’s fucking nuts if he thinks we can go after the motherfucking Constellas.”
Another man laughed, dark and sinister, before he coughed. “What, like it can’t be done?”
“I don’t think they’d go down as easily as the Domino outfit did.”
“The Dominos were weak,” a third man said, laughing.
“Pussies hardly fought back at all, even with Giovanni supposedly fighting alongside them,” the second man replied.
“Yeah, and now, Stefan’s trying to switch sides and two-time us ,” the first man added.
“You think Reaper will string him along for too long?” someone else asked. “We got this Nina bitch, now, and that’s gonna be the trigger to make Dante come at us?—”
“Nah, nah, nah,” the second man said. “We ain’t gonna keep her. We’ll give her back once he pays up. Give her back in pieces.”
They all laughed and carried on, talking about how they’d use me as a pawn in their war. The Giovanni Family wasn’t trusted by anyone, not by Dante, and not by this motorcycle gang as they tried to convince him they were friends now. So much of what they boasted about made no sense. I hoped, again, that I was recording it because it seemed like these bikers were talking freely and honestly.
Come on, Dante. Please. Look for my phone. Storm down the gates of their club. He couldn’t be far, but I worried my time was running out. Stalling was all good and well, but the men in this storage room got impatient.
“You’re not too bad on the eyes,” one biker said as he crept closer, eyeing me like he wanted to rape me.
“Even if she was…” Another man walked up and tossed a burlap sack to his buddy. “She ain’t gotta look at us.”
“Fuck off,” I snapped, scrambling back toward the wall.
Please, Dante. Please, please, please hurry. If these assholes got it in their mind to rape me, to share me…
Bile shot up my throat again. The threat of a gang rape was too horrid, too unspeakable, and my body revolted.
“I want to see her as I fuck her.”
“Not before I do.”
“You get her ass. I’ll take her pussy.”
“Fuck that. She’s going to gag on my cock first.”
They bickered, all coming closer to surround me. Cornered like this, I had no chance to run. Outnumbered like this, I had no option to fight back.
Please, please, please. I wanted to save myself, but I was without a single resource or weapon.
“He’ll kill you,” I said, hoping that psychological warfare would make an impact.
It didn’t. They all cracked up, laughing and taunting me more with my threat. Dante would, though, and I had enough faith to know that he had to be on his way to me. All the Constella men would rally with their leader.
Fate couldn’t be so cruel. I couldn’t have found him only to lose him this soon.
“You’re going to be a good little bitch and?—”
The biker never finished his statement. As I cowered and shrank back from him standing over me, his head burst apart. Blood and gray matter splattered, forced toward the wall.
I turned my head and screamed, not wanting anything to rain into my open mouth. Gunfire filled the room, and I tucked into the tightest ball that I could. Smoke and screams came. Men shouted and yelled. Threats were shouted. The music stopped, and without risking to open my eyes and witness the utter violence taking over, I knew that my wishes had come true.
In dark, morbid detail, my rescue had happened. Or it would. I recognized the yells from the Constella men I was already becoming more familiar with. The guards and soldiers who swore loyalty to Dante. I felt the vibrations sending up from the wooden floor I lay on, wishing a hole could open up and swallow me down so I wouldn’t get hit by a body or a bullet.
Footsteps pounded every which way as the place was stormed and became crowded. Thuds reverberated from the walls as bodies were slammed and shoved. Wet streaks splattered constantly, and I sucked in a sob, keeping my mouth shut as I knew those were more globs of blood and other bodily fluids. Screaming with my lips clamped tight, I shook and tensed, balling up into the smallest form against the wall that I could.
Trying to block out all my senses, I fell into a numb status. I retreated into the darkness behind my squinted-closed lids, wishing so vainly that it would all be over soon.
I’d never ever imagined being trapped in the middle of a grisly bloodbath like this, but I knew it couldn’t last forever. All I could do was tuck in and wait it out the best I could while hoping Dante would be all right.
Guns continued to be fired, but over the din, I heard him call for me. “Nina! Nina! ” The desperation in his shouts saddened me.
I couldn’t risk opening my mouth. I didn’t want to swallow a drop of blood or brains or?—
Oh, fuck. Just the thought of it had me retching. I turned, pivoting my head to the floor, and vomited.
Before I could inhale again to prime myself to heave harder, my body’s involuntary demand to throw up at the nauseating thoughts and cloying smell of death in here, I was hit.
The searing pierce of a bullet cut through my shoulder, and I cried out at the agony that instantly lanced through me. “Dante!”
I didn’t know if he could see me. I refused to open my eyes, keeping them closed to avoid anything dripping in them. Safer in the darkness of no sight, I whimpered and waited for him to find me in this hellhole of murder and killings.
“Nina!” He’d come to me. I felt the weight of his body as he dropped to his knees, shaking the floor. As soon as his hands touched me, urging me to roll over, I gave in to the pressure of his protecting me.
“Nina.” He couldn’t stop repeating my name, almost as though the more he said it, the more it would stick that I was here, that he’d found me.
“She’s bleeding.” Franco might have said it, but I couldn’t be sure. Pain filled my shoulder. It radiated down my arm and coursed along my back. The agony was so sharp, so intense, that all I had the energy to do was lie against Dante as he urged me to uncurl from the fetal position I’d tucked myself into.
Although the ache and sharp, stinging needles of inflammation claimed all my thoughts, deep down in my heart, I relaxed. With this man, with Dante championing for me, I would be all right.
He wiped at my face, cursing as he tried to clear the blood and other slimy substances from me, but I could not surrender to the urgency to see him, to look at him and trust in my vision that he was here and all would be well again. That he’d take care of me.
It felt like a dream, but as I accepted his careful hold as he lifted me, I kept my mouth shut and swallowed down the cries that I almost uttered. It hurt to move. It hurt to be repositioned. Vaguely, with the dizziness and lightheadedness that came with the loss of blood, I registered that Dante was carrying me and taking me out of this bloody room.
“You’re safe, Nina,” he told me as he carried me out. “You will always be safe with me.”
I know. I know I will be. It was one reason I loved him. It was a cornerstone of my trust in him. Ever since running into him that fateful night almost a month ago, I knew that he would do everything in his power to keep me safe and secure. Not as a fake girlfriend. Not because I was a young, clueless burden or obligation. But because he cared about me, truly. I heard it in his voice and felt it in the tremor of his touch.
I might have nodded, but I felt like I was separate from my body. Refusing to open my eyes or speak, to avoid that stuff getting in me, I couldn’t let him know that I heard and agreed.
“I promise you,” he said as he brought me outside. The air was clearer. Faint rain drizzled down, and the sensation of being rinsed off was cathartic.
“I promise you this, Nina…” He hurried, picking up his pace and jostling me that much more that I winced. Faster and faster, I grew sleepier, but I strained to listen, to cling to his words.
Dante hoisted me higher in his arms to match his quicker gait. “No one will ever dare to touch my wife again.”