4. ~Nico~
4
~Nico~
My tires screeched as I made a sharp turn off the back road onto the dirt driveway that led to our target location, the place where Milo had managed to track Caterina’s ring to.
Mud sprayed my windows as I tore down the way toward the dilapidated shithole house in the distance.
I was coming in hot, despite not knowing what we were hurtling into.
I didn’t give a fuck.
We didn’t have time to approach carefully.
From what I’d been able to ascertain from Julian’s bike cam footage, we’d confirmed it had been Angelo who’d stopped them on the road right by my place and caused the crash. I’d also watched him sedate Julian, who’d been conscious afterward. Caterina hadn’t been, but the bastard had shot her up with a needle, too. She’d been unmoving as she’d hit the ground really fucking brutally. I was hoping that the tough gear Julian had insisted she wear would have absorbed some of the damage, at least. But I didn’t know that for a fact.
What I did know was that Angelo and his men who’d been concealed behind oversized sweats and balaclavas, had stripped both of them down on the road, tossing their jackets and phones, then hauled them into one of the unmarked vans, fucking kidnapping them.
With Angelo’s intentions for Caterina through her father, the suggestion of what she could be enduring was god-awful enough. And with Julian crossing Angelo, he would be considered fair game in that respect, too.
As much as I’d tried to stay calm, now I’d seen the footage of them being set upon, then dragged away like that, I couldn’t stop the hellish thoughts of what they could be suffering through right fucking now with every additional moment it took us to reach them.
I was halfway to the house when Milo roared by on his Harley, gun drawn and at the ready, riding one-handed as he tore ahead of me. That wasn’t just his urgency, it was him always in the headspace of defending me. No matter what.
I caught up and pulled up just as he basically dropped his Harley, then started scanning the area while moving his gun back and forth, on high alert, prepared to fire in a split second.
Beside the two-story log cabin type house, there was a free-standing two-car garage. A white transport truck was parked next to it, the back open and facing us. I growled low in my throat as I took in the benches there fitted out with restraints. The thing was running, its lights on.
I signaled to Milo, and we approached it, splitting up, him taking the right side, heading to the front passenger door, me taking the left and going for the driver’s door.
As I came to it, I started when I saw a bloodied handprint on the white paintwork. I didn’t see anyone sitting up there. I grasped the handle and threw open the door, and darted back as a body crumpled out, falling with a hard thud in a heap on the ground at my feet. No wonder I hadn’t seen him. He’d been hunched over. I kicked him over, noting the stab wound in his throat, blood completely dousing him. Each one of his fingers was broken too.
“Shit,” Milo exclaimed as he rounded the hood and came to me. “Nothing in the passenger side, but look what you’ve got there.”
“He was tortured before he was killed.”
“Sure looks like it.” His eyes lit up. “This bodes really fucking well. Julian and Caterina must have—”
A shriek tore through the quiet area, jolting us both, and we swung our heads toward the sound coming from the garage, just a second before a guy decked out in black sweats stumbled out from a side door, slapping his bloodied hand to the wall, only to be suddenly wrenched back inside, and I saw a flash of that beautifully familiar brown, wavy hair.
We were bolting over there in the next second.
I burst through the door with Milo right at my back.
And then I pulled up short, my breath catching in my throat as his face was being smashed into the wall over and over by none other than Caterina, who was half fucking naked, her hair matted with sweat and a whole lot of blood. Her whole body was actually doused in it.
“Hell fucking no,” Milo choked.
She swung her head at the sound of his voice, eyes flaming wildly and… inhumanly.
A snarl escaped her, before she turned her attention back to the guy, spun a knife in her hand, then drove it deep into his throat, right through his carotid artery.
He spluttered and gagged as blood sprayed all fucking over her, then she released him roughly and even gave him a kick in the junk as he slumped to the floor, bleeding out.
As if that hadn’t been enough, there was the scene taking up the rest of the space inside the garage.
Blood.
So much fucking blood.
Splattering the walls, drenching a metal chair, and soaking five bodies, and now this one we’d just seen her take out too, littering the floor like a macabre carpet.
Bodies that weren’t even fully… intact anymore.
Dismembered.
Sliced into.
Shot apart.
Beaten beyond recognition.
There was a butcher’s knife, several handguns, and even pocketknives strewn all over the place.
“He had two more guards waiting when I was done with the four assigned rapists,” she uttered. Her clouded emerald eyes fell on Milo, who couldn’t hide his shock, then she screamed, while waving the knife wildly, “They deserved it! They deserved all of this!”
Rapists. “What did they—”
“They didn’t get to do anything!” she yelled before I could finish my sentence.
Milo held up his hands. “All right, let’s just calm down now. It’s done. They’re all down. Take a breath, Caterina.” His eyes darted all around. “Where’s Julian? Is he finishing off another one of these assholes? You and him worked together to—”
“He didn’t do anything!” she yelled, growing more irate. I realized why in the next moment, when she screamed, “He’s not here! He was never here! Angelo took him somewhere else and I don’t… I don’t know where! He’s gone! He’s being hurt right now, like Angelo ordered these bastards to do to me—to… to tear into me… to break me! But they didn’t! I stopped them!”
Fuck me.
When we went to ask more, she ran at me and slammed me into the wall of the garage, choking the shit out of me from the shock of it. “ I. Broke. Them!”
She wrenched me off the wall only to slam me back against it over and over, snarling and roaring like the animal she clearly was right now.
Completely unhinged.
Utterly irate.
And beyond reason.
I knew how that felt.
I understood that rage, that bloodlust, all of it.
But I’d never had it directed at me before like this.
I’d been the one dealing it out.
It had me fucking stunned to shit, and she clawed at me and screamed.
It was Milo who managed to snatch her knife before she brought that into play. He wrenched it from her grip, making her cry out at the force he’d had to use to accomplish it fast enough. He tossed it away across the room.
And then he was wrenching her off me, trapping her in a chokehold in the process.
“Don’t hurt her,” I managed to eke out as I pushed off the wall.
“Trying not to,” he grunted, as she fought him and shrieked.
He used his powerhouse strength to maintain his hold, and I watched as it started to take effect, her body slowing, her eyelids starting to droop, until she finally stopped fighting entirely and went limp in his all-encompassing hold, losing consciousness.
“Damn,” he uttered, scooping her up in his arms. He looked around, then eyes filled with a shitload of pain met mine. “He’s not here. Julian’s not fucking here, Nico.”
“I know, brother. I know. We’ll find him. I swear to you, we’ll find him.”
“We both know the person best equipped to do that is her,” he said, nuzzling against her, not caring that blood was smearing all over his cheek in the process.
I hadn’t fucking cared, either. Even as she’d been wailing on me and digging into the hard leather of my jacket and even penetrating through my skin all over my neck and chest, I hadn’t fucking cared about the pain. Just that she was here with us. Just that we’d found her, that she was safe. Fuck.
Rapists… I couldn’t get that word out of my head. What she’d alluded to, what Angelo had ordered them to do to her. It was a struggle and a half not to give into my own animalistic side right now and lose my shit all fucking over the place and tear into the assholes who were already mere corpses.
That wouldn’t help anything.
Julian needed us. And to help him, to find him, level heads and rationality needed to prevail.
But once we did locate him, all bets would be off.
There would be absolutely no mercy.
Humanity would take a backseat.
And the worst of me would reign.
“I’ll see to her and get her back to the house,” I told Milo. “I need you to see to this.”
“So many dead bodies, the mess… it’s a lot to sanitize. I can’t do it alone. Not fast enough to be able to help with tracking Julian. Want me to call in Rocco? Tony, maybe?”
I shook my head. “Carlo.”
“What? You’re serious?”
“Consider it the test of his loyalty to us.”
“Nico, I don’t know if—”
“He has the resources that we don’t currently have until we’re sure which of my soldiers are loyal to me, independent of the Family.” I pulled out my phone and fired off a text to him.
Nico: Need your assistance. Milo will contact you with the details.
He responded right away, surprising both of us.
Carlo: My resources are yours, Nico.
I sighed and stowed my phone back in my pocket, confirming to Milo, “He’s on board.”
“Why doesn’t that fill me with a whole lot of relief—or any?”
“Desperate times make for deals with devils, Milo. It is what it is right now.”
“Being restricted, backed into corners… I hate this shit.”
“As do I. But the situation is fluid. This is just where we are at now. It won’t remain as such. I fucking promise you that.”
“And I trust you. I just… Julian is… fuck, Nico.”
I laid my hand on his shoulder. “We’ll bring him back to us.”
“What if it’s too late by the time we manage that? What if Angelo… what if his punishment shatters him? After what happened with his father, Julian is susceptible to certain—”
“He won’t succeed in breaking him. You know how devious and resourceful Julian is when it’s called for. He can hold out until we get to him.” I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “You know that too. You’re just panicking, getting emotional.”
He frowned at me. “And you’re not… how? Us being threatened, it’s a major trigger to you and your feral side.”
“Believe me, I’m feeling it, but you all need me to be above it right now. It’s the only way we’ll win out here.”
“Thank you.”
I smiled. “You know that I would never do anything less for the three of you.”
Sentiment threatened to get the best of me as he stared back at me with so much intensity, so I released him and looked away, telling him in my commanding tone, “Pass me Caterina. I’ll get her back to the Manor and see to her. Sort this shitshow with Carlo’s help.”
“Yeah,” he murmured. “Yeah.”
He handed her off to me and I swept her up in my arms as he pulled out his phone and started snapping into action and communicating with Carlo.
As I carried Caterina outside and toward my car, I breathed her in, hating that I couldn’t smell her usual Chanel scent and only other people’s blood. “We’ve got you. You’re going to be just fine. Everything is going to be fine.”
They were more than hollow words of comfort.
They were a fucking promise.
And a brutal warning to all of our enemies.