12. ~Caterina~
12
~Caterina~
I tapped my earpiece as another transmission came through.
A moment later, Milo’s voice sounded in my ear, while I drove like a crazy person through the city streets in my Lambo.
“Hostile’s not meeting with Angelo. At the strip mall on Westwood and Garde. A transport truck just pulled up. Two guys got out and greeted him. They’re now loading the supplies the hostile stole.”
Nico’s voice was next. “Sounds like they are planning on moving Julian tonight.”
“I’m gonna move in and beat some answers out of them.”
“Authorized.”
Even if he didn’t get anything out of them, which was very likely, it would at least give Milo a much-needed release.
He was really on edge. To be expected given what was at stake here. But it could be problematic if he wasn’t given an outlet—which he now had in those guys. When we’d been strategizing how to sneak out of the Manor without Marco’s security realizing, Milo’s only plan had been to run right through them and put them all down. Fortunately, Nico and I had managed to talk him down, but the fact that it had been a plan of his at all was the worrying thing. He was usually the cautious and careful one all about protecting and safeguarding, not going on the offensive and pulling some insane shit like that.
We’d get Julian back tonight, and it would put an end to that for him.
It would calm him. Hell, it would calm all of us.
“Arriving at Site B now,” I reported down the line.
No response came from Milo, obviously because he was busy laying into those assholes at the strip mall.
But I heard Nico’s voice a moment later.
“Proceed with caution. But if you come across our target, let loose, principessa.”
“Believe me, I will.”
“There’s our woman.”
I smiled to myself.
As much as he’d been worried about me unleashing in that garage, he also knew that it was the best way for me to protect myself. The fact that we’d all split up to do this wasn’t sitting well with him, especially after how worried he’d been about the garage situation and then me getting sick. But there hadn’t been much of a choice. We were all needed to cover different areas if we stood any chance of being able to stop Angelo from stealing Julian away.
It was a desperate situation.
I pulled my car over on the dirt road just a few blocks from the designated location.
I hurried out, pulling my gun as I went, then approached the lone three-story house with the red roof. It was down by Brimbank Waterfront, of all places, right on the edge. No one and nothing else around for several blocks, fortunately. I didn’t have to worry about having my gun out in plain sight.
I headed for the rear, vaulting over a dilapidated fence and landing in a backyard with overgrown grass and dead plants. A floodlight guided the way through the dark night just enough for me to locate the backdoor. There was no basement, just a crawl space. But that still left me with three floors to cover. Yeah, this situation really wasn’t ideal.
I tried the door carefully, finding it locked as pretty much expected.
Pulling out my lock pick set, I made quick work of it, then opened it slowly, readying my gun.
No sign of any hostiles.
I stepped inside, finding myself in a large open space with a scuffed hardwood floor that had seen better days, along with two walls that had been torn down, revealing big gaps through the rest of the area. I walked through a makeshift arch and found myself in a wide corridor with closed doors on either side, listening carefully as I went.
Muffled sounds reached me, sending a surge of adrenaline flooding through my system.
I followed them to the first closed door on the left.
Taking a centering breath, I kicked it open and burst in, ready to clear the room, only to find it empty.
Well, of people.
I’d walked into a surveillance area.
The equipment looked brand new and as I peered closer; I saw that it was actually state-of-the-art and it really stood out from the rest of the place that I’d observed so far.
Hmm. The place was being renovated, not just in the process of being torn down, as the state of those walls had suggested.
This was one of the first rooms to get the renovation treatment.
I walked to the monitors, finding them observing different rooms inside the house. Most were empty.
But then I saw one decked out like a BDSM dungeon, somewhat similar to a few of the rooms at Nocturne.
My breath caught in my throat as I took in Angelo stalking around a black bed where somebody was bound naked.
I peered closer and nearly vomited when I identified the person as Julian.
“Oh my God,” I breathed.
He was shaking his head from side-to-side and writhing in clear pain on the bed.
I found the volume button and turned it up enough to hear what was actually going on.
“Please, just stop. I can’t… I can’t take another second.”
“You begged me to fuck that sweet ass. And, hell, did I make you come. I’m still wearing it all over me.”
“To end… this. It’s done… just… stop.”
Angelo lunged forward and wrapped his hand around Julian’s throat. “You were playing me? After all we’ve done together? After how you melted for me? I’m getting you medication and treatment tonight and this is how you repay me? You are fucking mine. That isn’t changing. Just for that, you’re gonna take me raw. I’ll show you how much you belong to me, tear through all this denial bullshit.”
I cursed, then stepped back.
I couldn’t tell which room they were in. It could be any of them.
A creak sounded, and I just managed to activate the panic button beneath my ring and spin around in time as one of Angelo’s masked men lunged at me.
I kicked him back and as he fell into the control panel, an idea occurred to me.
So, when he came at me, I pretended to lose my grip on my gun, and I let him drive me into the wall. He snatched the gun up and shoved it against my temple.
“I know who you are,” he told me. “The boss is gonna want to deal with you personally.”
Excellent. Plan progressing nicely.
I let him drag me out of the room and down the hallway, shoving me every few steps, then jamming the gun into my back to make it clear it was still there and very much a threat.
He grabbed my arm and hauled me up a set of dirtied carpeted stairs to the second floor, down another corridor, until we came to the room at the far end straight ahead.
There was a keypad door lock and I took in the code as he typed it in all too slowly.
The door chirped open, a hefty steel thing, before the guy threw me inside, and I landed on my knees, before he then shoved the gun to my temple again.
I rapidly took in the room, the same space I’d seen on the monitor.
“What the fuck is this?” Angelo yelled, pushing off the bed and storming toward me, glaring at his guy. “Why—what—how is she here?”
“I told you I got word that she escaped the others and now I just caught her trying to sneak in. No idea how she knew to come here, but I figured you’d want to deal with her.”
I saw Julian register me. Although, only just. His eyes were glazed, and he seemed barely lucid as he frowned out at me, like he wasn’t sure I was actually real. Shit.
Angelo came to me and yanked on my hair, forcing my gaze to his.
“Came to play too, did you, Caterina?”
When I didn’t answer, he slapped me across the face—one of his signature moves. I grunted as my head snapped to the side and I tasted blood on my lips.
“No!” Julian cried weakly. “Leave… leave her.”
“She just broke into my place!” Angelo called over his shoulder. He yanked on my hair harder, ripping out strands in the process. “And how did you? How did you know I was here? Tell me, whore!”
“I know a lot more than you think.”
Worry flitted across his features, and he looked wonderfully creeped out by my eerie response. Good. Fucking good.
He stared at me in black tactical gear, the empty holster at my right hip. “Is that hers?” he asked his guy regarding the gun he had trained on me.
“Yeah. Bitch couldn’t keep hold of it for long, though.”
Angelo frowned.
“Hmm. Are you bait, Caterina? Did your husband send you in here as a sacrificial lamb to get his longtime best buddy out of here?” He laughed. “Wow, I guess he is doing his job of punishing you, then, after all. Let’s take that up a notch, shall we?”
In the next second, he used his hold in my hair to yank me to my feet.
He gestured around the room. “What would you like to start with? I’m partial to watching that fucking machine tear your cunt apart. Or maybe I’ll tie you to that spanking bench and beat your little ass until it’s bloody as you cry and beg for the punishment to end? Hmm, so many amazing choices.” He grabbed himself through his jeans obscenely. “Just the thought of it is getting me hard, and that’s really saying something, seeing as though I only just finished up fucking my little bitch over there not ten minutes ago.” He gestured at Julian. “You see him wearing my cum so nicely? All over his pretty cock? Dripping from his well-used ass?”
I shuddered and had to look away so I didn’t lose focus.
So emotion didn’t get the best of me.
“You’re a monster,” I hissed.
“Don’t worry, he enjoyed it.” He lifted his shirt and gestured at the cum stains all over his abs. “See? He was pleasured a hell of a lot during his time here.” He eyed Julian over his shoulder. “And that’s what you’ll remember, isn’t it, my pretty cock slut? Just how much everything I did to you got you off. How much you really relished it while merely playing the unwilling one. You fucking wanted it, wanted me. ”
Rage burned through me at his poisonous words, his clear attempt to recondition Julian into actually buying that disturbing bullshit.
A growl reverberated low in my throat, building and building as my fists clenched white-hot.
Angelo’s eyes widened.
The guy with the gun trained on me shifted his weight, unsure.
And that was all I needed.
I spun to the side, snagged his wrist, and dislodged the weapon with two rapid-fire moves. As he fell back, I pistol-whipped him across the side of the head, then fired off a shot right through his throat.
“Fuck!” Angelo yelled in a mixture of shock and indignation.
He was there in the next second, jumping on my back as I watched his accomplice slide down the wall, dying right there as blood spewed from his destroyed artery.
I forced his weight back against the wall, slamming him in the process, and he grunted as his back jarred painfully into the drywall. He had hold of my gun, preventing me from firing or moving my arm at all. His other was wrapped around my throat trying to choke me out.
Julian was tugging frantically at his restraints, freaking out and in severe distress.
“Fucking cunt!” Angelo roared.
I dug my nails into his arm that was wrapped around my throat and he hissed, loosening his grip a little. But not enough.
“The only cunt here is you!” I wrenched at his knee with my boot and it destabilized him enough for me to take advantage of it, rip his arm from around my neck, and then spin into him.
He yanked my gun from my grip at the last second, but I managed to kick it out of his hand before he could turn it against me. It ended up sailing right across the room.
It didn’t matter.
I didn’t need a weapon to take the fucker down.
I was the weapon.
Something he was about to discover for the first time.
In a very painful way.
“You’re not going to ruin this for me like you ruined things before by turning down my marriage proposal!” he yelled, before lunging at me.
I spun into a kick that clocked him across the jaw and sent him reeling back, crashing into a set of stocks. As he grabbed at the apparatus to maintain his balance, I came up behind him, fisted his hair, and smashed his face into the wood. He spluttered as blood sprayed from a clearly broken nose.
He thrust his elbow back, clocking me underneath my jaw, making my head snap back and causing me to stagger a little.
It was all he needed to grab hold of me and toss me into a black cabinet over by the door.
I caught sight of a set of keys there. Likely to Julian’s binds.
I swallowed down the pain, adrenaline, and that monstrous blood-lusting side of me helped me out with that in a big way. And, as he came at me, I snatched up a whip, spun and cracked it across his fucking face with all my strength.
He screamed as it tore into his cheek, blood spewing.
I was there in the next second, ripping his legs out from under him and taking him down to the floor. I slammed his head against the floor over and over, disorientating him.
As he tried to snag hold of me, I drew a knife from my ankle holster, spun, and drove it into his right hand, stabbing all the way through it and into the floor below.
He shrieked like the little bitch that he was and writhed beneath me in utter agony.
It called to my bloodlust like nothing else.
But before I could satiate it, footsteps rushing down the corridor outside caught my attention.
Shit.
I kicked Angelo in the face, knocking him out cold, then I ran to the cabinet and snatched up the keys.
I bolted over to Julian and rapidly undid the cuffs binding him to the bed, doing everything I could not to look directly at him while he was in such an awful state.
“It’s okay. It’s over now. I’m gonna get you out of here.”
“Cat,” he uttered weakly, reaching out for me and touching my cheek. “Go. Run.”
“No, I’m not leaving you.”
Sobs sounded from him and I lost the battle with trying not to make direct eye contact or take in the state of him.
There he was lying there in so much pain, bruised and cut, covered in Angelo’s… fluids, and he was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks.
The door flew open, making me swing my head around to see four guys with balaclavas barreling in. I rapidly calculated my chance of making it to my gun in time.
It didn’t bode well.
The sight of Angelo sprawled out unconscious on the floor pulled them up short for a few seconds.
I pushed away from Julian and strode to them, ready to let myself go completely and utterly decimate them.
But then a ferocious roar rang out, drawing their attention as well as mine.
In the next second, Milo hurtled into the room.
His gaze darted to Julian briefly, and then his eyes turned utterly black.
“Motherfuckers!” he bellowed, before running at the guys and tearing into them viciously.
Within moments, screams, bones cracking, and even begging filled the space as he went apeshit all over them.
Another three burst into the room and I ran back into the fight, beating them back and keeping them away from descending on Milo.
It all became a blur of undiluted violence and brutality as each hostile melded into the other, everything coming hard and fast, and my reactions coming faster than that as I was in the throes of my monstrous state.
I slammed one of them up against a wall, then literally ripped them apart with my blade, tearing them open and savoring their shrieks as it called to the power I had over them, over their fucking disgusting lives.
I sensed another coming at me and I spun, snagged the guy’s arm, then wrenched it, dislocating his shoulder and making him scream for me.
I used the hold to swing him around and haul him into the black cabinet.
As he crashed into it, I was there, wrapping both hands around his throat and choking the life out of him, the monster in me desperate to see the light drain from his eyes as I stole it away like a fucking dark god.
But a shot rang out before I could accomplish it, blowing the guy’s skull apart.
I jolted and looked out to see Julian standing there, grabbing onto the wall to steady himself. He fired a bullet off to the side of me and I saw it kill the guy I’d shredded open in an instant, too.
“It’s over,” he rasped. His gaze darted to Milo, who was literally tossing an already dead guy across the room. The guy crashed into the St. Andrew’s cross and decimated the thing at the impact. “Milo… stop. Stop.”
Milo jolted at the sound of Julian’s voice and swung toward him.
Julian wavered, dropping the gun, and collapsing onto the ground.
“Fuck!” Milo cried, rushing to him just as I did.
He ran his hands over the stark bruising around Julian’s ribs, particularly on one side. “Internal bleeding,” he told me. “It looks like internal bleeding.”
“Oh my God.”
“Contact Nico. Tell him I’m taking Julian to the hospital right fucking now.”
“All right, yeah,” I said, reaching up to tap my earpiece to do just that, until I noticed something missing from the mess we’d made of the hostiles.
“Angelo’s not here,” I told Milo.
“What?” he grunted as he lifted Julian into his arms carefully and rose to his feet with his unconscious form cradled against him.
“He’s gone. He must have escaped during the chaos of the battle.” I gestured at Julian. “Get him to the ER immediately. I’ll go after Angelo.”
“No,” Milo rumbled. “We tend to Julian. The rest comes after.”
I stared out at him there in Milo’s arms.
So pained.
So beaten down.
So gaunt and near lifeless.
I swallowed hard, trying to choke back the emotion that threatened to get the best of me now.
“We’ve got him,” Milo told me, seeing my distress, even as he tried to hide his own.
I reached out and stroked Julian’s hair. “He’s coming home.”
That was what mattered.
Milo was right, the rest would come later.