Chapter 45 Marcello
Marcello
The family jet waited on the tarmac under a moonless sky.
I boarded alone. There was no entourage. No backup. No distractions. This was mine.
The information sat in a thin folder on the seat beside me, though by now I knew most of it by heart.
Samira’s mother had died a year ago. Illness. Long and slow, by the looks of the medical notations one of my contacts had managed to pry loose.
The stepfather was still living in the same rural district, in a small cabin with a porch that sagged to one side and a rusted rocking chair parked out front like some parody of a peaceful life.
The stepbrother had done better for himself.
It was a new address closer to the city. He had a wife and children. A proper home in a better district. Clean facade. Respectable neighbours.
But he was rotten through and through.
Reports from locals, from a teacher, from one frightened shopkeeper who had seen too much and said too little—he was as abusive to his family as he’d been to Samira. He had a short fuse and heavy hands. And he was smug enough to think nobody could touch him.
I closed the folder and stared out the window into the black.
By the time the sun came up over Tunisia, both men would belong to the dead.
I arrived before dawn, dressed plainly, speaking only when necessary. Men like me did not need much language to make doors open. Money did the rest.
I sat in a hired car at the edge of the stepfather’s property and watched the cabin for nearly an hour.
He came out just after sunrise.
He looked older than in the file photos. Thinner too. Time had hollowed him out. But there it was—the same lazy, ugly arrogance in the way he lowered himself into the rocking chair and spat into the dirt like the whole world beneath him was something he owned.
There was only one word to describe him.
Pathetic.
He had no idea death was already standing in his yard.
I got out of the car and walked toward the porch, unhurried. I wanted him to see me coming.
The boards groaned under my weight as I climbed the steps. He looked up, annoyed first, then wary when he took in my face and realized I wasn’t lost.
“Who are you?” he asked in Arabic.
I ignored him. He’d find out soon enough.
I stepped closer, menacing.
He glanced toward the open door behind him. Calculating whether he could reach something inside.
Weapon. Phone. Escape.
I put a gun to his knee and fired. The crack tore through the morning. He screamed.
The rocking chair tipped, dumping him sideways across the porch. He clawed at his leg, blood pouring between his fingers, face drained white beneath the weathered skin.
I crouched beside him and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, hauling him upright enough to force my face into his line of sight.
His mouth worked uselessly around the pain.
I hit him across the mouth with the gun. Teeth snapped. Blood sprayed over the boards.
I leaned in closer.
“I came for Samira,” I said. “Consider me her guardian angel.”
Confusion flickered through his agony. Then anger. Even as he lay bleeding into rotten wood, this pathetic old bastard had anger left over her name.
It sealed his fate, if there had been any doubt.
“She found happiness,” I told him softly. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
He stared at me, panting, shaking.
I smiled.
“It means you lost. And I want the last thought that crosses your mind before your soul leaves your tormented body to be the knowledge that I’m going to do so much worse to your twisted son.”
Then I went to work.
I broke his other knee first, slow enough to hear the crack beneath his scream.
Then his hands. One by one. The same hands that had once touched her life and left stains all over it.
I used the butt of the gun, a length of wood from the porch railing, and finally the small knife at my belt when his cries turned ragged and wet.
I took my time. Explained who Samira was every few minutes as if he might somehow forget.
Forced him to hear her name over and over again until it became the last prayer his ruined body knew.
When I was done, I cut his throat and watched the light leave his eyes.
There was no triumph. No sense of relief. Just completion.
I left him on the floor, blood creeping through the porch slats in thin red lines.
Then I drove to his son.
Samira’s stepbrother lived in a cleaner place.
The house was freshly painted, the lawn trimmed. Children’s shoes were lined up neatly by the front door.
It all looked very domestic.
I watched the house until evening.
I saw the wife move through the kitchen window with the careful, tight-shouldered posture of a woman who lived by anticipating moods. I saw the children flinch when the front door opened and their father stepped inside.
He ate dinner like a king. She served him with lowered eyes.
One child dropped a spoon. The man backhanded the boy hard enough to snap his head sideways.
That was all I needed.
I waited until the house settled and the lights went out one by one.
Then I went in through the back. The lock gave easily. I slipped in and moved through the dark like I belonged to it.
The wife slept curled on the outer edge of the bed, fully clothed beneath a light blanket as if she didn’t trust herself to ever fully rest. He lay on his back, snoring lightly, one arm flung over his head like he owned all the space around him.
He never heard me cross the room.
My hand clamped over his mouth before his eyes even opened properly.
He thrashed once.
I pressed the blade to his throat and whispered, “Make a sound, and she wakes up covered in your blood.”
He froze. His eyes rolled toward me, wide now, panic rising.
I dragged him out of bed and half-carried, half-shoved him into the hallway. He fought more there. Harder. I slammed his face into the wall, then dragged him down the stairs and out into the yard behind the house.
The night was warm.
He fell to his knees in the dirt, clutching at his bleeding nose.
“Who are you?” he choked.
I circled him once, then stopped where he could see me clearly.
“Samira sends her regards.”
He went very still. Then he did something that almost made me laugh. He sneered.
Obviously, he wasn’t afraid quite enough.
“That bitch,” he spat.
I slit his throat before he finished the sentence. Quick. Deep and efficient.
His hands flew to the wound, but there was no stopping it. Blood pumped hot and black through his fingers. He gurgled, eyes huge, body tipping sideways into the dirt.
I stood over him until the kicking stopped.
Then I crouched and wiped the blade clean on his shirt.
The wife found him at dawn.
I watched from across the street as her scream split the morning.
Neighbours came running. Children cried. And then, something unexpected happened.
After the shock, after the horror, after the first collapse of grief for the life she thought she was supposed to mourn—something in her changed.
It was subtle. A release in her shoulders. A strange stillness that looked almost like relief.
I had his lawyer deliver the deed to the house that afternoon, signed over fully in her name, along with a bank transfer large enough to carry her and the children for years.
Anonymous. Final. It was the least I could do.
I watched her later from a café across the road as she sat on the front step while the children played in the yard.
She held the paperwork in her lap and cried quietly—not the broken cry of a woman shattered by loss, but the stunned, disbelieving cry of someone who had just realized the cage was open.
She looked happy.
I sighed—there was now one less house poisoned by a man who hid his cruelty behind his authority.
By the time I boarded the jet home, Tunisia had become just another place where blood had dried under my nails.
The work was done. The stepfather was dead. The son was dead.
Samira’s loose ends were severed. Cleanly and completely.
And yet as the plane lifted into the night, all I could think about was the hospital room. The chair by her bed. The warmth of her hand in mine.
I had crossed a sea to bury her ghosts. I had killed the men who had no right to keep living in the same world she did.
It should have felt like justice. But justice was a thin, ugly thing compared to what I wanted.
I wanted her safe. I wanted her smiling. I wanted her home.
And as the dark stretched endlessly beyond the window, one truth settled in my chest with bone-deep certainty—if anyone ever brought trauma to Samira’s door again, Tunisia would look merciful by comparison.