40. Taken
Taken
Salvatore
“Where is she?!” I roar.
“Salvatore, calm down. We’ll find her.” Luiggi knows to keep his distance. I’ll shoot, stab, or strangle anyone who isn’t my wife.
Aldo is dead.
Andrea isn’t answering his calls.
My wife is missing.
The tightness in my chest suffocates my breath. I clench my fists on my desk through shallow gasps of air. My body shakes as my mind races through hope and fear.
“Breathe, son,” a calm voice says lowly next to my ear. “Breathe.”
Firm arms wrap around me and squeeze.
“I can’t lose her too,” I choke out.
“You won’t, niputi.” Ziu holds me against his chest. “Breathe for me, son.”
The first breath burns my lungs. I take another, but stumble under the weight of my knees buckling.
My wife is gone.
“Give us the room,” Ziu says to Luiggi.
I blacked out when my enforcer told me Bianca and Stephanie were taken. Trouble was already twenty minutes late before I got the call. I drove myself to the Catania property by muscle memory, where I’ve been failing to piece together what happened.
Ziu sits me in my office chair.
“I need you to hear me, Salvatore. Agostino Messina is dead. Police found his body with his son inside a car in an alley.”
“Tino?”
He shakes his head. “Nino. Each shot in the back of the head. No casings.”
“To make it look like I killed them.” I say the quiet part out loud. “Where’s Tino?”
Ziu stands to sit across from my desk. “No one has seen him since you left on your honeymoon.”
“He better be dead.” I punch the code to my weapons closet.
“What are you doing?”
“Killing.”
I pull out a bulletproof vest, assault rifles, and an ammo bag.
Handguns. I need handguns. Grenades too.
I grab the belt for shotgun shells. “I’m not losing her.”
“And I’m not losing you!”
My mother’s eyes stare at me in a silent plea. “You’re the only blood I have left, Salvatore. I can’t let you walk into a setup. Prosecutors want another high-profile case. They can’t have you.”
My throat tightens. “I love her, Ziu.”
“Then we go to war with caution.” He pulls me into a hug by the back of my suit. I cling to my uncle, transported back to the day we buried my parents. “She’s family now. No one fucks with us.”
My office door opens. Andrea steps in, his waves flat, tracksuit wrinkled.
He swallows hard. “We need to talk.”