Chapter 25 - Marco
The third Irish bar tonight, and my knuckles are finally starting to split properly.
Blood drips onto sawdust floors, mixing with spilled whiskey and fear-sweat as I survey the wreckage: overturned tables, shattered bottles, three men groaning in corners they won’t crawl from without help.
The mirror behind the bar is spider-webbed from where I drove someone’s face through it.
Glass crunches under my boots with every step, the copper taste of blood thick in my mouth.
"Marco, enough." Luca's voice cuts through the ringing in my ears. He stands in the doorway, Alessandro and Nico flanking him like they're approaching a rabid dog. "This isn't strategy. It's just violence."
"Good." I wipe blood from my mouth, mine or someone else's, I can't tell anymore. The sting of whiskey in my cuts barely registers. "Violence is all that's left."
Another Irish soldier tries to crawl toward the exit. My boot finds his ribs, and the crack echoes through the ruined bar. No purpose to it. No information to extract. Just pain answering pain.
"This isn't you, brother," Luca says, stepping over broken glass. "You're stealing my thing."
I turn on him fast, my hand shooting out to grab his throat, slamming him back against the wall hard enough to crack plaster. His eyes widen with shock as my fingers tighten.
"This is exactly who I am." The words echo with truth.
I release him, and he stumbles, hand going to his throat as he gasps. Alex moves to help him, but Luca waves him off, eyes never leaving mine. The calculation there, the wariness. Good. They should be afraid of what I've become.
"The O'Malley warehouse burned twenty minutes ago," Nico reports, professional despite the carnage. "The dock workers are fleeing. Every Irish business in a three-mile radius is either destroyed or abandoned."
None of it matters. None of it brings her back. None of it erases the way she looked at me in that cemetery, like I was poison in her veins.
The compound feels like a tomb when we return. Dante waits in the main hall, still pale from his injuries, his bandaged hands moving in slow, desperate signs.
I don't even do him the honor of trying to make out what his clumsy, broken fingers are trying to say.
"She loved you," Alex translates, his voice careful. "This dishonors that love."
The laugh that tears from my throat sounds inhuman. "Love? Love's just the lie before the destruction."
Dante signs again, more urgently, and this time I look. "You're becoming the monster she was afraid you were."
"I was always that monster. She just made me forget for a while." I pause, the truth cutting deeper. "No, she made me want to be something else. Made me believe I could be. That's the real cruelty."
Nico's phone buzzes. He checks it, and something shifts in his expression. "Boss, you need to hear this."
"If it's not about burning more of their territory…"
"Our contact at the O'Brien compound just confirmed." The words drop like stones. "She's still there. Been there since she walked in two hours ago. They're preparing something."
The crystal decanter stays in my hand this time, whiskey burning down my throat instead of decorating the wall.
Still there. Two hours at the O'Brien compound, doing what?
Planning what? The thought of Liam's hands on her, his mouth where mine was just yesterday, his cock inside what belongs to me.
The images tear through my brain like bullets.
I can still taste her on my tongue, still feel her pussy clenching around me as she screamed my name. And now she's giving that to him.
My fist goes through the antique mirror, then the wall behind it. Again. Again. Until the plaster gives way to studs, until my knuckles are hamburger, until the pain in my hands might match the thing tearing apart my chest.
"This is what Father wanted," I hear myself say, voice hollow. "A son who could destroy without feeling. Who could be the monster the family needed."
"Marco…" Alex starts.
"He won. Even dead, he fucking won." I stare at my ruined hands. "Made me into this thing that even she couldn't love."
The phone call comes as I'm washing blood from my hands. Intelligence, breathless: "Alonzo Bernardi. Spotted at his mistress's old apartment on Halsted."
I don't tell my brothers. Don't want their questions or their concern. This is between the Bernardis and me now.
The apartment building is run-down, trying to hide its decay under fresh paint that fools no one. Third floor, corner unit. The door splinters under my boot.
Alonzo scrambles for a gun, but I'm already on him.
The weapon skitters across cracked linoleum as I drive him into the wall.
Fake passports scatter from his hands. He was running.
The coward was running while his daughters pay for his sins.
The smell of his sweat mixes with cheap cologne, making my stomach turn.
I don't speak. Words are for men who still pretend to be human. The knife appears in my hand, and I start with his fingers. Methodical. Precise. Each joint separated with surgical care. Blood makes the handle slippery, but my grip never falters.
His screams fill the small apartment, but no one in this building will call for help. They know better than to interfere with Rosetti business.
"Your daughter asked about her mother," I finally say between his sobs. "At the cemetery. Standing on her grave."
"Please…"
"The truth, Bernardi." The blade finds new flesh. "All of it. Or I'll make this last for days."
He breaks faster than expected. Weak men always do.
"Your father wanted her dead! Offered me fifty thousand! I have the wire transfer, the proof!" The words pour out mixed with blood and snot, desperate and panicked. "She knew about the shipments, the routes. She was going to testify."
"And you killed her for him."
"No!" His eyes wild with pain and desperation. "I refused! She was the mother of my children. Killing her would have been too messy, too many questions."
The knife stills against his throat.
"Pietro came to me," Alonzo continues, words tumbling over each other. "Offered fifty thousand for the job. But I refused to do it. Too messy, I told him. You don't kill the mother of your children like that."
"But she died anyway."
"Yeah." He laughs, bitter and broken. "But it wasn't me who set it up. I can't deny it was convenient. No more threats of testimony. No more fights over the children."
I process this. My father lied. Valentina thinks I knew about a murder that never happened the way she believes. She thinks I touched her knowing my family killed her mother, when the truth is even more twisted.
"Doesn't matter now," Alonzo wheezes through blood. "She's marrying Liam. Tonight. Moved everything up."
The knife drops from nerveless fingers. "What?"
"The O'Brien compound. They're doing it tonight instead of waiting." His smile is red and terrible. "She traded herself for Alice's freedom. Walked in there and offered herself to save her sister. Ceremony's at midnight, moved up from the original plan."
Of course she did. My brilliant, self-sacrificing wife. Trading herself like her mother tried to, like all Bernardi women do, thinking sacrifice equals love.
"My daughter will die in an Irish wedding dress," Alonzo says, "just like her mother died trying to escape this world."
I check my watch. Eleven fifteen. Forty-five minutes until midnight. Not even four hours since she left the cemetery, and she's already giving herself to another man. She didn't need even a full day to mourn. She needed less than four to replace me.
Twenty-four hours ago she was in my bed, my cum dripping down her thighs as she promised she'd never leave. Twenty-four fucking hours.
I drop Alonzo where he lies, still breathing but his left hand broken beyond repair. "If she's hurt when I get there, I'll come back and make this seem like mercy."
The city blurs past as I race toward the South Side, toward the O'Brien compound. My phone rings. Luca, Dante, Alessandro. But I don't answer. This is between my wife and me now.
The engine screams as I push it harder, racing through empty streets. Every red light ignored, every law broken. For the first time since my mother died, I find myself praying to a God I don't believe in. Let me get there in time. Let her be safe. Let me stop this before…
The compound gates loom ahead, blazing with light like they're celebrating the theft of what's mine. Eleven forty. I slam the brakes, tires screaming against asphalt, as I see what's waiting: twenty Irish soldiers, armed and positioned. They knew I'd come. Of course they fucking knew.
Behind them, through the gates, I glimpse green. A flash of wedding dress disappearing into the main building. The hem trailing behind her like a ghost.
Valentina.
My wife in another wedding dress. Walking toward another man. While my marks are still on her skin, while she still smells like me, while her pussy probably still aches from how I fucked her yesterday morning.
I check my clip. Fifteen rounds. Twenty men between me and my wife.
The math is against me. The smart move would be to call for backup, wait for my brothers, plan this properly. But there's no time for smart moves. In twenty minutes, she'll say vows to another man. In twenty minutes, she'll promise him what she already promised me.
I smile for the first time tonight. Finally, odds that make sense. Twenty men who think they can keep me from what's mine. Twenty bodies between me and the woman who signed divorce papers in the rain but whose body still knows exactly who it belongs to.
The first guard spots me, starts to raise his weapon. Too slow. I'm already moving, already calculating angles and cover, already tasting blood that hasn't spilled yet.
Eleven forty-one.
Nineteen minutes to stop a wedding. Nineteen minutes to remind my wife that death is the only divorce I recognize. Nineteen minutes to either reclaim what's mine or die trying.
I slam another clip home and step out of the car. The guards tense, fingers finding triggers, but I'm already moving toward them with the confidence of a man who has nothing left to lose and everything to take back.
They have no idea what's coming.