27. Francesca #3
My phone was somehow still in my back pocket, so if Wolfe was alive and tracking me, he would know I was on the move. But I couldn’t sit there and wait for him to save me. I had to cut myself free and kill both of these assholes.
We started down the dirt road until we made it to the paved street.
The car sped up, and I could hear the sound of the wheels against the asphalt.
We didn’t see another car on the road. The radio was off, so it was silent inside.
The men didn’t talk to each other, to my misfortune.
I needed them to be distracted and have the silence drowned out by their conversation.
“How long is the drive?” I asked with a wet throat.
“Shut up,” the driver said without glancing at me in the rearview mirror.
“How can you possibly work for a monster like that?”
“I told you to shut up.”
While the conversation progressed, I turned the knife in my grasp and sawed at the rope, knowing there was a good chance I would cut my own wrist because I couldn’t shift forward to give my hands space, not when that would look suspicious.
“My father was a good man who paid generous salaries, and he didn’t do this shit to people. ”
He slammed on the brakes, and I flew forward into the seat in front of me.
I gripped my knife tightly and didn’t let it fall.
The passenger chuckled. “That’ll shut her up.”
I pretended to struggle against the seat to right myself, but in that time, I was cutting the bonds that held me. By the time I shifted backward and returned to the seat, I’d cut the last cord free and felt the rope loosen around me. I could tell I’d cut myself a little bit, but I would live.
I stared ahead and saw a car in the distance, so far away I couldn’t identify what kind it was, whether it was a sedan or an SUV. I glanced in the rearview mirror to get a view of the road behind us to see if there were other cars following us, but I couldn’t really tell.
I had to go for it.
If I could take them out and commandeer the vehicle, I might be able to get away.
I had to do this quickly. Kill one and then the other instantly before I could be shot.
I studied the driver and then the passenger before I changed my grip on the knife. I could see the carotid artery on each of them. I just had to jab the knife in the right spot before I did the same to the other man.
I took in a slow breath and then thought of Wolfe. If he were here, I knew what he would say.
Tough fucking bitch.
I sprang forward and stabbed the knife into the jugular of the driver before I yanked it out and moved to the passenger. He shifted away and reacted quickly, but I slammed his head into the side window before I got the knife in and yanked it out.
The second guy screamed, and the first one just died.
His hands dropped from the wheel, and the car immediately started to swerve off the road. I grabbed the wheel and steadied it, but his boot was flat on the gas, so I bunched the leg of his jeans in my grasp and yanked it up, lifting the pressure from the pedal to stop feeding gas to the engine.
I got the car back on the road, but initially, the car didn’t slow down.
It took about thirty seconds for the speed to decrease, and then every second after that, the speed dropped considerably.
When the car came to a crawl, I turned the wheel and guided it onto the dirt shoulder then grabbed the man’s leg and moved it over to touch the brake so I could shift it into park.
I wanted to sit there and take a beat, but I knew I had to keep moving because I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I looked out the back window and saw no cars coming—for now.
I opened the back door, covered in blood and vomit, and then opened the driver’s door before I unfastened his safety belt and started to drag him out.
I could hear the approach of the car that I’d seen in the distance. They were about to pass, and they might pull over at the sight of the bloody scene…or get the hell out of there.
I dropped the man’s body partially in the road then moved back to the car.
I heard the other car come to a screeching halt on the other side of the road.
I turned, expecting to see some poor taxi driver or a tourist who wanted to offer help. Maybe they assumed it was a hit-and-run and the other car had already taken off. But I saw a dark gray Range Rover with black rims.
“Cristo.” Wolfe ran to me across the road and grabbed me with a harder grip than he probably meant to exert. “Francesca, are you hurt?” His hands were immediately caked in the blood that was soaked into my flesh and my clothes. Blood that belonged to my family and my enemies.
“No,” I said breathlessly. “He killed my dad. Shot him in the head right in front of me…” I started to sob again, my legs becoming weak once more, my balance compromised.
Wolfe kept me up. “Who?”
“Warren.”
His eyes immediately shifted back and forth between mine as his eyebrows furrowed. “Leo said he was dead.”
Now I understood exactly why Leo had lied. “Leo is the rat.”
All the consternation left his face as the shock settled in. His eyes were wider than I’d ever seen them. He turned to look down the road toward the winery, which was so far away it wasn’t visible anymore.
I started to sob. “Because of him…Dad is dead. Because of him…the winery is gone. Because of him…I was almost Warren’s prisoner.”
He suddenly scooped me into his arms and lifted me into his chest. He carried me across the road and then gently placed me in the passenger seat.
I continued to cry. “I want him dead.”
He buckled my safety belt.
“I want him tortured,” I said as the tears ran down my face. “I want him to beg me to put a bullet in his fucking head—”
“Trust me, they’re all going to be dead real fucking soon.
” He shut my door then got into the driver’s seat.
The engine was still on, so he flipped the SUV around and hauled ass down the road, driving faster than I’d ever seen him.
He pushed a hundred kilometers per hour and took sharp turns that I thought would tip us over.
I was in such shock that I wasn’t scared.
He missed the turn that led to our house in Caltanissetta.
“Where are we going?”
“We can’t stay here. It’s too easy to find us.”
“Then…where are we going?”
“Palermo,” he said while he drove with both hands on the wheel, which was a first. “They’ll never find us there.”
“Why won’t they be able to find us…?”
He was quiet for a while, glancing at the rearview mirror from time to time. “Because Cosa Nostra will protect us.”
Next in the series…