Chapter 3
Xavier
The record time I was able to hold my breath underwater was three minutes. Nearly four when I wasn’t under duress. I was twenty-six. I don’t think I can last half as long now, pushing thirty.
The hand dragging my head deeper into the basin of water digs its fingers into my skull to maintain a tight grip. Enough time has passed that my practiced control is quickly unraveling into something else.
It burns . A white-hot iron pressed to all sides of my throat, traveling down into the rest of me.
Don’t breathe.
No matter how tired you are, don’t do it.
My bound hands, forced tight against my back, induce the feeling of entrapment—a form of torture itself to be unable to save yourself when your body is draining oxygen.
The walls are closing in.
Arturo’s order is muffled, distorted in the sloshing pool of water. “That’s enough.”
My head is ripped from the depths, swung back to face the revolting bastard who has a fistful of my hair in his grasp .
Dario blanches at my directness, deflecting his gaze downward as I heave, wheezing sounds exiting my throat like a broken machine.
“Tell me where you’ve sent the girl.”
Once the room stops spinning, my eyes sear through my father.
The Russian trials repeat themselves like mantras in my weary brain. Face your opponent. Lower your heart rate. Still your mind and remove the pain. Replace it with hatred.
My pulse slackens.
The fears my natural mind has created begin to dissipate.
I am all hatred, piercing him with an unwavering gaze.
My father does his best to look unperturbed by my recovery, standing with his hands tucked behind his suspenders. The pistol that could end all of this rests peacefully in his holster.
Dario makes an uncomfortable grunt as my body sways. There’s no feeling in my knees. “Boss, it’s been hours…”
Arturo’s eyes remain clasped to mine. “ Again .”
The sliding metal door to the warehouse opens, revealing the Marcello Family’s consigliere. Henri has a group of men tailing him. “Boss.”
My father sucks back a vicious explicit in English, but a few loose under his breath in his first language. “You were told to remain outside,” he seethes, barely composed.
Disoriented, my focus shifts to our audience—new blood looking positively horrified by what they see as they’re ushered hastily out of the reeking space.
A father tearing his son apart from the inside out.
Some of them I’ve gone on calls with. Some dine in my restaurant, a distant cousin or a man brought in with the promise of an exuberant life.
The illusion dies right before their eyes.
This is the reality of this life. This is where you end up.
Sweat coasts down the side of my father’s face now that we’re alone again, pissed as hell.
He removes his handkerchief from his waistcoat, patting his agitated flesh until it’s crimson.
For a fleeting moment, I’m weak enough to wonder whether he’s taking the blood pressure medication his doctor recently prescribed to him.
That thought, that insufferable chink in my armor, makes this so goddamn worse.
Arturo is summoned from the door. Not unusual at this time of day. Normally, I’d be swapping my desk at the restaurant for a tinted conference room at the club, watching fucked up people do fucked up things for the greater portion of the night.
My father’s hands slam against his side as he crosses the hollow room for the exit. Dario’s grip loosens with each step my dad takes, releasing me completely once the boss has freed himself from this unbearable hellhole. Unable to sit upright, my forearms catch onto the edge of the basin.
To steel myself, I draw in a bracing breath and turn to set a devilish glare onto my executioner. “What made you think it was a good idea to cross me?”
“Vito chose me. I had no choice, X.”
“You know he’s a fucking pazzo.”
“Well, stop pushing him . Just tell him where she is. Then we can all go home.”
The agony pulsating under my flesh is pushed back only by my desire for vengeance. Any form of it. I just need a win. “My father doesn’t understand loyalty. He’s a fucking fossil. He lacks the ability to see what we can do here.”
“What’s that?”
“If I rise, we all do. The media is for me . The politicians. The police are for me. I have connections with other houses he doesn’t even know about.
If word leaks out about this, not only will the men I’ve combed the streets with, built relationships with follow me, but they will too.
I’d have control of two families, and that’s something unprecedented, something that would finally bring us out of the shadows. ”
Dario stares at my bloody face, my swollen eyes half-shut, saying nothing.
He’s listening. That’s what matters.
“Make the tide turn, Dario, and I will ensure you become more than a damn picchiatore.”
The bastard made of pure muscle shoots an uncertain glance to the doorway. “What happens to the Boss?”
A long-suppressed wickedness seeps into my veins.
“Leave that to me.”
I don’t have enough strength to lift my head from the rows of wire behind me. To shift is to put pressure on my feet, which have been bludgeoned with corkscrews, so I do my best to remain still.
Impatience eclipses any pain I suffer.
The clouds have opened over the harbor, releasing rain in silver sheets. Windows spanning the length of the building reveal webs of light shattering the atmosphere, thunder rumbling the foundation beneath me.
I find solace in the violence of nature, letting it strip me of my agony.
The small, insignificant boy within me wants to cave in on himself. Beg—beg his papa to stop. Ask how he could do this. To survive my father, that boy had to hide, disappear into a crevice of my body he’d struggle to find. Something about mind-numbing torture brings him right out.
He cradled me as a child, took care of me when I was sick, cleaned my wounds when I fell. Every decision he made in his life has been with me in mind, even the decisions that would eventually destroy everything he worked so hard for .
Striking a deal with Vito Marin for his eldest daughter was one of them.
I come to the conclusion that there’s no point in remembering, in hoping for anything better from a man like Arturo Marcello.
Not when I can’t even remember the last time I saw him as a father instead of my Capo dei Capi. Not when he descends upon me every damn day as my waking nightmare.
“ Sophie ,” I whisper, simply to say her name.
To let the vowels and consonants ease my weary soul.
My eyes close and I see her. Tumbling black hair spilling from my grasp. Skin as pale as the moon outside. I picture her without the scars I know she carries, unable to stomach that shit right now.
Move on .
Lips. Unnaturally red… as red as the blood oozing from the gaping holes in my feet.
Move. On .
Her smile. Her laugh that harnesses goddamn sunlight.
Fucking hell.
I thought I was broken before I married Sophie. That pain was laughable compared to what I went through after they ripped her out of my arms.
But this? Knowing she’s gone? Knowing I’ll never see her again? Suspecting that this warehouse is all I’ll know for the foreseeable future makes me think death would be a mercy.
Thunder drowns out the creaking door as it opens. In this darkness, I can’t make out who has entered, nor do I care. A bolt of light reveals a face, one I hadn’t expected. I find the will to lift my head as Bo’s hands grab ahold of my neck.
Someone else slides through the doorway. Dante.
“That son of a bitch ,” Bo seethes, releasing me to tear off the bag on his back.
Time suspends in a place like this, but I’ve seen enough sunsets to know they should’ve been long gone by now.
My voice is barely audible, words struggling past my fractured lips. “I… told you to go.”
Dante bends down. Even in this dim light, fury corrupts his usual devil-may-care countenance. “I’ll tear them to pieces. Just give me the chance.”
Bo unscrews a lid. Only when he applies balm to my face do I appreciate the ointment. “Where else?”
I let out a weary chuckle. My body is a battlefield of scars. He’d never find them all. “Don’t worry about it.”
Bo directs his flashlight down with a single click before darkness blankets the warehouse again. Dante’s hand digs into my shoulder, concerned by whatever he’s seen. I wonder if it’s infected. It would explain why I can barely move.
“X, fuck, you couldn’t even walk out of here if you tried. Dante, you’ll need to carry him?—”
“I'm not going anywhere .”
“You grab one side and I’ll—” Bo lurches back as if I’d just spawned a new language out of thin air, something incomprehensible to someone with a semi-normal headspace. “ What ?”
“If I leave now, he wins.”
“Who gives a flying fuck if he wins?”
My chest expands, ballooning until my rib cage flares in agony. “He’s taken too much … too much from me.”
“At this rate, he’ll kill you!”
“Then let him.”
Dante scoffs, choosing to disregard what he thinks are ravings. “He’s not coherent. Just grab him?—”
My arm stretches out to stop him, and with the movement, the chains shackled to my ankles grate deeper, right to the bone. “If you give a shit about me, you’ll go. You’ll take the money I gave you, and you’ll disappear. That would make this worth it. ”
Dante shakes his head, locs loose around his face. “Listen, I already told you there wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening. Zeke won’t leave either.”
“Has word spread?”
Bo stares at me long enough for his gaze to become accusing. “That was you ?”
I nod, grimacing as I attempt to straighten my spine. “I have Dario’s ear. When he isn’t bashing my brain in, he lets me know what’s going on out there.”