Chapter 39
Damiano
After about an hour traversing the goat path, we finally spotted the silver SUV parked in front of an old cabin. Tucked into a natural crevasse near the edge of a cliff, deliberately hidden under a haphazard layer of brush and dead olive branches.
This place is obviously a safehouse.
Julian’s access to this place only proves that he is working for someone other than Mateo.
Andreas’s investigation found he has ties to the Mexican cartel, which points to only two families in La Famiglia. The Guidicellis, who run a trafficking ring with the cartels, or the Castigliones, whose deceased matriarch, Katarina’s mother, was a cartel-born heiress.
I am crouched in the waist-high grass, the salt-heavy wind blowing against my face. To my right, the cliff drops off into a violent sea. The waves slam into the rocks two hundred feet below with a haunting sound.
Beside me, Andreas has his eye pressed to the glass of his binoculars. Lucian is on the other side of us, surveying the perimeter and leading the other guards. We quietly observe the house for any movement or sounds.
Just one more minute, I tell myself, the words a frantic prayer against my own impulse that is begging to blow up that door and tear that motherfucker into pieces.
Just hang in there, Dolcezza. I’m coming for you.
“He’s in there,” Andreas whispers, his voice hardly audible against the rustling of the leaves of the trees around us. “No sentries, completely alone. He’s that cocky.”
“We wait,” My jaw aches as I drum my fingers on my thigh. My patience has worn thin; all the suppressed violence I hid in the past two years is begging to be unleashed.
I grip the hilt of my knife, the leather worn and familiar.
A door this heavy takes two seconds to breach. Two seconds is enough time for a desperate man to put a bullet through a hostage’s temple. If I move now, I am gambling with her life.
The wind moans and the trees rustle around us, the cabin looking more and more like a haunted house by the second. There is still no movement. I watch a single guttering candle through a narrow slit of a window—the only sign of life inside.
“I can’t see her,” Andreas mutters, still looking through his binoculars. “There’s another room at the back. She might be in there.” He adds before passing the binoculars to me.
Before I can peek at it, a blood-curdling scream tears through the silence.
“STOP! PLEASE! LET ME GO, JULIAN! PLEASE!”
I dash across the open ground, the tall grass hissing against my trousers. My heart is beating like a jackhammer inside my chest as I drive my foot into the center of the door. The ragged wood splinters into shards of timber before slamming loudly against the interior wall.
Then the world slows to a sickening crawl.
My vision narrows until the periphery is nothing but black.
Through the other open door at the back of the room, I see her.
She is lashed to an iron bed frame. Her dress is torn down to her waist, baring her chest to the freezing air.
Her face is bloodied, and her right eye is swollen shut.
Her lip is split, blood tracking down her chin and staining the mattress.
She’s no longer screaming, losing the fight to stay conscious.
Julian is on top of her.
His fist is raised, his face a sweating mask of pure hatred. He is mid-swing, caught in the momentum of his own depravity.
Something inside me snaps, and all that is left is a singular need to kill.
My vision washes out into a blinding red, and the sound in the room vanishes.
There is only the roar of my own blood in my ears.
I cross the distance in a violent rush, my forearm slamming into Julian’s head with the force of a high-speed collision before his fist can connect with her face.
The impact shoves his weight back with such sudden ferocity that his knees lose their balance on the mattress.
He goes reeling, his tall frame snapping backward until he hits the far wall with a thud, leaving him slumped against the masonry, gasping for air.
When I look at Katarina, the sight of her—half-naked, bloodied, and half-conscious—sends me into a darkness I’ve never seen before.
My breath shudders out in a ragged gasp, knees threatening to buckle as relief and terror crash through me. My head snaps to the roach on the floor, who’s looking at me like he’s seen the Grim Reaper.
I don’t reach for my gun or my knife. No. I want to feel the resistance of his skull when I bash it with my own hands. I want to feel his life leak out onto my knuckles.
“Traditore,” I hiss, the word vibrating in my chest, but I can’t hear it.
He looks at me, his eyes staring wide, the realization of his doom finally reflecting through his gaze.
He tries to get up, but my hands find his collar first. I lift him off the floor like he weighed nothing and throw him against the other wall, the back of his head hitting the stone with a loud thud.
He slumps to the ground, and my fist connects with his face.
The first one makes blood sputter out of his mouth as his jaw cracks.
My fist dives again, this time it hits his nose, and that breaks with a loud crack too.
One more swing.
More blood.
Another.
His eye socket breaks.
But I don’t stop.
I keep hitting.
Until all his face is nothing but a red pulp dented in all angles.
Someone is screaming—maybe Katarina, maybe me, maybe Julian.
The world is all blood and noise.
But I won’t stop.