Chapter 11 Giovanni
GIOVANNI
I’m about to cut the conversation short between Meggie and the actor when I hear the yells outside the cabin.
I had a niggling feeling that something was going on with Meggie, something slightly off-kilter, only I didn’t know what it was. Until I open the door and see Demi and the bodyguards sprinting towards the vehicles while the black van sped off down the slope, the prisoner in the passenger seat.
“Meggie!” Demi shouts, pointing at the van.
I don’t waste a heartbeat. I jump into a car with Bruno and two of his men.
We don’t speak.
I shouldn’t have left her alone with the fucker Romano. If anything happens to her, I’ll never forgive myself, but I trust that we’ll catch them before they can go anywhere. When Meggie takes a corner almost on two wheels, I know that this has something to do with the unknown caller.
Demi is a car ahead of us along with three of Bruno’s men, but my eyes are on the black van being driven erratically by the woman I love.
It brakes suddenly, clouds of dirt puffing up from the rear wheels. It starts turning. Before I can open the door and close the distance on foot, it leaves the road, crashing through the undergrowth and heading downhill.
Something is wrong. Meggie wouldn’t have tried to turn around without good reason, not once she’d committed to helping the actor escape.
“Faster,” I mutter as Bruno veers away from the road, trailing the speeding vehicle.
The van reaches the clearing a few car lengths ahead of us. I spot the RV and my gut clenches. They’re going to crash.
We churn up grass as we plough into the field, hitting the brakes and spilling out of the cars like woodlice crawling out from under an upturned log.
I reach the driver’s side of the van before anyone else. I open the door to find Meggie bent over the steering wheel, motionless, her hair covering her face, knuckles white as she holds on tightly.
“Meggie?” I sweep the hair away from her face.
Her eyes are closed. There’s a bruise on her jaw, but I can’t see any blood.
The passenger door is pulled open, and Bruno drags Tommy Romano from the vehicle. I hear the thud of his body as it hits the ground, but I pay it no heed. Meggie isn’t moving.
I unfurl her fingers from around the steering wheel and ease her out of the driver’s seat cautiously, gathering her into my arms, and carrying her away from the collision.
When we’re clear of the wreckage, I set her down gently on the grass and check her pulse, almost crying out with relief when I feel it clear and strong.
“Is she alright?” Demi sinks to her knees beside Meggie, her face pale.
“She must be concussed.” I worry that she hasn’t fully recovered from her injuries and the previous concussion, but she’s alive, and that’s all I can think about right now.
“Why would she do this?” Demi glances at the men surrounding Tommy Romano. “She never said a word; never gave me any indication this was what she was planning.”
“She must’ve had her reasons.”
Meggie stirs, her eyelids flickering open. I take her hand and raise it to my lips as she tries to focus on my face.
“Wh-what happened?” she whispers, and I lean close to hear her.
“Hush, don’t try to speak.” I smile, squeezing her hand to reassure her. “You’re going to be alright. Everything is going to be alright.”
Her gaze slides away from me and settles on the van, the hood slightly more battered than when it left the cabin, concertinaed against the back of the RV. Her eyes grow huge with tears. “Gio…” she whispers.
“It’s okay.” I stroke her face. “You don’t have to worry about a thing. Are you hurt?”
A look of concentration settles over her features, lips pressed together, jaw clenched. “I-I don’t think so.”
With my support, I help her into a sitting position, and she sways against me, rolling sideways and retching onto the grass.
Demi shoots me a questioning glance. This isn’t the first time Meggie has been sick, and I’m starting to wonder if the pain meds are exacerbating the nausea. One thing at a time though.
“I’m here, fiore.” I hold her hair while she vomits onto the grass and rub her back until she leans against me, burying her face against my chest.
“Gio, I’m so sorry.”
“We’ll talk later, Meggie. First, I want to get you to a doctor.”
“No!” She grips my arm tightly, pleading with her eyes. “I don’t need to see a doctor.”
Her pulse is racing, her hand trembling like a sparrow between my palms.
“No one is going to hurt you, Meggie.”
I don’t care what she did, or why she did it; she’ll explain when she’s ready. But seeing her like this, I wish I could clear a path for her and Amber, provide her with a future that will bring her only good things. Love and laughter and happiness.
“No one is going to hurt you ever again.”
“Did I…?” Her eyes dart back and forth between me and Demi. “Did I ruin everything?”
I smile. “No, fiore. You didn’t ruin everything.”
I don’t know if Tommy Romano survived the crash. He has outlived his usefulness, and I still owe him for what he did to Nikki. But before I can move Meggie into one of the waiting vehicles and get her back to the cabin, the click of a finger on the trigger of a gun makes me freeze.
Demi hears it too.
She crawls around Meggie, her own pistol cocked, and peers around the back of the van at the scene playing out on the other side.
I should join them, but I can’t leave Meggie, not like this.
“Gio?” She tugs on my sleeve, eyes wide and dark. “What’s—”
I press my finger to her lips.
My hackles are up. I can’t make sense of the zipping sound that is reaching me from out of view or the thud of something heavy landing on the ground.
But with the first gunshot, I throw myself on top of Meggie and shield her with my body until it is all over.
Meggie is dazed and disoriented but surprisingly unscathed after the collision with the RV.
She insists that nothing hurts although I suspect, from the way she winces whenever she sucks in a deep breath, that she may have bruised a couple of ribs.
She refuses to lie down when we get back to the cabin, and instead, busies herself making cakes while Demi supervises, the police officer’s eyes never wavering from her charge.
She doesn’t know what happened in the clearing.
It’s something else that we’ll discuss when the time is right.
I post guards outside the front of the cabin and each window and make my way back to the war room.
Bruno dealt with Tommy Romano; he won’t be coming back again.
But I don’t give him a second thought; we have much bigger fish to fry.
When the van Meggie was driving collided with the RV, she unwittingly uncovered The Fish’s current hiding place.
Having tracked the vehicles’ movements and realized that we were heading his way, he’d hidden inside the waterproof bike carrier attached to the rear of the motorhome.
But unfortunately for him, it suffered the brunt of the collision.
He came out fighting but was quickly overpowered and is now being held in the room recently vacated by the slimeball actor with the chip on his shoulder.
I don’t know how I feel about coming face to face with the man who kidnapped Amber and tried to kill my Meggie. When this is over, I will deal with Mario and his bratva allies the way I deal with anyone who tries to harm or steal what’s mine.
But this…
This is different. There is way more at stake here than there has ever been. He holds Amber’s life in the palm of his hand, and if anything happens to her, it will kill Meggie too.
Part of me wants to see the kind of man who could hurt his own offspring, to savor the moment when the monster realizes that his luck has finally run out, and to be the one to deliver his retribution.
But there’s another part of me, a tiny shard of ice buried somewhere deep inside that is afraid of what I will do to him.
I will not regret having his blood on my hands, but I fear that, once unleashed, I will not be the same person I am today. Because I have never wanted to hurt someone the way I want to hurt Steve Barone.
In the war room, The Fish is bound to the same chair that held Tommy Romano captive until this morning.
His jeans are stained rusty brown from the bullet wound in his thigh.
There is another bullet lodged in his right shoulder, his arm is positioned at an awkward angle, and blood is seeping through his sweater on his left side.
But he appears to be unaware of his injuries as he watches me enter the room and sit on the chair placed strategically in front of him.
We face each other like beasts sizing up a predator.
Steve Barone, aka The Fish, is an unremarkable man, the kind of person you would pass along the produce aisle of the grocery store and promptly forget. Perhaps that’s how he has managed to fly under the radar for so long.
Until you happen to look directly into his eyes.
His eyes are cold. Whatever color exists in the iris is swallowed up by the blackness at the center, the darkness that must’ve begun as a seed in childhood and has gradually overtaken whatever humanity once existed inside him.
Because no one is born with darkness at their core.
They nurture it above lightness, feed it on death and destruction and fear like a pet serpent until they no longer feel compassion for anyone or anything.
But now that I have him, I’m not letting him go until Amber is reunited with her sister. Whatever it takes.
“Where is Amber?”
He stares at me as if he hasn’t even heard the question. I note that, unlike with the actor Tommy Romano, the guards have their weapons ready, on high alert. The Fish’s reputation precedes him wherever he goes.
I keep my eyes on the captive. One glance from me, and they will react, despite my orders that The Fish is mine.
I get nothing back. No acknowledgment that the question was ever posed.
I try again. “Where is your daughter?”
The men searched the RV after The Fish’s capture.
They discovered the decaying bodies of an elderly couple presumed to be the motorhome’s owners, side by side in their bed, vacant eyes turned skyward.
There was no indication that Amber had ever been there or anywhere in the surrounding area, despite the obvious signs that The Fish had been using the RV as a base in which to eat and sleep.
Keeping company with a couple of corpses.
His gaze drifts around the room. This isn’t even a game of ‘First one to look away loses’. He is simply uninterested.
Torturing him will achieve nothing. The man is unperturbed by the bullets puncturing his body or the blood that he has lost. We haven’t located Amber’s whereabouts yet. He knows that we won’t kill him because he is the only person who can tell us where she is.
I stand up.
We don’t have time to waste, but I won’t beg him for information. I’ll find another way.
I almost reach the door before he says, “I’ll talk to Megan.”