Chapter 2
My cell phone vibrated in my coat pocket. ”Yes?” I snapped without looking at the screen.
”She”s not at her brother”s,” Matteo told me, and I closed my eyes as something heavy settled in my gut. If Luna had shown up anywhere near that college campus, he would”ve found her. He was one of my most trusted—and discreet—contacts and I paid him well to remain so. ”He hasn”t been to any of his classes all morning, so I went to his dorm room. Neither of them was there. No one”s seen her or her brother anywhere around the building since yesterday.”
I stilled, my blood running cold as my worst imaginings became real. ”Were Logan”s things in his room?”
”Yes. Everything was there. His roommate told me he hasn”t seen Logan since last night when they were hanging out. He got a strange phone call in the middle of a video game and Logan went out into the hall to speak to whoever it was. He said he seemed off when he came back into their room. Logan told him he was meeting someone for a late dinner and left shortly after. He wouldn”t tell him who it was that called, and he hasn”t seen him since. The school”s camera footage only showed him walking away from his dorm and getting into a black sedan. There was no sign of Luna anywhere.”
I didn”t ask him how he”d gotten a hold of the camera feeds. I didn”t need to. Matteo was damn good at his job. And if he said she wasn”t there, I believed him. ”What did the car look like?”
”Black, as I said. Nondescript. Dark windows. I couldn”t get a read on the plates. The video feed was too blurry to make out the numbers.”
”Thank you,” I told him. ”I appreciate your time.”
Grabbing a screwdriver from one of the kitchen drawers, I strode to my bedroom and entered the walk-in closet. Carefully, so as not to leave any telltale marks, I pried up a few of the floorboards and set them aside so I could access the safe hidden underneath. My thumbprint opened the door, and I took stock of the weapons and ammo I kept hidden there. It would do.
Retrieving a black duffle bag from the top shelf above me, I loaded everything into it except for one pistol. Taking the bag and the gun to my bed, I quickly changed out of my suit before stashing a box of ammo into the outside thigh pocket of my tactical pants and sliding one of my favorite knives into my left boot. Then I holstered the pistol at my side as I reviewed what I knew so far.
Luna and Logan were both missing. Luna would do anything for her brother. Hell, she”d sold herself to Gino to take care of him. I also knew Gino would have someone watching Logan, and if she”d snuck out to see her brother, he would”ve grabbed her before she got anywhere near him.
Gino suspected that I”d taken Luna, but he had no way of proving it.
Still, my gut told me that if I found Gino, I”d find her. And probably her brother, too. He”d likely used Logan to lure her away from the safety of Luca”s compound. And instead of coming to me for help, she”d left to deal with it on her own. Just like the stubborn, infuriating woman she was.
Enzo was leaning casually against the side of my house with his arms crossed over his chest when I walked out the front door. I barely gave him a glance.
”Where are you going, T?”
”Where do you think?” Opening the passenger side door of the SUV, I threw the duffle bag inside and slammed the door closed. As I walked around the front of the vehicle, he met me at the driver”s side door. I leveled a look at him. ”What.”
He took my impatience in stride. ”Luca told me Luna is gone.”
I stared at him and said nothing.
”Do you know where she went?”
”No.”
”Do you know why she left?”
”No.” Recognizing the lie for what it was, I shook my head and tried again as I got into the SUV. ”Yes.” That didn”t quite feel right either. ”Maybe.”
”Tristan.” Stepping in the way of the door so I couldn”t close it in his face, he braced his other arm on the doorframe. ”I know what you”re doing.”
”Do you.” It wasn”t a question.
”Luca”s had men watching Gino”s house. We don”t know where he is.”
”I”ll find him.”
He stared at me hard for a moment. ”You really think he has her again.”
There was no sense in lying to him about it. ”Yes.”
Enzo shook his head, his jaw clenched so hard he spoke through his teeth. ”This is reckless, even for you. You can”t go after Gino by yourself. Let me call Luca and have him call for reinforcements. We”ll come with you, and we”ll find Luna together.”
I grabbed the door handle, about to slam the door with him in it if necessary. There wasn”t time for Luca to organize a search party. But at the last minute, I stopped.
”What?” he asked. Through the dark lenses of his glasses, I felt him studying my face. ”What is it, T?”
I couldn”t bring myself to look at him as I asked, ”She was real, right?”
His eyebrows furrowed in confusion. ”What do you mean?”
I glanced in his direction, but didn”t have the balls to see the truth in his expression and looked away again. Still, I needed to know. ”She was really here? You”re not just playing along with some psychotic break I”m having or something?”
Taking off his glasses so I could see the sincerity in his eyes, he said, ”Yes. Luna was…is real, Tristan.”
I nodded as some of the stiffness left my shoulders. ”I have to go.”
”Come on,” he said as he put his glasses back on. ”Wait. At least give me a minute to grab more weapons and let Luca know what”s going on and I”ll come with you.”
I shook my head. ”I don”t want your help, Enzo. This is between me and Gino, and you don”t need to get dragged into it. Now get the fuck out of the way, because I really don”t want to hurt you.”
After a moment, he stepped back. ”If you”re not back in two hours, I”m coming after you.”
Without looking at him again, I shut the door and drove off.
The drive to Gino”s was a blur. I didn”t have a plan, and I didn”t need one. All I knew was that I would tear that place apart brick by brick if I had to in order to find any clue as to Luna”s whereabouts. My fingers tightened on the wheel as adrenaline coursed through my veins, and more than once I had to remind myself to watch my speed. A dead cop was a little harder to make disappear than a civilian corpse. Not impossible, but I didn”t have time right now to deal with that shit.
When I arrived at Gino”s property, the gate was closed. I started to drive past to my usual parking spot up the road, but slammed on the brakes and threw the car into reverse. I swung the SUV around and lined up the front end with the gate. My upper lip lifted in disgust as I stared at the home of the bastardo who had made my childhood—and now my adult life, and Luna”s—a living hell.
My pulse pounded in my ears, drowning out the echoes of my childhood screams as memories circled around me like vultures, waiting for me to succumb so they could pluck out my entrails.
Something had been unleashed within me the night he”d caught me in Luna”s room and forced me down into that cold basement. He”d taken my innocence. My childhood. Taken everything. But he wasn”t going to take Luna from me. This time, I wasn”t hiding in my cell. This time, I wasn”t locking the monster back into the box where I kept all the dark things within me.
An icy calm settled over me, and I stomped my foot down on the gas pedal and slammed through the gate, flying up the winding driveway right to the house. My tires spit up gravel as I skidded to a halt outside the front steps. Grabbing the duffel bag from the passenger seat, I left the car door open for a quick escape and strode up to the double doors. Without pausing, I kicked them open, my pistol raised and ready.
”GINO!” His name roared from deep within my chest, echoing through the halls as I waited for a response. Only silence greeted me. Slinging the duffel bag over my shoulder, I quickly cleared the rooms closest to me, finding no one. The house appeared deserted, as Enzo said.
As I made my way back toward the kitchen, I stopped in front of a closed door. Watched my hand as it reached for the knob, turned it, and pulled. It swung open with a soft creak. A set of wooden stairs led down into the darkness.
I stood frozen, the fingertips of my left hand rubbing against my palm, feeling the phantom texture of each step as I”d crawled up them to escape the horrors below. No one was down there, or I would”ve felt the burn of a bullet by now. Yet I couldn”t stop my hand from shaking as I flicked on the light.
One foot at a time, I forced myself down the steps, if for no other reason than to prove that I could. That he hadn”t broken me completely. Not yet.
When I reached the bottom, I stopped, my eyes on the cement floor. It was as far as I could make myself go. I smelled leather and the tangy, metallic scent of the chains that hung from the ceiling. The acrid sting of bleach burned my nostrils and made my eyes water. My stomach rolled and my heart rate spiked as my muscles tensed in preparation to fight. Or perhaps, run. At that moment, I couldn”t have said which.
My eyes felt impossibly heavy as I lifted my gaze from the floor. The leather couch looked exactly as I remembered, the chains still hung from the ceiling, and the cement floor was stained with the remnants of blood from the men I”d killed.
The bodies, of course, were no longer there. Milo had come to collect them, and he was damn good at his job. It would be impossible to collect any DNA evidence from the scene.
A cold sweat dripped into my eyes, and I swiped it away with the back of my hand. I wanted to run back up the stairs and burn this entire house to the fucking ground, but I forced myself to stand there.
Then I stayed for another few minutes. I didn”t move. Screams rang in my ears, mostly my own. And my skin crawled with the memory of hands all over my body, stripping off my clothes. Touching me. Touching me everywhere…
I closed my eyes again and rode it out. Only when the screams faded and there was silence again did I allow myself to go back upstairs and down the second hallway.
My gaze landed on Gino”s office door. If there was anything in this house that would lead me to his whereabouts, that”s where I would find it. I tested the handle and found it locked. Taking a step back, I kicked in the door, the wood splintering around the lock with a satisfying sound, then immediately flattened my back against the wall.
Pistol at the ready, I bent down to make myself a smaller target and stuck my head around the frame, quickly scanning the room. Assured no one was in there, I straightened and stepped inside, looking around with mild curiosity. His heavy wooden desk sat front and center, buried under notebooks and loose sheets of paper. Gino had never trusted technology as long as I”d known him. He was old school. And if he”d made a leap into the future recently and gotten a computer or a laptop, it wasn”t here. A built-in bookshelf lined the wall to my left, and a large fireplace took up the wall to my right, flanked by ugly paintings of Jesus on one side and the Virgin Mary on the other. Rosary beads and an old Bible laid on the mantel.
Was this where he prayed for his soul after he raped his daughter?
Crossing to the desk, I holstered my gun, picked up a notebook, and started flipping through the pages. It appeared to be a log of all the business transactions he took care of for Luca. Setting it to the side, I rifled through the stack of papers and found a collection of bizarre notes. Mostly what appeared to be drunken ramblings to his dead wife.
A corner of a piece of paper stuck out from the middle of another pile. The word ”Perdonami”—forgive me—was written in a dark scrawl across the top. I pulled it out and scanned the rest of the letter, feeling absolutely nothing as I read the mental breakdown of a man who utterly deserved it. It was a suicide note dated the night I took Luna from here. Whose forgiveness was he asking for? Luna”s? Or God”s? It certainly wasn”t mine.
I crumbled the note into a ball and threw it on the floor, then continued searching, but I found nothing to indicate where Gino might be hiding out. Gathering up the notebooks, I stuffed them into the duffel bag to take back to Luca.
Picking up my bag, I glanced around one last time, clenching my fists in frustration. Luna was out there somewhere, scared and alone. And it was all because of me.
Because I was a fool.
She”d convinced me to let her out of the cell. That she wouldn”t leave. I thought she”d understood I only wanted to keep her safe. I thought I could trust her.
I thought…I thought…
Something cracked inside my chest, the pain so intense I fell back against the wall and slowly slid down to land hard on the cold tile floor. The duffel slipped from my grip and fell to the floor beside me.
I thought she wanted to stay with me.
Was I that stupid? So desperate for human connection that I believed Luna cared for me? Was it all just an act? If so, she was a very good actress, and she”d made a complete and utter fool out of me.
I rested my elbows on my knees and dropped my head into my hands. My actions had caused her pain and confusion. I”d seen it on her face and in her eyes. And it was why she hadn”t trusted me enough to come to me. To let me help her. And now my carelessness may have put her directly in harm”s way.
My chest tightened until I could barely draw a breath. If anything happened to her out there, if Gino hurt her again, I would never forgive myself.
I slammed my fist into my forehead. What the fuck was happening to me? This beautiful, maddening, confusing woman made me feel weak. Helpless.
And yet…more of a man than I ever have in my life.
Taking a deep breath, I lifted my head, finally admitting to myself there was nothing I could do right now. I had no idea where to fucking start looking for her. Yet, I wasn”t giving up. Luna needed me, and I would move heaven and earth to find her.
Because I needed her even more.