FORTY-THREE
The belt strikes stopped. The slaps. The kicks.
For a moment, the world went deaf except for the sound of his ragged breath, like an animal deciding whether to tear into flesh or bone next.
The air burned in my throat.
‘Those like you never learn,’ Travis rumbled.
He stepped away, the scrape of his boots against concrete louder than the rush of blood in my ears. I could smell the stench of sweat and iron on him. His fingers went to the buttons of his jeans – and the world folded in on itself.
Cool night air clawed into my throat – and stuck there.
No.
No…
The realisation hit harder than the blows. My stomach lurched, throat locked, but no sound came out. The room pulsed, fading in and out.
Maybe this was a dream. Maybe I was already gone.
My body convulsed in pure horror, the chains cutting deeper as I yanked against them until my shoulders screamed.
In the split second he freed himself, something cracked inside me. Could have been the cultivating madness, could have been the terror. And as he lunged at me, the years of him stealing breath and light out of my life came out as a scream. A raw, searing sound that didn’t feel like mine.
In the instant it left me—
Something tore through the dark.
Travis spun just as a shadow slammed into him in full force. The impact rattled the walls – steel against bone, a roar that wasn’t mine echoing through the basement.
Cain.
They crashed into each other, a blur of flesh and blood I could barely track. Each impact echoed through the space like thunder. Travis’ snarl split the air, but Cain stayed silent – and that silence was worse. It was the kind that made a stomach twist before the agony came.
His movements blurred, bone-jarring, feral – a violence that wasn’t about stopping Travis yet erasing him entirely.
Travis swung, missed. Cain’s next two hits landed hard – jaw, temple. Blood arced across the wall in dark ribbons.
His face…
Bruised. Bleeding. One eye already swelling shut, blood crawling down his temple. He was unrecognisable. Half ruin, half vengeance.
I whipped my head left and right, hoping to see something that would aid him. Suddenly, I zeroed in on a small red dot beneath a beam that spanned the tall ceiling.
Oh God… Travis recorded this?
The chains above me clinked with every shallow breath I took. My body trembled.
I stared at my past and my present fighting. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from them – from him.
Cain was a hurricane made flesh.
He kept going, each motion a wordless scream in me.
And I saw it in his eyes. The man I tethered myself to, body and heart, was still in there. But so was something else. Something vicious. Not human.
I winced, the rattle making my muscles scream in pain.
He didn’t look like Cain… He looked like Ghost.
Unrelenting and brutal. Deadly.
A punch to Travis’ gut folded him over, Cain’s knife dropped to the ground as he grabbed him by the hair. He brought his knee up like a hammer to his face. Travis flew backwards and met the floor with a loud crash – barely conscious.
Cain raised his fist again. Took a step towards him.
‘Cain,’ I croaked out – but it wasn’t loud enough. My ribcage hurt from the damage. My lungs wouldn’t squeeze out the breath I needed to call him.
But he heard me. Because just before he picked up his knife, he glanced towards me.
Travis scrambled back, slipping in his own blood. His shoulder hit the doorframe. Then he bolted, stumbling up the stairs, one hand dragging against the wall like a half-crushed spider.
The knife hit the ground with a dull clatter as Cain rushed to me, chest heaving, fists shaking, dripping blood.
And I finally let that sob tear out of me before I even realised I was breathing again.
His rage still hummed beneath his skin like an aftershock. He didn’t stop moving, eyes scanning the room, looking for something to break or save – until his eyes landed on a rusted hammer with the rest of the tools in the corner.
He snatched it, staggered to the base of the column anchoring the beam where the chain hung, and climbed despite the blood and wounds.
Rebar and cables gave him footholds as he hauled himself up, grunting through pain.
I watched him reach the bolts. He raised the tool and brought it down with a grunt.
And though my body ached from bruises and wounds, I flinched whenever he did.
I couldn’t keep my head up. I let it hang as the clang of metal-on-metal rang through the concrete tomb like a war drum. Each swing sounded heavier, slower. Once. Twice. Three times. And then—
It gave.
My body crumpled as the tension snapped.
My limbs ached, my body useless.
A heartbeat later, his arms wrapped around me so tightly I could barely breathe, but I didn’t want him to loosen. Not yet.
His heart thundered against my cheek as I sagged against him, too broken to hold myself up.
‘Paula…’ he whispered, like it hurt to say it.
His hands shook as they gripped me with a gentleness that contrasted what I’d seen earlier. One slid up to cradle the back of my head, the other pressed into my spine as if he were trying to fuse us together.
He carried me out of that room, his arms shaking from strain and fury.
I cracked one eye open, dizzy, vision swimming. I needed to see the way out – to know I was leaving it behind.
My gaze caught the dark streak of blood on the floor. It trailed across the path.
Both my eyes snapped open then.
Tucked in the far corner, half-hidden by shadows and debris, sat the machine. The machine.
The memory came crashing down like a wrecking ball – Trionfo’s basement. Ghost’s message…
My breath hitched so violently it burned. The fog thinned just enough for horror to cut through.
It wasn’t Cain that night. It wasn’t…
My God…
A sound ripped from me – half sob, half strangled denial – as memories collided.
I buried my face in Cain’s chest, pressing the cry into his shirt, tasting dust and salt and grief.
He said nothing to me. I said nothing back. We were both caught in the web of our past and our present, each unravelling in our own way.
He held me tighter, his stride never faltering, but I felt the shudder go through him too – from this night. From what we’d endured. And I hated myself for it.
On the ground floor, the atmosphere thickened, turned metallic, wrong.
Cain halted so suddenly I felt the shock ripple through his body into mine. His biceps drew taut, breath locking as if something had punched the air from his lungs.
I turned my head—
‘Don’t,’ he rasped, stepping sideways, careful. His boots skimmed past a thick smear of blood trailing across the uneven floor like a dragged scream.
But my eyes had already found him.
A figure lay twisted in the middle of the room, caught in a grotesque sprawl – as if dropped from a height.
Blood pooled around him like a dark halo, seeping into the cracked cement.
The tattoos on his face were almost unrecognisable beneath the splatter, but I noticed them.
Travis was so mangled I couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from. His skin looked like it had been dragged through thorns; ripped, scratched, shredded.
Still leaking.
For a moment, everything went silent. I didn’t hear the incessant dripping of a pipe, the ragged sound of Cain’s agonising breath, even my own pulse. All I could see was the ruin of my past, and the silence that followed it.
A sickened tremor rolled through me when I looked at his slack mouth, the blood still pulsing sluggishly from the gashes that had stolen his voice for good.
Horror clawed up my throat, meeting the salt of tears I hadn’t realised I’d shed.
I should have looked away. I should have felt only pity, or rage, or grief.
But beneath the nausea and the shaking, something darker stirred – something quiet and dangerous in its stillness.
Relief.
Because my monster was finally gone. And for the first time in years, the world didn’t taste like blood.
Outside, the night broke open with noise again as people shouted, boots trampled the gravel. Life came back in fragments, like someone turning the world’s volume too fast. Cain and I both looked up at the same time.
Matteo and Zio were staggering towards us, half-carrying, half-dragging someone between them.
Only when they got close enough did I register a mop of blood-stained blonde hair hanging dishevelled over his face.
‘Fuck! Vinnie?’ Cain’s voice cracked, his eyes scanning him from head to toe, lingering on his hands.
I realised why, then – he’d seen the box. Seen the finger. He must’ve thought it belonged to his friend.
I looked at Vinnie's hands myself and exhaled in relief when I counted all ten fingers.
But he looked as though he’d been mauled. Blood was crusted over one eye, lip split wide, shirt torn and soaked. Yet the bastard still managed to lift his head and grin stupidly.
Bruised lip, broken tooth, purpled jaw, one eye swollen shut – but he smiled like he’d just won a simple bar fight.
‘Took you long enough,’ he wheezed.
‘Zio found him on the roof,’ Matteo muttered, crouching as he eased Vinnie’s battered frame onto the gravel. ‘Unconscious.’
‘I was just resting my eyes for a bit,’ Vinnie rasped, trying for cocky but wincing hard as he slumped down next to a boulder.
Then he looked at me. The grin dropped as his gaze traced my split lip, the dark marks blooming across my half-naked body.
Gianna was already throwing a blanket over me as Cain set me down onto the ground.
Aunt Francesca was right behind her, cracking open the first-aid kit with surgical focus.
Vinnie didn’t take his eyes off me. Then he glanced at Cain.
‘He really did a number on you two,’ he murmured, voice low and strained.
‘He’s gone,’ I said. My voice caught on the truth, needing it spoken aloud to root it into the present.
Cain turned to me. Jaw clenched. Then – without a word – he leaned in and pressed a kiss to my forehead.
‘My colleagues will be here soon. Matteo will get you all out of here,’ Zio said. ‘You were never here.’
‘Our blood is all over the place,’ I murmured.
‘Is it?’ he asked, too calmly.
‘Dario’s on his way. He’ll handle it,’ Gianna added, already pulling out her phone.
Dario? Our cousin Dario?
I winced – less from pain, more from the creeping truth that maybe Cain had been right: there was more to my family than I wanted to believe.
And as I watched them move in eerie sync, I realised that solving issues like this wasn’t new to them.
After all this was over, I really needed to talk to them.
Cain didn’t move from my side. His arm was a band around my waist, holding me upright, and I leaned into him as if he were the last pillar of something sacred.
Vinnie groaned, Francesca cursed as she stitched him up with what she had.
‘She needs to get to a hospital,’ she said in Italian, briefly glancing at me. ‘I’ll make some calls.’ To keep it quiet, no doubt.
I was no longer shaking.
Because the breaking was done. Wounds healed. Bones mended. And the air smelled of rust.
And freedom.
Cain’s hand found mine. It was rough and bloodstained, fingers curling possessively as if he were afraid I might fall apart.
I didn’t pull away. I didn’t flinch. Because after everything – after the chains, fire, and bone-deep terror, this was the only thing that felt real. Not safety. Not salvation. But him.
The man who had shattered my fear. Had bled for me. Is still burning for me.
The only one who ever gave me a safe word.
And I never needed to use it. Not with him.
Because with Cain D’Angelo… I didn’t want it to end.
Tomorrow would come. There’d be police, questions, scars, and silence. But tonight, just this breath and this man was enough.
And the healing could start.