42. Make Me, Break Me
Make Me, Break Me
My instincts were never wrong.
The moment we approached the warehouse, I knew something was off. No sign of the Russians. The Irish soldier guarding the door was slouched in a chair in the sunshine, feet up and smoking. Men who weren’t expecting a fight. That should have been a good sign, but I didn’t trust it.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” Santino mumbled as we crouched behind an overgrown bush, guns at the ready, eyes darting across the landscape.
“This is the location Aleksandr sent me,” Alessio hissed through clenched teeth. He knew it too. Something wasn’t right.
“Then where the fuck are they?” Santino growled. “Do we wait? Or do we attack?”
Alessio pulled out his phone and made a call. When it went to voicemail, he swore under his breath and rubbed his jaw. “Aleksandr isn’t answering.”
“Course not,” I muttered, rage festering beneath my skin. “He isn’t comin’.”
Alessio exhaled, rolling his tongue over his teeth. “That doesn’t make sense. He said he’d be here. He has no reason to fuck us over.”
“Nothing the Russians do makes sense,” Santino growled. “I said we couldn’t trust them. They do whatever they want, whenever they want. If Aleksandr woke up today and decided he didn’t want to get his hands bloody, he didn’t. He gave us the location. In his mind, that was enough.”
Annoyingly, I agreed with him.
A car pulled up outside the warehouse, and three men climbed out.
My heart hammered as one of them stepped around the bonnet and entered the building, wearing a tailored suit.
His back was to us, his brown hair lowered, but I spotted the silk handkerchief sticking out of his pocket, like a sick souvenir.
Mam’s handkerchief.
Twenty-four years he’d carried that with him, a reminder to me, every time I looked at him, of what he’d taken and how little I could do about it.
“That’s McKenna,” I hissed, ready to launch myself over the bush. Alessio grabbed my shoulder to keep me hidden. I shrugged him off. “Give me the Raw Mercy.”
“Wait. What’s the plan?” Santino asked impatiently. I grabbed his bag and pulled out the kit. I didn’t want to take too much, or I’d kill him too quickly. Santino was right. Sean needed to come back to Italy breathing. He needed to suffer first.
Alessio twisted around and studied the building and the Irish soldiers. “We still outnumber the Irish. It will be a closer fight than I would have liked, but—”
“Let me go first,” I interrupted.
“No, lone wolf. Not happening,” Santino snapped. “I made a promise to have your back.”
Alessio looked at me with a narrowed stare, thinking. He knew it was our best option.
“Use me as a distraction. I’m your weapon. I’ll make sure he thinks I’ve come alone to kill him. When their attention is on me, you attack.”
“Fine,” Alessio said with a curt nod. Santino frowned.
“Then I’m going with you.”
“It will only work if I go alone.”
“Don’t die again,” Santino groaned, shaking his head. “Or my sister will really kill me.”
Alessio’s head snapped our way, his eyes squinting as his lips curved into an amused smile. “I was right. That explains everything.”
Santino frowned. “What?”
“Why you two beat each other to shit this morning. And why there’s this weird energy between you. I thought it was because of the fight in France, but…” He let out a quiet laugh. “Now I get it.”
Santino glanced at me. I stared at him.
“There’s one thing Buccini men don’t take lightly, and that’s men fucking their sisters,” Alessio chuckled, checking his rifle. I swallowed hard. He looked at me, smirking. “Trust me, I know. But let’s deal with one problem at a time, si? I’m too old for this drama.”
“You aren’t goin’ to put a bullet in my back the moment I walk out there?”
“I’m considering it. I don’t appreciate being lied to. Did you even lose your memories?”
“I never lied. I didn’t remember.”
“I believe you.” He raised his sniper rifle over the bush, aiming at the soldier seated outside. “As you said, we need you to draw McKenna out. You’re safe.” A pause. “Until Giovanni finds out.”
He squeezed the silent trigger. The soldier’s head snapped back, a dark hole between his eyes, before he’d even registered the threat.
“Go.”
I moved. Ducking out from behind the bushes, I sprinted towards the entrance just as two more soldiers rounded the corner. Lifting my gun, I put two bullets into one’s chest as a bullet whizzed past my ear and struck the other in the eye. I glanced over my shoulder.
Santino winked at me.
Cocky prick.
With one aggressive kick, I sent the door crashing in, the sound of it slamming into the wall echoing through the warehouse. I stood in the doorway, heaving.
“McKenna!” I roared and waited. Nothing. “McKenna!”
It was too quiet. Where were the rest of his men? My eyes swept the space, finding proof that people had been staying there. Empty food tins, camp beds set up across the huge space. Clothes thrown messily across the floor. But no sign of McKenna or his men.
A camp abandoned in a hurry.
My gut twisted. He knew I was coming.
“Moriarty!” Santino’s urgent voice boomed from outside. I spun on my heel and bolted back outside. Italian soldiers were opening fire at the back of the warehouse, and Alessio was sprinting through the trees towards it. Santino ran towards me, pointing to the back. “He’s fleeing.”
Fucking coward. He’d never stand and face me.
I took off before Santino reached me, boots pounding the dirt as I rounded the warehouse. There he was, in the distance, tearing through the trees, running like a monster was after him.
I was.
I’ve been called many things in my life. Slow wasn’t one of them. Sean had roughly fifty metres on me, but panic makes a man clumsy. He tripped and ducked repeatedly, trying to dodge the bullets flying his way. The two men he’d been with were face down in the dirt, and I leaped over their bodies.
“Tell your men to hold fire!” I yelled at Alessio, who had taken cover behind a tree with his rifle when he saw me pursuing Sean.
He shouted in Italian for the guns to cease fire, and I closed the distance between us in seconds. Branches scraped across my face and body as I used every ounce of power in my legs to propel me through the woods. The navy blue suit flickered between the tree trunks ahead of me, closer and closer.
Santino’s heavy footfalls thundered somewhere behind me.
Alessio barked Italian orders further back.
Everything fell away. My vision, rage and focus were fixed solely on that fucking blue suit.
This was for my parents. For my sisters.
For Conor. For the boy he’d carved out of me to make a monster. For Raya. This was for all of it.
I launched myself off my back foot and drove my shoulder into his spine, sending him crashing into the dirt. We hit the ground hard; the air punched out of him in a strangled cry as I flipped him onto his back, pinned him beneath my forearm, and reached for my knife—
Dark brown eyes bulging in terror stared up at me. Not frosty blue.
Same age. Same suit. Wrong face entirely.
“Please—” the man spluttered, holding his trembling hands up by his head. “Please, please don’t!”
“Who the fuck are you?” I roared, pressing harder into his throat. Behind me, Santino’s boots skidded to a stop. “Where is he?!”
“I-I d-don’t… I don’t know,” he whimpered, his voice thick with a Dutch accent. “A man paid me. A man paid me to dress like this and come here. That’s all. I swear to God. I swear on my life, I don’t—”
I jumped off him. Ice trickled down my spine. Santino grabbed the man by his suit lapels and hauled him to his feet, hissing in his face, “You’ll need to give us more than that if you want to stay alive.”
“I didn’t know why,” he cried. “He gave me the suit and handkerchief and told me these men would take me where I needed to go. He paid me more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, and I have a wife—I have a wife and a disabled child with many medical needs, and we needed the money…
” His voice cracked into a sob. “Please don’t hurt me.
I’ve never hurt anybody. I’m nobody. I’m—” Santino let him go, and he fell to his knees.
“Maddox?” Santino tried to snap me out of the dark hole I’d fallen into in my mind.
I couldn’t speak. My hand trembled around the handle of my knife. So fucking close. I had him. I thought I’d finally—
“You’re Maddox?” The man’s eyes widened.
His shaky fingers fumbled inside his suit as he searched for something.
Santino’s gun jerked up to the side of the man’s head again, in case he was about to draw his own gun on me.
He whimpered and closed his eyes. “It’s just paper.
He told me to give it to him, to the one covered in tattoos who looked like he wanted to kill everyone. He said you went by Monster or Maddox.”
He drew out a small square of paper. I stared at it. Then I took it.
Dread flooded through me as I unfolded it, the man sobbing at my feet. Santino and Alessio stood deathly still, waiting.
Before I’d even read his cruel taunt, the cold realisation had turned my blood to ice. He’d let us come. He’d lured us here because he’d already gone somewhere else. Somewhere he knew would hurt more. He’d always wanted to break me, not kill me.
I knew exactly where he’d go to do it.
And who was there.
I turned and ran.