Chapter Fifty Enzo
Chapter Fifty
Enzo
I knew things were dire when I found Tiernan waiting for us inside the private plane, looking like the entire family had collectively pissed in his soup.
He never tore his ass from his precious Lila.
Barely even went to work these days. All he did was serve his wife day and night.
Especially since the revelation of her second pregnancy.
I’d stopped attempting to figure out what business Lila had falling pregnant twice at the age of nineteen.
Maybe she’d always been an old soul. Motherhood agreed with her.
And I had a feeling this was her do-over, her redemption arc.
Her chance to make right all the things that had gone wrong in our own childhood.
“You’re not with Lila?” I didn’t bother masking my surprise.
Tiernan flicked his wrist to check his Montblanc. “I allotted you idiots ten hours of my time, and only because I know it’ll upset your sister if one of you dies. I intend to get back to her before dinner.”
“God forbid my sister spends five seconds in this world not getting knocked up,” I muttered, falling into the recliner next to him.
“Tiernan.” Luca didn’t bother looking at him as he tore his way straight to the liquor. “I suggest you leave unless you wish to get your head blown off by not-so-friendly fire.”
“If there’s a way to salvage this, I’m going to find it.” Tiernan sprawled in his seat.
“Save yourself the field trip. There’s no way to salvage this.” Luca jerked open a whiskey and took a swig straight from the bottle. “The Bratva charter in the U.S. of fucking A. is as good as dead. Vegas will be lucky if I let it keep its lights on.”
Whoa, boy. I’d just boarded the delulu train to Unhingeville. So much for keeping myself safe for Tom.
“I told Alex about Slava, the FBI, his aspirations about Katya, and the botched operation,” Tiernan said, ignoring Luca’s temporary madness. “Explained why you had to kill his baby brother.”
“And?” Achilles’s lips pursed in annoyance.
“And while he understands why Slava needed to die, he insists you should’ve handed his brother over and let him do the honor.”
“Even if we were stupid enough to give our sworn enemy a heads-up, we were in a time crunch to save Tom,” I piped up. “You know, to help the man who actually helped us escape life in prison.”
“Alex doesn’t give a shit about your sugar daddy.” Tiernan waved me off.
“Was he the one who gave the order to kidnap Sofia?” Luca pinned Tiernan with a scowl.
Tiernan hitched one shoulder up.
“Your best friend is dead.” Luca jammed the whiskey bottle back into its cart. “He just doesn’t know it yet.”
The rest of the plane ride was spent putting together an IED.
Explosives were Achilles’s forte, and he took great pains to ensure maximum damage.
He stuffed the bottle with screws, broken razors, rusty nails, and glass.
Before he screwed the cap on the small tank, Luca pushed a bottle of nitric acid into his hand. “Pour.”
We all watched my older brother, shocked.
Luca never showed enthusiasm for cruelty. He just did what had to be done.
Something had profoundly changed in him since his marriage to Sofia, and I wondered how much of it we’d missed while we were too busy leading our own lives.
“Luca,” Achilles warned.
“Put yourself in my shoes. If Sofia was Tierney.”
Achilles swore under his breath, pouring the entire bottle of acid inside.
Nobody spoke. Luca teetered on the edge of detonation. Achilles looked like he kind of wished for it—it meant that he’d be the don. And Tiernan? He was busy texting with his wife, who had to go through the distress of not having her husband personally feed her grapes and fan her with a palm leaf.
Luca’s phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen before answering.
“Tristan, you’re on speaker.”
“Write down an address. You’ll land just in time for a Bratva meeting.”
Luca glanced at Achilles, who grunted. “Is it the Indian Spring warehouse?”
“You know it?” Tristan asked.
“Yup.”
“There you have it.”
“Alex and Jeremie gonna be there?” I asked.
“Fat chance,” Tristan drawled. “All of my sources indicate that Jeremie’s out of the country.”
“And Alex?”
“You know how the pakhan is. Elusive as disappearing ink.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Luca shot up, kicking everything in sight. He actually broke a table and dented a drink cart. “Do you know where?”
“My sources aren’t budging,” Tristan said. “Anyway, gotta go. These high-profile diplomats aren’t going to off themselves.”
He disconnected the call.
We all stared at each other. We were entering a war zone, and no amount of preparation was enough for what awaited on the other side.
“If the Rasputins do something to Sofia to get their point across…” Luca trailed off.
“Don’t think that way,” Tiernan ordered him. “You’re getting your wife back.”
Troy had fallen. The kingdom my father built was in shambles. We were at war with the Bratva and among ourselves. And yet Luca cared little about anything other than the family he’d seemed reluctant to build with Sofia only a couple years ago.
Luca picked up his double-barreled Nitro Express, pushing the top lever and loading it. “I know.”
First, we set the IED behind a bush outside the Bratva’s warehouse entrance.
We waited until fifteen or so soldiers had gathered around the doors, smoking and shooting the shit, before activating the bomb.
It exploded in a cloud of orange and black smoke.
We watched from across the street as the soldiers who didn’t die on detonation ran around, aflame, before succumbing to the fire eating them alive.
The doors had melted into nothing. We waited a few more minutes for the fire and residual shrapnel to settle.
Then we pushed the doors to our Cadillacs open and strolled toward the warehouse.
The weapons factory was empty on the ground and second floors. I looked around, clutching my rifle. “The fuck is that meeting?”
“Probably the basement. There’s a secret room downstairs. We found out about it when Tiernan thought he was ambushing Alex.” Achilles tilted his head right, and we all followed him to a closet-size metal locker. He pushed it easily across the wall, exposing a secret door.
Taking a step back for momentum, I kicked the door down. It shattered without resistance, splintering into two from the force of my boot.
Tossing a tear gas can down the stairway, I listened as it hissed, then exploded.
I pulled my balaclava down, using the heel of my palm to jam the magazine into my firearm. “A’ight. Let’s get it over with. I want to cook Tom breakfast tomorrow morning.”
Strolling through tear-gas-filled spaces was just another day in the Ferrante household.
My father used to lock us in tear gas chambers as a bonding experience.
He’d make us recite the entire fucking Con te partirò before he’d unlock the door and let us out.
If nothing else, it made us resilient to the point of delirium.
Luca brushed past me, the first to descend the murky stairwell. Achilles followed, and I went last. Tiernan hung back outside, trying to get a hold of Alex. Perish the thought that he gets a papercut helping someone else.
Three stairs before I hit the floor, three gunshots rang in the air. I lunged forward the rest of the way, just in time to find three Bratva soldiers at Luca’s and Achilles’s feet, all of them very much dead.
There were several more milling around a table with cards, beer bottles, and cigarette-filled ashtrays.
The first thing I did was aim my gun at each of the three surveillance cameras wired to the junctions between the walls and ceiling, and blow them the shit up. After that, I ripped the balaclava off. It made my hair hella oily.
“Line up against the wall.” Achilles pointed at said wall with his gun, peeling off his mask, too. “Hands in the air. Enzo, frisk them.”
“Ah, not the gay one!” Someone laughed mockingly. My stomach dropped.
Achilles turned to him, shooting him straight in the throat without so much as a blink.
He gurgled one last breath, his blood cascading down his body.
My brother turned to stare at the other Russian soldiers, who quickly and efficiently plastered their backs to the wall with their palms exposed.
“Anyone else got something to say about my baby brother?”
They shook their heads.
“Good, because for your information, he’s got a boyfriend, and isn’t on the market for soggy Russian dicks.”
Hiding a giddy smile, I proceeded, giving each of them a pat-down and removing their firearms. I made sure not to let the homophobic remark get to me and did a thorough job.
After cuffing them and emptying and tossing their guns into a pile in the corner of the room, I stood next to Luca, waiting for further instructions.
“Slide down.” Luca gestured with his firearm at them. “Asses on the floor.”
They did as they were told.
“Now I’m going to ask you one simple question. I recommend you answer truthfully, if you want to see your loved ones ever again.”
Funny, how he had looked like he was going to fling himself off the fucking plane when we were in the air, but now, when we were in the heart of Bratva territory, in a hostile environment, in a warehouse that could very well be a setup, he appeared the picture of psychotic nonchalance.
“Where is my wife?” Luca pointed his gun at the first Bratva soldier in the human line.
“Idi nahui, suka.” He spat at Luca’s shoe, snarling, “I don’t know, and even if I did—”
Luca shot him in the face. The man next to him flinched, staring up at Luca in horror.
Luca pointed the gun at his head. “I’ll ask again. Where’s my wife?”
“I swear I don’t kno—”
My brother didn’t let him finish the sentence. He hit another bull’s-eye. The soldier’s brain exploded on the wall behind him. Luca moved a step toward the third tied-up man.
“Where. Is. My. Wife?” The slow, deadly enunciation made everyone’s skin crawl.
The Bratva soldier had a piss stain on his jeans. He was shaking all over. “I–I can find out for you. P-please. If you give me—”
Luca shot him, moving to the fourth and last soldier—a young man, his teeth chattering, his body quivering like a leaf.
“Are you gonna tell me where my wife is?”
“Y-yes! Yes! Don’t shoot!” he begged. “Jeremie took her to Moscow. He has an apartment there. Th-the Rasputins own the building.”
“Address?” Luca demanded.
“Ulitsa Volkhonka 14, Moscow. Right next to the Pushkin State Museum.”
Luca nodded once, face unreadable. “Enzo?”
“Bro?” I said.
“Get the plane ready.”
“On it.”
Luca turned around and sauntered toward the stairs. He halted at the threshold and pivoted toward the fourth soldier, snapping his fingers. “Oh, I almost forgot. Tell your boss I said this.”
He shot him square between the eyes.
I sighed. Both my brothers had a proclivity for anarchy, but only Luca was casual about it like he was filing his taxes.
Achilles and I caught up with him, the three of us sauntering in a perfect line out of the place.
“I’d like to contribute to the chaos, but not enough to break my word to my wife. I’m not boarding a plane to Russia,” Achilles declared. “I promised Tierney I’d never set foot in the place again after the time I brought her a few presents from there, and I’d die before breaking a promise to her.”
Presents was code for the assholes who’d attacked her when she was a child.
“Same,” I said, again proud of myself for setting boundaries the way Dr. Andrews and I had discussed. “I want to be home in time to make Tom a reduced-fat turkey bacon sandwich with egg whites on sprouted bread.”
“I’m doing this on my own.” Luca’s tone held a note of determination. “And if I have to finish Jeremie and Alex myself, I’ll do that, too.”
Achilles and I exchanged glances. It was unlike Luca to be deep in his feels. Or…to have them in the first place.
“You understand this is a declaration of war?” I asked my older brother. “The way we barged in here, into their territory, racked up a body count, and left without a word. Things are about to get very ugly.”
“I’m aware,” Luca said coolly. “We’ll win. And when we do—the entire country will be our playground.”
Achilles whistled, filling the three of us glasses of grappa to clink together. “Finally, some mayhem.”