CHAPTER 24 #2
"One mag," he rasps, his chest heaving as he leans against a boulder. "That’s all I’ve got left."
"What are you looking at?" I demand, my eyes tracking his gaze toward the abyss. He looks like a fallen, bloodied god sitting there on the edge of ruin. I wonder fleetingly if he’ll still look like that when we hit the bottom and shatter into a million pieces.
"The only way out is down," he says, his voice flat and devoid of hope. "And it’s a long way down."
He manages to rasp out the rest of the miserable plan.
Renato, his psycho of a tactical driver, is supposedly waiting somewhere at the absolute base of the gorge with the armored truck, but we have to physically reach the secondary, sloped outcropping further along the ledge to have any mathematical chance of sliding down the cliff face without snapping our spines on the first bounce.
He finishes speaking and leans the back of his head hard against the rock.
His eyes flutter shut for a terrifying second.
He’s bleeding out too fast. He’s crashing.
The realization hits me like a physical punch to the throat.
Angelo Ferraro, the monster who mapped the entire escape route, the man who holds all the keys to my survival, is physically failing.
If we are going to make it off this ledge, I have to stop being the kidnapped liability and start being the getaway driver.
I grab his jaw with my blood-soaked hand, my fingers digging viciously into his skin, forcing him to open his eyes and look at me.
My bloody fingers leave dark, savage streaks across his cheek and chin.
"Stay with me, Angelo. Tell me where to go," I demand, my voice hard, completely unrecognizable to the girl who used to spend her afternoons drinking prosecco at the yacht club.
"Renato... at the bridge..." he slurs slightly, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. "...the old stone one."
"I'm getting us there. Do you hear me?"
I shove myself to my feet, my torn dress whipping around my bruised legs.
I hook my arm aggressively under Angelo’s good shoulder, planting my feet on the crumbling stone.
My spine practically pops in protest as I take the dead, shifting weight of his massive body.
We begin a torturous, agonizing three-legged shuffle along the crumbling, razor-thin ledge.
Every single uneven step we take sends a cascade of loose pebbles tumbling over the edge, skittering down into the void in a terrifying audio countdown of our impending death.
Angelo’s heavy combat boots drag uselessly behind him, leaving twin, parallel tracks in the dirt and blood.
The physical exertion is absolute hell. My thighs burn with lactic acid, and my lungs feel like they are stuffed with broken glass, but the sheer, unadulterated spike of adrenaline is the only thing keeping us from going over the side right now.
A small, green lizard scurries frantically over my bare, dirt-stained foot, startled out of the rocks by our heavy, uncoordinated footfalls.
"Move your feet, you giant oaf!" I scream at him, struggling to keep my balance as the wind tries to push us over.
"Stronzo... just leave me," he mutters, his pride clearly stung by his own uselessness.
"I'll leave you when I'm damn well ready."
Angelo scoffs, a wet, ugly sound. He starts mocking me as we drag ourselves forward, his voice a sharp, biting whip.
He asks me if I’m waiting for Alessio to personally pin a medal on my chest for my unwavering, pathetic loyalty.
He’s deliberately trying to provoke me, digging into my insecurities just to keep me angry, because he knows damn well that if I stop being pissed off, I’ll start being terrified, and if I’m terrified, I’ll fold.
I snap back instantly, venom dripping off my tongue, unleashing a string of absolute, top-tier Silvestri-level insults about his trash background and his dead-end life.
The verbal warfare is the only tether keeping us grounded to reality as the world rapidly closes in on us.
Angelo deliberately leans just an ounce more of his massive weight onto me for a split second, testing my limits, pushing me to see if I’ll break.
I respond by jabbing my elbow viciously straight into his bruised ribs.
"You're a soft little princess, Fiorella," he taunts, his breath ragged in my ear. "You'll fold."
"I'm the one carrying you, you pathetic 'Ndrangheta dog," I spit back, tasting the salty tang of sweat running down my top lip into my mouth.
"That's it," he grunts, his mouth curving into a bloody, terrifying smirk. "Keep that fire. You'll need it."
We hit the wider limestone outcropping just as the air cracks open a third time.
This time, the sniper’s bullet doesn't hit the rock.
It doesn't miss. It hits Angelo directly in the right side, just above the hip, tearing straight through the tactical webbing.
The impact makes a horrifying, wet slapping sound that completely stops my heart.
Angelo is thrown violently forward by the sheer kinetic force of the rifle round.
His grip on my shoulder is violently ripped away, and he crashes heavily toward the center of the pale outcropping.
The situation instantly violently pivots from 'highly dangerous escapable scenario' to 'absolute suicide mission.
' He is double-wounded now. Completely immobilized.
A violent spray of his blood hits the front of my white silk dress, speckling the fabric like a gruesome, abstract map of an entirely new, deeply violent country I now inhabit.
The world just tilts on its axis. Everything in my peripheral vision turns a hazy, frantic shade of red.
"ANGELO!" I scream, the sound tearing out of my throat raw and completely unfiltered.
"Gah... damn..." he chokes out, his body immediately curling inward, collapsing onto the blood-slicked stone in a defensive fetal position. "...they got the liver..."
"Don't you dare close your eyes!"
I crash to my knees on the unforgiving limestone right beside him.
My bare knees literally skid on the fresh pool of his blood, permanently staining the remaining shreds of my dress.
Angelo is clutching his abdomen, his large fingers physically disappearing into the horrifying mess of the entry wound, desperately trying to hold his own organs inside his body.
He is gasping, taking short, wet, rattling breaths that sound entirely wrong.
His normally tanned face is turning a sickening, translucent shade of grey under the cold moonlight.
His hand goes entirely slack. He drops the Beretta.
The heavy metal gun clatters uselessly against the limestone, sliding a few inches away.
The man who dragged me out of a ballroom by my hair, who physically dominated every square inch of space he occupied, has lost total control of his body.
He is the vulnerable one now. And I am sitting in a puddle of his blood, holding the sole power to dictate how this ends.
He looks so reduced, so agonizingly small curled up on the rock.
It entirely breaks my brain that someone who takes up so much psychological space can be brought down to this.
"Let me see. Let me see it!" I yell, grabbing at his forearms to pull his hands away from the wound so I can assess the damage.
"Get... away..." he gasps, pushing at me with a weak, violently trembling hand. "Run, Fiorella."
"I’m not going anywhere without you."
I grab the hem of my ruined silk dress and violently rip a long, thick strip of the expensive fabric completely off.
My hands are shaking so violently I can barely manage to tear the seams, but pure, unadulterated panic gives me the strength.
I ball the blood-soaked silk up and try to press it directly into his side, but Angelo shoves me back again.
He sneers at me, his lips completely coated in his own blood, his eyes wild and defensive.
He tells me to take my aristocratic pity and go running back to my brother before the extraction team crests the hill.
He is actively trying to save my life by being unbearably cruel, entirely rejecting the very help that might buy him another sixty seconds of existence.
He thinks I'm weak. He thinks I'm still that pathetic, sheltered girl spinning in a silk gown at the masquerade ball. He’s completely, utterly wrong.
I slap his hand away with a sharp, echoing crack that rings out over the wind. I lean my entire upper body weight directly onto the balled-up silk bandage, driving it deep into the bleeding hole in his side to force the bleeding to stop.
"Go be a good little Silvestri," he chokes out, glaring at me through hooded eyes. "Go home."
"Shut your mouth, Ferraro! You don't get to tell me what to do anymore," I snarl down at him, my hair hanging in wild, dirty strands around my face. "You'll die for nothing... for a debt that isn't yours."