Milan #2
I stepped forward once, taking my wife with me, and splayed my hand around my gun to show a voluntary cease in gunfire. “For what purpose do you require her?”
Sicily’s fingers clutched stronger; I assumed she believed I was going to give her to them.
I was not. She would not become one of my victims.
One of the masked men chuckled. “We just want to take her for a test ride for you.”
“Go to hell!” Sicily snarled, jutting her head out from behind me to bare her teeth.
I shoved her closer to my spine with a force that made her stumble.
Sicily did not know when to be quiet, and this caused me a deep level of internal failure. My thoughts did not process properly when she was speaking, and my brain did not compute when she glowered at me.
She was a severe problem.
“Oh, she’ll be so much fun,” the Camorrista said as his tongue darted out to lick his lower lip.
My stomach churned. I expected to vomit on the bodies beside us, but I turned my gun to aim at his head instead. He was too busy looking my wife up and down to notice, and by the time he had, there was already a smoking bullet between his eyes.
There was a brief moment of pause and silence as the body slumped to the ground, but then the remaining charged at us, growling like a pack of wolves.
I pulled the trigger, and nothing released.
I had no bullets left.
I thrust Sicily aside, into the safety of the wall, requiring my second hand.
Lurching forward, my fingers wrapped around one Camorrista’s greasy locks of dark hair, my other hand latching onto the other’s throat.
I squeezed the soldier’s windpipe until he could not even splutter, until his body grew rigid and curled into itself like a dying insect.
When he was weak and pliable, I smashed their heads together, the corners of my lips twitching as the sound of the hollow smack silenced them both.
As they collapsed to the floor, lifeless and limp, a scream split through the air like another bullet, or perhaps a dozen.
It dizzied my head enough that I could not work out what was happening or who was hurt.
I could only hear myself panting as if I was inside my own body, until I saw the third Camorrista, the one I had forgotten about, crawling beside Sicily.
He had a small silver knife embedded in her palm.
Her scream had sounded like someone else’s.
Her blood looked like the blood on the hallway floor from ten years ago.
I had that overwhelming sensation in my body again, the one that caused malfunction in every system in my brain, but Sicily whimpered, and I snapped back to the harsh reality that we were currently in. Sicily’s other fingers were on the knife, dragging and pulling against her own flesh.
“Do not pull it out!” I shouted, but it was too late.
Sicily withdrew the blade from the center of her palm, her blood trickling down my own hands and dripping onto the stone beneath us as I lunged for her.
For a moment, she was in my arms, against my chest, touching my beating heart with her own, and I breathed.
I breathed clearly despite the strong scent of her perfume lingering on her throat and the blood soaking into our clothing.
I breathed freely even though she was overheated against me underneath a thousand layers of white silk and tule.
I simply breathed because I had kept her alive.
I did not want her as my wife, but she could not die. That was non-negotiable.
Her face was streaked with tears, her breath coming in harsh, ragged pants, but she did not express the facial indicators of being sad or scared, but rather…
angry. She clutched her palm tightly in her spare hand, her nose flaring as she looked past my body and toward the Camorrista who was scurrying to the edge of the balcony as if he could escape me.
As if he could get away with what he had done to somebody that was mine to protect.
I settled her on the floor, standing with a flicker of something I had not felt in my entire life.
Rage.
Hers.
The metal scraped against the stone as I snatched the knife from the floor and stalked toward the assassin’s attempted escape over the iron banister. He had slowed, like he had time, like I was not a threat.
You are capable, Milano.
You are capable, Milano.
You are capable, Milano.
He was wrong; I was the worst kind of predator to exist when I needed to be.
The assassin had barely taken a step over the fence before I wrenched him against my body, his legs twisting and kicking awkwardly as I dragged him back onto the balcony.
I thrust the tip of the knife against his throat.
“Do you even know who she is?” I hissed into his ear, my spare hand tugging the black mask away from his face, only enough to reveal his neck and present his throat to my new wife.
Sicily said nothing as the man grunted out a strangled “no.” She still remained silent when his scream pierced through the cold air as the blade, still sticky with her blood, dug underneath his skin.
I tore a layer off, just a small slice of flesh, but it swelled with black blood instantly, dribbling onto his skin and clothes. “Look at her.” I forced his chin down onto the blade, copying his stare at my new wife.
Sicily was as pale as the remaining white on her gown. Her brows were furrowed, her palm clasped around her bleeding one, her lips parted slightly. She was fixated on the blade, on where it met the Camorrista’s throat, and I could conclude that she was disturbed, perhaps even scared.
My wife had a disruptive attitude, but now she was vulnerable, and vulnerability needed protection. I had to prove to her that I could keep her safe despite my inability to have done so with the other women in my life, despite how I did not find our marriage ideal.
I held the blade like a pen, delicately and precisely, and chipped away at him again, shaving away at his throat. Each layer of skin got thicker, and the deeper I went, the louder his screams became.
The more he bled.
That was the part of murder and torture that made me hold my breath—the blood. If people did not bleed, I would never hesitate before taking lives, but they did. A lot.
“She is a part of my household,” I gritted through my teeth, shearing a longer layer from his throat to his shoulder like peeling an apple.
“She holds my name.” He shook in my grip, his body convulsing through the screams that bellowed from his chest. “She is my wife, and you will be punished for touching her.”
My mind was calm at that moment. The assassin’s grunts and quiet cries of pain were sounds I’d grown accustomed to in my lifetime; they were a lullaby, a soothing reminder of my childhood, but even that was taken when I heard the heel of Sicily’s pearly white shoes scraping along the bloodied stone as she took a step toward me.
My head jerked up in time to see the tears beading on her lashes and the slight sway to her stance.
“Milan,” she said in a weak, strained tone. “Can we leave?”
I frowned. Why would we leave when the man who had harmed her was still breathing?
She slammed her eyes shut as she sniffled. “Please?”
Sicily required this to be over, and I did not much appreciate the blood on my clothing either.
I shoved the assassin to the floor and kneeled over his body, caging him beneath me. I ripped the mask from his face to reveal a younger male with dark hair like Brenno’s. He was flickering between conscious and unconscious, but he was awake enough to feel how I was going to end his life.
I twisted his face to the side to face my wife. “Apologize to her.”
Sicily whimpered, and it was a sound so small that it made me look at her too. I had not expected a sound like that from her. “Milan, don’t,” she cried. “Let’s just—"
“I will kill anyone who touches you; that is my job.” I turned back to the assassin, pushing his skull into the stone until he groaned. “Apologize to her!”
“I—I’m—” he began, but before he could finish the apology he did not deserve to give, I struck the knife into the Camorrista’s chest, yanking it directly down the center of his body to his stomach, halving him into the pieces he deserved to be in.
My body numbed, muffling all sound, including my wife’s screams that I was vaguely aware of somewhere beside me, but it heightened everything that I needed to experience. The need to kill held me in a bubble of nothing but me and the body, me and the knife.
Me and the blood.
I withdrew the blade and slammed it into his throat this time, and then his torn stomach, and then his legs, his hands, his shoulders.
“You are capable, Milano,” I muttered. “You are capable, Milano. You are capable, Milano.”
When I withdrew it the fifth time, my eyes narrowed on the thick spread of deep crimson and chunks of flesh coating the knife. It was on my hands, soaking into my suit. It was warm and thick, the coppery scent heavy in the air.
The knife clattered to the floor, the sound making me aware that I had dropped it. I turned my hands over to find my palms, and I watched the blood dribble through the creases and scars on my fingers.
My brain told me to stop, that the sensation on my hands was sickening, but I did not want to stop. I could not stop the overwhelming voice inside that reminded me that I was defective, that bad things happened when I existed, so I did it again, and again. Nobody stopped me.
I was not defective.