Chapter Twenty-Two
Matteo
Dario Rizzo was right behind my girls.
I watched him close the distance, grab Morena by the hair, and slam her back against a tree. The gun came up under her chin. Then it shifted to Camilla.
Something in my vision went fucking white at the edges.
“Hold fire,” I said into the radio. My voice did not sound like my own. “He has the girl.”
Santino answered immediately. “Copy. We have eyes. Waiting on your call.”
I moved through the trees with two of my men flanking me.
Every step was measured. Dario dragged them deeper into the trees toward a second vehicle.
He was talking, low and ugly. Morena was answering him.
I could not hear the words but I saw the way she held the child.
Protective. Unwilling to let go even with a gun pressed to both of them.
He forced them into the passenger side of the sedan. I gave the order. “Take the tires. Do not hit the cabin.”
We managed to shred the front right as Dario tried to swing onto the access road. The sedan fishtailed hard and slammed into a low embankment of trees. Metal screamed. The engine died in a harsh, broken sound.
We were on them in seconds. Dario came out of the driver’s side shooting. One of my men put him down cleanly through the shoulder and the knee. He dropped, trying to raise the gun. I crossed the distance and put my boot on his wrist until the bones ground together and the weapon fell away.
“Alive,” I said. “For now.”
Then I turned to the passenger side.
The door was jammed from the impact. I wrenched it open.
Morena was curled around her sister in the footwell, body shielding her as much as the small space allowed. Blood ran down her cheek from a cut that was fresh. Her eyes found mine over the top of Camilla’s head .I crouched in the open door, careful not to crowd them.
“Morena.” Her name came out rough. She stared at me like she was deciding whether I was real. Then her arms tightened around the child and she gave a single, sharp nod. I reached in slowly. “I’m taking you both home. Now.”
She let me help her out of the wrecked car. The second her feet hit the ground her injured ankle nearly folded. I caught her around the waist with one arm and kept the other free. Camilla stayed locked against her, small fingers twisted in my wife’s top .
Santino appeared at my shoulder, weapon up, eyes scanning the trees.
“Dario’s secure,” he said. “Two teams sweeping the house. No other hostiles.”
I nodded once, never looking away from Morena. She was breathing hard. Blood tracked down her face. She looked like she had walked through hell to get here. And she had done it without me.
I shrugged out of my jacket and settled it around my wife as carefully as I could. Morena’s free hand came up and clutched the front of the jacket like she needed the weight of it.
“I’ve got you,” I said quietly. “Both of you.”
Her eyes closed for a second. When they opened again there was something exhausted and complicated in them. Not forgiveness. Not surrender. Something closer to recognition.
“And I have something of yours, little lady.” I produced the pink unicorn jacket. “Is this yours?”
She nodded shyly. I wrapped it around her. Camilla flinched at the movement, then seemed to decide I was not an immediate threat.
Santino’s voice stayed low. “Medical is two minutes out. We should move.”
I guided Morena toward the nearest SUV. She limped badly but refused to let me take Camilla from her arms. I did not push it. One of the men opened the rear door. I helped her inside and climbed in after them, keeping my body between them and the open night.
Dario was being loaded into a different vehicle, conscious, breathing. He would answer every question I had before the sun finished rising. That was a later problem.
Right now the only thing that mattered was the woman beside me and the little girl in her arms.
The door shut. The SUV started moving. I reached into my pocket and closed my hand around the ring. The only sound was Camilla’s breathing and the low rumble of the engine as we left the trees behind. Camilla shifted in Morena’s arms.
The silence that followed was heavier than the one that had filled the car before.
Morena pressed her mouth to the top of her sister’s head and closed her eyes.
I watched them both and felt the last of any hesitation I might have had about what came next drain out of me.
“Bring him.”
Two of my men dragged Dario Rizzo over. He was bleeding from the shoulder and the knee, breathing hard, trying to look like he still had leverage.
They dropped him on his knees in the dirt ten feet from the vehicle.
The headlights caught the sweat and blood on his face and turned it cheap and yellow.
Morena was already in the penthouse with her sister. They had been through enough. This part was mine.
Dario lifted his head and found me. An ugly little smile pulled at his mouth.
“You going to make a speech?” he rasped. “About how she’s yours now? About the kid?”
I stepped closer. The ground was soft from last night’s rain. My boot sank half an inch. I let him see I was in no hurry. He kept talking. Men like him always did when the end was close and they still thought words were a weapon.
“I had them both for years. Your pretty wife danced with my collar on her throat long before she wore yours. I put it on her. I taught her what it meant. Every night she came home with my money in her fist and my marks under the lace. You paid thirty-five million for used goods, Ventura.”
I said nothing. The gun was already in my hand. It felt ordinary. That was the part that should have scared me. He smirked. Blood in his teeth.
“The little girl…” He coughed, spat, kept going because he could see it landing.
“I never even liked the kid. She cried too much. She was just the only leash that worked on her sister. You think you saved them? I had that baby on a dirty mattress while your wife was still learning how to smile on a pole. I told Morena what I’d do if the numbers dropped.
I described it. She believed me. That’s why she danced.
That’s why she begged in the hallway like a whore. Not because of you. Because of me.”
Something old and familiar moved under my ribs. The same voice that had lived in my head since I was twelve.
This is how it starts. You let yourself care and then you become him.
I looked at Dario Rizzo and saw every man who had ever put a hand on what was mine and called it ownership.
I saw my father. How monstrous he was to me, to my sisters.
I did not give him the dignity of a last name or a last breath he could spend on another threat. I raised the gun.
Dario saw it. The smirk died the way cheap things always die: fast, ugly, with nothing left behind it. For one second the man who had kidnapped a four-year-old to keep a girl on a pole looked exactly as small as he was.
Blood on his teeth. Dirt on his knees. Eyes wide with the first honest thought he had ever had in my presence: this is it. The end.
He opened his mouth to beg.
The shot was one clean decision. No warning. No pause for the part of me that still heard my father’s voice telling a twelve-year-old boy violence was always the answer. I refused that inheritance in the space between heartbeat and recoil.
The bullet took Dario in the forehead, slightly off-center, the way I had been taught when the goal was silence instead of spectacle. The back of his skull opened.
What had been Dario Rizzo jerked once, a useless animal twitch, and the light in his eyes went out before his body understood it was finished.
He folded sideways into the wet dirt with his mouth still shaped around the last humiliating statement he would never get to finish.
One hand stayed open, fingers curled like he thought he could grab us all on the way down.
The sound was flat. Final. It did not echo the way people pretend gunshots echo in stories. It simply ended.
I stood over him and watched the last of the blood darken the ground.
I waited for the satisfaction I had promised myself when I first decided he would die.
It did not come. What came instead was the old crack under my ribs, the one I had been trying to close since the night I carried Morena off that stage with my cum still on her thighs and my mother’s ring on her finger.
It widened. It hurt. It felt like proof.
This is how it starts.
I crushed the thought the same way I had crushed it in the warehouse with the Vernizzi sons. I did not intend to become my father.
I did not make the dying man look at the people he had broken. I did not speak. I did not give the corpse the courtesy of a name.
I confirmed there was no pulse left worth respecting, then lowered the gun. I handed the weapon off without looking at the man who took it.
“Burn everything,” I said. “Nothing left that can touch them.”
In the penthouse, I watched them sleeping for a long moment. I crouched beside the bed. Camilla looked at me with the same flat, careful stare she had given the world since we pulled her out of the car. I kept my voice low.
“Can’t sleep? You’re safe here,” I said. “No one is going to take you again. Not while I’m breathing. Do you remember me, kiddo?”
She blinked once. Her gaze flicked to the blood drying on my shirt, then back to my face. “Yeah… Matteo.”
“That’s right,” I grinned. “Good memory, little lady.”
“Thanks for helping me find my sister,” Camilla said.
I smiled wider. “You’re welcome.”
The same way I had seen Aurora do with her girls. The same way someone should have done for this girl when she was with that man.
“You should sleep a bit more,” I said again, quieter.