Chapter 9 #2
Marcus leaned against the door and appeared like he couldn’t care less about the situation they were in.
That eased him out of arm’s reach from Vinnie.
Marcus wasn’t worried about the foe in front of him but didn’t want to encourage the enforcer.
“Evidently, Enzo has not taken my last warning to heart. I will have to send him another.”
Vinnie froze. His spine stiffened as he stared at Marcus. Any hint of the pretend nightclub-visiting character Vinnie had assumed melted away.
Now it was Bram’s turn to chuckle in Marcus’s mind, thinking back to their last visit with Enzo Costa. Was that a pun about ripping more hearts out? Did the always serious Marcus actually display a sense of humor? Carina is already influencing you, my friend.
Marcus gave Bram a mental shrug and reached out to his security team.
Two of you go outside and secure the driver.
I want him alive, please. Bring the van around the back.
This won’t take long. Then he pushed his powerful shoulders off the door and advanced on Vinnie, who stood visibly shaken that their clever plan had utterly collapsed so quickly.
With each step that Marcus advanced, Vinnie’s men spread out to give themselves space to maneuver in the enclosed space.
This wasn’t a big room, but there was no furniture to hinder them, or help them, for that matter.
This was going to be a brawl. He watched the silent communication between his opponents.
From their confident smirks, they’d decided he was a single man outnumbered by the four of them.
Those favorable odds might have helped them against anyone else.
Vinnie lurched forward, stumbling to cover his movement.
His hand emerged from his clothing, clutching a knife.
He swept the blade upward toward Marcus.
That trajectory could have split Marcus open from crotch to shoulder, perhaps severing a major artery along the way.
Marcus appreciated the decent plan as he spun Vinnie around, painfully wrenching Vinnie’s arm and the blade behind his back.
The enforcer now faced the rest of his men.
Vinnie struggled to free himself as a wall slid aside to reveal a dark passage.
Within seconds, members of Nightfall’s security team wrapped each of Vinnie’s team in a crushing embrace.
The two men and a woman dressed in black slacks and polo shirts with the club’s logo easily contained their attempts to get free.
Marcus let Vinnie digest the fact that while the invading team members were powerfully built, Nightfall’s guards held them effortlessly.
When Vinnie stopped thrashing around uselessly, Marcus nodded, and his guards yanked their captives’ heads to the side, exposing their necks.
At his “help yourself” command, Marcus’s guards’ teeth descended.
With lightning speed, they struck and greedily sank their teeth into the throbbing blood vessels of the men they held.
“Oh God, they’re drinking their blood!” burst from Vinnie’s mouth. “Fight them!” His struggles to get free intensified without success.
Marcus didn’t allow Vinnie to look away.
He forced him to watch Costa’s men scream in agony as the vampires did nothing to blunt the violence of their actions.
Their desperate cries for mercy mixed with the heavy bass of Nightfall’s music thumping through the wall.
That construction of lumber and sheetrock was all that divided them from their target.
No one in the nightclub would hear a thing.
The first would-be attacker slumped dead on the ground with a meaty thud.
Marcus relaxed his hold on Vinnie’s head, allowing him to glance down at the pale corpse sucked dry of his life’s essence.
A second and third thud made Vinnie shudder as each man expired before his eyes.
The extreme slaughter of his men was too much.
Vinnie had killed countless people for the family, but he’d never seen anything like this.
He opened his mouth to scream, but a sharp point of a knife pricked his jaw in an unspoken warning.
The pain snapped him back to the realization of his own predicament.
Marcus still held Vinnie with his arm behind his spine, wrenching him up onto his toes with the sharpened steel poised at his jaw.
Another guard wheeled a cart into the room, and the newly-fed guards piled the freshly drained corpses onto the metal platform like sacks of potatoes, completely erasing their humanity.
Marcus leaned close to Vinnie’s ear, “I warned Enzo not to fuck with us, and we wouldn’t interfere with him.
This is now the third time he’s tried. Tried and failed. ”
Vinnie stammered through gritted teeth to keep the blade from stabbing his jaw, “Enzo is too proud to take the hint. I can talk to Frankie. He’s Enzo’s right hand.
He’ll listen.” Vinnie grasped at anything to get out of this nightmare.
Vinnie’s mouth was running far ahead of his brain when he blurted out, “He has no clue that you have his sister!”
Time stopped. The security guard’s grip on Vinnie’s arm tightened one moment, and the next instant, another man appeared out of nowhere and yanked Vinnie free to slam him to the wall.
The new guy held Vinnie by his throat and squeezed, his feet dangling above the floor so their eyes were level with each other.
Vinnie couldn’t breathe and had almost passed out when suddenly the man’s voice boomed into his mind. Tell me what you know! Now!
Vinnie’s lungs screamed for oxygen to form words, but his struggles didn’t matter to the man.
The powerful brute invaded Vinnie’s mind with his.
Vinnie couldn’t stop him even if he had a clue how to end this mental invasion.
A gigantic whirlwind swept through his brain and noted the recent events leading up to this point.
Vinnie had always heard that your life passed before you before you died, and he guessed that was what was happening.
Defeated, he let the scavenger hunt in his mind play on, watching the memories unearthed by this attacker.
The newcomer spotted the woman outside who recognized Alessia from the picture on his cellphone.
Vinnie saw the mental note he’d made to tell Frankie once they had returned.
Scenes played like a timeline in reverse, rewinding to his arrival in town.
Then returned to his pronouncement that Enzo wasn’t aware they had Alessia.
Vinnie jerked in the man’s grasp as he came back to himself. He stared into the man’s glowing red eyes pleadingly before rushing to assure him, “Enzo doesn’t know.”
The man sneered at Vinnie. “And he never will.”
With that, the pissed-off vampire tore through Vinnie’s throat.
A scream wasn’t enough to vent the amount of pain that lanced through Vinnie.
The heated suction of the creature’s mouth on his neck sent shockwaves through his body.
Seconds passed like hours until his thoughts scattered like fog in a valley.
His heart stopped beating. He was dead, even though his mind lagged slightly behind.
Titus threw the lifeless corpse onto the cart with the others. He’d always had the vampiric ability to influence or invade anyone’s thoughts. Disgusted by the contents of Vinnie’s mind, he glanced at Marcus and shook his head. “I trust the message will make an impact this time?”
Marcus shrugged. “Doubtful. Perhaps. If word gets out that Alessia is here, that complication will escalate things.’
Titus laughed. “My opinion of Enzo can’t worsen. He hasn’t bothered to search for her until now. I don’t think that will change.”
Marcus nodded in agreement, “True, but Enzo is a prideful jackass. Even if he doesn’t care, he will act to save face.”
Titus cocked his head, considering Marcus’s suggestion. “Agreed. We’ll have to make certain he doesn’t find out.” Titus walked toward the hidden passage. “I need to change my shirt.”
“A shower might be in order as well. I’ll take care of delivering this message tonight.
” Marcus said, turning back to the cart and his team, as Titus lingered in the room to hear the instructions.
“Stack the bodies into the van and make sure the driver gets to the mansion this time. I don’t want there to be any doubts about where they came from. ”