CHAPTER SIX #2
He turned at the sound of my footsteps. He wasn’t startled, but his tensed muscles told me he was alert. His body pivoted with the fluidity of someone who had been trained to respond to threats from behind, and I saw his hand move toward his waistband before he caught himself and let it drop.
My lips twitched with a begrudged smile. He was smart, I’d give him that.
He’d assessed the distance between us and decided he couldn’t reach whatever he was carrying before I closed it.
“Who are you?” I asked.
The question hung in the air between us, simple and direct. I didn’t raise my voice; I didn’t need to. The dark alley amplified every sound—the drip of water from a leaking pipe, the scuttle of something small moving through the garbage, and the measured cadence of my own breathing.
The man looked at me, reading me in the same familiar way I had done to him. Whatever he found didn’t frighten him. The corner of his mouth curled into a lazy smile.
“Why do you care?”
His arrogance would get him killed tonight.
“The woman you’re trailing is my wife.”
His wicked smile widened. He seemed to enjoy this game, and he appeared to find it particularly amusing being cornered in a filthy alley by a stranger.
But I wasn’t a stranger to him. He was stalking Serafina. He probably knew everything there was to know about her … so in turn, he knew me.
“Your wife?” He tilted his head, considering the word. “That’s an interesting way to put it. Last I heard, she tried to put a bullet in you.”
I didn’t react. Of course he had done his research.
“Was that some kind of foreplay between you two?” He let out a low, dark chuckle, shaking his head. “No, I don’t think so. If it were the case, she wouldn’t have fled to the other side of the world just to escape you.”
His smile turned sharper. “She was running from you, wasn’t she? From you and the Cosa Nostra. Because if word gets out that she tried to kill a Salvatore, they wouldn’t care why she did it even if perhaps she had good reasons. She will be hunted and there will be nowhere for her to hide.”
“Who sent you?” I asked.
His sick smile didn’t falter. He tsked darkly, the sound echoing in the alley. “You can’t make me talk.”
“I don’t need you to want to talk.” I took a slow step toward him. “I only need you to understand that eventually, you will.
I had many ways to make a man like him talk.
He watched me approach, amusement still glinting in his eyes. “Are you trying to threaten me, Salvatore?”
“I’m not threatening you.” I stopped just a few feet away. “I’m giving you an opportunity.”
“For what?”
“To leave this alley alive.”
The amusement faded for half a second before returning. He threw his head back and laughed.
I cracked my neck side to side. And when he was done laughing, I tilted my head to the side, regarding him with a bored gaze. “So, I’ll ask you one more time. Think carefully before you answer.”
I let the silence stretch between us.
“Were you paid to kill my wife?”
He said nothing. The grin held, fixed and unyielding, and in the silence I heard everything he wasn’t saying. The refusal was deliberate. Calculated.
He wanted me to push until I was angry and reckless.
He wanted me to close the remaining distance and make this physical, because he believed—mistakenly—that he could handle it.
Unfortunately for him, he had no idea how badly he had miscalculated.
“See, that’s where you’re mistaken,” he finally said. “I don’t take money and then betray the person who paid me. My word is worth more than that.” His eyes locked onto mine, sharp and deadly. “My silence has been bought, Adrian Salvatore.”
My lips twitched and a smile spread across my face.
And for the first time, his expression truly faltered, and I saw a brief moment of fear. Too bad, too late.
“Wrong answer.”
I moved.
The distance between us vanished in the space between heartbeats.
My right hand found his throat, fingers locking around his windpipe with enough pressure to cut off sound but not enough to collapse his airway. Not yet.
His hands came up, fast and competent, the typical trained response of a man who had been in many fights before. But I already had the upper hand.
My left forearm drove into his sternum, and the air left his lungs in a soundless rush.
He bucked, twisting his hips to throw me off balance.
I let him turn, using his momentum to drive him into the wall of the alley.
His head connected with the brick, and I heard the dull thud of impact.
His eyes went glassy for a moment, just a moment, but it was enough time for me to shift my grip.
I released his throat and drove my knee into his groin.
He folded.
I couldn’t help but let out a low, mocking laugh. Where was his arrogance now?
The grin was gone now, and he let out a growl, raw and animalistic. He was pissed off, good. That was real fucking good.
His hand went for his waistband again, but he never made it.
My favorite dagger found the inside of his wrist. It was a shallow, precise cut, severing the tendon that controlled his grip. His knife clattered to the ground, and I heard the sound of it bouncing once before it came to rest against the asphalt, useless.
He didn’t scream. And you know what? I respected that, even as I drove my knee into his stomach again and felt the remaining air leave his lungs in a wheeze that smelled like stale coffee and cigarettes.
He dropped to one knee, and I was behind him before he could recover, my left arm locked around his throat in a rear choke, my dagger pressed against the carotid artery on the right side of his neck.
“Who are you working for, Henry Beckett?” I said against his ear, my voice calm. Unhurried.
I felt him tense when I said his full name. His real name—not his alias.
Rocco had done his job well. He’d dug through every corner of the man’s life and uncovered everything there was to uncover. Henry Beckett. Thirty-seven years old. Former military. And his current occupation: hired mercenary. No wife. No children. No family worth mentioning.
And no loyalties beyond the highest bidder.
We knew where he lived, where he worked, the dozens of names he’d used, and the bodies he had left behind.
Rocco found almost everything. Almost.
The one piece of information he wasn’t able to find was the only one that truly mattered.
Who had hired him to kill Serafina?
Because men like Henry didn’t stalk women halfway across the world for no reason. Someone had put a price on my wife’s head.
And I intended to find out who.
He swallowed, the movement pressing his throat harder against the blade.
“Last chance,” I murmured.
Henry Beckett said nothing.
His body went rigid in my grip. It wasn’t fear. No, his body tensed with his resolve. He’d made his choice. He would die before he talked, and the grim acceptance of that fact radiated from him like heat from a furnace.
I knew men like him. Proud and disciplined. Arrogant enough to stare death in the eyes without blinking. He would never tell me what I wanted to know.
I respected that too.
It changed nothing, though.
The dagger in my hand moved.
It was one clean stroke, left to right, following the natural life of his throat.
The cut was precise, deep enough to sever his carotid arteries.
There was no sound at first. Just the wet, tearing whisper of the blade parting flesh, and then the blood—erupting and pulsing from the wound in rhythmic spurts that painted the brick wall behind him in a grotesque arc.
He clutched at his neck with both hands. I let go and walked around to face him. His eyes locked onto mine, wide and terrified, and I watched the light behind them fade.
He made a sound. It wasn’t exactly a scream. It was a wet sound as his body tried to breathe through a throat that no longer existed.
His fingers pressed against the wound as if he could hold the blood inside. Too fucking late for that now.
Henry collapsed to his knees. Then to his side. The blood pooled beneath him, spreading across the cracked concrete in a slow, mesmerizing stain.
I wiped the blade on my pant leg, leaving dark streaks across the black fabric.
The threat was gone. Eradicated.
But the satisfaction I should have felt—the cold, clean clarity that always followed a kill—wasn’t there.
If not Henry, then someone else would be hired to hunt Serafina down.
There was a price on my wife’s head.
And I still had to find out who put it there