Declan steps in front of me, taking my place beside Kassian, slamming the butt of his gun into his face. “Hands off, dickwad.”
“That’s enough,” Lorenzo says, his voice firm.
Declan casts him a look that asks ‘why?’ but he says nothing, stalling what he’s doing.
“Get him out of here,” Lorenzo says. “Put him in my trunk. And if you let him die, I swear to fuck...”
“Got it, boss,” Frank says. “We’ll keep him alive.”
The guys snatch ahold of Kassian, pulling him to his feet. He sways, knees damn near buckling, not making it easy for them as they haul him away. The second he’s out of my line of sight, panic rushes through me. I shove out of Lorenzo’s grasp, darting after them.
“Kassian, please!” I yell, stopping in the middle of the foyer as they reach the front door. I’m not above begging at this point. “Please, tell me what you did with our daughter!”
Kassian stalls, resisting, fighting the guys as he turns to look at me. “You want to know where kitten is?”
“Yes!”
“I would take you to her, if I could,” he says. “I would love nothing more. It would be my pleasure, truly, to choke the life out of you again, just like I did her.”
“No,” I whisper, dizzy, as I shake my head. “No, no, no... you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“Don’t do this, Kassian. Don’t... please!”
“Too late,” he says. “So go to hell, suka... if you are lucky, maybe you will find her there.”
My knees give out on me. The world spins as I drop. Lorenzo is there, grabbing me before I hit the floor, arms winding tightly around me, but he’s not strong enough to keep me from falling apart.
I choke on a sob, crying, inhuman noise echoing from my chest as I struggle to catch my breath. My heart, I can feel it shattering. It hurts. Oh god, it burns. My lungs won’t work anymore. They’re nothing but ash, charred by flames. No, no, no...
“I’ve got you,” Lorenzo says, his voice quiet as he holds me. “It’s okay... I got you.”
The strength fades from my body as those words reach inside of me, gripping tight. Days of torture, weeks of sorrow, months of heartache catch up to me all at once. I collapse into myself, unable to find the words to tell him he’s wrong. It’s not okay. It’ll never be okay. They just hauled my best chance to find my daughter out of that door, and my fear of never seeing her again is feeling more and more real.
On my knees, curled over, I hold onto myself, trying to keep from breaking but it’s hard. So hard.
I don’t believe it. I refuse to believe it. She’s not gone. I’d know it if she was. A mother always knows. I’d feel it in my heart. A piece of me exists inside of that little girl, and it has to still be out there. It can’t just be gone.
Who knows how long I lay here, just like that, how long Lorenzo kneels beside me, letting me cry. It feels like forever. Lifetimes pass. He takes off his coat, draping it over me, covering me up as he rubs my back.
He says anything for a long moment, consoling me in silence.
His hand stops moving eventually. I feel him tense, pulling away, putting enough distance between us that I lose his warmth, coldness creeping through me, ice in my veins.
“Morgan,” he says, his voice quiet as he whispers my name. My name. “Open your eyes, baby.”
I raise my head up when he says that, but I don’t get far enough to look at him. I freeze when my gaze reaches the front door, still hanging wide open. Markel stands there, barely visible within the shadows of the front porch, but that’s not what gets me. No. It’s the small body just inside the entryway, a few feet in front of him, not far from where I sit. Bare feet, white nightgown, wild brown hair—longer than I remember, but everything else is so much the same. She stares at me, her dark eyes wide like she’s seeing a ghost, like I’m a figment of her imagination. Sasha. She’s not moving, not making a sound, but I can see her chest rising and falling fast, like she can’t breathe very well.
“Sunshine?” I whisper, finding my voice.
Her bottom lip trembles, tears filling her eyes. “Mommy?”
I nod, opening my arms, choking on a sob at the sound of her sweet voice calling me that again. Mommy.
I don’t have to say another word.
She runs right for me, loudly crying, flinging herself at me so hard she nearly knocks me back onto the floor. I wrap my arms around her, clinging to her, feeling her warmth. My heart. My innocence. The light of my life. I squeeze my eyes shut, and for a brief second I wonder if I’m dreaming. I wonder if I’ll open my eyes and all of this will be gone. It’s cruel, the thought that maybe it’s just all in my head, but her voice washes over me again, and I push those thoughts away.
If this is a dream, whatever... I’m okay with never waking up again.
“You found me, Mommy,” she says, her voice shaking. “You found me!”
I open my eyes again, pulling back just enough to look at her. She smiles as I wipe the tears from her flushed cheeks. I glance past her, around the foyer, being greeted by nothing more than silence.
The front door is closed now. Lorenzo is gone.
There’s nobody here, nobody but us.
“I did,” I whisper, smoothing her hair as I return her smile, looking back at her. “I promised, didn’t I?”
Chapter Twenty-One
My life has turned into a three-ring circus.
I like to think that I’m the ringmaster of it all, but I’m beginning to feel more like a fucking trained lion, one that’s sick of jumping through hoops, seconds away from breaking loose and mauling everyone. The acrobats are all around me, bending over backwards, or hell... maybe they’re more like a carnival freak show. Regardless, I know who the fucking clowns are.
One of them is currently indisposed in my trunk.
The other jumped in a car and sped away after dropping off a kid that was supposedly dead. I haven’t exactly wrapped my mind around all of that yet, but suffice it to say, that particular bozo will get to live to see another day.
How many more days is really the question... the answer dependent upon what he does after tonight.
The one in the trunk, however, won’t be so lucky.
“Christ, it feels like we ought to be halfway to China by now,” Five mutters, sweat rolling off of him. He comes to a stop, leaning on his shovel as he pulls his shirt up to wipe his face. “How come he gets out of digging?”
Five motions toward my car.
“He’s really in no condition to dig his own grave.”
“I meant Bruno, not the Russian,” Five says, pausing as he looks at me, his voice dropping lower. “Wait, shit, this is for Aristov, right? This isn’t, you know... is it?”
I glance over at Seven as he leans against the side of my car, arms crossed over his chest, watching us in the darkness. Instead of humoring that with a response, I continue to dig, throwing shovelfuls of dirt aside. “The reason he’s not doing it because I don’t trust him.”
“You don’t trust him to work a shovel?”
“I don’t trust him to take a piss right now. The jackass in the trunk has been more honest about his intentions, so no, I don’t trust him with a shovel.”
“Why’s he here then?”
“Because I haven’t killed him.”
“Are you going to?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think he—?”
Sighing exasperatedly, I slam my shovel into the dirt and look at Five, cutting off his last question, because I’m not answering whatever it is. “Is this one of those check yes or no moments? You trying to pass me some notes here? Want to gossip like little fucking busybodies? Braid each other’s hair? Be best friends forever?”
“My fault,” he mutters, going back to digging. “Just trying to get on the same page.”
“All the page I’m on says is ‘they dug a fucking hole to bury the Russian in’ so that’s what I’m doing.”
He nods. “Go
t it.”
We dig in silence until I’m satisfied the hole is big enough. Takes about an hour. My shoulders ache and my back hurts, not to mention my head is viciously pounding. It has been steadily thumping since I took those hard blows to the face hours ago, when the jackass beat the hell out of me before Aristov put my own gun to my forehead.
Yeah, it has been one fucked up day...
There was a second, a brief second, where I thought I might die tonight before Scarlet got her wits about her and decided to do something. I was counting on that, counting on her tenacity.
She didn’t disappoint, but the pain in my head says it sure took her ass long enough.
Throwing my shovel up over the side, I pull myself out of the hole, brushing the dirt from my clothes. Five follows my lead, but he struggles, crawling over the side, collapsing on the ground beside it.
“You’re starting to whine more than Three,” I tell him.
Five forces himself up. “I haven’t said a word in forty-five minutes!”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t hear you complaining.”
“Whatever,” he mutters, not bothering to brush the dirt from his sweaty clothes. “That’s who ought to be out here digging holes. Declan.”
“He’s got other things to take care of,” I say, popping the trunk on my car and opening it, my gaze meeting Aristov’s as he forces his eyes open. He’s barely clinging to consciousness. He’s lost quite a bit of blood. Not from the bullet that grazed his shoulder, nor from the beating he took. No, it was the rod of metal that Scarlet rammed into his back. I don’t know what she hit, but she must’ve hit something. “You look tired, Aristotle, but don’t worry... we’ve got your bed all made up.”
Grabbing him, I start yanking him out of the trunk. He doesn’t fight, because he doesn’t have much fight left in him, which means it isn’t going to be easy for me, either. Five jumps in, helping me lug him out, dropping him to the ground between us.
Aristov groans, muttering something I don’t pay attention to, because fuck him.
Would you give a shit about his final words after the things he’s done, if he did them to you?
We haul him toward the hole, but the son of a bitch is heavy, bulky, dragging the ground as we pull him along. Seven shoves away from the car, coming toward us. “Here, let me help you, boss.”
“I swear to fuck, Seven, if you call me that one more time, Five and I are going to be digging yet another hole tonight, and trust me when I say none of us want that to happen.”
“I sure don’t,” Five mutters. “I’m tired.”
Seven grows silent, returning to his place beside the car, as Five and I drag Aristov the rest of the way and roll him into the hole.
He lands face-up with a thud.
I grab my shovel, scooping up a pile of dirt, instantly dropping it on him. He opens his eyes, looking up at me, but he otherwise does nothing.
What can he do?
Not a goddamn thing.
I know. I know. I’ve been there.
It might’ve been a world away, but I’ve laid where he’s laying.
The pain... the pain had been intense. I can still feel an echo of it sometimes rattling around in my head. Otherwise, just like my skull, the rest of it became fractured, my memory a pile of puzzle pieces that will never completely fit together. Flashes and moments, like a fucked up flipbook out of sequence. I vividly remember my stepfather standing over me, panting and sweaty, his nose bleeding. I’d put up a fight, but it wasn’t enough. He caught me off guard, swinging the metal shovel, hitting me right in the face the second I turned around.
I laid in the hole he dug behind the house, barely clinging to consciousness as I stared up at him in the darkness. My ears were ringing, and the man was talking, but I could barely make out his words. Something, something, something... you brought this on yourself. Alarms shrieked inside my skull, but I didn’t make a sound. I didn’t beg, or cry, or curse, even as he took the bloody shovel and picked up a pile of dirt, sending it raining down on me.
I closed my eyes as they burned, coated in blood. I waited for death. I knew it was coming. I waited... and waited... and waited... as he piled on the dirt.
Something jarred me eventually as I was yanked and dragged, the pain explosive as I forced my eyes open, looking up, expecting to see my stepfather, but it was another face I found. A guy, not much older than me. People were shouting into the night, fighting going on somewhere, as he knelt down, leaning over me. “Can you hear me?”
I tried to nod.
“Can you tell me your name?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything?”
I opened my mouth, my voice a broken whisper as I tried to speak. No idea if he heard me or if he understood, but he said, “My name’s Ignazio. Just hold on, okay?”
Blackness took over then, more little flashes. It took a while for me to realize Ignazio had saved my life, pulling me out of a homemade grave and finding help.
“How long does it take?” Five asks, his question catching me off guard, drawing me out of the memory.
He’s staring down at Aristov. The hole is only about four feet deep, six and a half feet long.
“What?”
“How long does it take to die this way?” Five asks. “Hours? Days?”
“More like minutes,” I say. Buried alive. “Inhaling dirt, a thousand pounds of pressure on top of you. You’d suffocate.”
“Sounds terrifying.”
It is.
Within a few minutes, Aristov’s no longer visible. He doesn’t have an Ignazio to save him like I’d had. Less than an hour later, and the hole is again filled.
We kick stuff on top of it—leaves, tree branches, stones, making it blend in, so if anyone stumbles upon the area, it won’t stand out. We’re deep in the woods, an hour or so across the border in New Jersey, in the middle of fucking nowhere. He’ll likely go undiscovered forever.
“I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could sleep for a month,” Five says as we toss the shovels in the blood-soaked trunk, adding dirt right on top of it, a forensic team’s wet dream. “Probably could use a vacation after the night we’ve had.”
“Florida’s nice this time of year,” I tell him. “You should take the trip down.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, there’s some work on the groves that needs done.”
Five laughs, pulling out the car keys to head for the driver’s seat. “It’s not really a vacation if you’ve got me on the clock.”
I shrug, getting in the passenger seat. I’ve never taken a vacation from working, so I don’t know what that’s like. There’s always stuff that needs done. Seven climbs in the backseat, staying silent, as Five drives us back into New York under the cloak of darkness, heading straight to my house in Queens.
The rest of the guys are here, waiting. Well, except for Three. He’s still off handling things.
I dismiss everyone right away, not in the mood for company, needing some time to get my thoughts in order, but Seven lingers, standing on my front porch. As much as I’m still itching to gut him, I have to admit he’s got balls. Big balls. Maybe too big, but still... it takes balls to stand here.
“What do you want, Seven?”
“A second chance,” he says.
“Why should I give you one?”
“Because I want to make it up to you.”
I shake my head. “That’s not a good reason. I don’t care what you want. Not anymore. So if you’re looking for a second chance, come back when you’ve got a good reason as to why I should give you one. Until then...”
I wave him off.
He turns away, leaving without arguing.
My brother meets me in the foyer as soon as I’m in the house, my boots tracking dirt in along the floor.
“What happened?” he asks. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I took care of it.”
“You took care of it,” he repeats, looking all around me, and I know what he’s looking
for: Scarlet.
“She’s fine,” I tell him. “She’s with her kid.”
His eyes widen. “You found her daughter, too?”
“Yes.” I grasp his shoulder, squeezing it. It’s all of the reassurance I can manage. “All’s well that ends well, right? Or some other cliché bullshit. Whatever you want to hear right now.”
“But—”
He’s got questions, I know... so many fucking questions... but I’m not in the mood. “Not tonight, Leo. Let me get my head right before you interrogate me about this shit.”
He just stands there, gaping at me, as I walk away, heading to my library. He doesn’t try to follow, dropping it for the moment, going into the living room to report what he knows to his girlfriend, to set her pretty little head at ease that the world is a beautiful place again, that the sun will come out tomorrow and the flowers will soon bloom and they can sleep snug as a bug in a fucking rug tonight without worrying about monsters hiding under the bed.
Me? I’m exhausted, but there’s no way I can sleep, not with so much weighing on me. Turning on the lamp, I run my hands down my face before fixing my attention on my still unfinished puzzle.
It has never taken me so long to do one before.
After grabbing a bottle of rum from the kitchen, I decide to dive into the puzzle, hoping the alcohol will numb my pain, hoping focusing on something else will keep my head from exploding. I don’t know how much time passes, the night wearing away, but I’m feeling little more than a tingling sensation in my muscles when there’s a knock from the doorway.
I glance over, seeing Three standing there.
“How’d it go?” I ask quietly.
“Okay, I guess,” he says, stepping into the library, rubbing the side of his face. It’s red, a hint of a bruise forming on his pale skin. “I had them checked out by a doctor. Neither seemed happy about it, but they’re both okay, for the most part. Nothing seriously wrong. Some dehydration, a bit of malnourishment, a hell of a lot of bumps and bruises on Morgan, but that was obvious just looking at her.”