I moved forward to shake Benito Donati’s hand. Ciro’s father had been standing quietly, assessing everyone in the room. Ben and Vito were like second fathers to me, having been best friends with Arlo long before Lauren came into his life. There had been no hard feelings between him and the other two men as there had been with Gio.
“Good to see you, boy,” Ben said as he slapped me on the back.
“Sir. What’s the plan?” I asked, cutting to the chase and bringing the others’ attention to what needed doing instead of killing each other.
“Desi followed the guy who snatched Scarlett and Vito using closed-circuit cameras to a house on the other side of the city. He hacked the security feed inside the house, and we’ve narrowed down where they might be keeping them to two possible rooms. We estimate at least twelve men inside, including Fontana.”
“Fontana but not Gio?” There was a sudden tingle at the bottom of my spine, an itch that wasn’t really an itch but made me feel like I wanted to peel my skin off.
“No one’s seen him since he left the compound earlier this morning. We had eyes on him, following his every move, but our man lost sight of him just after Scarlett was taken.” Ben scowled, shaking his head in agitation. “We naturally thought he would be wherever they took Scarlett and Vito, but there’s been no sign of him there.”
“Someone give me a phone,” I commanded, holding out my hand as a sick kind of dread churned in my gut.
Anya gave me hers, and I dialed quickly. “Pick up, Allegra,” I muttered when it rang over and over again. “Pick up, goddamn it!” My heart was pounding in my ears as I hung up and hit redial.
“H-hello?” Her shaky voice made my heart stop.
“Is he there?” I tried and failed to keep my voice calm, but for the first time, I couldn’t be the stoic robot I normally was. Her voice was too weak, too full of fear for me to remain emotionless.
“You wouldn’t be talking about me, now would you, Dante my boy?” Gio’s sadistic laugh filled my ear, and I nearly crushed the phone in my hand.
“You hurt her, and you’re dead,” I snarled. Behind me, Anya moved closer, while everyone else watched me in complete silence.
“Why would I harm my own daughter?” he chided, sounding like the thought had never entered his head. “She’s much too precious to me for me to hurt in any way.”
There was the sharp sound of flesh hitting flesh, and Allegra cried out. Closing my eyes, I inhaled deeply through my nose, but it did nothing to calm my mind. I needed a clear head, but thoughts of him hitting Allegra were making me crazy. Forget bullets. I was going to kill him with my bare hands. “What do you want, motherfucker?”
“Tut-tut, dear boy. I have everything I could possibly want right now.” His voice lowered, taunting me, making the dread sit like a cinder block in my stomach. “Everything.”
Fuck!
“Lauren,” I muttered, and he laughed.
“How nice for me that my dead wife appeared right before my eyes, gun in hand, pointing it straight at my head?” He sighed contentedly. “Best day of my life.”
The memory of how broken Lauren was when my father first saved her from Gio turned my stomach. “I repeat, what do you want?”
“It’s not what I want, but what you do. I have not one, but three of the females you value the most. I only assumed you would want at least one of them back.”
Three?
Three…
“Jenny,” I choked out. But how would he even know about her? Unless…
Lauren wouldn’t give up her daughter so easily, I knew that to my bones. She would die before she gave up Jenny. But if Gio did have her, that could only mean Jarvis was most likely dead, possibly Eloise as well.
There was no time to think about that, however. Gio was talking once again, ratcheting my fury higher. “If you want to see your sister again, you’ll do exactly what I say.”
“Name it.” No hesitation, no second thoughts. I would do what he wanted for the sake of Allegra and Jenny, as well as Lauren.
He shot off an address I didn’t recognize. “You have one hour. Come alone. I see anyone but you, and I start putting bullets in sweet little Jenny.”
The phone went silent, and I dropped my hand. Murderous rage was spiking through me, making me see red. I lifted my gaze to Ciro. “I can’t help you rescue Scarlett. I’ve got to go.”
“Do what you have to do,” he said with a nod.
Not wasting time, I ran out to the car and was starting it when the passenger-side door opened. Anya dropped into the seat, slamming the door closed. “What the fuck are you doing?” I snapped as she pulled on her seat belt. “I don’t have time to play games with you, Anya. He has everyone I love right now.”
She rolled her eyes. “You can’t go in there alone, dumbass. Gio is a narcissistic megalomaniac. You’ll be dead before you ever set eyes on Allegra.”
My hands tightened around the steering wheel. “If he sees you, he’s going to kill my sister.”
Surprise flickered in her eyes for a nanosecond, but she just shrugged. “He won’t see me,” she assured me with total confidence. “Right now, you need me, De Stefano.”
“Why would you help me and not your brother?” I asked curiously once I was on the road with my foot hitting the gas hard.
“They don’t need me. Fuck, turn Cristiano and Ciro loose right now, and they could take on an entire army and win.” She turned her gaze out the side window, and I thought I heard a trace of vulnerability in her voice when she murmured, “And Allegra is my friend. I don’t have many of those, so I need to keep the ones I do have alive.”
Chapter 21
Allegra
Nausea seemed to be my constant companion. My stomach was tossing and turning, made worse by the tension and fear making my heart race and sweat bead on my brow as I watched my father pace back and forth.
Not five minutes after Dante and the others left, his phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but then again, I doubted he had programmed anyone’s name into the contact list. Like the one I stole from him, this one was a burner. A cheap smartphone he probably bought out of one of the vending machines at the airport. The area code, however, was one I recognized all too well. It was from Chicago, something I knew because Dante’s real cell had the same first three digits.
Thinking it was important, I answered without hesitation, only to hear my father’s voice on the line and a sobbing child in the background. “Did you know you have a sister, Allegra?” he asked in greeting.
“Don’t you fucking touch her,” I exploded as images of Papa hurting Jenny as he used to hurt me flipped through my mind.
“If you don’t want me to kill her right here, right now, I suggest you get your pathetic ass here,” he’d told me in that calm voice that terrified me far more than when he was raging.
Sickness filled the back of my throat. “Where?” I whispered.
“I’ll text you the address to this number,” he said in a bored tone. “You have thirty minutes before I take off my belt. You know what happens then, Allegra. And don’t tell Dante. If I see him, your sister’s and mother’s deaths will be on your hands.”
The address was easy enough to find, even as nervous as I was, a single-story house in one of the middle-class parts of the city. There were children playing at the end of the block, bouncing basketballs and riding their skateboards. They didn’t have a care in the world, while only God knew what was going on inside a house mere yards away.
Papa met me at the door, and as soon as I was inside, I was thrown to the ground. I was expecting it, my already aching body tensing to prepare for it before my knees even touched the floor. With my next inhale, he was grabbing a handful of my hair and jerking me to my feet so hard I felt large chunks of hair tear from my scalp.
From somewhere in the house, I heard male laughter, more than one man by the sound of it. But no one appeared to help Papa, so I couldn’t be sure.
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Tears stung my eyes, but I didn’t cry out, too many years of conditioning telling me not to so much as whimper. He marched me deeper into the house and opened a bedroom door. Inside, I nearly screamed when I saw Lauren lying on her back, tied to the bed.
Her face was swollen, her skin discolored and bloody. She wore only her bra and panties, and there were slashes across her stomach and thighs from Papa’s belt. The smell of urine and other bodily fluids was so flagrant I couldn’t help but gag.
“Allegra!” Jenny shouted when she saw me.
I glanced around the room until I saw her inside the closet. Her wrists were tied over her head to one of the built-in bars. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears, and I could see a handprint-size bruise on her right cheek, but other than that, my quick appraisal didn’t detect any other injuries.
“Allegra, please help us!” she sobbed. “Mamma’s sick. She keeps talking gibberish.”
“Shut up!” Papa commanded, and he threw me down. My hands came up too late to keep my face from hitting the carpeted floor. “No talking.”
“You shut up!” Jenny shot back. “Dante is going to kill you for doing this,” she threatened boldly. “Jarvis will tear you apart.”
“Jarvis is minus his head right now, little brat,” Papa sneered. “I doubt he will be much help to your precious Dante.”
“You’re a monster,” she screamed at him. “I hate you. I hate you. I hate you!”
Her bravery only got her a backhand to the face. The force of it was so powerful, her head bounced off the wall behind her. “I’ll beat some manners into you, you little cunt.” He raised his fist, ready to strike her again.
“Stop!” I cried. “Don’t hurt her. I’ll do whatever you want, Papa, but don’t hurt her. She’s an innocent little girl.”
“She’s the bastard child of Arlo De Stefano,” he spat. “She should have been drowned the day she was born.” But he surprised me when he turned away from her and focused his eyes on me. “Ah, my darling daughter. Where have you been this past week? Whoring yourself out to Dante?” He crouched down in front of me, his eyes manic as he grabbed the front of my shirt and lifted me until barely an inch separated our faces. “Did you spread your legs for him like your whore mother did Arlo?”
Knowing better than to actually answer him, I kept my lips pressed together. He slung me back, hard, and my shoulder hit one of the bedposts Lauren was tied to. The impact shook the bed and made her cry out in both terror and pain.
“No!” she screamed. “No, you can’t! I…watcher grams than’t take eggster…” The gibberish only continued, and I knew something was very, very wrong with her.
Papa, irritated by her, stood and grabbed the belt I only then noticed from the nightstand. He struck her once across the stomach, the leather snapping like a whip against her flesh and making her scream in agony. “Be quiet, you fucking whore.”
I pushed myself backward until I felt the wall at my back and sat up. Forcing myself to breathe normally, I glanced around the room frantically. I couldn’t let him kill Lauren or Jenny, but I didn’t see anything I could use that would help me get them out of there…
Now, as I sat in the chair Papa pushed me into after Dante’s call, I was still looking for a usable weapon to get us the hell away from here. Papa was in one of the other rooms, but the door was slightly ajar, and I could hear him yelling at one of the other men. I wasn’t sure why he was yelling, but they weren’t making him very happy. Every few moments, I heard a mumbled male reply but couldn’t hear what was being said.
“Allegra,” Jenny whispered. “Hey, look.”
Turning my gaze on her, she nodded her head at the other end of the closet. “There’s something here you could use for a weapon.”
I jumped up and ran to where she was motioning. There was a toolbox open and several screwdrivers lying inside. I grabbed two of them and rushed back to my chair, placing my new weapons under my thighs to hide from Papa just as he came back into the room.
“De Stefano will be here soon,” Papa informed us in that eerily calm voice. The fury that had been present only moments before as he yelled at whomever was completely gone. He pulled his gun from the holster under his suit jacket, checking the clip.
The sound of the springs snapping as he checked the chamber made Jenny whimper, and I had to clench my teeth to keep from doing the same. I heard a car door shut right outside, and my stomach bottomed out.
Dante was here.
But I wasn’t glad he came. I didn’t want him anywhere near my father when Papa was in this kind of mood. He was unpredictable, and there was no way of knowing who else was in the house or how many guns they might have. I couldn’t handle it if something happened to Dante.
An evil grin spread across Papa’s lips. “Showtime,” he murmured in a singsong tone and left the room. There was a long pause where the entire house seemed oddly quiet.
A loud crash broke the silence and made Jenny and me both cry out, afraid for Dante. It sounded like a huge fight was going on. There was a pained groan, followed by something heavy hitting a wall so hard the house seemed to shake, so I didn’t immediately hear the tap on the window.
It came again though, and I snapped my eyes to it. Anya’s face greeted me, and she motioned for me to lift the window. Leaving the screwdrivers on the chair, I ran to the window and unlocked it so I could let her in. She jumped through the window easily, making it look effortless, and pulled out a Glock with a silencer attached to it.
“Are you hurt?” she demanded in a barely audible whisper.
“No more than normal,” I whispered back. “Help me get Jenny out.” Expecting her to follow me, I ran into the closet and crouched down beside my sister. “I don’t know where the key is to the cuffs. Can you get her out of them?”
“Not a problem.” She pulled something from her pocket and picked the locks on the cuffs. Seconds later, they unsnapped, and Jenny groaned in pain as her arms were lowered.
“Come on, let’s go. Dante can get your mother.” Taking Jenny by the elbow, Anya went back to the window. Helping the girl out, she turned back to me, but I shook my head.
“I’m not leaving him.”
Her face darkened. “Yes, you are. He’s a big boy. He can take care of himself just fine.”
“No. I can’t—” A gun discharging had both our heads twisting in that direction. Without thinking, I ran back to the chair and grabbed one of the screwdrivers, racing in the direction of the gunshot.
The living room looked like a tornado had come through it and tossed every piece of furniture across the room. There was a broken coffee table, shattered lamps, and the couch was upside down. A man I didn’t recognize was lying on the floor on his stomach, a pool of blood already seeping out of his lifeless body.
Papa stood on one side of the room, his gun lifted and aimed at Dante’s head. Dante, however, was without a gun. Blood dripped from a gash on his left brow, leaking into his eyes and making him squint as it blinded him.
“I’ve waited a lifetime for this moment,” Papa laughed. “Now it’s here, and I want to savor every last minute of it. The last of the De Stefano linage will be eliminated, and I’ll never have to think about that bastard Arlo again.”
“Do it,” Dante goaded him. “Fucking do it, motherfucker. Better make it count, though. Because you’re only going to get one shot at me before I kill you with my bare hands.”
I saw the gun waver, then Papa’s hand steadied, and his finger jerked on the trigger. I didn’t think or dither. Dante was right there, only a foot away, and I jumped in front of him, putting my back to Papa as I wrapped my arms around Dante just as the sound of the gun firing exploded throughout the room.
The searing pain that blazed through my shoulder was so intense my knees gave out. Dante caught me as I began to fall to the floor, his eyes full of shock as my blood spilled down my back and over his hands. “No!” he bellowed. “No, Allegra baby, no.”
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“Love you,” I whispered, fighting to keep my eyes open as the feeling of not being able to get enough air began to overtake me. The world around me narrowed, as if a dark blanket had been spread over everything but what was right in front of me.
“No!” Papa shouted, and the sound that came from him sounded sincerely agonized. “Allegra, no!”
The screwdriver was still in my hand, and I pressed it into Dante’s. “Do…it,” I gasped out. “End…it…now.”
Frowning, he looked down at the screwdriver then back to my face. He was beginning to blur before my eyes. “Do…it,” I repeated and coughed. The sound was wet, and it made my lungs burn. Something damp coated my lips, and when I licked them, it tasted metallic.
“Allegra, I’m sorry.” Papa was sobbing now as he came forward. I looked up just as he started to kneel beside me.
“Do it!”
The last thing I saw was Dante driving the screwdriver into my father’s neck. Blood instantly erupted from his jugular, and Papa grabbed at the wound, screaming in pain as he fell on his face at Dante’s feet. I let out a relieved exhale just as the world began to go completely black.
It was over.
Papa was dead.
He couldn’t ever hurt me again.
Chapter 22
Dante
The goddamn doctors weren’t telling me shit, and I was about to lose my damn mind.
Three hours. That was how long it had been since the cops had broken down the door of Gio’s hideout and found me on my knees with two dead men at my feet and Allegra dying in my arms. An ambulance was called, cops threw question after question at me, none of which I was about to answer anytime soon. Someone walked down the hall and found Lauren. Another ambulance was called.
“What happened here?” some detective asked after the guys in uniforms stopped trying to get an answer from me. “Talk to me, boy, or I’m gonna be putting you in cuffs and locking you up before the EMTs even get here to take care of this girl.”