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They were going to die. There was nowhere to hide, no cover. Those men would keep shooting until the yacht caught fire. Surrender was their only option.
“Vitari, stop!”
Maybe he hadn’t heard over the noise of the yacht and helicopter. He tucked himself in behind one of the yacht’s upright pillars, aimed at the helicopter, and let loose a rattle of gunfire. It seemed to work. The helicopter pulled up, but then swooped around again, nose pointed parallel to the yacht. The gunman leaned out the door, rifle aimed at Vitari.
Francis lunged for the yacht controls. He yanked the throttle down, killing the engine revs, abruptly diving the yacht’s nose forward. The yacht rocked, and the helicopter overshot.
It would swing around again in seconds.
This had to end. They were sitting ducks.
Francis dashed for Vitari and skidded to his knees beside him. “Surrender.”
“What?” Vitari pressed his back to the fiberglass wall, already peppered with splintered bullet holes.
“We can’t win this.”
“They’ll kill us.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Pointing guns and firing generally means they want us dead.”
“Vitari, please. Don’t aim at them when they come back around.”
“Some of us don’t have God on our side, Padre. You think they came all this way to talk? I betrayed the Battaglia. I sold my father out to his enemy. There’s only one way this ends?—”
“Angel!” a voice blared through a megaphone, then reeled off a string of Italian. Francis only heard one word that mattered: Battaglia.
All the fight and rage deflated from Vitari. He slid down the pillar and thumped his head back against it. “Fuck.”
“What did they say?”
Vitari blinked at him, swallowed, and closed his eyes. “We’re done.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Vitari
He dropped the rifle and kicked it out onto the deck, then raised his hands. A rope spilled from the helicopter’s open door. Three black-clad men abseiled onto the main deck.
They were Battaglia elite, sent by his father. They’d probably been on their tails since they’d fled Panama.
One of the men found Francis inside and dragged him to his feet, another stayed with Vitari, and the third headed to the bridge, where he gunned the motors and adjusted their course. The yacht engines roared anew, now under Battaglia control.
“Where are they taking us?” Francis asked.
“Cartagena.”
“Is that bad?”
He couldn’t answer him, didn’t want to look at him. All of this was fucking bad, not least the fact the man he loved, the man whom he’d given his heart, had betrayed him to his father.
The elite pros sat them at opposite ends of the couch and barked orders in Italian not to move. Vitari didn’t feel much like moving anyway, ever since Francis had told him he’d fucked him. Why had he done it, why had he told his father how he’d gone to Sasha? Neo would have told Giancarlo Vitari was alive, that wasn’t the issue, but Giancarlo hadn’t known how deep the betrayal went. Now he knew everything, every step Vitari had taken, and not just because he’d been tracking Francis’s phone.
Francis had told him.
Had Francis done it to protect himself, to trade Vitari for some kind of loyalty to Giancarlo? What exactly had happened between them when Giancarlo had burned his hand? What the fuck had been going through Francis’s head to make him fuck over Vitari so thoroughly?
