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His companion laughed from the passenger seat.
They were both armed. He’d seen their holstered guns. They’d been part of the group who had ambushed them on the yacht. Capable, dangerous men. Where they took him next determined if he’d survive to see the sunrise.
“Who do you work for?” Francis asked.
They didn’t reply.
The car rumbled from the industrial area into thinning traffic along the old streets of Cartagena. “Where are you taking me?”
No reply.
“Do you work for Giancarlo? You’re Battaglia men, honorable men, not DeSica men?”
Nothing.
He sat back and watched the old city give way to tumbledown shacks and shantytowns, then even those flimsy structures began to thin out, giving way to overgrown lands and unkempt palms. Darkness was setting in too. How long had they been traveling now? Hours?
This road did not bode well.
Francis rubbed his thumb across the burn on his palm. “Every time you pray, you’ll think of me, and of how you will never cross the Battaglia,” Giancarlo had said when he’d put that burn there. Francis could still smell his burning flesh. Nobody crossed the Battaglia, crossed Giancarlo.
Neo must have done some kind of deal with Vitari, promising to keep Francis safe, but whatever the deed was, Vitari had no choice. They could kill Francis and not tell Vitari, then finish Vitari off too. That was how these men worked. They used people and discarded them.
But there was another way…
Darkness had blanketed the land when the driver pulled the car off the road, then down a gravel track. The wheels bumped through deep ruts.
“Here,” the driver’s companion said.
The driver stopped the car and both men climbed out.
Headlights highlighted stark, motionless palm trees.
They were going to kill him. Right here. In the middle of nowhere. Nobody would find him for days, weeks even. “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven. God, help me.”
An angel wasn’t coming to save him this time. He was on his own.
The rear door opened, and the bigger of the two men reached in, grabbed Francis by the arm, and hauled him out, almost dropping him to the ground beside some kind of drainage ditch. He rightened himself on his feet. “Wait?—”
The big man shoved him in the back, lurching him forward. “Move.”
“Wait, don’t do this!” He stumbled along the uneven ground toward where the headlights pierced the gloom. “I’m the Battaglia priest. Giancarlo wants me alive.” He tasted his heart in his throat. A few more steps, and they’d shoot him in the back.
He turned around and saw cold, hard, detached determination on both their faces.
The big man drew his gun.
Francis wet his lips. “Neo is lying to you, to Giancarlo. He works for Sasha Zhokov, the Russian. Sasha is behind all of this.” It sounded like insanity, like the desperate, ranting words of a man about to die. He sounded like Charles Montague during his last few seconds alive.
The big man gestured with the gun. “On your knees, Padre.”
“Oh God.” Francis dropped to his knees and interlocked his hands behind his head. His vision swam, his head and chest thumping. “I helped Giancarlo. Call him, tell him I want to talk.”
“Padre, the kill order came from the don,” the big man grumbled, clearly bored.
No, that couldn’t be true. Francis choked on a sob. Oh Lord, he was going to die, and his last words to Vitari had been awful. It couldn’t end like this, not like this. There had to be something he could do, something he could say. “Please, don’t…” It wasn’t enough. He knew that. And he knew these men wouldn’t listen to begging. How many others had they killed like this? Francis was just another mess to clean up.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. Sorry for all he’d done, for all the mistakes he’d made, for not being good enough. If he’d been a better man, a better priest, he could have stopped this. Perhaps this was all he deserved. But he’d been so sure there was more to it. Why would God send him his angel just for it to end like this? What was the fucking point in saving him only to have him die in a ditch?
