Page 94 of Venomous Throne

A rapid whir filled the space.

In the pause, I finally asked, “Where do Bonetti and his four other capos sleep?”

Hope filled those red-streaked eyes for the briefest of seconds when I opened my mouth. But the question quickly changed hope to a ripe, stinking fear.

“I don’t know,” he wailed. “That’s above my pay grade!”

Funny. The other roaches claimed the same thing. One of them had to know something. It didn’t stand to reason that the wanna-be boss kept his locationthatmuch of a secret. Usually, I was adept at finding my targets.

Not so in this case.

And whereas before I would have relished the challenge, it grated to no end that this inner conflict in the Moretti Famiglia couldn’t be brought to a more swift end.

“Let’s see if that’s true,” I offered.

The drill whizzed with fiendish delight before the bit found something soft and warm to chew a hole through.

***

As I cleaned up the mess, a burst of gratitude spread through me. It was such a foreign feeling that I stopped to consider it. I was grateful for the original contract that brought me to Chicago. If it hadn’t been for that job, my world would be dark and lonely.

It’d been so long since a contract gave me pause. I rarely took revenge jobs anymore. They reeked of amateur emotion and messy aftermaths, nothing like the clean satisfaction I craved from a perfectly executed challenge. But when the original client requested the best, when they said that others had failed, I was intrigued. That in itself was a rarity these days. I found myself unable to delete the encrypted request. To think, my partner almost didn’t pass the intel to me.

I was glad Chase did.

Coming to the Windy City led me straight to her. I owed the original client a debt of gratitude for bringing me here, to the damn labyrinth that was Chicago, because after years of drifting from country to country, job to job, and existing as a code name between passports, someone had inadvertently thrown me into the orbit of the sweetest, kindest soul in existence.

Isabella didn’t belong to any world I knew, neither strictly above nor wholly below. She had been an algorithmic anomaly in my work. She had the making of an agent of wrath, dispatching pain and death, but just as quickly, she jumped to help anyone and everyone, as though they were all hers to care for.

Even a monster like me.

I became not her stalker but her shadow. It wasn’t enough anymore. No…to protect her, I would have to step into her world.

That was what tonight had been. What the past several nights had been. Catching her enemies, gleaning information, and trying to act. With a frustrated sigh, I pocketed the bag of teeth to be dumped in random garbage receptacles. I flicked a couple of matches against a box and dropped them on the flammable trail. This dump would go up in smoke. The bank and insurance agency would do their thing, a random body wouldbe discovered, but it would never be linked back to the Chicago Underworld.

I have to do more.

But it was a decision I fought with every fiber of my being. I didn’t belong with others. That was why I continued to haunt the dark, to operate from a place of discretion, to spend time with her only in the midnight hours.

I tried to leave, to do right by her. But I was finished after that burning, unrelenting look saw straight into my blackened soul. She asked me to come back.

One request, and I returned.

Against my better judgment, I reasoned that I was already in her life. Threats loomed over her, greying her days with their heavy clouds of violence. At least they weren’t my creation.

“Resisting her pull nearly cost her everything,” I snarled, sliding into the unmarked vehicle and driving away as flames bloomed in the rearview.

The local news called it a freak accident.

The police covered it up as gang violence gone wrong—something their politics didn’t want the public to know.

I called it a failure.

My failure.

Leaving Chicago was never an option now. This city was mine until every threat to Isabella evaporated. As long as she sought to rule one of the criminal organizations, that was never going to happen.

Driving aimlessly, I considered my next moves. There was a dead man breathing in this city, and a bullet in my gun with his name on it.