“If, by some miracle, you were to bludgeon us three to death, you still wouldn’t escape. The men outside who were supposed to be looking after you? About half of them aren’t with us anymore. Unfortunately.” He tilts his head, mock-sad. “The other half are with us, however. And they want you to come quietly.”
My eyes sting. Blood rushes into my ears. But I can only think of one thing.
“Where’s Raffaele?”
His smile twists into an evil grin.
“Word is Mr. D’Amico’s having a brotherly little reunion tonight, Miss Mendez. Mr. Moreno arranged the whole wholesome occasion himself, bless him. He sends his regards.”
Victor.
Of course, Victor. Of course, the meeting was bait. Of course, we aren’t the side of the chess board being protected tonight. And now Raffaele is sitting in a warehouse somewhere figuring out the trap isn’t the trap he thought it was. I am the trap.
I’m the trap.
“Is he dead?”
“That’s above my pay grade, ma’am. My job’s you.”
I run.
I don’t think. I don’t plan. My feet are moving before the men have closed the distance, and I’m going for the bedroom door because the doorway behind them goes to the hallway and the hallway goes to the back stair and the back stair goes to the garden and the garden goes to the dunes and the dunes go to the ocean and beyond that there’s dark and there’soutandoutis what I want.
I get past the first one. I think it surprises him.
I don’t get past the second one.
He catches me at the doorway. He must be twice my size, and he wraps an arm around my waist, easily lifting me off the floor. I scream. The scream goes into a hand that’s suddenly over my mouth. The hand tastes like cigarettes and metal and the iron of someone else’s blood. I bite.
I bitehard.
He yells. I do too, into his palm, with the part of my mouth still free. He yanks the hand back.
The slap is open-handed and across my jaw. The room tips.
“Stupid bitch.”
I hear the older one sigh.
“Don’t damage her face.”
The last thing I’m aware of is the weight of something coming down on the back of my skull.
Then the floor.
Then nothing.
34
RAFFAELE
I know before I cut the engine.
The gate’s open, pulled half off its hinge, the iron twisted where someone backed a truck through it. The wrought-iron rose at the top of the right pillar is snapped clean off, lying in the grass twenty feet down the drive.
The house is dark.
No porch light. No motion sensors triggering. No movement at any of the windows I can see.
