Spada goes red from his collar up. His men's hands close fully around their holsters now.
Ours mirror the motion half a second later.
"We want compensation," Spada hisses. "Or this gets ugly fast."
"Compensation." I let the word roll in my mouth. "For your pathetic, idiotic lies? How about a fuck no."
Spada reaches across the table and pours himself another glass of wine.
"Then you leave us no choice." He takes a slow sip. "We'll retrieve it ourselves."
"Like. Fuck. You. Are."
This has gone too far. The patience we extended today made them brazen instead of grateful. That was our mistake. Won't be repeating it.
My bullet catches Spada's hand right as it lifts the wine glass. The glass shatters against the table, wine and blood mixing into the same red mess.
His men react instantly. One of them gets a shot off wild, panicked, and it catches the wine rack behind me instead. Pathetic. They couldn't even land their one free shot.
Ilya rings out two shots, and the two men both drop where they stand. He's already pivoting for a third target.
Ilya has always been a beast.
I put a second round in the man closest to Spada, then a third into the one still fumbling with his holster. They are pathetically bad; it’s almost depressing. The men who were stationed to ambush us from behind the bar we cleared out an hour ago for exactly this reason are screaming in terror—we aremuch better at this game than Spada. Always assume it goes bad, always have men stationed where the enemy won't think to look.
Spada's clutching what’s left of his hand to his chest, and I step over his men to level the gun at his forehead.
"You had one job today. Sit across from me and not insult my intelligence. You couldn't even fucking manage that."
That's when one of ours pushes through the door behind me, breathing hard.
"Pakhan. I got paged from the estate. It's bad."
The estate.
My Bratva. My people.
My woman.
Everything in me goes very cold.
"Define bad," I say, not turning from Spada.
"They wouldn't say more over the line. Just that it's bad, and that we need to come now."
Spada is trying to crawl away, and I put my boot on his stomach to stop him. He reminds me of a cockroach.
"You get to live," I hiss. "For now. Because I don't have time to finish this properly. Mutilate you like you fucking deserve. But we are not done. The second I remove the threat from my Bratva… I’m hunting you down. And the way you die depends entirely on what I find there."
I holster the gun and run for the door. I don’t worry about Spada escaping; he could go to the other side of the globe and I’d still find him.
"Pakhan." Ilya falls into step beside me. "Whatever it is—we handle it."
"If anything happened to her," I say, and don't finish the sentence, because we both know I’d lose my mind.
I'm about to paint this entire city red.
Chapter FIFTEEN
