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Roni whimpered, making him look at her small form. She didn’t deserve this. She really didn’t deserve this. She was an amazing girl, and the closest thing he had to a true friend. His first lover. She made him laugh. She didn’t deserve these ropes and tape.
His heart clenched, processing everything he had been told and everything he was seeing. He had to get her out. Somehow.
“Leo tells me you’ve gotten excellent with knives,” his father’s voice cut to the desperation filling him. Dante focused on his words, his heart slamming as the words dawned on him.
“Let her go, father,” he looked to the man, his eyes burning. “I swear fealty to you. I swear to follow every command you make. I swear to never see her again. Just please, let her go. I’m begging you.”
“Don’t beg!” his father yelled at him, grabbing him by the arm. “You are a Maroni! Maroni’s don’t beg, not even on their deathbeds. Do you understand?”
Dante nodded, letting his father shake his arm. Fear filled him at how the situation was unfolding. Huffing out a breath, his father cooled himself down, looking back at Dante again.
“Take this as another lesson,” he continued speaking, almost in a gentle voice. “Always have the upper hand when you’re bargaining. Right now, you have nothing. I am the one holding the power. What happens to this girl is under my control. What happens to your brother is under my control. You want him to get the help he needs? Kill the girl. A life for a life.”
Dante breathed out slowly, his mind racing to find a way, find a loophole, something, anything.
Nothing.
Fuck.
There had to be something.
Roni whimpered again.
Dante went to kneel before her, in a way he had kneeled before her countless times and saw her tears drench her face, words trapped between them. His head dropped to her lap, his hands gripping her chair.
“You don’t kill her,” his father’s voice said in that same even tone, “I’ll give her to the men who will have her first and kill her later. She will suffer. You, on the other hand, can give her mercy, my boy.”
No.
No.
He couldn’t. This was his fault. He never should have gotten involved with her. So many years they had spent together, and this is what it had come to.
“You have two minutes to choose.”
Two minutes.
One hundred and twenty seconds.
Suddenly, Dante could hear every beat of his heart pounding in his head, the blood rushing to his ears, ticking like a time bomb, every second closer to detonation.
He looked up at the wide, frightened blue eyes of the young girl who had dared to stay with him, knowing what he would choose. He couldn’t let her suffer, not at the hands of his father’s men. He couldn’t let her die like that.
He couldn’t do shit. He was a helpless little asshole who’d thought he could get away with playing with fire, without burning himself or his lover.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed in helpless frustration, getting up to pick an empty chair, throwing it across the room.
He looked back at his father, his heart racing. “Don’t make me do this.”
“One minute,” came the reply.
Grabbing fistfuls of his hair, Dante shook, howling at the ceiling in his helplessness, not wanting to do the one thing he knew he had to do to spare her.
“Thirty seconds.”
Tension climbed up in the room.
Exhaling out a deep breath, Dante slowly let a sense of calm wash over him. Without a word, he walked to his father and took the knife from the inside of his coat pocket, the little weight feeling like a rock in his hand. “You unleash this beast, father, do it knowing that one day, it will kill you too. This is your last chance to stop this madness.”
