AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“We can’t win this one, Lastra, but we can make the comeback stronger.”
Outside, the dusk is casting shadows across the runway and drenching the sky in weak Rioja red. It makes me think of the highlights in her hair. Makes me think of the way I wrapped my fists around them as we fucked the desperation out of each other; how I still replay these moments in my head every damn night until my cock is raw, and my hand is aching.
I’m coming for you, dove girl.
Sliding my cigarettes into my inside jacket pocket, I knock the rest of my whiskey back, noting the dried blood on my wrist.
Murder stains.Badges of dishonour.
The prison guards didn’t even question me about Zaccaria’s murder before they turned me loose. They were too busy sitting in their counting houses, counting out Santiago’s backhanders. Windows of opportunity are fragile. One crack, and you can punch a hole straight through them. One bribe, and you can find yourself alone in a prison cell with a makeshift blade and one of the men who ripped your whole life apart.
Thecapo dei capihad finally broken his own rules and left Italy, and Interpol caught up with him in a villa outside Cannes. Soon after, I found myself doing time in a different prison a hundred miles away.
I’d let myself get caught.I’d seen my opportunity.
With Aiden’s influence, I was transferred toLa Bastille, and for the next couple of months the man who’d stared out a traumatised kid in the back of an SUV fourteen years ago, had that very same kid staring back at him across a metal stairwell.
One difference: I was a killer now who didn’t know the meaning of mercy.
Zaccaria knew he was a dead man the second our eyes met. He knew the Red Compass was my four points of revenge.
Four betrayals.
Four lives to end.
Tommaso Zaccaria
Guido Rossi.
Cian O’Sullivan.
Kirill Semenov.
Every single one of those bastards had hurt my family and the woman I love. As payback, I was planning to make them suffer the kind of deaths dark legends were made of.
Starting with him.
* * *
There’sa car waiting for me on the tarmac by the jet. Exiting the airport, I head North-West on the MA-21 towards a small town on the outskirts of Córdoba
This is where Viper’s been hiding out for the past decade, cooking up a coke storm, while executing local paedos and scumbags on the side. Acting like a vigilante for a sister he couldn’t save, who was then forced to marry the worst of them.
I’ve been keeping tabs on him, as much as he’s been keeping tabs on me, from our respective corners in Europe. Feasting on scraps of information as we rattle the bars of our cages. Zaccaria had forced him into exile too, pressing his bony finger against the only pressure point Viper had left after O’Sullivan’s Family Razor execution spree:
Ada.
Everything comes full circle back to beautiful, smashed up, brave-as-fuck Ada.
Her photograph is weighing heavy in my pocket again. On the flight over, I couldn’t stop looking at it. Couldn’t stop touching it. So many women have tried to take her place over the years and all of them have failed.
Didn’t want them.
Didn’t want to try.
Instead, I found my release in every other kind of sin. I gambled away millions, only to make a hundred million more. I drank bars dry. I murdered, blackmailed, and blew a hole in my septum with all the coke I snorted.
Nothing touched the sting…theincompletenessI felt without her. Ada’s face was always present in the spaces before dawn, haunting me like a living ghost I had no interest in exorcizing.
