AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“She’s about an hour away. Arrived about thirty minutes ago, and it looks like…” I zoom in on the location map but can’t tell exactly what type of environment she’s in. “All I know are the coordinates. I’m sending it to all of you now, but we need to move.”
“Not so fast,” my father says, shaking his head when I look at him. “You don’t think we’re going to go in on the cartel without a plan? Without any idea of what’s happening behind those doors, do you?”
“How do you know it’s the cartel?” my mother asks, fingering the necklace similar to the one that just gave us a real shot at finding my girl and getting her home.
Unless…
I refuse to allow my mind to go to that dark of a place.
I fucking refuse.
“Because the Amatos are in the other direction. Their territory expands to the south, and whoever took her headed west of the city. Sure, they could be doing it to throw us off, but if they don’t know we have tracking equipment on her, then why bother fucking around? They wouldn’t. Whoever has her took her to a place they know. And Amatos don’t know shit west of here.” My father nods as if willing us to accept his reasoning, but I’ve already assumed as much.
Save her.
Two words, and my spine stiffens.
The voice in my mind isn’t my own.
It’s hers.
Julissa’s voice. The sweet sound of her inflection, a calm, even tone in her words. A voice I’d know anywhere.
Save her.
Save her like I couldn’t save you, I think to myself, refusing to utter the words out loud.
Adrenaline pumps through my veins, but my racing heartbeat evens out, and a strange, eerie calm washes over me when I realize what I need to do.
And it’s not act like an irrational dickhead.
“Leo,” my father says. “Put a call in to the Amatos’s consigliere and tell him we want a meeting immediately. There’s absolutely zero time to waste, and they need to meet us at the conference hall on Center. Neutral territory. Where we met with the Fiore family to discuss allyship a few months back. Tell him to get his top men to the spot, and we’ll be there in twenty.”
Once my father is finished with orders, I move to unlock one of the hidden safes I have scattered all throughout my home, pull out two extra weapons, and place them strategically on my body.
Then, I heave my front door open, letting it slam into the wall behind me as I head toward my father’s vehicle.
I call back toward my father as I descend the steps. “You drivin’, boss?”
My heart fluttersas I come to. I immediately feel something foreign on my cheek, something hard against my skin. I can’t touch it because my hands are tied behind my back, but my mind flashes back to when Remi and I were thrown in here and one of the men whipped me with his metal pocket watch because he thought I was trying to run.
Which is bullshit because I didn’t attempt to flee. I’m not an idiot. The bastard just wanted an excuse to hurt me.
I also wouldn’t ever leave Remi here to pay for my sins.
What I can only assume is a dried laceration on my face is so raw and painful that my stomach swirls. I have no idea how long we’ve been in this empty storage unit, but I know it feels like hours. Long enough for my blood to stop running and dry up, that’s for sure.
I try to carefully reach Remi, even just to nudge her a bit to stir her, but I fail. My ankles are bound, too. Even if I could reach her, she’s knocked out; a different man punched her so hard in the side of the head that she fell to the cement and was out cold, instantly. Her arm is very obviously broken—it’s bent in a way an arm should definitely not bend, black and blue coloring her beautiful skin.
I check every few minutes to be sure she’s breathing, that the rise and fall of her chest is happening without fail, but my mind keeps wandering to how hard his fist connected with her skull. I’m terrified she has internal bleeding. The sound of his fist hitting her head plays over and over again in my mind, making me nauseous.
I try to get a better look around the space we’re in. I wasn’t coherent long enough when they first threw us in here. The unit is probably no bigger than about the length and width of a sedan. Three industrial light fixtures hang from the ceiling, and for some reason, my mind focuses on how perfectly they’re aligned down the middle of the unit. Even their spacing looks flawless.
I’m clearly trying to think of anything and everything to take my mind off the situation I’m in.
I’m a tough bitch. I’ve had to be to survive this long in my family. I may have been protected from outsiders, but from the inner workings of my family? From those closest to me? I was just another pawn in their fucked-up game.
Being tough now isn’t going to get me far. I’ve already pieced enough of this together. Dante and I both knew either my family or The Blood Syndicate would hunt me down. I thought we’d have more time before their retaliation. Dante, his men, and his father were working on something behind the scenes. We just didn’t work quickly enough.
