AllFreeNovel
Share Us
That’s what I thought.
The closer we come to the house, the more volatile I get. My men wait outside in the garden, their breaths making white puffs in the darkness. The powerful beams of tactical flashlights cut through the forest and up into the velvet-black sky. The air has a distinct smell of gunpowder and smoke mixed with the fresh scent of pine needles.
“Come with me,” I tell Enzo.
He blanches.
One of the men walks up to meet us. The slight shake of his head and the hard glint in his eyes as he juts his chin toward the forest tells me my men are dead.
The man guarding the front door nods when we reach him.
“In the kitchen,” he says.
My ribcage constricts around my lungs, making it hard to breathe when I clamber over the broken door and enter. The lounge smells of her perfume. The whole house does. I always liked the way her presence seemed to have pulled into the very woodwork of the house. It feels permanent. I like to believe nothing will ever wash that smell away, not the bleach the men will soon be using or the stench of blood that reaches my nostrils when I step into the kitchen.
The furniture isn’t disturbed. Nothing is broken except for the doors.
And my wife.
One of my men guards the back door. He stands in the doorframe, smoking a cigarette, which he puts out when he sees me.
I take it all in—the three bodies on the floor each with a bullet hole between the eyes. Only Roch can shoot like that. He hasn’t lost his sniper’s aim. I slide a gaze over a puddle of thick, sticky-black blood. The pool is intact. It’s Roch’s blood. I force myself to look at the floor where a struggle is painted in more blood. The picture is like a snow angel drawn in red. I force myself to imagine how that picture was made, to live the horror through Sabella’s eyes, ears, and skin, and it’s like a thousand white-hot pokers that skewer my heart.
Enzo gags behind me. I don’t tell him to wait outside. He needs to see his work, what he did. I take my time, imprinting every detail in my mind. The broken pieces of a phone that lie next to the table catch my gaze.
I only turn to the guard when I’ve stored everything in my head so that the reminder can haunt me forever. “Did the chopper arrive?”
“Fifteen minutes ago, sir. They touched down in Bastia. We’re waiting for an update from the hospital.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Surprisingly, yes.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “Roch has always been a tough bastard.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He took out those guys.” He spits on the ground. “He managed to take out the three of them before Marziale shot back, otherwise that piece of shit would’ve been dead too. Roch did wound the bastard though. Shot him in the shoulder.”
“Did Roch say why he happened to be here?”
“He said Mrs. Russo called him on a phone he gave her. She didn’t speak to him, but he could hear there was a fight, so he came. He told me you’d want to know. Said that he took his off-road motorbike from the village.”
Roch lives in the village. He teaches at the local school. I kept tabs on him after dismissing him. You never know. Is that why Nico and Enzo were so insistent that I should’ve killed him? They understood that he was faithful and that he’d be loyal to the end?
How he gave Sabella a phone is a mystery. The only logical explanation is that he did it when Sabella went to the village, because my men would’ve told me if Roch came here. She somehow managed to slip away undetected. She went to a small town where the people despise my family and ended up making friends. Why else would all those people crowd the corridor in front of her hospital room?
The guard hands me a phone. “We found this in the dressing room.”
I turn it over. It’s the phone I gave her. I wake up the screen and press on the green button of the only dialable number. My number. A recording comes on, stating that the number doesn’t exist.
Motherfucking bastards. I close my fingers around the phone until the edges dig into my palm. “Anything else I should know?”
“We checked the house. The other rooms are clear. They came in through the front and the back.”
To block Sabella’s only exits. My instruction is practical, omitting the emotions churning inside me. “Get this cleaned up and have the damage repaired.”
“Yes, sir.”
I go out via the back with Enzo in tow.
