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I was trapped again, locked inside of a box.
Chapter 44
Liam
“Where is she?” I urged, bursting into the building.
I was furious. The cars parked outside were in the middle of two warehouses, so we split up to cover more ground, each one of us trying our luck with a different one.
The dirty, roofless space I raided was empty. My Jamie was nowhere to be found. I didn’t even need to complete the search to know she wasn’t there. Those two gunshots were telling enough.
Two bodies littered the ground, bathed in their own blood, each with a hole precisely in the middle of their foreheads. It almost seemed like the man had a laser beam attached to his gun.
Clean shots with no fucking room for error. Don Amato was still at the top of his game.
The stench of death was old but clear, amplified by the humidity inside a place that had been vacant for some time now. I scanned the place with a quick glance, noticing the lines of gutters on the floor and the hooks that hung from a rail right above them.
A slaughterhouse. How fucking fitting! Somehow the weight of the air told me there were more than just pigs being killed here. These walls surely had much more macabre stories to tell.
Don Amato was holding his wife at gunpoint, yet she kept her silence, probably thinking her husband didn’t have what it took to put a bullet in her brain.
But I had no such attachment, and pressing that trigger would almost feel like pleasure.
In a few wide strides, I reached them, placing my own gun against Mrs. Amato’s head.
“I’m not going to ask again. Where. Is. She?”
“Right here,” Mercier said, on queue with the forklift that drove into the wide space, a wooden crate precariously placed on the very tip of the metallic forks. I heard his voice but couldn’t see where the fucker was. “If I drop the crate from this height, do you think she’ll survive? How many splinters would pierce her body? Where will they pierce her?” The forklift stopped, and Mercier appeared from behind it. The sick grin on his face told me he wasn’t playing. The fucker would actually do it. “It’s a gamble, really, and I’m an all-in kinda man.”
The forklift was driven by an armed man I didn’t know. I dared a look over to Don Amato, and the look on his face told me he knew him. One of his, maybe? But with whom did his loyalty lie? I sure hoped it was to his Capo and not the wife.
The forks jerked, and both Don Amato and I put our hands up in surrender, Mrs. Amato taking the opportunity to run for her life.
The wife then.
“Let her go,” I plead, trying with all my strength to sound submissive while my blood boiled in my veins.
Threatening my girl was like feeding lava to a volcano. Yet I had to reel in my demons and make him believe I’d behave if he put her down.
“She’s innocent in all this,” I spoke again, trying to lure Mercier into the open space. “Jamie has never hurt a soul in her life. Just, please, put her down, and you can have me.”
“She is innocent. And that’s exactly my favorite flavor. Don’t be presumptuous. I don’t want you. It’s always been about her. So you gentlemen are going to watch while I place her inside my car and drive off, or she dies right here, and her spilled blood will be on you.”
“You don’t need to do this, Mercier.” Don Amato tried.
“You’re wasting precious time. That crate is lined with foil. Soon enough, your precious little girl will be out of oxygen. So please, Mr. Dornier, Mr. Amato, keep on trying to convince me not to kill her while you do it yourself.”
Fuck.
There was no reasoning with a madman. So maybe controlling my own madness wasn’t the right move here.
My men were standing outside waiting for a signal, after all. Mercier was outnumbered. I just had to figure out a way to keep Jamie safe while taking him out for good.
I shut my eyes, putting my hands down and cracking my neck to both sides.
Fight fire with fucking fire.
“You know what? You’re on your own, Don Amato. Save your precious daughter or don’t. I don’t give a fuck. I have more pressing matters to attend to.” It was a hard bluff, but all I could do right now was keep the straightest poker face I was capable of. I needed all my demons to step out of their shadows for this one. “Mara Mercier is waiting for me somewhere in the Verten basement, tied to a chair. How old is she, Mercier? Twenty? Twenty-one?”
