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“Valentina, your heart is telling you to listen, isn’t it? You’ve prayed for this day, the day you hear that your sister is alive. Haven’t you?” More desperation and tears.
I poke my head around the doorway. A girl is lying still on the ground wearing a blood-soaked dress. Val has Maria in her grip with a knife to her throat. She stares at the young girl on the floor.
A sudden and sharp scream pierces the air.
“She’s going to bleed out.” Maria struggles against Val. “That’s my daughter. Let me go so I can save her.”
Oh,fuck.
I raise my gun, pointing the barrel to the woman’s head. With her one free hand, Val grabs the back of the woman’s hair and yanks her backward.
“How fucking dare you say those things about my sister?” she growls against Maria’s ear. “When you know damn well that she’s gone!”
“She’s not,” Maria whimpers, her tear-filled eyes on the girl at her feet. “She can be saved.”
“Liar,” Val hisses. “You manipulative bitch. That shit won’t work on me. You want to save your daughter? Then tell me what I want to know. Where are Luis and Branko?”
The woman’s eyes blaze with anger, her lips twisting like she’s morphed into a demon. “Maybe they’re in Miami, killing the rest of your family. Or maybe they’re at the safehouse, slaughtering Alek Severinov and your two brothers.”
The blood turns to ice in my veins. How the fuck could she know who’s at the safehouse? How could she know about the safehouse at all?
Jesus Christ, how far down deep does the deception go?
If Val is shocked to hear those words, she doesn’t give it away, just tightens her grip on Maria’s head. But this time Maria doesn’t just stand there whimpering like the fake bitch she is. She jerks her head backward so it smashes against Val’s nose, then wrenches herself away.
Val yelps, stunned for a hot second. She leans forward to grab Maria before she can fall to the floor next to the girl. But instead of going down, Maria lunges for a gun to her right.
She picks it up on her way down to the ground and swings herself around, gun in hand. The barrel is on Val. My throat tightens. I squeeze off a single shot before a hand from behind me closes around my neck. The cool metal of a gun barrel jabs me in the temple.
“Try that again and your brains will be all over that wall,ese,” a grim voice hisses against my ear.
I drop my hand with the gun in it.
Motherfucker. How many times am I gonna forget to check my goddamn blindside?
“Yours and yourwife’s.”
Val’s accusatory eyes tangle with mine. She’s got Maria, the kid is still unconscious on the ground, drenched in red, and I’m here, useless because I lost my focus.
And she knows it, too.
How the hell are we gonna get out of this one?
“Seems like we both have something the other wants,” the jerkoff behind me growls, following his words up with a thick phlegmy cough.
I gag on his stank breath. “Jesus, dude. You might wanna cut it back to five packs a day.”
He smacks the side of my head with the gun. I wince, but fuck him if he thinks he’ll get anything more out of me.
“Marisol was hit,” Maria says in a shrill voice, no longer the in-control sadistic bitch she was only a few minutes ago. “She needs to get to a hospital.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Val yells. “Unless you tell me what I want to hear.”
But her eyes keep flickering to the girl.
And just like that, the savior complex grabs hold… of both of us.
My limbs tense. Nobody is coming for us, I already know that. No distress call, no help from Sev or the Malikov brothers. It’s up to us to get the hell out of this shithole in one piece.
