AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Only after a few moments did they probably realize that we were hunting them, as one did with animals. They could run away from us, seek shelter, and try to play us off. But in the end, they would still die. Not without reason were they at a certain disadvantage.
Naked. Unarmed. A dark forest was full of trip hazards… but that was precisely how they had treated their victims. So there was no reason to pity them and give them a fair trial before a judge.
It took only a few seconds for the three men to be swallowed up by the darkness. Fiero stepped next to me and handed me a shotgun and a knife usually used to gut animals during a hunt.
I pulled out my phone, looked at my watch, and then calmly opened the tracking app.
The little bastards didn't know they had ingested a GPS tracker with their last meal via the stomach tube.
We would find them. No matter how well they hid in the forests and mountains of Tramonti.
"None of them look like they're about to back down for a change," my cousin informed me.
I nodded. "Good. I don't feel like spending half the night showing someone the way out of the forest," I muttered, then turned around so I could take in the small troop.
Fiero had already equipped them with the weapons of their choice, and they were just waiting to stomp off to hunt the pigs. I, too, could hardly wait. A little action and adrenaline were just what I needed after the past two days and the many problems that would come my way soon.
"Let's give them two more minutes," I muttered, my eyes back to the forest.
The trees stood close together, root systems protruding from the ground. Around us, it was almost entirely silent. A few crickets chirped sporadically, and one could hear one or two animals creeping through the thicket, but that was all I heard. As if the forest knew that the hunters had returned for a new round.
A new round of hunting men who beat, killed, raped, and did far worse things to women had they been able to.
* * *
I could have moved through the forest blindfolded. I knew every inch by heart where I could put my foot and where not. I had spent hundreds of hours in this forest, creating a map in my mind with all the critical markers.
So it was not news to me that there was an abandoned foxhole about two hundred yards to my right, in a hollow about two yards deep. You could break your leg if you didn't know it existed.
A few miles further, a narrow stream dried up entirely in midsummer, but you could easily follow it to the spring high up in the mountains. There was always fresh water there.
I knew where every clearing was, every tripping hazard, and every stone formation, just as I knew where the forest trails began and which major or minor roads they led to.
But we certainly wouldn't have to chase the three felons that far. Fiero had set a demanding pace and set out alone with the three hunters on the search. They didn't know that I kept a permanent eye on the whereabouts of the hunted to prevent any unpleasant surprises.
Whoever had killed once would do it again. I could confidently speak from experience.
As I crept through the deep black forest, always careful not to draw attention to myself, I thought back to the first hunt of this kind. It had all started when Rina's family had fled Italy and tried to hide from me. They realized what a mistake it had been to kill Rina. Just the attempt and the thought that they might have gotten away with it, even though they had messed with me as soon as they had even raised a hand to her.
Rina had been innocent – she had only been trying to help her sister-in-law escape a violent relationship. A violent, toxic family that she had escaped only after we met.
And how had she been rewarded for this courage? With death. I clenched my hand into a fist and punched it into the nearest tree until I felt warm liquid flowing over my knuckles.
I should have been with her at that last meeting. Someone should have been with her, even if it had only been one of my men. But they had cleverly arranged that, too, and brought the meeting forward at the very last minute by almost two hours while I had been caught up in another important meeting. Important. That was laughable. There should have been nothing more important than showing up there with her and presenting the barrel of my gun to those horrible people.
Instead, she had been alone. Alone, while her family had taken all their hate out on her. All the anger, the rage, and every nasty emotion.
It wasn't until I had come out of my meeting two hours later and still hadn't heard from her that my alarm bells had jumped into warning mode. Much too late, of course.
I had arrived there, eventually, but much, much too late. No matter how hard I tried, I still remembered exactly how the sight of her broken body had torn my heart out.
There had probably not been one bone in her body that had not been broken. Shattered, partially. She had lain in her own blood, and the only thing they had spared had been her face – to hurt me further.
I tore myself away from the memory when I heard a shot echo through the forest. Had Fiero found one of the hunters' prey and successfully shot him? With quick steps, I bridged the distance by several hundred yards. We were already deep in the forest, which meant it would be torture to bring the bodies back to the property and cut them up into morsels fit for the big cats.
The three big cats would never attack a living human but as soon as human flesh was thrown to them, they pounced on it enthusiastically. In the end, nothing remained because even the bones were too mauled to identify them. Only a DNA test would shed light on the matter, which was certainly not a problem because the bones were collected every few weeks and sent to a local pig farmer, who collected a fat check and asked no questions.
I reached Fiero, standing there with his arms crossed, the three hunters in a semicircle around him. They all stared at something lying on the ground.
