Page 50 of The Enforcer's Revenge

Nova slammed the door.

Hard.

Carlo was fucking with his phone, calling Lola again, so he didn’t see the look on Nova’s face, but Tino did and said quickly, “What?”

Nova opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He looked completely frozen in shock and horror.

“Casanova, what?” Tino shouted.

Then the phone started ringing again from outside.

Tino had one of those slow-motion moments in life, where everything in his world turned into frame-by-frame terror.

Every heartbeat.

Every breath.

He turned his head and looked at his zio, just as Carlo pulled his phone away from his ear.

Carlo was staring at the door again while the ringing from outside echoed through the deadly silence of the foyer.

Carlo hung up the call on purpose.

And the ringing stopped again.

Tino just stood there like Nova had, frozen, because he did this shit for a living. Everyone knew their family gathered on the water for the Fourth of July. It’s not like the Morettis were subtle about their parties. The Mills Basin mansion wasn’t guarded with big, tall walls, guard booths, and gated driveways like the Don’s Dyker Heights place.

Mills Basin also happened to be the only property where there weren’t cameras on the outside. Tino and Carlo used the docks for a lot of things they didn’t want on video feeds, so the cameras ran inside when they were gone to keep the government and other criminals from planting bugs, but not the outside.

It was the perfect recipe for a message job.

They probably waited for months to leave it.

And message jobs were never pretty.

Never.

They were designed to crack an entire crew.

Usually, Tino’s reflexes were fast, but Carlo slipped right by him. Tino’s body hadn’t caught up with his mind. Nova was fucking useless, too, maybe more so because he’d seen what was on the other side of that door.

“Casanova!” Tino screamed at his brother because he was the only barrier between Carlo and the door. “Don’t let him see her!”

Tino spent many times in his life being pissed off that somewhere along the way, he’d become programmed to obey Nova blindly, without question, almost completely on autopilot when things were tense. It was a defense mechanism, and he never once considered that Nova had the same programming. That if life threw them in the shit and Tino told Nova to do something, he’d do it, even if he was frozen in terror.

Nova jerked out of his shock and downed Carlo like a fucking linebacker. The two of them hit the tile so hard, it’d be amazing if they escaped without broken bones, but Tino didn’t stop to see the fallout.

He wasn’t real sure why he did it.

Why, when his feet started moving, he left his brother to deal with Carlo and went for the door. Maybe a very stupid part of him thought he could fix it. That he could rewind time and make it not be Lola sprawled out on their doorstep, naked, with her phone lying at her feet like they’d cut her clothes off right there and hadn’t noticed it.

Her long, curly black hair hid her face.

Tino pulled the door closed and fell to his knees in pools of blood.

So much fucking blood.

They’d bled her out completely.