Page 23

Enzo Rissi

I took only long enough to bathe the blood from my body before talking to Uncle Giovanni about options. It wasn’t as cut and dry as we had believed. There was talk of consequences for Aria but also a sense of mutual understanding. There was a reason she had done the things she had done, and she seemed to have a plan to make them right.

She was under duress when making her decisions.

However, they were still decisions that she had made, and people were dead because of them.

“When we go into the Bianchi home, the odds of running into Aria are high,” Uncle Giovanni reminded me. “What we know about her motivations is second-source hearsay. We don’t know that her intentions weren’t malicious.”

“I need to talk to her again.”

It was a back-and-forth, but neither of us had the answers. All we knew for certain was that I loved her. I cared deeply for her. Fuck. Who was I kidding? I had allowed myself to fall in love with the woman. I wanted to believe that she was innocent—that she had no choice.

Uncle Giovanni’s phone rang, and he glanced down at the caller ID with a raised brow.

He showed me the screen.

Alonzo Bianchi.

“Answer it on speaker,” I demanded.

“Alonzo,” he said with a hard tone I rarely heard from him.

“We seem to have a problem,” Alonzo claimed, sounding both smug and cruel all at once. “You sent my daughter away. You broke our alliance.”

“That’s the excuse you plan to use, then?” Uncle Giovanni stated.

He was a man of few words. He liked letting people dig their own graves, and it almost always worked. I waited, though I had to grind my teeth to keep from shouting at him. I wanted to ask about my wife—about what he was making her do.

She shouldn’t have mattered, but in my mind, she was the only thing that truly mattered. I lost a cousin and a guard today. I had killed men and washed their blood from my skin. But none of it mattered as much as the pit Aria had left in my chest.

“Excuse for what?”

“I have three men who told us about many of your recent machinations, Alonzo. I would rather keep this dialogue open and honest,” Uncle Giovanni said patiently. “We know the truth of your plans for us, and we don’t allow for such things here.”

He laughed hoarsely on the other end of the line. Unhinged. He sounded utterly unhinged.

“You think you have the power, but you have gone too long without staking claim to it. Your time has passed, Rissi. Your family’s time in power is over. I have back my daughter, and we no longer have anything tying us together. I will no longer settle for your disrespect—”

“Disrespect?” I shot back. “Lying to your people about us—killing your soldiers’ women for the sake of pushing an agenda—is disrespectful. You’ve attempted to kill my uncle unsuccessfully, and it’s finally our turn to offer repayment for your disrespect. We are no longer sitting idly and allowing you to push the boundaries of this partnership. You have seen your final days, Alonzo. I will be the one to seek you out and kill you.”

Uncle Giovanni narrowed his eyes at my threat, but I had warned him that I was no longer waiting.

And now that we had definitive proof of Alonzo’s involvement, Uncle Giovanni was no longer interested in waiting, either. Diplomacy was long gone after the actions of the Bianchi family.

“I had hoped to speak with you, Enzo. My daughter has a lot to say about you. It seems your reputation doesn’t precede you the way I had once hoped. You have my daughter quite smitten. Enough that she turned her back on me and her sisters. He sighed. “It’s a pity I have to punish poor Evelina for her behavior. If she would have just followed my orders, none of this would have happened.”

There it was. The admission that changed everything. Aria had tried going against her father on our behalf. The pit inside my chest ached at the thought of her suffering beneath her father because she had chosen us—because she had chosen me.

“Keeping my wife in your possession is an act of war against us, Alonzo.”

“What about keeping your future child? Would you consider that an equal offense?”

I froze.

Everything around me went still as time seemed to stop. I turned over his words in my mind. I wanted to believe it was impossible, but…

We had never used protection.

“You’re lying,” I finally declared. She would have never told him something like that. It would only become more leverage to be used against her.

If she were pregnant, she would have told me.

Only… she had said there were things we needed to talk about.

“I had planned on using her to have an heir, but when she couldn’t go through with it, she told me the reason. She told me that she already carried your heir. Did you not know?”

He sounded so fucking smug that I wanted to tear out his tongue.

“It’s possible that if you hand over the position of capo dei capi, I’ll consider giving her back as a gift,” he mused. “I will have no use for her at that point.”

“We don’t negotiate with people like you,” Uncle Giovanni said before I could reply.

He must have seen the hesitation in my eyes. I would have given Alonzo everything he had ever wanted if it meant seeing Aria and our child safe. I would have burned down the fucking world. I didn’t care .

“Then come and get them. See how well you’ll fare,” Alonzo said noncommittedly.

“You spent years refusing to come against us directly,” Uncle Giovanni reminded him. “What has changed, Alonzo? If we go down this path, there will be substantial bloodshed. And it won’t just be our people who fall.”

I didn’t particularly care about the bloodshed. Not when Aria was at stake.

“I am not asking for my wife again,” I declared into the line, sounding every ounce of the monster that Aria had once believed me to be.

“I’m not restating my demands again, either. If you don’t want to commit, come and get her.”

He ended the call without another word, and I walked toward my bedroom where there were still a handful of weapons that would aid me in what I was going to do.

“You need to think this through, Son. He’s taunting you. It’s a trap,” Uncle Giovanni said as he followed me.

I strapped on a bulletproof vest beneath a black long-sleeve T-shirt. Then, I got to work arming myself with everything that would fit on my body. Pistols. Assault rifles across my back. Knives and brass knuckles. Everything.

“I know it’s a trap, but I also know that he is keeping her in that house, and I don’t know what he’s doing to her.”

He nodded. “I can’t let you kill yourself.”

“I can’t let him kill her.”

“Then today is the day we end this,” Uncle Giovanni said as he pulled out his phone.

* * * *

It may have been a trap, but the Bianchis didn’t know how many people we had, and they certainly didn’t expect those numbers to come to our aid.

Three dozen men surrounded the house, and the Bianchi guards were entirely unaware as they spoke to one another, hands off their weapons. Nobody seemed at all prepared, but I knew better than to go in obliviously.

“I only need a gap,” I told Matthew as he stared down the barrel of the sniper rifle.

He didn’t have to be here. We offered him the option to take care of his brother’s arrangements, but his fury knew no bounds. He would never let this family get away with taking his brother from him, so he insisted on coming and working at my side to clear the premises.

My walkie talkie buzzed. “We see two snipers in neighboring rooftops,” one of my men said. “Give the signal, and they’ll be eliminated.”

I took in all the home’s defenses.

I knew the main threat would be on the inside, and I hoped our inside source had gotten the memo that we were coming. If not… well, I could do it alone. I would do it alone.

I wouldn’t bring a bunch of my men into a house where my wife was being held captive. I couldn’t have a dozen different guns firing in different directions—not when any stray bullet could take her life. I had to go in and out alone, and my men would cover me from out here.

“Are you ready?” I asked Matthew.

He nodded once, and I gave the go-ahead.

The second guns began firing, I jumped from my cover and ran toward the side entrance of the mansion. I heard the return fire—everyone too focused on the shooting guns to worry about the man running into the house. I tightened my grip on my pistol as I walked through the door and fired two shots immediately.

It looked like two guards were intent on storming through the side door and joining their companions, but I caught them both off guard as they fell into the wall with the force of my bullets. One of them tried aiming his weapon, but I pushed it out of the way and threw my fist—brass knuckles and all—into his cheek.

He toppled to the ground unconscious as I continued moving through the house.

I went from room to room, clearing each one. An occasional housekeeper sat with her hands up, and I let each of them live. Anyone with a gun fell beneath my bullets or knives or brass knuckles.

The bullets outside peppered the air, and it sounded like an occasional one broke a window or came through the siding and into the interior of the house.

A few screams of dying men echoed through the home, but I continued forward, intent on finding and killing my target. He had to be here. He had to know we were coming, and he would be waiting beside Aria, ready to kill us.

Unless… unless he decided to get out and get far away to preserve himself and his empire. It would be just like him to allow his men to die while running in the other direction.

I rushed up the stairs and down one side of the hallway. It didn’t sound like anyone had bothered to be guarding the upper level, but I went through each room, kicking the doors in and scanning anywhere a grown person could hide.

The gunfire became more sporadic, and I knew we were running low on time. If Alonzo had planned on us being here, he had made moves to make sure we didn’t leave, so we needed to be in and out quickly.

I wouldn’t announce myself, though. I wouldn’t risk warning anyone that I was coming.

I cleared one hallway and walked toward the other, gun still raised.

Almost as if in over-excitement, one of Alonzo’s cronies peeked around the corner and fired a shot that mercifully went wide. A burn brushed across my forearm, and I swore as I ducked back into one of the rooms, using a dresser as a makeshift cover.

“He told me you motherfuckers were coming,” the man shouted, giving up his location without thought.

I brushed my hand across my forearm and found a trickle of blood, but nothing more significant. The wound was shallow.

“You didn’t think he’d leave the girl unguarded, did you?”

He was just outside the room, and I lifted my gun, waiting patiently.

“Fucking fools. All of you.”

I fired right where I heard his voice, and he cursed as I heard him drop to the floor. Three more shots, and the man went silent.

I rushed toward the door and opened it, finding that my shots had all met their mark. He lay on the ground, eyes open and lifeless. My eyes drifted toward the hallway where he had come from, and I saw nothing. Heard nothing. I didn’t sense the underlying current of another person waiting for me in that hallway, so I crept forward, waiting just another moment.

Finally, I stormed forward, listening for anything that would indicate Aria’s presence.

A muffled sound came from the end of the hallway, and I toed down it, careful not to allow the floor to creak beneath my feet. As I grew closer, the noise became more distinguished. It was a muffled shout—one that had to come from a woman’s lips.

Aria.

Nothing could have stopped me from racing forward and slamming into the room, taking less than two seconds to scan the surroundings before planting my eyes on her.

Aria lay cuffed to the bed, a gag tied over her lips. She shook her head frantically, trying to say something but failing to get it passed the gag. I had never moved so quickly in my life. I rushed toward her and reached for the cuff. There was no key in sight, but the metal bar of the bedframe met another metal piece with a small knob. I grabbed the knob and began twisting it as she thrashed.

“You need to hold still. I’m not going to hurt you,” I shouted at her as the bar shook and finally fell away.

Aria shocked me as she flung herself upright and grabbed her gag from between her lips. The bar slid through her cuffs, but she caught it frantically as she rushed around me and held it up like a makeshift weapon.

My attention caught on where the closet door burst open.

My half-brother Vito—Alonzo’s consigliere—stepped out, gun in hand.