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Next to my cell was another, I could reach through the bars and touch him, but I couldn’t save him, and he couldn’t save me. Santino was leaning against the bars reaching for me.
I ran over to him and fell to my knees. “I’ll get us out. I’ll find a way out.” His teeth were chattering.
I was almost afraid to look. I reached through. “May I?”
His nod was jerky, his eyes uncertain but trusting as I reached for the bandages on his stomach and lifted them up.
They were already getting infected. And without medicine and treatment, it would just weaken him more and more. I put the bandages back. “How are the ribs?”
“Broken.” He laughed and then sobered. “But I’m alive, so we should at least celebrate that.”
“How did this happen?” I reached for his hand.
He took mine without questions and squeezed it tight. “I’m not sure, nobody knew. It has to have been a plant who had been working for Tex for quite a while, someone who got paid off. Most likely, my brother’s behind it. I might be able to reason with him—”
“You won’t,” came a loud voice as the door to my cell opened, revealing a man in his late thirties with greasy jet-black hair, a freaking eye patch over one eye, and a sinister smile right out of the movies. He seemed fit, but he was much shorter than Santino, and his face carried scars down its left side, maybe from a knife? I wasn’t sure.
“Mattia.” Santino ground out his brother’s name. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Grandfather would have your head on a spike if you—”
“Grandfather will never need to know the means by which I got his attention, only the result.” Mattia grinned at me. “You’re just as pretty as Jonny said, you know, before his very untimely death at my brother’s hands. And to think, had you just waited a little longer, I would have been the one to rescue you and kill him. I had it all planned, you know, and then my brother had to ride in on his white horse sent directly from the Cosa Nostra.” He spit on the floor. “Fucking traitor is what you are, Santino!”
“Leave this pathetic woman alone, or let her suffer; I don’t give a shit,” Santino growled. “This is between you and me. Let her go.”
“But that wasn’t part of the plan.” Mattia grinned and took another step toward me. “The plan was to take the last Sinacore heir and marry her, come home the war hero, and tie ourselves to the Five Families, then infiltrate from the inside out. It would take years, of course, but it’s doable. People will practically do anything if the price is right, and maybe in a decade, I could be the Capo. Who knows?”
Santino cursed under his breath and jerked at the prison bars. “You’re insane! They’ll kill you before you even get the chance!”
“Not if I bring peace.” Mattia used his forefinger to touch my chin and lift it toward him. “The Five Families will have to honor it, and you’ll have to endure it.”
“Why the hell would I need to endure anything?” Santino said. “She’s nothing to me! If you want her, fine, be my guest, but don’t bring me into this insane cycle of vengeance you have just because nobody named you boss.”
Mattia dropped his hand, stomped over to the bars, slammed his hands against them, gripped them, and sneered at his brother. “There was no vote!”
“Because we aren’t the rightful heirs! Andrei is!”
“A FUCKING RUSSIAN?” Mattia spat on the ground twice. “His blood is tainted! He’s not Italian! And what? He takes our organization? Our livelihood? Our honor? No,” Mattia shook his head over and over. “No, no, no.” He laughed. “No, I don’t think so. This is perfect actually; I couldn’t have planned it any better.”
I wrapped my arms around my body to keep my teeth from chattering and to keep from looking afraid in front of Santino. I know he said that just to try to protect me, but it still stung a bit because I knew I would always wonder if he truly felt something for me other than physical.
Or a need to help a poor girl hell-bent on revenge.
Mattia started circling me again like a shark. “You know, I wasn’t planning on truly taking all those hits out. I don’t have the pockets for it like you do, brother, but it does bring me a certain amount of joy that at the end of this, they’ll think that’s exactly what happened. Santino, jealous of his brother and his wife, sends hits out on every boss in the Cosa Nostra. I wonder what they’ll do to you. I return the hero, and you return to a waiting bullet for setting up the Five Families.” He shook his head sadly. “Damn shame, you worked so hard to save her and to become one of them, and now look at you. Bloody. Broken. Beaten to a pulp, you can barely walk, so it’s not even a fair fight right now, so in order to really drive my story home, I just wanted to give you guys a little… gift.”
“I don’t want a gift,” I blurted.
Mattia winked at me with his good eye. “Oh, it’s a gift for both of you.” He snapped his fingers.
One of the men standing at the door brought over an old-school clock. Mattia set it on the ground in front of me. “In six hours, you’ll be marrying me. In seven, I’ll be fucking you while he watches. In eight, I’ll be preparing us for our triumphant return to Italy, and in, oh, say around twenty-four hours, Santino will be killed.” He laughed to himself, covering his mouth with his hand, then swiping at his nose. “I love happy endings, don’t you, sweetheart?”
“I’ll tell everyone!” I yelled. “I won’t be silenced!”
Mattia’s smile fell. “For every secret you tell, I’ll put a hit out on a pregnant woman in the Families, so I would think very carefully about what you say; I know the exact location of each and every one of them. It’s your choice, so my dear, what were you going to tell?” He waved me forward and cupped his ear. “Hmm? What was that?”
Hands shaking at my sides. I took a deep breath and whispered, “Nothing.”
“Good girl.” He patted me on the head like a dog, turned around, stepped over the clock, and walked out of the prison, the door clicking shut with a bang behind him.
I caught my breath and fell to my knees in front of the clock as tears streamed down my face. Santino moved down the bars until he was as close as he could be to me. “I’ll fix this; I’ll fix it, Katya. You won’t have to marry him or have sex with him. You won’t, I promise.”
