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His voice was conspiratorial, like he was expecting all the men to agree with him.Sure, go on and have your fun with the dead girls walking and then get rid of the leftovers.They’d probably all agree. This was it, the end of the line. Our deaths would boil down to inconvenient messes to be cleaned up, then forgiven and forgotten. Our lives meant less to them than the custom paint jobs on their fancy cars.
Renato held up a single finger, and his man snapped his mouth shut so hard his teeth rattled. The boss reached into a drawer beside him and took out a pair of black leather gloves. The sight of them sent a chill through me. He pulled them on slowly, carefully adjusting them so they were a perfect fit.
“Again, I don’t like to repeat myself, but seeing as we were so rudely interrupted, I’ll give you another chance to answer. What did you see, Charlotte?” the boss continued.
I shook my head. “I didn’t see anything. Neither of us did,” I repeated.
“You killed Miguel! Your men shot my boyfriend dead, right in front of us!” Lucy’s violent outburst hit the air like a gunshot. She’d been standing behind me, her arm gripped in Elio’s huge palm. Now, she fought to step forward.
I shot a silencing look at my sister, but she was too determined. She glared at Renato, while he watched her with faint amusement, not so much as flinching when she lunged forward. He almost looked bored by the display, like normal human emotion couldn’t break through his jaded shell. He was a man who had seen the full spectrum of dark and desperate human emotions and found it monotonous.
He flicked a look over her shoulder at his henchman, and Elio reached out and wound a muscle-bound forearm around Lucy’s neck. She was a doll in his brutal grip.
“No!” I shot up and ran toward Elio. He had already lowered Lucy to a velvet settee sitting along one wall, efficiently cutting off her air supply in seconds. “Don’t hurt her!”
I lunged at Elio, scratching and kicking at him. The other men hauled me off, their harsh fingers digging into my arms and chest, pulling at my waist, wrenching me away from my sister. Sobs of terror shook me, and I couldn’t breathe. The sight of Lucy in a killer’s hands, her face turning red as she slowly went under, was more than I could stand.
“Fuck this,” one of the men snarled and wrenched a gun from his waistband. It was the same man who had killed Miguel. He aimed his gun toward Lucy. “Calm the fuck down, or—”
“Or what, Tony?” Renato’s granite tone sliced through the escalating tension like a knife through silk.
Everyone paused, and I took advantage of that moment to break free from the hands that held me and step in front of the gun. Standing on the other end of a point-blank shot was terrifying, but not as terrifying as seeing that black muzzle aimed toward my little sister.
“Don’t hurt her. Hurt me if you need to hurt someone. Kill me if that’s what you need, but let her go. She’s just a kid,” my voice faded away to a whispered plea. My forehead pressed against the end of the gun, the metal cold as ice. As freezing as impending death.
The man holding the gun on me seemed frozen too, unable to move, as the boss stood slowly from his chair. Everyone seemed spellbound for a long, silent moment.
“She’sjust a kid? How much older canyoube?” Renato broke the silence.
“I’m twenty-six, and she just turned nineteen. That’s just a kid. She doesn’t understand…” I trailed off.
Renato came into view, standing just behind the man who held the gun on me. Now that he was standing, I could see just how tall and broad he was.
“She doesn’t understand what?” He prodded me when I lost myself in staring, fear dragging my mind into lingering pauses.
“Men like you.” The words left me before I could decide if they were a mistake or not.
Renato came closer, and the man holding the gun trembled. He wanted to move, I could tell, but didn’t know if that was a wise move.
“And you do? Tell me, what do you know aboutmen like me?”
“Can you – can he put the gun down first?” I attempted, wetting my lips twice to get the words out.
Renato raised an eyebrow. “But you’re doing so well. Most men would have pissed themselves by now or pleaded for their lives. Most never would have stepped in front of it in the first place.” He stepped closer to me, passing behind me. “Why do you want it moved now?”
“I don’t trust the man pointing it at me. He looks like a coward,” I ground out. The man’s eyes widened, and his grip slid on the metal. “He’s shaking,” I added.
Renato turned to look at the man. His man. He nodded slightly. “Yes, he is, isn’t he? Not a very reliable man after all, are you, Tony? First, you make your own judgment calls, and then, you’re too weak to stand by them. It’s not behavior worthy of the De Sanctis name. Maybe under my father such weakness was tolerated, but that family isn’t this one, as you know.”
Renato took Tony’s shaking hand and slowly pulled his fingers from the grip, and pried the gun away from him. The entire time he did, the pistol was turned toward his chest. He wasn’t afraid of being shot by the terrified man. That was power.
He gripped the gun and looked at me, holding the butt of the pistol out. “Do you want to, or shall I?”
“What?” I asked numbly, my brain too shocked and scared to keep up.
“He pulled a gun in my presence without permission…and he decided the fate of a kid without my input. He’s a dead man. Do you want to do it, avenge your sister’s friend, or should I?”
“I – I could never…” I stuttered.
