Taking a steadying breath to refocus on the task at hand, Dante and I use the blackout as our way into Vitale’s mistress’s house. The security system doesn’t make a beep when we pick the lock on the laundry door. But that’s on them for having shitty security without a backup battery, as well as having glass doors on the ground floor. Fucking stupidity.
Jesus, they don’t even wake when we climb the stairs, or when we push open the door to their bedroom. Vincent’s eyes only fly open when the blade I use slices over his throat. His frantic and loud panic is over too soon. If we didn’t have a tight schedule, I’d have thrown him in the back of the Escalade and placed him downstairs in our holding cell, so we could take our time and enjoy reclaiming some of the pain he caused my pack. But such is the path we’ve chosen, plus that’s what Diego and Rosa are for.
Dante stays on track, and the cheating woman is dying in seconds. Without a shred of remorse, he flicks his attention from her choking loudly on her blood, to setting a fire on their bed while I search through drawers, reclaiming from the old hag anything of sentimental value from the De Luca side of the family.
I fill a small bag with keepsakes Vitale wrongly gifted her—some of them plastic beads, other pieces worth infinitely more.It’s not their monetary value that is important; it’s that each piece stolen meant something to my nonna. Reclaiming those things in her memory is as important as spilling the blood of those who wronged us.
A timer goes off on Dante’s watch, and we finish by taking a couple of souvenir photos of their corpses to show Vitale later. Closing the door on the growing fire, Dante checks on Layne as we go to our next destination before he lets Matteo know we are headed his way.
Diego and Rosa’s house is as gaudy as you’d expect from such tacky people. The security is pretty good, the backup generator humming when we get out of our vehicles. But the back corner where they house the generator is unmanned. Worse, it’s not in the area they have cameras set for surveillance.
Matteo waits until Dante and I are ready before swinging the axe down over the cord. The three of us chuckle quietly at how loud the electrical bang and how bright the flashing explosion is. We all had differing opinions on what would happen, and each of us was right about what we’d been arguing but none of us expected the noise, the flash of light and how quick it would happen at the same time, like instantly.
“Tick tock,” Dante goads as he cracks his neck from side to side. “What do you think Layne’s doing now?”
“Sleeping,” I hiss, without looking at him while licking my lip. “Are you focused?”
Dante groans. “On her? Fuck, yes. Jesus, her pussy is so fucking…”
Matteo chuckles, but a second later, his attention shifts. His head tips to the side, making him look almost alien. He makes a series of sharp, silent gestures, indicating we have incoming.
The two guards are loud like stampeding elephants in the jungle. The beam of their flashlights hit us, but it’s too late. Dante fires at one, Matteo moves out of the shadows and snapsthe neck of the other. Their bodies don’t even hit the ground before we’re running past them through the garden, on silent fucking feet, to surprise another group of guards in the small separate building near the main house.
We make easy work of them too before grabbing an earpiece from one of the bodies. Dante listens, waiting to see if the rest of Diego’s guards pick up anything, but he rolls his eyes at their ineptitude.
With the power still cut, there are no lights to guide us, but we’ve been here enough times to have mapped our route. Honestly, we made it a game between our Pack to see who could memorize the houses of our family. Although our game was always for the benefit of sneaking in to murder them when the time was right.
Disposing of the last few guards in the house is a noisy affair. Intentionally so.
We let the savage sounds the wounded men make echo through the home, letting Diego’s and Rosa’s terror get out of control. Diego’s voice echoes through the earpiece his dead guards used, his barks for assistance increasing in franticness the longer no one answers.
Matteo, Dante, and I take our time walking up their sweeping staircase, only to fuck with them more when Dante opens the tracking app on his phone and turns the volume of the beeping alert up.
He stage-whispers loud enough for his voice to be heard over the alert. “Do they know we’re here?”
And Matteo starts laughing before shooting a couple of shots in the opposite direction of where we’re going, so they definitely know we’re upstairs and getting closer. Again, for no other reason but to fuck with them. It’s pretty clear someone is coming for them, and honestly, if they’re surprised it’s us, I’ll kill him quickly for his stupidity before reviving him to kill him slowly.
The double doors to their bedroom wing are locked. Matteo kicks them open, and we come face-to-face with a couple of surprise guards. But thank fucking god, breaking in here was too easy and not at all rewarding. At least now, we have an opportunity to expend all the aggression and built-up retribution we’ve been harboring for years.
My Pack has the same idea I do. The three of us drop the weapons we’re holding and go for hand-to-hand combat. Like I said, it’s the promise of our plans coming to fruition that sees us acting so undisciplined. At the same time, we’ve been training our asses off. It’s a good time to test if we’ve done enough.
Matteo moves first, coming out from the darkest shadow and front kicking the first guard's knee out before stepping past him and punching the face of the next one. He spins and disappears, leaving the path clear for me, but Dante steps in front of me.
My brother is such a cunt sometimes. He throat punches the guard with the fucked-up knee and then kicks him in the dick as hard as he can.
“Dante! For fuck’s sake,” I growl, frustrated my twin beat me to what I was going to do.
He laughs. “Just teaching you some valuable lessons.”
“Which is?” I run past him to catch the shirt of the guard trying to run off.
Matteo reappears, blocking the guard’s retreat. He smirks and throws a dismissive wave my way. “I’m with Dante. You need to remember you don’t do this shit anymore.”
“What? Why the fuck not?” I spit, my hand digging under my suit jacket to grab the second gun from my holster.
“The boss doesn’t get his hands dirty,” Dante taunts from behind me.
I re-holster my gun and unsheathe my knife. Before either idiot—and that’s referring to my pack—can speak another word, I move like a tornado and slash one guard’s throat beforestabbing the other one through the throat. Or through the hand he’s gripping around his throat, but the effect is the same. He drops like a sack of shit, disappearing with my knife.
