“What?”
“Well, we can stay in the panic rooms as long as possible, but they still have weaknesses. Fire is one of them. I think.” Dana frowned.
“Why do they want me?” I asked.
“I have no idea,” Dana said. “Perhaps they are going to use you as leverage?”
“I wish there was some way we could contact Odin.” I leaned my head against the wall.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. Dana would occasionally look at the security video. The two men that were outside our basement panic room were looking around. All the men were snooping. From time to time, they would talk about ways to open the panic room. They didn’t know what to do until we heard the one suggestion we had been dreading.
“We could set fire to the top floor and let it burn the house. They will have no choice but to burn or come out,” one of the men said.
I looked toward Dana. She was as panicked as me. We couldn’t speak, as I watched the men clearly weighing their options, and I wanted to scream.
I went to the door. “Open it and shut it immediately.”
“No,” Dana said, grabbing me. “First of all, there is no way I’m going to let you do that. Odin would … it would destroy him. Second, do you think they’re going to allow us to live? You go out there, they are going to kill me and set fire to this house anyway. They’re clutching at straws.”
“What do we do?”
Neither of us had the answer. Killing my sister was one thing, but allowing women that I had helped to save was another entirely.
****
Odin
All of Serra’s Capos were dead.
It was easy to do. My men, who had been trained for this, were happy to see the removal of the Serra Mafia. I didn’t know when it occurred to me, but I suddenly realized, in removing the Serra Mafia, all it would do was allow another to rise up in their place. The world was full of bad men and women. The Serra wasn’t the only problem in the world. There was so much bad, and good men and women got beaten down every day of the week.
Taking out the problem wasn’t going to solve it. The problem was still going to be there. There were always going to be people that trafficked people. Drugs were going to be on the streets, people doing bad shit.
The man I was, the man I wanted to get back to, was long gone. There was no sign of him ever returning. It was the illusion. I lost him many years ago, the moment my sister was taken, my first kill, and a deep-seated need for revenge.
My cell phone beeped, and I reached into my pocket. The moment I saw the alert, I knew exactly where to find Serra. My instinct was to go to the safe house. But the only way to end this was to get to Serra, and I gave my men the order. They were to go to the safe house, secure the location, and I would give them orders on what to do next.
As for me, I had one place I needed to be, and I should have known Serra would come back to where this all started.
I found Serra, the man responsible for ordering the death of my sister. She had been sold to a businessman, who had been using her for his own personal pleasure. The marks on her body had shown the abuse she had suffered in the short time she’d been taken.
But, when Serra learned what I was doing, he took her back and had her killed and dumped.
This is where I found Vincenzo Serra, the man I had become obsessed with. He was a man in his seventies and had been slowly passing his legacy to his sons. Both of which I had already killed. It had been easy to take them out.
Vincenzo was standing at the edge of the river, staring into it. He was in an expensive suit, designer, probably Italian. I held a gun in my hand, and it had been a long night, and I hadn’t gotten off scathed. I had a bullet to the shoulder, and one had grazed my thigh. It had been a battle. A bloodbath. They arrested whoever I didn’t kill.
“You know, the moment I looked into her eyes, she told me I was going to be sorry,” Vincenzo said. “There had been a lot of women over the years, many of whom didn’t accept their fate, but they were scared. She was scared, but she was also defiant. I had never met a woman like her. Even after my men had beaten her, she wasn’t truly beaten. She was sold, and used, and I took her and she knew you were coming for her. She was still not beaten.”
My sister was stubborn.
“When I forced her to take the poison that would end her life, and she knew she was dying, she told me with her last breath that I was going to regret what I had done.” Vincenzo looked toward me. He had a scar down his face, from the top of his head to his neck.
“She gave me this,” he said.
I was so proud of my sister. She was a firecracker, and it gave me peace to know they didn’t win.
“I had no idea the fight I had started, but it was because of her, wasn’t it?” Vincenzo asked.
