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“What are you going to do?”
I scrub a hand over my head. “I don’t know.”
“Where is she?”
Fury fires through me at his multitude of questions. “I don’t fucking know, Miko. I just want the match to end”—I point toward the cage—“so I can get home to my girl.”
“You shouldn’t have left her,” he confirms, which only makes my gut twist more.
“Fuck!” I rub my forehead. “I thought I was in control of this bullshit. But Amanda was the one in control the whole time. She held Immie above my head and didn’t even treat her well, and that was the only thing I insisted on. The only fucking thing!”
“Well…” Miko thinks for a moment then opens his mouth again. “I doubt that Immie will be dissatisfied with your actions. There will be no love lost between the two of them.”
My lip twitches. He’s right about that. Immie will be pleased.
“You need to look toward your future, brother, yours and Immie’s.” He clinks his beer bottle against mine, and I chuckle.
Though when I glance at the five unopened messages I’ve sent to Immie in the past hour, I can’t help the ball of fear gathering inside of me, and it’s not dissimilar from the night I found her.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
JENSEN
FIVE YEARS EARLIER …
I hate this place. The Carrera family’s auction house is notorious for its underground network in the black market, human trafficking, to be precise. Something I’m not okay with and have voiced my opinion on the matter multiple times to Azrael, my boss, and he’s adamant he’s working on a way to eradicate the auction, but while his father, Benito, remains the Don, he won’t be able to close this place down. It’s far too risky, and we’ve become pawns in an unspoken threat that leaves us unable to do anything but comply with his father’s sick demands.
Azrael’s younger sister, Sienna, is the perfect weapon to keep him in line. His father constantly uses her to blackmail him, along with his half-brother, Stone, who is regularly abused for being the bastard child in their fucked-up family.
Czar, Azrael’s younger brother, is much more hotheaded than Azrael, and he’s determined to put an end to the twisted punishments that even their mother was not exempt from. Azrael is forever chastising Czar for his bluntness and blatant disregard for his father’s rules. While Azrael sees it as recklessness and immaturity, I can see it as something else. Beneath his exterior is a born leader, an intelligently loyal man who is destined for more. Something I would love to see him achieve as a Carrera heir, but knowing what it would mean for him to dethrone Azrael as future heir, I don’t welcome it either.
My loyalty has and always will remain with the man who showed me mercy in a world where there is usually none.
Resting against the wall of the mansion, I take out a cigarette from my jacket and light it. I bring it to my lips and inhale, then blow the smoke into the bleak sky. Even the fucking atmosphere has changed into something sinister, as if knowing of the sick, sordid events taking place a stone’s throw away.
The limo shines beneath the moonlight, and I itch to get inside it, to drive away from this hellhole and never look back.
One day.
One day, I’ll leave and return to my family.
What little I have left of it.
A voice inside me tells me there’s more to life than this, but the truth is, I’m yet to feel it. I’m yet to feel anything but anger and disgust, and with that thought in mind, I push off the wall, flick my cigarette to the ground, and head inside.
Hoots and hollers and laughter greet me as I stride down the corridor and away from the auction room. Instead, I head toward one of the back bars that hold the after parties.
Down the corridor, the door to Benito’s private quarters opens, and out steps one of his acquaintances, Philip Steiner, a lawyer who works for the FBI. My stomach does a weird flip, and as he marches toward me buckling his belt, awareness prickles over my skin. I give him a chin lift as he passes, which he mirrors, but the hairs on the back of my neck stand and a chill sweeps over me as the sound of his footsteps drift farther away.
The roar of the crowd snaps me out of my daze, and I stare down at my shoes, realizing I’ve come to a standstill.
The sensation Steiner left me with is peculiar, and while I’m surrounded by monsters on a daily basis, I’ve only ever had this feeling when in Benito’s proximity, and suddenly something hits me.
Benito has been wanting to move into trafficking children, something Azrael and his brother are fiercely against. Women and men are one thing I’m uncomfortable with, but I see it as a means to an end. Where Benito holds Sienna over Azrael, I, too, have a family I care about, and should Benito discover the truth of who I am, an all-out war would break out. Something I’m unprepared for, so I remain silent, compliant, if you will. But children? Hell fucking no.
Like many in Mafia life, my childhood was marred by brutality. My mother committed suicide while pregnant with my father’s baby, leaving me, their only child, to become the recipient of his drunk-fueled frenzies. I hated him and the Mafia life, so much so, that at ten years old, I took a gun to my father’s head while he slept and delivered the whore in his bed with equal kindness. My only regret was I never got to see the life drain from his eyes with the knowledge that it was his son who killed him.
Vinny Marino was the Don of our family, and when his brother Sal stepped up to take me under his wing, I expected much of the same cruelty, yet received something completely different. I have comrades now, brothers, if you will; I have people to rely on, who refuse to abandon me despite me turning my back on La Familia to carve my own path in my turbulent life.
