Even as I forced my eyes closed, the sounds coming from Dulles were something that I knew would haunt me. The gasping was followed by the sound of him choking on his own blood even as there were other noises from Primo that implied he continued to do… something to his brother until, eventually, I heard the slam of his body hitting the ground.
“No. No, Primo. We can talk about this,” Dawson insisted from where, I imagined, he’d been incapacitated by Primo’s other men.
“You came into my fucking home,” Primo roared, the sound so loud it made me jolt, “and you dared to put your hands on my fucking woman?”
“Shit,” Vissi hissed, and I was aware of his body coming down closer to mine just a second before his hands cuffed over my ears. “Hum with me,” he demanded, even as he started to do just that.
Even with both of us humming. Even with his hands pressing down on my ears, the sounds of Dawson losing his life crept in, making me need to swallow hard to keep from getting sick as the man screamed and begged for mercy.
But Primo proved he had none right then.
It seemed like forever that he exacted his revenge on the brothers he’d thought had been loyal, who had proved to be anything but.
At some point, Vissi’s hands dropped from my ears, and his humming stopped, even though I couldn’t seem to stop my own, some part of me was terrified I’d hear even more of something that I didn’t want to.
Behind my back, a key was put into the lock, and the cuffs loosened and were pulled off my wrists.
My arms fell limply for a moment until I managed to force them up, pressing them to my face as I pulled my knees up to rest my head on.
Shock and fear and whatever drugs were still lingering in my system seemed to assault me all at once, keeping me a prisoner in my own swirling mind.
“Isabella,” Primo’s voice said, low, soft. Soft for him anyway. He must have been kneeling in front of me. He sounded close. “Baby,” he tried again, reaching out, pressing a hand to the side of my face. “You’re okay,” he insisted, fingers stroking back into my hair. “Talk to me, lamb,” he demanded, worry seeping into his voice.
“I don’t feel good,” I admitted.
“What kind of not good? What did they do?” he asked, anger rising in his voice again, and I swear if he could resurrect his brothers to hurt them some more, he would.
“They… there was a needle,” I admitted, holding out my arm. “I passed out,” I added. “I feel sick.” Though, admittedly, it might have been just as much from the sounds of torture and death as it had been from the drugs.
“Ketamine, probably,” Vissi said. “That’s what those bastards who ran me all the way to Italy were into dealing.”
Primo cursed under his breath as his hands reached for me, pulled me against him, held me there like I was something precious.
“It will wear off in half a day,” he promised me. “But we can get you home to try to sleep it off.”
“No!” I shrieked, body jolting. “No, we can’t go home.”
“Why?”
“They said… they said there was going to be an ambush.”
“Shh, baby, no there won’t.”
“No, they said it,” I insisted.
“I know. It’s okay. There will be no ambush. I called Lorenzo Costa myself,” he said, meaning the Capo dei Capi of all the mafia. “All the Families are coming together on this. If any of them are still alive, they won’t be by morning. It’s over. It’s all over,” he promised, arms tightening around me, as he lifted my body while he got to his feet.
“Oh,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Okay. Let’s go home then,” I said, resting my head into his chest.
“You still want me?” he asked, voice vulnerable. “Even after all of this?”
“I can’t help it,” I admitted, taking a deep breath, catching traces of blood, yes, as well as his cologne, but also just… him, a smell I was getting a little addicted to, if I were being completely honest. “I think I might actually be falling for you,” I admitted, wincing at how those words sounded, but knowing there was no other way to say them.
“That’s convenient, lamb, because I fucking love you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Primo - 1 day
It wasn’t going to be easy.
There was no taking back the events of Christmas that year.
There was more death and blood and fear and anger and grief than I’d ever felt before in my life.
But underneath all of that, there was Isabella.
We’d gone back home and climbed in the tub together, just holding each other in silence, a bit in shock over the events of the last twenty-four hours.
She slept restlessly after, tossing and turning in my arms, crying out, plagued by things she couldn’t un-feel, unsee, or un-hear.
Thank God for Vissi with his quick thinking to tell her to close her eyes, cover her ears, to make her hum, to dull the sounds of what was going on. I knew Isabella had very few illusions about the kind of man I was, and especially, the kind of boss I was. But I didn’t need her witnessing it in action as I cut the tongue of a lying brother out. Or as I sliced the Esposito Family crest that all my men had inked on them when they got made off of his body while he was still alive. And I didn’t need her to see or hear as I strangled him to death, watching the life drain from him minute by minute.
His fate would have been death no matter how his disloyalty came to light.
But the ferocity of it was due to Isabella.
I’d never felt panic like I’d felt when I knew she was taken, when I didn’t have any idea what was being done to her, or if I would get to her in time.
It had been Vissi who had been able to remain logical while I spiraled out of control. He was the one to remind me that there was no way Dawson or Dulles could take Isabella to their apartments which were across the hall from each other on a high floor. There would be too many neighbors there.
“And it seems too personal for that,” he’d reasoned. “What is more personal to you and them?”
Then it came to me in a rush of blinding realization.
Of course.
Of course they would take this back to where it all began for them.
The basement of the brownstone where all our childhood and adolescent beatings had taken place so the neighbors didn’t wise up and call child services on my father.
I still owned the place. I made sure I had some men do upkeep on it to make sure it didn’t crumble on me, but I hadn’t stepped foot inside of it myself since the day I murdered the man who’d turned it into a house of horrors for all his sons.
That was where Dawson and Dulles would take her.
It brought everything full-circle.
They would hurt her there because they’d been hurt there.
And they blamed me for it.
Hell, I’d blamed myself for it.
But I thought we’d worked past all that shit in the years after our father’s murder.
Clearly, I was painfully mistaken about that.
And who had suffered? Everyone else I cared about, who I’d vowed to protect.
Vissi had needed to leave his life behind.