“Come to the shack.”
End tone.
Gritting his teeth at the order, Dante walked out of the mansion, down the hill, to the shack in the woods. Once upon a time, the little shack had been a hunting shed. It was barely bigger than a few square feet, and mostly abandoned. Nobody really went there so it had been a pretty good place for his little trysts over the years.
Frowning as to why his father would call him that far out, Dante breathed evenly and adopted the little mask he usually wore around the older man. As much as he despised him, Dante admitted that he was a powerful leader and he didn’t get to that place by being dumb. He was sharp and he scented weakness before anyone even knew about it.
There was both pride and shame in him for having that blood in his veins.
He saw his father standing outside the shed, dressed in a suit, his beard starting to show little greys here and there. And he was smoking a cigar. Not a good sign.
“You called?” Dante asked, joining him, realizing that he was taller than the other man now, much more casually dressed though. His father didn’t like his attire. He didn’t want Dante in ripped jeans and leather jackets, looking like the quintessential bad boy. No, he wanted Dante in suits and ties, looking like a good bad man.
Bloodhound Maroni smiled. “Yes. It’s time.”
Dante’s stomach dropped, even as he kept his face even. It was time for the kill.
Taking a cigarette out of his pocket, he lit it up, and exhaled a cloud of smoke, seeing it swirl up at the cloudy sky. Usually, Dante loved the winters in Tenebrae. It got cold, wet, and snowy, and it made him love the summers even more. Not today though. Today, the clouds seemed gloomy, foreboding.
That feeling returned tenfold.
“Who is it?”
Lorenzo Maroni smiled again, a smile that made the back of Dante’s neck prickle and went to the shack’s door. Dante threw his cigarette to the side, crushing it under his boot before slowly approaching the door, to see who was inside.
Roni.
No.
Fuck, no.
She sat tied to a chair, tape over her mouth, her eyes red and swollen from tears as Al and Leo stood behind her.
Tension knotting on his shoulders, he turned to look at his father, his spine rigid as his hands fisted. “What the fuck is this?” he demanded.
“This,” his father said with a theatrical flourish, “is what you created, my son. You thought you would get involved with an outsider, a common girl, and I would do nothing?”
He hadn’t thought of what his father would do. He might be indispensable but she wasn’t. He should have thought of it. Fuck, he should have.
“Let her go,” he told the older man, his voice firm. “I won’t see her again.”
Lorenzo Maroni shook his head, finally putting out his own cigar. “This is a lesson, son. A lesson you need to remember. Love has no place in our world.”
Dante locked his jaw. “You loved mama,” he reminded the man.
His father laughed. “No, I didn’t. I wanted her, so I took her. That’s what men like us do. You’re too soft and I’ve let it go on too long.”
“What do you mean you took her?” Dante stared at his father, surprise filling him, followed by disgust at the implication. He had never imagined what his father was hinting at.
“Took. Snatched. I saw her and took her right from her car, brought her here, married her,” his father said, almost proudly.
Dante thought of his mother, beautiful, warm, but always sad, acid in his stomach. “Did you rape her?”
“Why does it matter?”
He had.
Disgust filled Dante, bile rising his throat as he swallowed it down. He looked away from the man who had sired him, perhaps forcefully, on his mother, and his skin crawled.
Roni whimpered, making him look at her small form. She didn’t deserve this. She really didn’t deserve this. She was an amazing girl, and the closest thing he had to a true friend. His first lover. She made him laugh. She didn’t deserve these ropes and tape.
His heart clenched, processing everything he had been told and everything he was seeing. He had to get her out. Somehow.
“Leo tells me you’ve gotten excellent with knives,” his father’s voice cut to the desperation filling him. Dante focused on his words, his heart slamming as the words dawned on him.
“Let her go, father,” he looked to the man, his eyes burning. “I swear fealty to you. I swear to follow every command you make. I swear to never see her again. Just please, let her go. I’m begging you.”
“Don’t beg!” his father yelled at him, grabbing him by the arm. “You are a Maroni! Maroni’s don’t beg, not even on their deathbeds. Do you understand?”
Dante nodded, letting his father shake his arm. Fear filled him at how the situation was unfolding. Huffing out a breath, his father cooled himself down, looking back at Dante again.
“Take this as another lesson,” he continued speaking, almost in a gentle voice. “Always have the upper hand when you’re bargaining. Right now, you have nothing. I am the one holding the power. What happens to this girl is under my control. What happens to your brother is under my control. You want him to get the help he needs? Kill the girl. A life for a life.”
Dante breathed out slowly, his mind racing to find a way, find a loophole, something, anything.
Nothing.
Fuck.
There had to be something.
Roni whimpered again.
Dante went to kneel before her, in a way he had kneeled before her countless times and saw her tears drench her face, words trapped between them. His head dropped to her lap, his hands gripping her chair.
“You don’t kill her,” his father’s voice said in that same even tone, “I’ll give her to the men who will have her first and kill her later. She will suffer. You, on the other hand, can give her mercy, my boy.”
No.
No.
He couldn’t. This was his fault. He never should have gotten involved with her. So many years they had spent together, and this is what it had come to.
“You have two minutes to choose.”
Two minutes.
One hundred and twenty seconds.
Suddenly, Dante could hear every beat of his heart pounding in his head, the blood rushing to his ears, ticking like a time bomb, every second closer to detonation.
He looked up at the wide, frightened blue eyes of the young girl who had dared to stay with him, knowing what he would choose. He couldn’t let her suffer, not at the hands of his father’s men. He couldn’t let her die like that.
He couldn’t do shit. He was a helpless little asshole who’d thought he could get away with playing with fire, without burning himself or his lover.
“Motherfucker!” he screamed in helpless frustration, getting up to pick an empty chair, throwing it across the room.
He looked back at his father, his heart racing. “Don’t make me do this.”
“One minute,” came the reply.
Grabbing fistfuls of his hair, Dante shook, howling at the ceiling in his helplessness, not wanting to do the one thing he knew he had to do to spare her.
“Thirty seconds.”
Tension climbed up in the room.
Exhaling out a deep breath, Dante slowly let a sense of calm wash over him. Without a word, he walked to his father and took the knife from the inside of his coat pocket, the little weight feeling like a rock in his hand. “You unleash this beast, father, do it knowing that one day, it will kill you too. This is your last chance to stop this madness.”