“This isn’t the time for that, either.”
Step follows step, until my boots hit concrete. There’s another odour down here, something beneath the stale fear and the tang of dried blood. Something sour and putrid with a bittersweet aroma.
Triumph.
“You took your time, Lastra,” comes a mocking brogue from the darkness.
A beat later, a blinding white light has me throwing my arm across my eyes as a vicious blow to the back of my head forces me to my knees.
“Jesus…Fuck!”
Another fist comes out of leftfield, smashing into my jaw and sending me sprawling before a heavy boot is making mincemeat of my rib cage and robbing my chest of air.
“Don’t kill him right away, Kirill,” chides the same voice. “In my house, we play with our fucking food before we carve it up.”
Coughing and wheezing, I rise to my hands and knees, trying hard not to vomit as my gun is kicked out of reach. My head is reeling. It feels like my future just got dumped on the concrete floor next to me, and it’s bleeding out a single word:
Betrayed.
“Don’t you know it’s polite to look a man in the face when you enter his home?” Another kick to my side has me rolling onto my back and groaning, staring up at a beast of a man with tattoos all over his arms and a smile on his face. It’s a dirty smile though, full of scorn and violence. “Shall we start with the formalities, Lastra? I don’t believe your father introduced us before I emptied five rounds into his chest.”
The floor beneath me turns a whole lot colder.
O’Sullivan.
“Here, have a drink. My house. My hospitality.” Holding out a bottle of whiskey, he pours the contents straight in my face.
Eyes stinging, lungs spluttering, I roll away again. “That was a waste of good alcohol, you Irish twat,” I croak.
“Only fair I share it. I did murder your family and decimate your legacy. Crying shame about your sister, though… Didn’t you have designs on her, Kirill?”
“You bastards!” My roar of rage is cut short as O’Sullivan’s boot connects with my face, breaking my cheekbone with a dull crack.
Half-blinded with agony, my eyes dart around the stark basement, taking in the metal chairs, the bloodstained floor, the dozen or so armed men standing around watching me, until finally they land on Guido.
He’s leaning against a wall, picking his nails.
“What happened to Omertà, you piece of shit,” I gasp out.
“You’re no more a made man than the whore I fucked last night, Frankie,” he says calmly. “Don’t delude yourself, kid. Zaccaria had this orchestrated from the moment your father died. It was all about distraction while we moved you into position.”
“To where? A council house in Shoreditch?” The left side of my face is on fire. I think O’Sullivan’s dislocated my jaw, as well.
“Tell Zaccaria that we’re all square now,” I hear the Irishman say to him. “I don’t owe him anything after what this little punk did today. I warned him Lastra would cause trouble for us. We should have put him down with the rest.”
They were all in on my family’s destruction: Irish, Russian, British, and Italian.
Peace wasn’t prosperous enough. These kinds of snakes only live for the carnage.
“Have your fun, O’Sullivan, but come morning, what remains of him is ours.”
“What’s so special about this mudak, anyway?” demands a heavy voice to my left.
Kirill Semenov.
“He was spared to serve a purpose.”
“As what? A fucking thorn in our sides for the next forty years?” O’Sullivan shakes his head in disgust. “Bring me the other one… Razor’s boy,” he adds to his men. “We’re going to have ourselves a generational massacre tonight.”
“I’m warning you,” Guido snaps. “Don’t go against Zaccaria’s wishes again. Lastra is ultimately mafia business, not Irish.”
“Just so long as he leaves London and never comes back after I break every bone in his body!”
O’Sullivan looks furious. I’m a loose end. A sharp splinter in the side of his dominance over this city.
Closing my eyes, I suck in a couple of deep breaths. I’m standing in the middle of the Red Compass and being spun in every which direction. What other purpose am I supposed to have, when the only ones that matter are avenging my family and Ada.
Ada.
“Shut the fuck up, Lastra.”
I don’t even realise I’m chanting her name until another kick from O’Sullivan’s boot connects with my stomach.
“You want to know about her? My men just picked her up. Caught her hitch-hiking all the way home.”
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
“This isn’t her home, O’Sullivan,” I rasp, as another wave of nausea ripples through me. “Never was.”
“True,” he admits, hauling me up by the scruff of my T-shirt and throwing me onto a metal chair. “But she’ll be living with Kirill from now on. I just brought their wedding forward.”
A second metal chair gets slammed down next to mine, and a young guy gets shoved into it. I can tell he’s in a bad way. His white dress shirt is covered in blood, and he’s bent double at the waist, hissing in pain like a deflating balloon, with two bloody stumps where his fingers used to be.
There’s something familiar about his dark hair, and when he rolls his head back to look at me—or what’s left of me—the one eye that isn’t swollen shut is a wicked green.
Danny Razor.
“You Lastra’s son?” He pauses to gasp for breath, his skin a mess of blood and bruises. “How the fuck did you end up here?”
“History repeated itself.”
We share a look that sticks.
In a different life, this guy might have been an ally.
A beat later, Semenov is punching me so hard, I’m slithering down to the concrete floor again.
“Did you touch her?” He crouches over me, crushing my jaw between his fingers.
“I’m a gentleman, fuckface, we don’t kiss and tell.” With this, I spit at him, leaving a trail of bloody saliva on the front of his black shirt. The punch he gives me in return robs me of consciousness for a couple of seconds. When I come to, I’m back on the chair, and Guido’s halfway up the basement stairs, the wooden steps creaking under his weight.
“Guido, wait! Aiden’s innocent in all of this. Don’t let—”
“Knight’s safe.” He stops and turns, considering me dispassionately for a moment. “You were never the starring role in your own life, Frankie. It was always about him.”
“Aiden?” I splutter. “But he’s just a kid.”
“Who means something big to Zaccaria. Knight needed a brother figure to protect him while he was growing up, and Zaccaria chose you for the job. He’s still choosing you because it’s your fucking vocation now. That’s your punishment for going off script with O’Sullivan’s daughter. After tonight, you’re heading home, via a long stay at the hospital, and then you’re taking that plane to Italy with him, not Ada.”
“I’m not going anywhere without her.”
“She was never yours to begin with. She’s history. She’s gone.”