Page 80 of The Scars We Keep
I let the silence sit for a moment, long enough to become its own kind of threat.
“The De Luca’s in ruin,” I say slowly, my fingers tightening around his throat a fraction, just enough to make the point.I lean in close enough that there is nothing between us but bad intentions.“Luca, look the fuck around you.”
His hand reaches for the gun at his back, but mine is already moving, faster, and already pressed to his skull before his fingers have even closed around the grip.
The lot freezes with every man on it.Every breath.Every trigger finger itching since we pulled through those gates, all of it suspended in that suffocating stillness that only descends when death stops being a concept and becomes something you can smell in the air.
And Luca Serrano, with my gun pressed to his temple, looks me dead in the eye and smiles.
The lot erupts at the order I gave my men before the sun came up.No one walks out of here today except Luca.He is mine.Everything else is theirs.
The first shots crack through the air, and the lot becomes a different world entirely.My men move like a single breathing thing, wide and fast.Twelve bodies in tailored jackets spread across the lot with the kind of cold, practiced efficiency that money can’t buy and fear alone cannot produce.It takes the particular loyalty that comes from following a man who has never once sent them somewhere he would not go himself.
Luca’s guys scramble.Reaching for positions, cover, some version of safety that makes sense.But they won’t find one.You cannot build a defense inside a trap.You can only discover, too late, how well it was constructed.
One of Luca’s men goes down near the SUV, hand clawing at his throat as if he could negotiate with the bullet already inside him.The sound he makes is swallowed whole by the chaos erupting around him.
Another makes a run at Rafe with a knife.Rafe watches him come, then raises his gun and puts a bullet in him with the unhurried calm of someone crossing an item off a grocery list.The knife hits the gravel and the man follows it.Rafe is already looking elsewhere before the man lands.
Luca drives his fist up into my mouth and the world tilts sideways.
My gun hits the gravel before I even register it leaving my hand.Blood floods my mouth—that hot, intimate taste of a split lip that has a way of sharpening a man’s attention to a very fine point.I see Luca’s hand move for his weapon, but I don’t let it get there.
I slam my forehead into his nose.The crack of it travels up my skull like a door slamming shut on the conversation he thought he was about to finish.The force of it sends his gun skidding across the gravel, and blood spills down his upper lip.His eyes water with the involuntary honesty a broken nose produces in even the most composed of men, and for one glorious second the smug, polished Luca Serrano cracks clean down the middle.
I close my fist and hit him once.Twice.A third time across the jaw with enough force to feel it all the way up my arm,
He bucks hard beneath me, gets a knee between us with the kind of dirty, instinctive technique that is never taught in any gym, and throws me sideways with enough force to make the gravel an opinion I didn’t ask for.
We hit the ground separately.
We scramble up, both breathing hard, both wearing the evidence of the last sixty seconds on our faces, and both entirely past the point of pretending this morning would ever resolve itself through conversation and good intentions.
Around us, the lot is still erupting with gunfire and shouted Italian.
Luca wipes the blood from his nose with the back of his hand, one long, slow drag, then looks down at it for a moment.The sick fuck grins, wide and bloody, absolutely without remorse, and comes at me again with the kind of momentum that belongs to a man who has just decided he has nothing left to lose.
He swings for my head.I drop beneath it, feel the air move where my skull just was, and drive a punch deep into his kidney—a blow that should rearrange his weekend considerably.He grunts, folds half an inch, then catches me with a sharp elbow across the cheek that lights the entire left side of my face.I stagger half a step sideways before I can pull myself back.
He follows fast.Too fast for a man bleeding from the nose onto a three-thousand-dollar shirt.He grabs my jacket with both hands, pivots with his whole body behind it, and slams me into the ground with enough force to drive the air from my lungs and send pain tearing through my shoulder.
He is stronger than I gave him credit for.Meaner, too, and I gave him considerable credit to begin with.
He snarls and drives his fist toward my ribs, and I twist beneath him, using the ground as leverage, coming up hard and fast.I grab him by the jacket and slam him face-first into the gravel with everything I have—hard enough that the impact sends a shudder through his body.
Luca looks up at me from the gravel, blood painting his chin, and the sick fuck laughs.The sound is unhinged, the laugh of a man who has either lost the plot entirely or never had it to begin with.
Across the lot, the fight continues.My men move in sequence, closing the gaps, cutting off options, until each of Luca’s soldiers finds himself outnumbered.His men are good, but not good enough, and that realization arrives for each of them at precisely the wrong moment.
One by one, they go down.
And then I see one of my own hit the ground, and something cold moves through me.
Just as the last of Luca’s men hit the ground, he drives a knee into my stomach with everything he has left.The air leaves me in a brutal, undignified rush.
The Serrano polish is gone entirely now, stripped back to a raw, ugly thing.The moment I see that wild, entitled fury take over his face, I recognize it immediately.I watched it on the security feed at two in the morning, and I’m watching it now in real time.This is what Bella saw.This unhinged, coiled violence.This is what he walked into my home and did, wrapping his fingers around her jaw as he leaned in close and pressed his threats against her.
He punches me in the temple, and white explodes behind my eyes, a hot, blinding sheet of pain.My vision blurs at the edges.
