Thirty minutes later, Jovanti showed Rafe and Carmen into Leon’s office.
Leon nodded at him. “Have you had the men out checking the grounds Jovanti?”
The bodyguard nodded back. “All seems normal.”
“Well, it isn’t fucking normal.” Leon growled. “We have a killer loose and he aims to take this whole house down.”
Jovanti looked startled. “I will have them patrol again.” He then shut the door.
Carmen seemed to be a little nervous as he refused to sit down but Rafe just seemed concerned at being called in.
“What, my friend, is going on here?” Rafe asked.
“I find myself in a dilemma,” Leon told his old friend.
“Anything I can do to help?”
“Actually, there is something you can do.” Leon nodded at him. “We got a phone call the other night and the woman on the other end of that phone call told us that someone was out to unseat me as a Council member and take over my spot in the family.”
Rafe looked shocked. “Who would do such a thing?”
“My bookkeeper and your grandson.” Leon raised the mud stained lighter. “This was dropped by one of the men who was in on that conversation. She overheard him say his grandfather gave it to him.”
Rafe stared at the very familiar gift he had given to Carmen just last year. He gasped and slowly turned his head to stare Carmen. He could read the guilt on his grandson’s face. He shook his head and reached out to slap Carmen’s face.
Carmen’s head snapped to the side with the hard slap.
“You would dare to do this?” Rafe shouted in rage.
Carmen then turned his head back to glare at his grandfather. “You are an old man, as is he. You need to step aside and allow younger men to take over. Fresher blood will bring back the fear to the people of Boston and the East Coast. We will make the Family a stronger force to be reckoned with again.”
“That time was over a lifetime ago.” Rafe shook his head.
“No, old man.” He raised his voice. “The Family could be great again!”
“The Family is still in control and we have enough power,” Leon argued. “Now we need to know who you are working for. They kidnapped the woman who alerted us to your plot and we want her back.” He looked over at his friend. “The Council is on their way from New York. If I don’t get the information I need, then the situation will be out of my hands when they get here.”
Rafe nodded then looked over at his grandson. “Tell him what he needs to know.”
“No I can’t,” Carmen protested. “He’ll kill me!”
Rafe shook his head. “You’ll be dead anyway. You disgraced us all and there is no coming back from that.”
“I can’t,” Carmen insisted.
“Then you have killed us both, you selfish little bastard,” Rafe told him.
A loud knock sounded on Leon’s office door.
Leon pulled his trusty magnum from his inner vest. “Come in,” he called out as he pointed his large weapon at the door.
The door swung open and John stood there. “Donny is dead,” he stated.
“What?” Leon asked. “I never told you to kill him!”
“I didn’t.” The large bodyguard shrugged. “Not that I wouldn’t have minded but I found him hung from the ceiling.”
“How in the…?” Leon was mystified.
“I know how!” Carmen shouted. “He got to him! That’s how. This is why I won’t talk. He will kill me.”
Leon turned to the younger man. “Not if we kill you first.”
“I don’t care! At least it will be merciful with one bullet to my head! That man is insane, he hates you and Calderone like no other man on this green earth. I-I’ve seen him—torture someone once…” Carmen looked pale. “I couldn’t stop puking until I was dry heaving.”
“Son, don’t you get it?” Rafe asked. “The Council will have you put down. You need to do the right thing here.”
Carmen kept shaking his head. “I’ll take my chances.”
Leon looked over at John. “Go and see if there was any sign that Donny did not hang himself.”
John nodded and left, closing the door behind him.
“He will find the man with his intestines hanging out of him,” Carmen whispered in fear.
Leon was disgusted by this event and this pussy that stood in his office as he dialed Calderone’s cell.
“Yeah Dad,” Calderone responded gruffly.
“Donny is dead and it looks like he hung himself.”
“Dammit, we needed him to talk,” Calderone swore.
“Well, according to Carmen, he was murdered,” Leon informed him.
“In our own house? Who the fuck is doing this?”
Leon stared at a trembling Carmen. “I wish I knew. Now, we know the leader is right here. A part of our staff.”
“Dannazione!” Calderone swore. “I need to find Willow and now, this is happening? Dad, I cannot leave you when this danger is right here.”
“No, son you do what you have to do,” Leon replied. “I am keeping my magnum in my hand until we find out who this is and we will find out.”
Calderone sighed over the phone.
“I mean it son. Go get your woman.” Leon hung up.
Calderone swiped his phone. How did is dad know that Willow was now his woman? He shrugged, his dad was a shrewd man though, and he had set it up so Calderone would be watching her at the safe house last night. So he’d known about Calderone’s instant attraction to her.
He paused. A lot of protecting I fucking did though.
With this thought, another call came in.
“Hey Calderone,” the caller spoke.
“Hawk?”
“Yeah man, we might have found the woman.”
At this news, Calderone nearly held his breath. “Where?”
“Down further along the bay. In a storage unit, we think?”
“You think?”
“Yeah,” Hawk said. “I got a call from one of our shippers that two men had been lurking around the docks. So I called the Dock Master, he told me that a man had rented one for some shipment, and he never saw him before.”
“This could be a wild goose chase,” Calderone replied.
“Yeah, I thought so too, until another call came in. It was Willy, he’s a bum that lives by the docks that we help now and then, he said he saw two men carrying something covered in a blanket to the loading area.”
“Okay, I’ll be heading over there.”
“We are there now as backup in the shadows like always, waiting on you, old man.”
Calderone snorted. “I’ll be there, kid.”
Snickering, Hawk ended the call.
Calderone went over to his closet and tapped the button. It opened and he moved forward. Grabbing a metal box, he opened it and there was his twin glocks along with his shoulder holster. He’d had the weapons made in Austria. They had never let him down and they fit him like an extension of his own hands. It had been a while since he’d worn them, but it never leaves you, he figured. He had done targets with them just last week, but wearing them for battle was a different thing altogether. He checked the weapons and checked the clips with a metallic snap. Swiftly, he shoved extra ammo into his coat pockets. He then spotted another box. That was his silencer pistol. He used this recently in Troy in fact. That had been more than necessary though. Those men had it coming like none he’d encountered before.
The dogs whined.
Calderone turned around. “Yes, you are both going,” he spoke to Zeus and Molly. “Maybe you can be bloodhounds and help locate your owner.” He knelt down and placed a hand on each canine’s head “Listen, I… I’m in love with your Willow and I will give my life to protect her as you both would. So, let’s go and find her.” He stood up and they both followed him to the door.
He knew he would be going to the garage and driving himself today. No one knew who this fucking traitor was, so he would have to sneak out of his own dammed home.
When this was done, he was going to kill another man. The last ones were fiends and had damaged many lives in their pursuits of greed and avarice. Before them, it had been five years ago. It had been Flynn Reardon who had killed his wife and taken his daughter. This time, it would be no different. The man would be just as dead.
Another fiend would be dying by my hand once again.
Willow couldn’t see anything as they were dragging her. They had covered her in some scratchy, smelly blanket and had shoved her into a car trunk as far as she could tell.
When they set her on her wobbly feet, they removed the blanket and she could still smell the bay. Were they close to the safe house? She couldn’t be sure but it had been at least ten minutes by car she guessed.
The bigger man then dragged into a metal container. The place was cool and damp inside and the air smelled stale. They came to a stop well inside it, toward the back and the stark silence that surrounded them when the other man shut the metal doors deafened her for a moment.
The only light was from their flashlights.
The bigger man looked around. “What happened to the fucking main light?”
“Fuck if I know?” his partner answered as he swung his flashlight around.
“There it is, flip it on,” the first man that held Willow up said. “I wanna see what we got here.” Turning, he dragged her by the hair to where the other guy stood as he snapped the light on.
Willow wanted to scream but she didn’t. When he shoved her to the wall, she saw the dirty quarters. At some point, someone had dragged a mattress in here and left it behind. It was stained and filthy and there were several empty beer bottles on the floor. There were a couple of mismatched chairs by this wall stained with what looked like old blood. She shivered in dread.
The larger man, who’d dragged her, turned and grabbed a couple of lengths of rope from the floor. “Take your clothes off bitch.” He growled.
“Why should I?” Willow asked as fear took her, but she dare not show it to these men. God, were they going to rape and kill her?
“Mostly because I told you to, but also because I want to see the goods. I mean that’s part of our payment for grabbling you.”
Her body shook as she spat, “Go to hell.”
He laughed. “I will after I send you there.” He stepped closer. “Now. Take. Off. Your. Clothes.”
Willow knew she’d better get control here if she could… she needed to stall and try to prevent this from happening. “Do you know what you just did?”
The men stared at her.
“I’m Calderone’s fiancé. Do you know who he is at all?” Yes, she wasn’t above lying to save her skin, literally her flesh was at stake here.
The larger man paused but then shook it off. “So? Vincinti is bound to find you sooner or later, after your body shows up in the bay, that is. All the boss has to do is step up the timeline. As far as the rest goes, well they have to find us first.” He shrugged. “We know all about the Sinners too, our club has dealt with them in the past. I’m not worried about them.”
Willow sneered as she kept up the act. “You should be. You took me from their safe house and they aren’t going to just let this boss run over them either. They are big in numbers too. You two are dead already.”
He glared at her as his hands shook, but didn’t bother answering her challenge. Raising his huge beefy hand, he hit her hard. When she stumbled and fell to the floor, he dropped the rope to the dirty floor, grabbed her roughly by her shirt, and ripped it from her body. She jerked as he pulled the material away from her torso. He tossed the shirt into the corner of the room.
Grabbing both her wrists, he dragged her over to one of the chairs. Pushing her down into the seat, he tied one wrist to the arm of the chair with a length of rope. With the other length of rope, he tied her other wrist to the opposite arm.
The bindings were so tight, she couldn’t move and her fingers began to tingle as the circulation was cut off to her hands.
His hands went to the zipper on her shorts and he ripped it down. Grabbing the waistband, he tore them down her legs, nearly pulling her from the chair. He left her in her underwear and stepped back to look his work over.
His partner joined them and stared at her.
Willow could see lust in both men’s eyes.
“So now what, Tap?” his partner asked. “What the hell are we gonna do now?”
“Shut up!” Tap shouted at him. “I need to think.”
“Yeah, well think fast okay?” he urged. “If what she says is true, it won’t take them long to find us and I want to be long gone when they get here. I think we are actually in the Sinner’s territory too, now that I think about it.”
Tap stopped and stared at the other man. “God dammit, Teague. So fucking what? They won’t find us, they’ll just find her barely alive later on, and we’ll be long gone. They don’t know where we are.”
“We gotta get out of town while we can.” Teague grabbed his arm. “We don’t have time to take her out!”
Tap yanked his large arm away from Teague’s hold. “We got time to have her though, he promised we could. Yes, they might know we’re here but they don’t know where here is. Didn’t you see how many containers are out there? Like five-hundred of them, man. Now settle down and let me do my thing.” He stared at Willow and licked his lips. “I’ve been waiting for this ever since I saw her with that shithead Italian and I will not be denied.” Tap reached behind his back and grabbed the handle of his knife from the sheath at his waist. Pulling it around to his front, he twisted the handle in his hands. “This is gonna be fun.” His eyes glazed over with some cruel glint.
Willow’s heart pounded in her chest. Her skin crawled just having these two men this close to her. He would bring her world to a nasty ending with a knife this large. She almost prayed for death to find her quickly. “If you kill me, what is your boss gonna say?”
“Yeah, Tap he didn’t give us the order to kill her yet. We were just supposed to bring her here and wait.”
Her eyes focused on the knife. God, this couldn’t be happening! She’d just met Calderone and she knew they had something special, something like fire. She’d never known passion like that. It just couldn’t end like this. She would miss out on so much. Glancing up at this killer Tap, she knew her future was very limited. She also knew Tap was the kind of man that would take his sweet time in delivering her to the grimmest reaper.
Suddenly without warning, Tap moved closer and took a swipe at her belly with the large sharp weapon.
Flinching with the slashing, Willow didn’t scream. This surprised her, she thought he would stretch this out for a while, but he just stabbed her instead. Funny, how when you die you don’t feel pain. She got a little dizzy and the large man in front of her seemed to weave in and out.
Good, maybe I’ll just die and there won’t be any rape at least.
