Taboo Flames (The Sicilian Sins #2)

Chapter 24

CHAPTER 24

Giovanni

“ W here’s the son of a bitch?” I roar, marching into the safe house.

“This way, boss,” Fiore says, leading me deeper into the building to where a man is hanging from chains in the ceiling. He’s a skinny man who looks like he’s lived a hard life. The effect of both drugs and a life of crime is evident on his body.

I spot the spider tattoo across his palm and sneer.

“What has he said so far?” I ask.

“We haven’t asked him much," Fiore admits. “We just roughed him up a bit. We thought you’d like to do the honors.”

“You thought correctly.” I smile. “How’s Carlos?”

“He’s a tough bastard. He’ll be up and running in a few days time.”

“Good,” I say with a nod. Then I turn and face the groaning man before me. “On the one hand, I want this to be as easy as possible for you, but on the other hand, I want you to choose the hard way.”

I spread out the contents of the toolbox on one side of the steel table. There are different sizes of hammers, pliers, drills, whips, and a whole lot of other fun toys.

The man’s eyes widen at the selection, and then he spits out blood. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just let me go, man.”

“How disappointing,” I reply.

“I’m not loyal to Il Sguardo Nero anyway,” he says angrily. “I knew he had plans to get rid of me. Said I was a weak link or something like that. I’m not a damn weak link.”

Fiore and I exchange a look. From where I’m standing, he’s very much the weak link.

“So what do you know?” I question him.

“I know that it doesn’t matter what I tell you,” he says with a stupid-looking smirk. “He’s too powerful for you to able to touch him. He’s not your regular drug dealer kingpin.”

I’ve been suspecting that for a while.

“So what is he?” I probe.

“Don’t get me wrong. He has his hand in every piece of pie. He’s sort of a jack of all trades. He recently teamed up with the Albanians.”

Hearing that, I step forward angrily. “What the fuck did you say?”

The man laughs. “He’s been fucking you from the back long before the Vitale girl came into the equation.”

“Who is he?” My words come out low and hard. “I need a name, a real name.”

“You don’t know?” He guffaws. “You’re pathetic. I thought you were the great Giovanni Lombardi, lethal and terrifying.”

I’m tempted to just shoot him straight through the head, but I need to hear what he has to say, so I stop myself.

“I’ll find him whether you talk or not. I know he works with The Godfather and that’s an easy path to trail. But be rest assured that?—”

His maniacal laughter cuts me off abruptly, and I stare at him in surprise as he laughs so hard that tears spring up in his eyes.

“You think he works with The Godfather?” he asks, putting a strange emphasis on the question.

“I know it,” I snap impatiently. “There’s no use denying it.”

“I’m not denying it,” He laughs again, spitting out another mouthful of blood. There’s a look of unadulterated amusement on his face that I don’t understand.

“Unless you want me to revisit my tool table, I asked you a question, and I’m not a patient man. Who the fuck is Il Sguardo Nero?”

He leans forward jeeringly and finally answers, “His name is Giacob Giordano, and he’s also known as The Godfather.”

I stagger back in shock. “Impossible,” I utter.

“He’s lying!” Fiore growls.

The man just throws his head back as far as he can, considering the restraint on his neck, his laugh echoing in the empty room.

“No, he’s not,” I respond slowly as the final piece of the puzzle clicks into place. I’d assumed there was a mole in our organization taking valuable information back to the enemy, but it turns out that all this while, I’ve been the unwilling leak.

This is why the Albanians have proven to be unstoppable. Because I’ve been pouring out my frustrations about them to a man I thought I could trust. The same thing with Aurora’s case.

The realization that I singlehandedly handed Aurora over to Il Sguardo Nero hits me like a freight train, and I squeeze my eyes shut, furious at myself.

“He’s the ultimate chess player, and he played you all very well,” the pimp says with a laugh. “You can’t stop him. His reach is infinite, and soon, he’ll be trading his girls all over the country.”

Fiore spits in disgust. “He’s a fucking trafficker.”

It’s one of the things that separates bad men from evil men in my world. As much as I was very okay with selling arms and drugs, selling human beings like cowhide in a market is something I don’t touch at all or even associate with.

No wonder all my contacts were unable to find this man. We know nothing about the flesh market.

“That’s where the money is at,” the skeevy pimp says with a salacious grin. “And when he succeeds in taking over Italy, he’s going to be richer than countries put together. Women were made to be warm, wet holes, and Il Sguardo Nero is only utilizing that. The Vitale girl will fetch a pretty sum on the block.”

In one swift move, I grab the axe close to me and bury it in his skull, shutting him up forever.

“Clean this up and gather the men silently. We’re going to war, and the only advantage we have on our side is the element of surprise.”

“But we don’t know where they’re holding her,” Fiore points out.

“I have a hunch, and my hunches are never wrong.” I know most of Giordano's hideouts, but the one I believe Aurora is being held at is at an ancient, crumbling castle by the ocean.

“Are you going to involve the Vitales?” Fiore asks.

“No,” I reply. “Aurora is my responsibility. I’ll handle it.”

Right at that moment, my phone begins to buzz. I retrieve it from the inner pocket of my suit and see that it is an unknown number.

I pick up the call immediately. “Yes?”

“After giving it some thought, I came to the conclusion that hiding behind anonymity feels wrong.” The voice is very familiar, and I immediately place it as Estefan’s.

I narrow my eyes suspiciously. “What the hell is going on?”

He chuckles, but the sound is grim and humorless. “You would have figured it out eventually, so allow me to go ahead and tell you. I orchestrated our meeting at Estes. I am your contact.”

“You knew about Giordano’s identity, didn’t you?” Even though I frame it as a question, we both know it’s more of a fact.

“You wouldn’t have believed me if I had told you,” he replies. “You needed to find out on your own.”

“How long have you known?” I ask through clenched teeth.

“I believe you have something far more important to do than playing detective, Lombardi,” he says gravely. “We have a common enemy. I would ask you to bring his head?—”

“I don’t work for you, Estefan.”

He chuckles humorlessly again. “I’ve lived in guilt for years at the fact that I was never able to get revenge for Ysabel,” he says. “I think a part of me has always known that this wasn’t my revenge though.”

Giordano’s life is mine, and no one is allowed to rob me of the satisfaction of ending him.

“Godspeed, Lombardi. You’ll need it,” Estefan says, and then the line clicks off.

It doesn’t take long for my men to kit up in their bulletproof vests and arm themselves with silenced guns. Then, we drive to the crumbling ruins at breakneck speed. I clutch and unclutch the chaplet in my hand nervously.

I’m not a praying man, but right then and there, I pray for Aurora with everything in me.

Our cars park some distance from the castle, and we creep around the fence quietly. The sky is beginning to show the first traces of dawn when we find a hole in the fence and sneak into the castle one by one, fanning out against the wall upon our entrance.

“Spread out,” I tell them in a whisper. “Shoot anyone you see and try not to get shot.”

“Yes, boss,” they all chorus quietly.

“And one more thing,” I add. “Nobody touches Giordano. He’s mine.”

The men nod, and I see some of them make signs of the cross before they scatter off in different directions.

I hold my Glock tightly in one hand as I make my way deeper into the building. When I come across one of Giordano’s men urinating in the corner, I fire a bullet into the back of his head.

I continue advancing deeper into the building, shooting anybody in my way. The stairs leading up prove tricky as they are far too broken, and they don’t look at all secure.

I search around and come up short on another route leading up, so with a muttered curse under my breath, I take the deathtrap-looking stairs, running up on light feet.

I don’t encounter anyone on my way, but when I get to one of the floors, I find some armed men playing cards and laughing. I flatten myself behind a wall, then grab a stone and throw it in the opposite direction. I shoot them when they all turn away to investigate the source of the noise.

As I turn a corner, a fist flies toward me, but I grab the fist, yank it forward, and twist the hand until I hear a satisfying snap and howl. Then I push the man away and shoot him twice in the head.

I take another set of stairs up and burst into another room, and finally, there she is. Aurora.

I take my first full breath since finding out she’s missing. She looks a mess, but at least she’s alive. Her lips are swollen and bruised, and one side of her forehead has a bleeding cut. She also looks spitting mad rather than scared, and I’m sure if there isn’t tape slapped over her mouth, she’ll be raining curses down on everyone’s head.

I chuckle lightly.

“Hello, princess,” I drawl.

Her head snaps forward, and she stares at me wide-eyed. She tries to say something, but it comes out muffled.

Just as I take a step toward her, Giordano steps out from another room with a gun trained on her.

“Take another step, and I’ll blow a hole through her.”

I freeze immediately. Gone are the pastel-colored shirts and pressed cargo pants. He looks nothing like the man I’ve known for a while and exactly like the man from my childhood days who had been a force to reckon with.

A compressed T-shirt exposes an arm with thick, whip-cord muscles that I hadn’t known he had been hiding behind his pastel-colored shirts and pressed cargo pants.

Even his eyes are different: cold, remote, and hard.

“You bastard!” I snarl.

“Drop your gun,” he orders.

Aurora begins to mumble loudly, her eyes clearly telling me that I shouldn’t do anything he says.

Giordano cocks his gun. “You do not want to test my patience, Giovanni.”

I raise my hands in the air in surrender and slowly lower my gun to the ground.

“Just let her go. This is between you and me,” I say harshly.

“It is, isn’t it?” He smiles, his lips lifting in a cruel, humorless curve.

“You killed my mother, didn’t you?” I ask him, my voice cold.

“Ysabel should never have gone snooping into my business,” he says angrily. “She found out about my trade, and I didn’t trust her to keep quiet. She had a weak point, which was you, and I knew she’d sing like a parrot if it meant saving you.”

He makes a pitying sound before continuing, “I enjoyed pushing her toward death and burying my cock inside her before I sliced her open ear to ear and threw her into the ocean.”

Fury ignites my blood, making it pound in my ears.

“You were a bonus I never expected to get. I came to kill you, the poor orphan boy of the woman I just murdered, but then I saw something in you that reminded me so much of myself.”

“I’m nothing like you,” I retort immediately with a frown.

“Yes, you are,” Giordano roars. “We are both ambitious men with a hunger for more. Nothing will ever be enough for us. Men like us are meant to rule the world, not exist under the leadership of lesser men. Me and you together, we could have owned the world.”

“Through the flesh trade? Is that how you plan to rule the world?” I snarl in disgust.

“Giving hopeless housewives access to copious amounts of cocaine and a gun is far more dangerous than selling girls, wouldn’t you say?” He cocks his head at me, his smile sharp and menacing.

“Guns don’t have families or feelings,” I tell him in a hard voice. “What you are is a greedy man who thinks he’s God. Newsflash, Giordano, you’re not God. You’re just a pathetic man who is too cowardly to come out of the shadows and actually fight for what he wants, so he stays hidden there and plays his little games.”

Anger turns Giordano’s eyes into slits, and next to him, Aurora looks panicked, her eyes wide.

“I was wrong about you, Giovanni. You’re as small-minded as the rest of them.” He shakes his head in disappointment.

“I’ve never been so glad to disappoint someone in my life,” I riposte.

He chuckles, then moves his gun until it’s trained on me. “I’m going to enjoy wiping you from this earth like I did to your bitch of a mother.”

“Go fuck yourself, Giordano,” I seethe.

Aurora’s muffled noises increase in volume as Giordano smiles sadistically and fires his gun at me.