"The damage was done the moment our eyes collided."
~Xavier De Luca
***
One life-altering night ignites a soul-scorching passion between a gangster and a good girl...One that could burn everyone they know and love to ashes.
Loyalties and legacies...
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The blood bathing my hands was hollow retribution. Its smell hung heavy in the air, tainted with filth and fear. It coated my heaving lungs and cloaked my vision in red.
Fernando coughed and spat out a mangled tooth. That must have been what tore my knuckle when I first laid into his sorry ass for trying to backtalk me.
The only sounds that snivelly piece of shit made when I was finished, were pleas for mercy.
"Did Gannon beg for his life while you were burning his skin?" I took a vulturine step, fist cocked and ready to strike again as Fernando scrambled back. His sorry ass wiped a long steak of his own blood along the warehouse floorboards. "What about when you pried his fingernails up, one by one? Or when you cut shapes into his stomach?"
Those were just a few of the ways he'd been tortured before they shot him in the neck to watch him bleed out. Regardless of what Gannon did, they inflicted ruthless suffering before forcing him to feel every second his own agonizing death.
"I didn't do that!" Fernando shrieked, holding his trembling hands over his battered face. "I swear it wasn't me!"
"Then WHO?" I thundered, flicking spittle on him to make him flinch. "Who keyed him up on our property without my family's consent? I want fucking names!"
"I can't!" He yelped, cursing out my mother under his breath in Spanish. "They'll kill me!"
I bit back acidic laughter at his idiocy.
I'm actually fluent in four languages, and proficient enough to have a conversation in two more. Not to mention people had been speaking Spanish in Los Angeles a lot longer than they'd been using English.
"FUCKER, I will kill you!" I sent my foot into his ribs to watch the weasel howl and flail. "And since you like talking about my mother so much, how about I pay yours a visit when I'm done here? Is Flavia still on Los Flores? In Lynwood?"
Fernando struggled to push his swollen eyes open in shock at the same time a dark stain blossomed on his jeans and down his leg.
He'd never crossed someone like me before, but he was quickly realizing the true err of his ways.
"Please, d-d-don't!" He begged, searching the darkness beyond the only light on in the whole warehouse. "Don't touch mi mama! I don't know anything, I swear!"
Matteo and his older brother Gael emerged from the shadows to let Fernando know I wasn't the only one with questions for him.
Fernando's pleas became whimpers of desperation laced with the stench of his urine.
"Why were you at my club?" I snarled, "Who hired you?"
"I didn't get paid," Fernando cowered, "I was paying a debt! He said they would sell my daughter to make up the money I owed! Please!"
