Breakfast on Tuesday

25. Run girl

With his gun already drawn, it took Dante but a second to decide that the person coming up the stairs was the enemy.

He squeezed the trigger and fired a bullet into the man's chest and then his head. I flinched, but the loud bang I was expecting didn't happen, instead, there were two soft pops.

A silencer.

I couldn't help but noticed that silencers weren't only good at silencing guns. They were superb at silencing meaty, tall men wearing dark clothes who dared to show up unexpectedly on Dante's turf.

The stranger never got a chance to utter any words before his heavy body fell backward, smearing the wall behind him with a streak of bright red blood before collapsing on the floor.

The burnt scent of gunpowder floated in the air toward me and caused my nose to twitch.

Two other goons showed up around the corner and Dante shot them too, using the blind curve of the stairs to his advantage. He didn't waste any bullets, using only one bullet per opponent.

I ducked behind the wall next to the stairs and continued to peep at what was going on down below. Dante looked behind him for a second as if looking to see if I was still there. Satisfied that I was gone, he rounded the corner and disappeared from my sight.

I swallowed the tight knot in my throat and pushed back the fear I felt roiling in my stomach. What if there was an ambush waiting for him on the other side?

Using my backside like a sweeper, I slid down the stairs, one step at a time. When I finally made it to the bottom, I heard the sound of two men fighting, hard fists striking skin and bones, their painful grunts echoing up the stairs.

Peeping around the corner, I saw that Dante was a bloodied mess. His shirt was torn open and a string of blood trickled down the side of his mouth. Streaks of blood covered his chiseled torso. His opponent's blood. His black hair was wild as he continuously punched the man before him in the face.

He held the much taller man by his collar and repeatedly punched him in the nose. His muscles undulated powerfully with every move, reminding me of a dominant predator in the wild. He drew back and I saw how bruised and bloodied his knuckles were.

"Who sent you?" he demanded.

"Fuck you, Dante. Your family deserves to die. Your father and your uncle don't play fair and neither do we." The man's eyes and nose were swollen like a wild macaque's behind and he could barely get the words past his battered lips.

"I recognize you. You're one of Santiago's men. Did he send you?"

Who was this Santiago, I wondered? Perhaps he was some high-ranking underboss within the clan?

"You killed his son. He was only twenty-two years old."

"Santiago knew what he signed up for when he and his son decided to join our family. His son was out of line and I had a direct order from above to execute him."

"He was just a child!" the man spat, flecks of blood landing on Dante's face.

Dante didn't flinch. "The fuck he wasn't. He knew what he was doing when he fucked and then convinced my girlfriend to help him steal a shipment of Columbian cocaine. My mother caught them in the act and they fucking shot her in the heart. So don't tell me he was a fucking child!" Dante punched the man in his mouth, knocking out one of his teeth. The bloody tooth landed on the floor next to my foot.

I stared at the three-rooted molar in disgust. There was a massive cavity in the crown, so maybe it was a good thing Dante had violently extracted it. That should save him a couple hundred bucks from having to get a root canal.