Page 102 of Tainted Blood

There’s a loud click, and then the room is an ocean of blinding white light.

I act on instinct, firing five punishingly loud rounds in his direction with my eyes shut tight. The result is a cacophony of destruction—grunts, thuds, the sounds of wood splintering, glass shattering. I don’t even realize I’m screaming until I’m all out of breath and rasping Santi’s name.

When I finally open my eyes, Reece is lying in his own puddle of crimson, haloed by splintered wood and plaster; his face a mask of surprise and anger.

Blinking away the last sting of the light, I jump to my feet. “Where’s Lola, you son of bitch?” I say, keeping my gun trained on him.

Reece just smiles that fucking smile again, and then he’s lunging for his own gun. Before he can take aim, I’m firing three more rounds and obliterating what’s left of his head.

And then there’s silence.

But the clock is still ticking.

Lola.

I have to find Lola…

The lights are back on. Maybe the phones are working again?

Sliding past Reece’s dead body, I sprint down the hallway toward Santi’s office. Bursting into the room, filling my aching lungs with that heady smell of history again, I come to a crashing stop when I see a tall figure standing in front of the wall of unsolved Villefort mysteries. His back is turned to me. He’s wearing a black suit, and with his hands in his pockets he looks so similar to…

“Santi!” I whisper.

“Not today,” comes a flat drawl.

It’s a voice that beat me. Tortured me. Denied me water. Denied me air.

“You.”

Without thinking, I squeeze the trigger again, but Lorenzo Zaccaria doesn’t even flinch as I fire round after useless round of an empty barrel at him.

“I’ve missed you, puttana,” he says, leveling me with the same dead eyes that haunt my nightmares. “I’ve enjoyed leading your husband in loops and circles this past month.”

“Stay the hell away from me!” I’m still pulling the redundant trigger, over and over, praying for a stuck bullet in the magazine to miraculously work itself free.

“Put the gun down,” he says in a bored voice. “You’ll need to conserve all your energy for where we’re going. I take it from the Wild West show down the hallway that you’ve killed Reece?” He clucks in frustration. “And his obsession with you was making him so much easier to manipulate. You have a nasty habit of taking out my best men, Señora Carrera. You’ll be punished for that.”

“Where’s Lola?” I cry, hurling the now useless gun at his head, but he sidesteps it at the last moment, and it goes crashing into the newspaper clippings and photographs, ripping the one of him from the wall.

All the red strings lead to The Black King.

He brushes imaginary dust from his lapel and grimaces. “She’s not here. She slipped through our fingers, but her time will come.”

“She’s safe?” I find myself daring to believe him. “But the recordings…?”

“Were taken the night I set my dogs loose on her,” he finishes tersely. “I suggested Reece use them to make you more amenable to what he wished to do to you. A confused mind makes for a far more pliable body to degrade. Would you care to guess how much money I made from my maze? Hunting mafia whores is far more lucrative than hunting Big Game.”

“You bastard!”

I turn to run and find myself staring down the barrel of a gun as one of his men blocks my exit.

A beat later, Zaccaria is fisting my hair and hurling me backward over Santi’s desk. The force is so violent, I go skidding across the surface, landing in a crumpled heap on the other side. Before I can catch my breath, I’m being dragged up by my hair again and punched twice in the face—fire exploding in my left cheek, and then above my left eye socket.

“Personal, just turned extremely personal,” he says coldly, barely out of breath, as he drags me up by my hair for a third time. “And, by God, I’m going to make you suffer. Tell my pilot to start the engines,” he snaps at his man in the doorway. “We’re coming straight up.”

I’m being dragged along the hallway, through the lobby, past the dead body of Santi’s housekeeper, and back into the stairwell. I’m too numb to speak. I’m in too much pain to resist.

“Are you ready for your night flight, puttana? New Jersey is far more picturesque from the sky at midnight.”

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