Page 40 of Taboo Flames

“Let’s try that again, shall we?” I snarl.

“I swear, I don’t know anything.”

I land a punch to his solar plexus. “Who is the woman?” I demand.

He wheezes, “I d—don’t know.”

Fiore slips back in while I’m landing my next hit to the side of his face.

“Boss, I’ve found something,” he says.

I straighten and look over my shoulder at Fiore. “What?”

“I caught the woman’s face on one of the alley cameras Elijah was trying to wipe,” he informs me. “One of my contacts is running it through our database as we speak.”

I smile coldly at Elijah. “Seems you really don’t know anything after all. Because if you did, you wouldn’t have lied to me.” Then I nod at one of my men. “Rough him up, then drive him to his house and set it on fire. Let him watch as his family burns and then shoot him.”

“He also has a mistress in a nearby motel,” Fiore added.

“She should be part of the bonfire then,” I say coldly.

“No, no! Please! They were going to kill my family. I had no choice. You have to believe me. No. You can’t do this!”

I walk out while the manager is still roaring his pleas and insane rants.

I take off the blood-stained knuckle ring and hand it to Fiore as I follow him to the computer room. All the while, I run the beads of the chaplet wrapped around my wrist through my fingers to keep myself calm.

I cannot afford to lose my mind right now because it seems this plot runs deeper than I initially thought. If I want to catch whoever the mastermind is, I have to act and think rationally.

One of the computers displays the image of a nondescript blonde woman wearing a severe glare.

“Her name is Lori, and she was recently in jail for kidnapping a teenage boy. Her family lives about half an hour’s drive from here,” Fiore says, reading the information off his phone.

“Lead the way.”

Finding Lori’s family house is easy. The problem is that nobody in her family has any idea that she has been out of prison for over a week. Her sentence wasn’t supposed to end until the end of the year.

“What are you thinking?” I ask Fiore as we leave the house.

“I’m thinking someone got her out of jail, and whoever did that must have a lot of power in the city. She must also be very useful,” he says. “Miss Vitale has gotten herself entangled in something deeper than she can imagine.”

My thoughts exactly.

I have also gotten entangled with Aurora in such a way that I can’t leave her to deal with this mess alone. I’m willing to flood hell and put out all the flames just to keep Aurora safe.

“Excuse me,” a young boy says as he walks up to us. He must be around ten or twelve. His head is completely shaved, and there’s a dark look in his eyes that I recognize from my younger years.

“I know where Lori is. It’s where she likes to hide out. It’s an old junkyard nearby.”

He gives us directions to the junkyard, and we make our way to it. I tell my men to wait outside, and only Fiore and I sneak our way inside carefully and silently. Our steps are light and measured, and our guns are held steadily as we creep in. We find Lori asleep in the bed of one of the junk trucks, and I carefully and quietly remove the gun lying beside her.

At my signal, Fiore whips her face with his gun, and she startles awake, hastily reaching for her weapon only to find it gone. He pulls her to the ground by her ankles and presses one foot down on her sternum, his gun trained on her forehead.

“One wrong move, and I’ll blow your brains out,” he warns.

She sneers at him but stays still.

“You know who I am,” I tell her, “so let’s skip that conversation. What I want to know is who you’re working for. Who sent you to kill Aurora?”

---