Page 41 of Borrowed Bride

“Yep. But we know where they are keeping him. Frederick is already there, waiting for the go ahead.”

“No.” I hand the phone back to Ben. Too much has happened without me there to witness it: my father, Tara, and now Gianna. “I want to do this myself.”

Carnage isn’t a cure for heartbreak, but it’s one hell of a distraction. Ben drives me to my father’s location, and my men surround the building when we arrive. It’s an old abandoned bakery with a sign hanging by just a few threads. The thought of my father, the great Dante Barrone, being held in a place as shoddy as this is almost laughable.

I kick down the door, raise my handgun at the first asshole I see, and open fire. Nothing stops me. Rage pours over me like molten oil, seeping from every vein and flooding from every pore. Too many people are screwing me over, and there’s too many things I can’t keep in control of.

Do people not see me as a threat anymore? Do they think I am someone that can be messed with like this? This Cherry woman, and now an outskirts family daring to kidnap myfather?

No one survives.

They fight back and I’m glad they do. I punch faces to pulp, shoot entire clips into the chests of others, and rip and tear my way through every pathetic guard that’s stationed between meand my father. They snatched him from a restaurant where he was just eating dinner, and each day he has been missing is a day they could have grown bored and killed him.

I yell his name until it bounces off the walls as my own reply, drive a crowbar through the gut of someone who tries to tackle me down the stairs, and shoot three men with the last of my bullets. Then I kick down the last door and find my father bound to a chair amidst old, moldy sacks of flour.

My heart stops.

His head is down. His chest is motionless.

My heart crumbles further. I take the steps two at a time and charge toward my father, dropping to my knees as soon as I reach him.

“Dad?” There’s a wound on his forehead, surrounded by dried blood, and his skin is pale but when I touch his cheek, he lifts his head and the tension snaps in my chest like a rubber band.

“Marco?”

“Dad, holy fucking shit, you scared the crap out of me.” I pat his cheek, studying his tired eyes. “The fuck happened? When was the last time someone got the jump on you?”

Dad coughs roughly as I move around him and untie the rope keeping him down, then I slide an arm around him and help him to his feet.

“My son,” Dante coughs. “They told me you’d been shot. That you were in the hospital, dying.”

“I’m fine,” I assure him. “I was shot but my armor took two of them, and I’m on so many painkillers I can’t find the third.”

“My boy.” Dante clasps my cheek and wheezes, then he straightens up. “I am so relieved to see you alive.”

“Me too.” Once he is steady on his feet, I pull my father into a crushing hug that makes both our bones creak.

“Give me a gun.” A nearby guard meets Dante’s request. “We have to kill the rest of these fuckers. I ain’t letting some scumbag, lowlife family think they can snatch a fish as big as me and get away with it.”

“You’re speaking my language,” I reply, seeking out a fresh magazine for my gun.

“What’s wrong?” Dad stops in front of me and his pale eyes weave across my face. “Something is wrong.”

“Gianna,” I say tightly. “She’s missing.”

“Someone took her?”

“No, she uh…” I almost don’t want to tell him. When it was just me, I could tell myself that I would find her before the pain became real. Telling my father brings that pain into my reality, and I don’t want to hear hisI told you so.

“She left.”

Dante’s eyes narrow. “I told you this would happen, marrying outside of?—”

“Don’t,” I snap, pushing past him. “Are we gonna kill the rest of these fuckers or what?”

“Sir.” Ben approaches through the door, his face twisted into an expression I can’t quite read. Something between excitement and dread. “We’ve found her.”

My entire body stalls like a snapshot and I wobble, half up one step. “What?”

---