Page 155 of The Beautiful Dead

It was a massacre.

“A fractured future of a dystopian nightmare…” Remi muttered under his breath beside me as we weaved through the burning remnants of an overturned SUV.

“You getting inspired,piccolo agnello?”

Shadows danced in Remi’s eyes, their flickering shapes reflected in his hungry, manic gaze. White-hot flames licked toward the night sky, their light catching on a ruined body lay sprawled near the wreck, flesh charred black, fingers curled into the pavement as if it had tried to crawl away.

The fire had claimed it. What was left flaked in the wind like burnt paper. I felt Remi’s slow exhale beside me. Felt his smile before I even looked.

My soldiers moved through the streets like specters, cutting down the last remnants of Federico’s men with ruthless efficiency.

The mercenaries he’d hired—pathetic, desperate, inadequate—fell fast. They died screaming. Their bodies painted the pavement, twitching in the amber glow of the streetlights, their spilled blood turning the cracked asphalt into something slick, something hungry.

The Gallos cleared a path through the gated community where Federico had barricaded himself, his cowards and traitors huddled behind automatic weapons and anti-aircraft guns.

They thought steel walls and bullets would be enough to keep us out.

They were wrong.

Six SUVs filled with Gallo soldiers completed the motorcade, their presence heavy with something more than firepower. They should have hated me.

Should have wanted me dead for the bodies I’d taken from them. Instead, they looked at me with something else—begrudging respect.

Fear. Recognition. They saw me for what I was.

Not an enemy. Not an outsider.

A weapon.

Remi pulled out the estate blueprints over the hood of a still-burning car, voice steady as he relayed Ghost’s intel, laying the plan bare in front of them all.

My men.

His men.

One army.

One plan.

Black combat gear was handed out. Kevlar vests. Ammunition. Weapons. Salvatore treated us like his own. And I didn’t quite know what to make of it.

Salvatore led the charge, moving through the crumbling gates like a harbinger of war. Enzo, Luca, Diego, and Elio closed ranks behind him like a wall of death, each a force of nature in their own right. They were relentless and precise, moved as a unit, their rage honed into something disciplined and terrifying.

Ghost rejoined us and moved with the second wave. He was a shadow. Silent. Lethal. His blade slid into flesh without resistance, carving open throats and leaving bodies crumpled in his wake.

Angelo followed, brutal and efficient, putting bullets through skulls like it was muscle memory.

And then there was Remi.

My Remi.

He was a storm in human form. A vicious thing; his knife danced in the firelight, a whisper of silver before it plunged into flesh. Blood speckled his face like war paint.

His movements were poetry.

A song of violence and death, written in the bodies of the fallen.

He didn’t hesitate.

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