Page 68 of Corrupted Deception

“Just breathe,Signorina.”

But I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the dead bodies. Thirteen dead bodies. Thirteen men I’d killed with the press of a button.

My stomach revolted. No matter how much I tried to hold it back, I wasn’t winning this one.

I surged to my feet, pushed past Aurelio, and made a mad dash for the bathroom, but those contorted faces came with me.

As everything I’d eaten in the past month came back up in the sleek marble sanctuary of a bathroom, I had a feeling those faces were never going to leave me.

Chapter Twenty

Cielo Luciano

“What the fuck just happened?” I asked Deo.

He stood next to me in the parking lot of Charlotte’s warehouse, shaking his head while my heart pounded with residual adrenaline, my mind struggling to comprehend the bizarre scene.

The air bore the putrid stench of singed hair and charred flesh, a nauseating blend akin to burnt rubber and meat. It was not a scent to which I would ever become accustomed.

“Beats the hell out of me,” Deo said, mirroring my bewildered state as his gaze swept across the motionless figures strewn about the ground.

Both of us clutched our guns, our vigilant stance paralleled by Vito and Carmine, who joined us, equally perplexed by the mysterious turn of events. The fine line between life and death had been abruptly blurred.

One minute, I’d been racing into the lot, prepared to take on the whole fucking cartel to get to her, and the next, they were dropping to the ground, like marionettes with their strings cut.

“That’s an awful lot of men dropping dead for no good reason,” Vito observed, suspicion tainting his voice as he cautiously inhaled the air.

“I don’t think it’s poison,” Deo added, dismissing the possibility.

“Electricity,” I concluded with a newfound respect for Charlotte and her father.

That was one hell of a defense system.

Deo nodded. “In that case, is anyone in the mood for barbecue?” he joked.

Vito and Carmine chuckled, but my heart still raced. The assholes on the ground were dead, but what about inside? If any of them had gotten into the warehouse…

Dread coiled around me, squeezing the breath from my lungs as my mind conjured horrific scenarios, all of them ending with Charlotte riddled with bullet holes.

“Stay here,” I managed to force the words out past an unfamiliar lump at the back of my throat.

And then, without plan or forethought, I bolted across the lot, my shoes pounding the gravel while I hoped like hell there was no more current flowing through the ground.

Adrenaline surged, pushing me forward.

I was just a few steps away when the door swung open, and I braced myself for the worst, for screams or bloodshed, but it was Aurelio who stepped into the doorway.

"It's all right,Signor," he said, his voice steady and reassuring.

An invisible vise that had constricted my chest began to ease, allowing me to draw breath once more.

“Where is she?” I asked as I stepped into the warehouse, glancing around to see for myself that none of those assholes had managed to get inside.

No bullet holes in the walls, no furniture out of place, no blood on the floor.

“She’s unharmed,” Aurelio said with a reassuring nod, but his voice was tight, fraught with tension.

“What is it, Aurelio?”

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