Drago (Made Men 6)
One
A Man by the Name of…
For the last three months, blackness was all the man had known. Now, he was sure he had finally been delivered to Hell. He’d had it coming, and this was his purgatory.
For almost thirty years, he walked the earth as a merciless man. Now, as he walked this dark plane of nothingness, his soul only grew darker.
Repenting for his sins hadn’t worked for him when he had been alive, and it definitely wasn’t going to work for a man who was already in the pits of Hell.
“Delivery for Lucca Caruso…”
Something started to trickle into the darkness for the first time.
POP.
Grabbing his chest, he felt the explosive pain that had ceased his months of endless walking.
POP.
A strong sense of déjà vu told him this had happened to him before, back when he was alive.
POP.
He was reliving his death.
POP.
Even though his body had grown very weak here, his will refused to let him go down until…
POP.
Everything he had known, had grown used to over those lonely black days that turned into months, just disappeared. It was as if he entered a new plane, one that came with sounds and smells… and light. A plane that was beginning to seem all too familiar.
Dark lashes attached to heavy lids laid upon his sunken blue skin finally lifted, revealing his eyes. His pupils that were severely dilated slowly began to adjust to the light, turning his eyes from large black orbs to smaller pupils surrounded by brownish irises… Until the devilish red he had carried in them since birth appeared. The red that had given him his name. However, now that red flamed brighter, burning like a red ring of fire.
Eyes like that fit a dead man who had walked the bowels of Hell. Eyes that fit a dead man who had been spit out of Hell and brought back to life. Eyes that belonged to a man by the name of… Drago.
Some men just refused to fucking die.
* * *
Hell was a special place on earth, a place many people thought started six feet below the earth, but it didn’t. Hell was exactly two thousand five hundred and fifty-six square feet, and she lived right in the fucking middle of it. It was a house that sat on the shitty side of Kansas City, Missouri, that she lived in practically her whole life. Almost eighteen long years she had been imprisoned here, and there was no knight in shining armor, let alone a god to save her. Those luxuries didn’t exist for a girl like her.
Most people experienced their Heaven on earth only to greet Hell in death for the sins they’d committed. However, there were what she called the unlucky ones; the ones who weren’t born like everyone else, pure and free of sin, but born into Hell itself. She was one of those unlucky ones.
All she knew was evil, fear, and hate. All four-letter words that had summed up her world since birth. Words and a world that she could never escape, except through death.
And it was all because of the blood that ran through her veins. A blood so wicked and disturbed it was like she could feel the coldness of it as it flowed through her body, so much so that it scared her shitless to think about what she could have become… or what she still could become.
When she looked up at herself in the mirror, it was as if she could see the monster that lay right under the surface, but it just hadn’t been woken up yet. Staring into her eyes that her father had given her told her it was there… The big black orbs of abyss promised her there was evil inside of her too, no matter how much she told herself she was nothing like him.
You just weren’t born the daughter of Lucifer without being fucking crazy.
Two
Setting His Fate in Stone
Do you know what it’s like to look in the mirror and not know who it is looking back at you? Staring at his reflection for the first time in months, he didn’t recognize the man before him. He had always been big. In high school he didn’t even pass as a student because he looked bigger than grown-ass men. Drago was called “the tank” because that’s what he was: a fucking tank for the Caruso crime family. He practically had been born and bred to take and carry out any hit for the Family. Almost all the De Santis men were, but something about Drago De Santis had been special, making him the best bodyguard the Carusos ever had. Until now… His muscle mass… gone. Along with the man he once knew. His strength and size were what made him Drago, and without it, it was like he no longer deserved the name. Drago De Santis had been replaced by a weak stick of a man who wouldn’t be capable of taking one bullet to the chest and live to tell the tale.