Unshackled

“I’m thinking it’s stupid you go anywhere right now, because Finn’s sending us both to Europe next month,” I said.

Best idea Finn had ever had, in my opinion.

That caught Shan off guard, unsurprisingly. “Why on earth would he send me? And you, for that matter. What’s happening in Europe?”

I decided to give him a watered-down version and put the emphasis on vacation. Guilt was always a great card to play as well. Aye, you gotta go, Shan, because your son can’t focus on his job when he’s worried about you, and he thinks a change of scenery will help. I’d play every card in the deck if I had to.

Chapter 13

It was time to end this.

And there was no AC in the little building we’d acquired near the airport, which consisted of three small rooms behind a bigger room that’d once been a convenience store. But it was freestanding in an area that became abandoned after office hours, and nobody could hear an Italian scream, so it’d been kind of perfect.

“There’s no way they’ll confirm the last items.” I scanned the list in Finn’s hand for the fourth time. We’d crossed off nine out of eleven pieces of information Eric wanted us to interrogate the Italians about, and I believed we’d reached the end.

Sleep-deprived and malnourished, they’d sung like canaries about their own children and personal lives—details Eric had been able to confirm—but rarely anything at all about men who ranked higher than them in the little organization that remained. In particular, there were three men Eric and Ghost had dug up. Our crew in Italy kept track of their families, but the men themselves were in the wind, and we suspected they were important. At least one of them was directly related to Gio Avellino, the boss we’d killed last year. Another was related through marriage.

But if the two Italians we were keeping here could barely give us the last name of the man they’d taken orders from, how were they supposed to know about inner-circle associates?

Another problem with the Avellinos was how widespread their operations had been prior to the war. They’d had dealings in several European countries, which meant that the scattered remains had huddled together—or rather, been summoned together by some new higher-up, but association didn’t mean they knew one another. The greaseballs we’d interrogated for the past several weeks had, for instance, been based in Barcelona. The odds of them knowing the current whereabouts of the three men we were searching for weren’t great.

Finn crumpled the list into a ball and stuck it in his pocket, and he frowned as he lit a cigarette. “I just wanna make sure we haven’t missed any angle. And for the record, I thought they gave up the information about their loved ones way too easily.”

He was underestimating what two weeks of silence and being restrained to a chair could do to a person. By the time we’d started cracking the whip, they’d already been tortured in a way.

Moreover, the Sons of Munster had honor. “Maybe they know we don’t go after women and children—unlike them.”

Finn grunted under his breath and loosened his tie. The narrow hallway between the storefront and the three backrooms was stuffy and hot as shit, and the smell wasn’t great either. We’d had two of Thomas’s crew members come by every day to handle food and bathroom breaks for the Italians, but it hadn’t stopped them from shitting and pissing themselves a few times.

Thomas and his crew were going to have a lot to do when we were done here.

And I wanted to be done. Today.

“We’ve tried everything, boss,” I reasoned with him.

Finn sighed and nodded tiredly. “Yeah—I reckon we have.” He shifted his smoke to his other hand and retrieved his phone from his pocket. “I’ll call T. Do you mind taking care of Mario and Luigi?”

“Ha! Mario and Luigi—no problem at all.” I grinned to myself and headed down the hall, where I found Luigi in the first room. “Oi, fuckface.” I grabbed my gun from the base of my spine, and he just barely managed to lift his head. He was a bloody mess, literally. “This is for Patrick.”

I fired two quick bullets and shot him in the head.

My ears started ringing, and as always when I took a life, a rush of melancholy welled up and tore through me, leaving just as quickly as it appeared. Then I trailed back toward Finn, before stopping in front of the second room and opening the door.

Mario was alert, likely because he’d just heard gunfire.

Blood ran down his forehead. His eyes were unfocused. He’d already been pleading for death for days.

“I can’t bring back my nephew’s father, but I can get rid of another man who’s threatened the lives of other fathers.” I aimed at his head and pulled the trigger twice more.