Maniacs (Depraved Sinners 4)

1

They’re dead. They’re fucking dead.

That manic look in Giovanni’s eyes as he ran his blade through his sons’ stomachs will forever haunt me. The way they fell to the grass, the way life slowly faded from their dark eyes … fuck. The way Levi begged me not to look.

I whimper, the very thought tearing me apart from the inside out.

How could I not look? How could I have possibly turned away? The three of them held my heart in the palm of their strong, calloused hands, and in one devastating moment in time, they were stolen from me.

My heart aches. I’ve never felt torment like this before.

BANG.

BANG.

BANG.

The sound of the three gunshots echo through my mind, and my body flinches with each one. It’s agonizing. It’s as though I can feel the bullets piercing through their bodies and shattering what little was left of my soul.

There’s nothing left of me now. Not without them.

Giovanni is a fucking monster. He won, just as he always said that he would.

The boys warned me, but I refused to listen. They said that he would take everything, said that he would destroy what was good in the world and that he wouldn’t stop until every knee was dropped before him. I never thought it was them he would take. All this time, I saw myself as his target, truly believing that he would destroy me in order to destroy them.

I believed we could survive. I trusted the three of them would come through. They were supposed to be invincible. They were supposed to be my rocks, my three devils on the coldest nights.

That’s all over now, and I have nothing left but the memories that haunt my mind and the scars left behind on my body. How am I ever supposed to be alright? How am I supposed to move on from this?

Tears stream down my face, and I turn my head into the dreadlocked dude’s chest, his arms caging around me as he tears off into the night on his motorbike, the convoy of SUVs speeding behind us.

Wind whips through my hair and smears my tears all over my face, but I barely notice it. I’m so numb. Numb to the world. Numb to the fresh hell wreaking havoc over my heart. Numb to … everything.

It’s barely been a few minutes since hearing those gunshots ring through the night, and if I dared to look up over this guy’s shoulder, I’d still see the DeAngelis mansion fading in the distance. I’d still be able to hear the fallen soldiers’ screams as they slowly died in the pools of blood gathering on the grass.

Roman. Levi. Marcus. No. I refuse to believe they’re gone. They can’t be gone. I barely got a chance to know them.

Perhaps this is karma … my own version of hell … punishment. I took a walk on the dark side; I sacrificed everything good about myself to indulge in that darkness, and now it’s caught up to me. Now I have to suffer the very real consequences. This is what I get for falling in love with the three DeAngelis devils.

I will never be the same.

I will never survive.

Tonight wasn’t supposed to go like this. I wasn’t supposed to get rescued by the woman who claims to be my mother, something I only learned a few short hours ago, and I sure as hell wasn’t supposed to see my three kings fall.

Tonight we were supposed to rise. Tonight we were supposed to be victorious.

Dreadlock Dude weaves through the streets and I cling to him as though he’s my last lifeline, only lifting my tear-stained face from his chest when his head whips to the right.

Gia’s SUV moves in beside us, and I watch as her tinted window lowers to expose her youthful face and her brows pinched with concern. She holds her hand up as her gaze scans over my face, completely void of emotion. A million questions filter through my mind, a million thoughts and suspicions, but then those three gunshots sound inside my head, and every last thought is replaced with nothing but a hollow ache.

All too quickly, her heavy stare flicks away as she takes in the man I cling to. “Pull over up here,” she shouts through the open window.

Dreadlock Dude nods, and without sparing me a second look, Gia speeds off in front of us before he even gets a proper chance to respond. He hits the gas, taking off after her at a million miles an hour as nerves fill my veins.

I swallow hard. I’m grateful that she was there to save me just in the nick of time, but how the hell did she know I was in trouble? Had she been watching us? Did she know that the boys needed her help just as much as I did, only to be left defenseless and bleeding out on the ground? I know this is a dark world and everybody only looks out for themselves, but surely she isn’t so cold-hearted as to leave them behind like that, leave them barely grasping onto life, especially considering that she knows how I feel about them.

Gia Moretti is nothing but a stranger to me, but she’s a stranger who claims to have watched over me my entire life with my best interests at heart. I’m damn sure that she had some fucked-up intel, considering she truly believed I was better off living with my father, and that I had a life any child would dream of. So yeah, she may have been checking up on me every now and then, but she never cared to dig deeper than the surface, and because of that, I can’t trust her. You know, apart from the fact that she’s the DeAngelis family’s number one competition, their greatest enemy. I mean, if that’s not the biggest red flag I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is.