“Where are the soldiers? The police we’ve paid all these years?” Guillem demanded.
“Dead. He says they’re dead.” Arnau’s face turned a dark red beneath his skin.
“Padre, I have millions in the safe. You do. Angel does. Between the three of us, we can leave here and go somewhere else and do whatever we want.” His voice was soothing.
“Look in your safe, Guillem. Look and see if your money is there,” Arnau encouraged. “I have to see it.”
“Of course.” Guillem went straight to the wall next to the fireplace. He had to step over his wife’s dead body. He did so without looking at her. Pressing his palm to one small depression, he leaned in for a retinal scan once the panel slid back to reveal the safe. He opened it slowly and stared at the empty interior.
Arnau gasped and let out a loud cry of anger. “I’m going to tear them from limb to limb when I find them,” he vowed.
“The bitch,” Guillem declared. “We have to get to her. She’s what this is all about. Once we have her, we’re in the driver’s seat. If Archambault is willing to go to these lengths for his bitch, imagine what he’ll do for us to get her back.”
Once again, he indicated the elevator. “We have to get to my son. Hurry. I want to get out of here. I feel like we’re being watched.”
Arnau hurried to the elevator and pressed the code to open the doors. They slid smoothly apart and he stepped in, turning and holding the door for his oldest son. Guillem sat on the floor, back against the wall, his automatic resting in his lap. His eyes were wide open, staring at Arnau, his head tipped to one side.
Arnau came slowly out of the elevator and looked around before crouching down beside his son. “Guillem,” he said quietly, his voice quivering with sorrow. He reached for the gun and straightened, turning quickly, prepared to shoot anything that moved, but there was only silence in the house.
Not taking the time to check on his grandchildren, he raced outside, calling to his personal security guards, who instantly crowded around him. He took the path that led between the two villas and hurried into his home, insisting that several of his guards accompany him inside. Giving them orders to patrol downstairs, he took the elevator to the master bedroom and the little control room off of it. He had cameras set up to record every perverted act in Angel’s home. He would know if his son was alive or dead. He would know exactly who was behind this heinous crime.
He turned on the screens and watched Angel and Rey Estay hideously abusing the little teenage boy, pretending he was the pet dog and then raping him repeatedly. They beat him with the dog brush and the whip and then scrubbed him with the brush to clean him. They tried to force him to eat and drink before shoving the kid in the dog crate, locking it and going to bed with champagne and ice cream. Arnau fast-forwarded until the cameras began to glitch. He couldn’t see anything but white snow. Then the men were dead on the bed and the boy was gone from his dog crate.
Arnau wanted to scream in frustration. Angel was dead. Guillem was dead. Even Claudia. The money was gone. His money was in the safe room with his wife, Adella. His marriage, like most, had been arranged, to better the family fortune. Adella had been a good wife, an asset to him. She understood what they needed to do to become powerful and she helped him in those early days no matter what it took. She was a good partner. He opened the door to the safe room and found his wife lying peacefully on the bed. He knew immediately she was dead.
He sank down beside her. The safe was open and empty. She must have opened it to retrieve their documents just in case they needed to leave quickly. She had their bags on the floor beside the bed. The cash was gone. He hadn’t thought to check it before he left Adella alone with just the guards.
“It wasn’t a very good idea to threaten my wife, Toselli,” Elie said from the shadows. “Men like you think you’re untouchable, but you aren’t. I would have dismantled your human trafficking operation no matter what, but I most likely would have left you alone if you hadn’t threatened her. Unfortunately for you, you were just too stupid to let it go.”
“Damn you, show yourself.”
“You think you’re going to shoot me with your gun, but I can assure you, you’re not. Every single member of your family is dead except for your grandchildren. They’ve been spared, although they will be watched closely as they grow up. If they turn out anything like you or their parents, they’ll be dealt with immediately. Your empire is gone.”
Arnau did exactly what Riccardo had done, and what Alfredo Colombo had tried to do to Stefano’s cousins. He lifted the gun and began spraying the house in the hopes that a bullet would find his elusive target. Suddenly the gun was turning toward him. Hard hands covered his, holding his finger to the trigger and preventing him from letting go. The bullets smashed into him, tearing through his body, up his chest and into his throat.
A man seemed to emerge right out of the shadows as the gun dropped into his lap, but he couldn’t tell if he was real or part of hell. Elie looked at Ricco and Mariko. “One more stop and we can go home.”
They found Izan Serrano at his home, an apartment in the middle of Barcelona. He had a small rooftop garden and that’s where he was sprawled in a lounge chair listening to music and idly throwing knives at a wooden target several feet away from his chair. He had bundles of ropes, handcuffs and a ball gag beside his chair. His head bobbed up and down to the beat of the music as he threw his knives.
“You aren’t very good,” Elie observed. “You’ve missed the target more times than you’ve hit it.”
Izan spun around, falling out of the lounge chair to his hands and knees, his head swiveling this way and that to try to see where the voice was coming from. Elie stepped out of the shadows right in front of him, causing him to sit back on his butt, eyes wide with shock.
Ricco stepped out of the shadows just in front of the target, crouching down to examine it. He sighed and shook his head. “Good thing the wall is here or you’d have complaints from the neighbors. What’s your average? One hit for every three or four misses?”
“Who are you?” Izan sputtered, trying to recover, pushing up with his hands in an effort to get off the ground.
Elie scooped up the throwing knives, testing the weight and balance of them in his hands as he stepped into Izan, making it impossible for the man to rise. “You should know me, Izan.” In rapid succession he threw all three knives he’d taken off the chair, picked up the last two from the small end table and threw them as well, all without a single pause. “Archambault. Elie Archambault. The man married to Brielle Couture. The Brielle Couture you put on a hit list that you sent to your good friend Riccardo Santoro. Sent her photograph to him, too. It was a beautiful picture of her. I decided to keep it for myself.”
Izan shook his head and kept backpedaling, pushing with his heels in an effort to get away from Elie. He looked from Elie to the target board and then let out a squeak. Every knife had lodged in the smallest circle, dead center. Each blade sunk to the hilt, although Elie had merely appeared to flick his wrist when he’d thrown the knives so casually, not putting any real effort into it.
“She has scars from your little edge play with her. She said no. It was a very firm and clear no, but you had her tied down and you used your knife on her anyway, Izan. Is that your thing with women? You like to cut them up after they tell you no?” Elie kept his voice very mild.
Izan shook his head and looked behind him, shocked that Ricco now stood there. He had no idea how Ricco had gotten there. “I—she—she’s different.”
“Be very careful how you speak of my wife.”
“They were going to traffic her, and I was going to buy her. Save her. I would have saved her.” Izan puffed out his chest and managed to scramble back onto his lounge chair, sitting sideways, facing the two men.