Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77066 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 385(@200wpm)___ 308(@250wpm)___ 257(@300wpm)
It’s less than a handful of turns, no more than ten minutes from the club, before Marcello is pulling into a dark alley.
I swallow down the fear and push away the emotion. Getting upset won’t prevent this from happening, but straight-forward compliance doesn’t guarantee making it out unharmed either. Sometimes he wants me to fight, only because he wants to punish me when I do.
My hands are trembling, the urgency to scratch at his skin making me anxious as he reaches for his belt buckle.
“God, I’ve been waiting for this for weeks,” he says as he unzips. “Come on, baby. Get that mouth on me. We don’t have very long.”
I’m doing my best to swallow down the threatening bile as I lean forward.
I jerk back at the sound of glass shattering, my hands coming up to cover my face as a spray of glass fills the inside of the SUV.
By the time the glass settles and I look up, a man has a gun pressed against Marcello’s left temple.
“Do you remember Ellie Baker?” the man growls.
He’s familiar—the man watching us from the bar—but I never imagined his voice would be so deep. I know it’s a strange thing to think about, considering I’m going to be dead soon, but I have no control over where my mind wanders.
A slow sinister smile spreads across Marcello’s face. I’ve seen it before and it never ends well for the person it’s aimed at.
“Ellie. Baker,” the guy says, pressing the muzzle of his gun against Marcello’s head with each syllable.
I’ve heard the name before. The guys always brag about their conquests and crimes, but very few come with names, mostly because they don’t take the time to ask or even remember if they did. Ellie was important to Alessio. She was his first.
I don’t know if they tell me about what they’ve done to scare me or because they know I’d never tell anyone else.
Marcello chuckles, a sinister sound that sometimes haunts my nightmares. He’s always had more balls than brains, but from the look on the guy’s face pointing the gun at him, there’s no real chance he’ll get away with this.
“If you think Ellie Baker got it bad, you should’ve seen what I did with my first.”
Tears, both due to fear and pain at his reference to Maya, begin to streak down my cheeks. I have an urgency to wash them away, to rid my face of the weakness, but I also know better than to make any sudden moves when someone is pointing a gun.
I wouldn’t call Maya my best friend, because forming those types of connection with the way I was raised aren’t smart, but she was the closest person besides my mom that I had. Maya was mine and Marcello’s age. Despite not wanting to see it back then, I think she only befriended me because she had this not-so-secret crush on my brother. By sixteen though, Elio was already deeper in with the Severino family than my parents liked and had no time for anything that wasn’t sanctioned by Lucian. The head of the family concerned himself more with training and making soldiers. He had no interest in the love lives of teens.
It ate at Marcello that Maya watched Elio rather than watching him, despite Elio and Marcello being best friends. I see the same look in his eyes when he watches me that I noticed when he watched her.
Marcello claims that Maya was his first kill. She was his test, the proof he had to provide to his family that he was loyal. I was a witness to what he did to her, and it didn’t look like a first.
“What do you think the Severino family will think of your death?” the man asks, showing no fear. There isn’t a tremble in his hand as he presses the gun to Marcello’s head. There isn’t hesitation in his voice.
“They will burn the world down, seeking vengeance for me,” Marcello snarls, and I believe the truth in his warning.
“That’s what I’m hoping for.”
The spray of warm blood registers on my skin before the sound of the gun firing hits my ears.
Chapter 5
Hollis
I don’t know why I expected to hear her scream. The woman is with the Severino family. She has to be just as evil as they are.
She turns her head, her face covered in blood and parts of Marcello’s skull, as she looks at his slumped body.
She remains silent even as the echo of the gunshot fades.
“You have no idea what you’ve done,” she whispers, her chin trembling even though I see no new tears springing to her eyes.
I lift the muzzle of my gun and point it in her direction.
Confusion hits me hard when I see the corner of her mouth pull up as she looks down at the body once more. She schools her face quickly. Maybe I’m delusional or imagining it, but I was certain she almost smiled at seeing her companion turning ashen gray.