Blood for my Rose |• Crimson Rose series✔️

Chapter 32

Moments before you die, you feel it. You just deny it. It's like a two-way communication thing where Death sends you a warning note, though he wants to take you by surprise. Where You suddenly feel there's something you should be doing that you are not, or something you've done that you shouldn't have. You feel wrong. And no matter how much you try to do what your brain thinks is right, that feeling of an empty body remains.

Then there'd be a time when the part of the brain responsible for regulating body temperature fails. You may run a high temperature one moment or feel very cold. You'll lose your appetite because as the body shuts down, energy need declines. Pulse and heartbeat become irregular or hard to feel or hear. Consciousness of death sets in. Breathing is interrupted by gasping and slows down until it stops entirely. Then, everything ends. Your life. Your presence. Your existence...it all stops. And who you were, what you used to know, they don't matter anymore. Because your new being is in a dark and hollow world where nothing exits.

The sound of Enzo's gun safety going off brought Riley out of oblivion. Out of the thought of death. He looked back into the car from staring out the window at the murky night, and he finally felt his hands shaking. He saw the dreadful faces the brothers had on, looked at his quivering hand and held it in position.

Giovani was driving, Enzo was in the front. He, Eduardo and Romero sat at the back. Sergio and his father were in a convoy somewhere behind theirs.

Riley didn't know it; that he didn't just look like death, he also looked like the devil in human form. He was offended to his core but didn't know that it had spread all over him and his hand had now tightened very hard around the pistol grip.

His jaw had clenched the moment they entered Zurich. His face was still hardened, and his head was rolling in a puddle of spine-chilling memories that had to do with a trail of vehicles going to a mafia king's mansion. The dangerous end.

He scratched his skin like he was coming down from a high. He was. 'Never be intoxicated before meeting the enemy', Riley never learned that lesson, because then he'd have been seeing clearly and not thinking of death. Then this whole thing would have made perfect sense to him. He wasn't alert enough, he knew why he was here and what he needed to do; shoot anyone he saw with Rose and take her back. But he wasn't thinking strategically about how to do it. He was swiftly cascading a deadly road that ended in fire.

"Next street," Enzo said. He poked his head out of the window and glanced at his constricted muscles through the mirror.

Giovani quoted, "Is that the last?" His question was answered with a nod from Enzo. Giovani's eyes were upfront when he swerved the steering wheel at a 'T' junction, and they came into the street. Quiet, civilized but forgotten. Lonely. Perhaps 'dreaded' was the right word. No body wanted to live strides away from Sandoval.

This was why.

Anyone could show up with eleven convoys and open fire in the estate, using vengeance as an excuse.

Giovani tilted his head and glanced at the mansion ahead of him. It was a gated hell. Security was first-rate. He didn't think, not for a second as he stepped harder on the gas pedal. The car zoomed up a slope and came down to knock the iron gates open, gaining them entrance into the dark compound. Those rods were no match for their armored vehicles. All they could do in protest was to alert the devil - with the infiltrated security horns - that his hell gate had been damaged.

In thirty seconds, the convoys were received by the enormous compound, half of the destroyed gate was flank north, and the other half was to the extreme left. Gunmen were trooping the remaining empty space in the compound as the floodlights of every convoy illuminated the length and breadth of the space between the gates and the house.