Blade

Chapter 73: Death for the Disloyal

Blade

Ever felt fear so powerful that it vibrates beneath your skin, making your entire chest feel like it’s collapsing in slow motion, every breath tight and trembling as if the air itself has turned against you?

That’s what I feel right now. This fear rises above even the rage burning through me.

This is the first time in my life I’ve felt this many emotions crashing into each other, and above all of them is the overwhelming sense of being lost. So fucking lost that it feels like it’ll take forever to claw my way back to myself.

It’s been twenty four hours since Sienna was abducted. Twenty four hours of pain, misery, and a kind of helpless madness that eats at every sane part of me. Every minute stretches into something brutal, every second reminding me that she’s out there somewhere, terrified and alone, and I’m still here, forced to endure the torture of not knowing if she’s safe, if she’s hurt, or if I’m already too late.

Most of all, I feel guilty. I should have been by her side every second. I should never have picked up that stupid call, no matter how important it seemed, because nothing in this world matters more to me than Sienna.

I made security so tight that no one outside my circle can breathe in our direction for more than a heartbeat, yet she still got kidnapped.

It makes me furious because it was my own people who took her, delivering her to whoever the hell is behind this. My men. Men who know better than to betray me or take any action against me. Men who should have stayed loyal to the Italian mafia and nothing else.

Hell is about to break loose.

"You keep torturing yourself with that and you're gonna drive yourself insane," Manuelle, Sienna's brother, says as he twirls a pocket knife between his fingers before flicking it at the oversized poster of me on the wall.

On any other day, I would be furious and curse him out for that, but right now, none of that matters.

"I am already so furious that I can feel my blood boiling at a ridiculous temperature, so I don't understand your point," I say as I rewind the camera footage on my laptop a few seconds.

Sienna takes a hit to the head from the back of a gun wielded by one of my men. My grip tightens around the glass in my hand. I swallow the last of the beer and force myself not to hurl the bottle at the wall. The scattered shards on the floor are leftovers from the times I lost control while watching this again and again.

Next, I see the woman who is supposed to be Sienna’s friend climb off a motorcycle and approach. Someone steps in and injects Sienna with something. I watch her body go slack.

"Fuck. I should have been there," I murmur, pulse pounding so loudly it drowns everything else. "I should have been there and none of this would have happened. She... she wouldn’t have been taken."

I swipe everything off my desk. The glass, the bottle, every piece of clutter crashes to the floor and shatters.

As I stand up and grab the laptop, ready to smash it against the floor, Nico shoots up from the chair across from me and pulls it out of my hands.

"Don't get on my nerves," I growl as he pushes me back into my seat. I try and fail to keep my anger under control.

"I won't tell you to calm down or stop being pissed, but quit smashing things. It won't solve any of our problems right now," he says, setting the laptop back on the table and putting out his cigarette in the ashtray.