His Queen: Chapter 16

My fist collides with his jaw, blood bursting from his mouth, and a jolt of pain lances through my arm. He staggers back, dazed from the blow, and I take advantage, lunging forward with a viciousness unlike anything I have ever felt before. I pummel him again and again until he falls to his knees.

It’s when he looks up at me that I see it in his eyes. He wants me to do this. He wants me to kill him.

I pull back and feel a surge of adrenaline as I prepare to hit him again when my brothers come rushing out of the house.

“Nicoli, stop!” Alexius yells. “Stop this right now!”

“You were supposed to keep her safe!” I scream, and Maximo spits out a ruby-red river of blood on the asphalt before shakily pushing himself up. He fumbles to his feet, staggering as he tries to steady himself. His face is a bloody mess, his nose crooked. But he hasn’t attempted to fight back or to defend himself once since I started beating him right after he told me she was gone.

“Where is she, Maximo? Where is my fucking wife?” I scream at the top of my lungs, birds erupting from their nests in the oak trees.

“I will find her,” he bites out, blood dribbling from his mouth. “If it’s the last fucking thing I do, I will find her.” He stumbles, and Caelian rushes to his side, steadying him with an arm around his waist.

“What the fuck, man?” Caelian snaps.

“He was supposed to keep her safe. That was his only fucking job, and now she’s gone!”

“You think Maximo wanted this to happen?”

“He’s right, Caelian,” Maximo mutters. “It’s my fault.”

“Bullshit. If you want to start throwing blame around, blame yourself, Nicoli. You’re the one who let her go in the first place.”

Caelian’s words slice through me like sharpened blades, and I’m almost knocked off my feet. The silence is heavy as the weight of his accusation sinks in. I’m the one who let her go. Me. I told him to take her.

My fists unclench as guilt washes over me, and tears fill my eyes. Maximo steps forward then, his face streaked with blood from where I punched him mercilessly only moments before. “I swear to you, I will find her or die trying.”

“What do we know?” Alexius asks, leveling Maximo with a pointed stare.

“She went out the back of the hotel with one of the florists to get more flowers. Neither of them returned.”

“Video footage?”

Maximo shakes his head. “Someone cut the feed. The entire hotel’s security cameras were offline for twelve minutes before they could get them back on. By then, she was already gone.”

“Jesus Christ!” I kick at the gravel, clenching my fists. “Where is she?”

“It has to be Nunzio,” Isaia remarks. He’s crouched down, arms resting on his knees, his expression laced with concern. “I bet my life that fucker is behind this.”

I snap my glare to Alexius. “I told you this would happen,” I grit out. “We should have acted sooner. But no, you wouldn’t fucking listen to me!”

My phone rings, and I jerk it out of my pants pocket. Ice shatters in my veins when I see the number.

“Nunzio, you motherfucker!”

“Is he alive? The brother I mean?”

I quickly glance over at Maximo.

“He’s the one who lost her in the first place, isn’t he?” Nunzio continues.

“Where the fuck is she?”

“She’s…somewhere,” he says, and I can hear him smirking.

My fists are clenched tight, and I feel heat radiating from my face. My heart is pounding furiously in my chest, and I fight back the urge to hurl my mobile phone across the gravel driveway. “If you hurt one hair on her head—”

“What then? You’ll fight me? You’ll kill me?”

“I swear to God, I will—”

“Wait,” he pauses. “That’s exactly what I asked her earlier when she said I’m not allowed to touch her.”

“Motherfucker!” Rage explodes, my veins molten lava. “Nunzio, I will fucking bury you.”

“You and your family lied,” he says, unfazed by my threat. “You all fucking lied the night you killed my cousin.”

“All I want to hear out of your fucking mouth right now is where my wife is.”

“You’ll get her back sooner or later. I just can’t guarantee in what condition she’ll be in.”

An unearthly, primal wail erupts from me as fire scorches through my muscles. My entire body feels like it is being ripped in two, and I can barely form a coherent thought as fury tears my spine from my back.

Nunzio’s laughter rings through the phone. “Wow!” he exclaims. “You sound just like her when you scream.”

“Fuck you!” I yell. “Fuck you, you motherfucker!”

“Now, now. Is that any way to speak to the man who has your wife?”

I pace, my heart thudding in my chest like a piledriver. “What the fuck do you want?”

“I want you to pay for killing Felix,” he seethes, and I slam my fist against Maximo’s SUV, reverberations of impact rippling through me as a dent appears on the side panel.

“He tried to rape my wife!”

“She wasn’t your fucking wife! You lied. All of you.”

“Let her go!”

“You know the best part of this is the fact that I can exact my revenge, and there ain’t shit anyone can do about it.”

“Oh, there’s plenty I’ll do about it, like tear your motherfucking heart out.”

Nunzio scoffs. “You lied, Nicoli. Your marriage is fake, which means I’m allowed my pound of flesh for the murder of my cousin. Retaliate, and you risk losing the support of others.”

“You think I care about that?”

“You should. I would if I were you. I mean, your wife is gorgeous, but I don’t think any woman is worth risking everything for.”

I swallow hard, my throat dry. “Let her go, Nunzio. She has nothing to do with this,” I say, trying my hardest to control myself.

“Of course, she does. You know—” I hear a scratching sound, imagining him rubbing his fingers along his jaw “—let’s pretend for a moment that your marriage is legit and that wedding license isn’t bought. I’d have myself a double whammy here. Both a Tirelli and a Del Rossa rolled into one hot piece of ass.” He sucks air through his teeth, and I’m overcome with a rage that makes me want to claw out of my skin.

“Two families my family has been at war with for decades.”

“Then why don’t you come here so we can fucking end it?” I challenge.

“All in due time,” he says with an amused lilt. “But first, I thought we could have ourselves a little game.”

“What game?”

“The one that’s about to start.”

The line dies, and I squeeze the phone in my hand, crushing the glass beneath my fingertips before throwing it with a violent jerk of my arm. “Motherfucker!”

Maximo rushes up to me, his eyes wide and face contorted. “Did he hurt her?” I let out a breath, and he grabs my collar, pulling me close. “Did he fucking hurt her?”

“I don’t know,” I snap. “I don’t fucking know.”

“Jesus!” He curses and lets go of me.

“He knows,” I start and give Alexius a knowing look. “Nunzio knows that Mira and I got married the night I killed Felix.”

Maximo roughs a hand through his hair. “What does he want?”

“He wants to play a game,” I tell him, clasping my hands behind my head. “But I don’t know what that means.”

Maximo’s phone rings, and when he answers, I can see by the look on his face that it’s not anything I’m going like. “I’ll be right there.”

He hangs up and stomps to his car. “There’s a package for us at the gate.”

“I’m coming with you,” I say, opening the passenger side door and sliding into the leather seat. Caelian jumps into the back just in time when Maximo kicks the gas, tires spinning on the gravel as we speed down the driveway.

The second we stop at the gate, I’m out of the car, a brown box settled by the guard’s feet. “Who delivered it?”

“Courier.”

“Be careful,” Caelian says over my shoulder. “We don’t know what it is.”

I crouch down, pull out my Espada pocketknife, and slice its blade easily through the tape. The stench hits me as I lift the flap and look straight into his eyes. It’s the priest who married us—the priest Alexius paid to lie for us.

It’s his goddamn head, bloodless and with eyes still open.

“Jesus,” Alexius blurts. “That’s how Nunzio knows.”

“The priest had to have run his mouth,” I say, not the least squeamish at the sight.

“What’s that?” Maximo asks, pointing to an envelope lodged behind the priest’s severed head.

I pull it out and stand as I open it, revealing a black card inside, with white text.

Every bone in my chest cracks, splintering straight through my heart. For a second, I don’t breathe. It hurts too much. It’s sheer agony existing with the thoughts stemming from a void I feel in the deepest parts of my soul. The ache is bone-deep, the desperation clawing up from a hole inside me. The one person I vowed to protect, the woman I’ve loved all my life, the girl whose ribbon tied me to her forever—she’s gone, and with her absence, my failure echoes with a deafening reality. Resounding and absolute.

I crumple the piece of paper in my hand, imagining it’s Nunzio’s head in my palm, his skull fracturing between my fingers.

Caelian grabs the paper, and I watch as he reads it, realization dawning on his expression. I already know what he’s thinking, what’s going through his mind. But when he says it out loud, it drags me down to the deepest parts of hell like an anchor tied to my neck.

“Mirabella…she’s the prey.”