Chapter 128: Chapter 128

Chapter 128 TALEN Cold frightful dread filled in me.

Two hours. It had been two hours since my wife was taken.

“You need medical attention, Alex.” Uncle Damien’s voice brings me out of my dark thoughts.

Even though I wince because of the pain in my right arm, I shake my head. “My wife needs my attention.”

Damien sighs. “What if it’s a targeted attack? We’ve already connected the two attacks, one that happened at your house a few months ago and this were orchestrated by the same person. What if the target was always Mia?”

“It can’t be.” I seeth, “The first time, they had no idea who she was.”

“And now they do?”

“Now, she’s my wife.”

“A fact that wasn’t true till last afternoon.”

“We’re wasting time, okay? We’re wasting time.” I pass my left hand through my hair and kick a chair in frustration. It slides a little before toppling over with a huge sound. “My wife needs me,”

“We have to consider the possibility...”

“Don’t!” I stop my Uncle’s words midway with a scream. I didn’t care in that moment that he was my Uncle or the head of the organisation I had worked half my life to be at. “If you want to help, help. If not, you’re free to leave my house. But I’m not stopping till I get my wife where I belong.”

Next. To. Me.

It was a miscalculation on my part to take just Mia and Dominic to meet Damien. I figured where would we be safer other than a house that has triple the security mine did, and also that she would be intimidated enough by all the changes in her life without adding another hundred soldiers to the mix.

A f**g miscalculation.

It had been six hours since my wife was taken and even turning the entire city upside down wasn’t enough. It was as if I was aiming to find a needle in a haystack.

We had three men captured from the attack, and not one of them would speak up despite the hours of torture I may have resorted to some methods that my wife would murder me for if she gets to know.

“This could severely backfife,” Nico reasons with me.

Now that Xander had Hannah by his side, he was back to agreeing with me. “Backfire how? He’s a bandit, not the head of an organisation. A f**g lowlife goon. Do it, Alex.”

I roll my eyes. “I’m sorry if I made either of you feel your opinion matters to me.”

“Does mine?” Uncle Damien asked.

“With all due respect, no, Uncle.” I reply, “Would anyone’s opinion matter to you if it was Aunt Elena who was taken?”

“Very well then.” A t**kle shines in his eyes and if I didn’t know any better, I would say it was pride. It wasn’t. It was probably a sinister plan to punish me for openly defying him. “Bring the little girl.”

Stephen, my third-in-command enters with a lady and a three year old girl in tow. “What’s going on?” The raver haired lady cries out, tears streaking her eyes. “Who are you?”

“I’m sorry for what I’m about to do,” I tell her before grabbing her daughter, and she cries out all the more, tryi to wriggle out of Stephen’s grip.

Her daughter was quieter though, calmer, as if she couldn’t make sense of the world around her.

I carry her to the torture room with me.

“Dada! Dadal” Her eyes lit up the second she sees her chained up father and then fills with tears when the bloc makes the appearance.

“F**g King...” The man roars, “Leave my daughter, you f**g devil!”

“I want my wife back. Tell me where I can find her and I’ll send you home with your daughter. Wife’s in the oth room, by the way.”

“You f**ker, she’s three!” The man- Daniel Tripp – I had learnt his name was, screams his punctured lungs out.

“Where is my wife, Tripp?” I ask.

“I don’t know!” He cries out. “I told you a million times before, I don’t know! We were paid to do this.”

“Where did they ask you to take her?” I ask.

2/5 I don’t know!”

“Okay then,” I raise my shoulder. “Will, come and take the little girl.” My eyes stay fixed on Tripp. “Do with her as you please.”

“I don’t believe it! Even you’re not as unhinged.”

“For my wife? Try me.” I spit out.

Just on queue, the little girl breaks into tears and full blown s**bs. “No, dada! Dada please! I don’t want to go!”

I wait. He gulps, his eyes hesitant. “Leave her... please..”

“Location, please,” I say with a calm I don’t feel.

He doesn’t break. The f**er doesn’t break. Will takes the little girl from my arms.

“Leave her.”

“Location.”

Will drags the little girl out of the door. “I.. I don’t know much.” Tripp **bs, and I raise my finger. Will freezes and leaves the little girl who runs to her intervention.

father: the one who would die by tonight without medical “Speak. Now. Or I will make you see your worst nightmare in front of your eyes, starting with your little girl, not your wife.”

Rage and hatred flickers in his eyes. “There’s a warehouse. It’s not too far from here. We were asked to get here there, and then they would transport her after we get our payment.”

“Transport her where?”

He shakes his head. “The warehouse is the best I know. I can take you there, if you leave my girls.”

“You think I’m **d?” I hiss. “I’m going to go to the warehouse and only once I confirm you didn’t set us up, they’ll let your kid go.

One mistake, Tripp, you even try crossing me once, and I will make sure you watch your girls get a fate worse than death.”

He nods, and then tells me the location of the warehouse.

I cover the distance of three hours in/one. The Italian Mob, that was the only name I could think of as we drove more and more towards the isolated outskirts.

3/5 Philadelphia, Chicago and New York were the Bratva territories, and yet Nico had found some Italian thugs setting up base in our outskirts, preparing for a potential attack. Xander wiped them clean, but I guess they came back like a f**g plague because the area corresponded.

My heart beat loudly in my chest when the warehouse came into view, abandoned and dark. It looked inhabitable, infested with diseases.

“Stephen, lead through the right.” I spoke through the comms, “Nico take the back. Xander take the left.”

“The main door?” Uncle Damien asked back.

“I will enter.”

“Alone?”

“Alone.”

“Seven hundred guards and you want to walk in alone?”

I nodded even though I knew he couldn’t hear me over, the comms. All through the way, I had to prepare myself fo the reality, the possibility that I might find my wife in an unseeable state.

And now that the moment was here, the lump in my throat, the pang in my stomach overcame the adrenaline rush.

The doctors were on standby and I prayed as f**k to anyone who listened that she would be in there, safe and sound, with no need for the doctor. That this would all be a scare.

Wishful thinking, really.

I knock the door down, armed with guns, but the silence that reverberates is heavy.

It’s most likely empty.

I couldn’t care enough to be discreet. “Mia?” I scream for her. “Mia?”

“The right is empty.” Stephen speaks back. “Left too.” Xander adds. “The back is clear as well, Alex.” Nico called Alex instead of Alexander. The pity in his voice made me want to throw up, or drive a bullet through his heart, depending on the mood.

“F**k.” I curse, the little hope I had been feeling emptying out. “F**K!”

“Alex..” Uncle Damien’s shadow falls over me.

“Don’t.” I warn. “Just... don’t.”

4/5 58%1 Chapter 128 “There’s a basement,” he says, and I freeze. “A loose tile opened into a ladder.”

“And?”

“And I didn’t send anyone inside. The smell of blood was too potent, all the way out.”

I nod stiffly. I daze out for the time I make my way down the ladder, alone. I was so in my thoughts that if anyone would have wanted to, they could have easily taken a shot at me.

But nobody did.

Everything in me stilled when I found a bloodied Dominic lying at the entrance, and I kneeled to check his pulse with shaking hands.

It was weak and thready.

“Need medical assistance,” I bark over the comms, my world shaken when I enter inside and find my wife there too.

On the ground. Frail and unconscious.