Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  King didn’t want to be left alone now. He’d never been the kind of man that needed company. He’d known men like that. Brasso, his ex-partner had been one. He wanted to lunch with the guys, party until the early hours, always with a woman or two under his arm, especially after his wife left him.

  But King had always enjoyed his solitude. Until now.

  Now every quiet moment was an invitation for his anger and regret. For blame.

  Anger that Lucy, given all the lousy fucks in the world, was the one who had to die. Why not any of the worthless men on the planet? Murderers, pedophiles. Rapists.

  Regret that he hadn’t been in her life sooner, that he’d let twelve years slip by without so much as a fucking phone call. A phone call! How hard could a phone call have been? Hey, how are you doing? How has life been treating you? I haven’t fallen out of love with you. Let’s get a coffee.

  He was only distantly aware of the gunfire in the church, the rat-a-tat-tat recognizable to anyone familiar with the sound.

  King’s mind was a million miles away. Back in his old St. Louis brownstone, four blocks from DEA headquarters where he used to walk to work each morning.

  He’d already settled into his pajamas, a cold beer in hand and a Rams game on the tube, when Jack turned up on his doorstep in the rain, begging for his help.

  He’d looked like a kicked puppy. I need you to find my sister.

  He hadn’t known about Lou’s condition then, or even about Lucy herself. But the moment his eyes had fallen on her beautiful face as she stepped out of her Chicago apartment and threw her beautiful legs over the seat of a bicycle…

  He should’ve never let go. What a fucking fool I am.

  Don’t do this to yourself, Robert. Lucy’s voice was so bright and clear in his mind that his breath sputtered.

  His face pinched and knew he would cry if he didn’t pull himself back. Yet he was reaching toward that voice, leaning into it. Anything, no matter how painful, that promised a taste of Lucy Thorne.

  The driver eying him in the rearview looked equally alarmed. Babysitting a weeping American man in an armored van wasn’t what he’d signed up for.

  An explosion rocketed through the church, vomiting stained glass and the wooden doors out onto the street. The van rocked up onto two tires, skidding along the street until it slammed into the adjacent building. The sound of crunching metal assailed King’s ears.

  It was compounded by the force of the blast.

  Then the building was coming down. A slow motion free fall of the collapsing dome and pillars.

  Car alarms went off. The dogs that had been merely barking earlier, now howled.

  “Shit.” King had his door open and was running across the street. The driver shouted Italian after him, but he didn’t stop. He peered through the powder-white dust, trying to estimate where the entrance had been.

  He supposed he should feel terrible, being delighted by the sudden tragedy. No doubt, someone had died in this blast.

  But this was action. This was something to do with the mind that was slowly eating itself alive.

  He shoved aside the rubble slowly, methodically. There was a way to do it, to make sure that it didn’t collapse and crush any survivors beneath. He focused on the pieces light enough to move by hand. Those that would require a crane or machinery, he left in place.

  King knew all about this strategy himself. Brasso had informed him in excruciating detail why it had taken them days to pull him from the destroyed building that’d nearly killed him.

  But now he had a new, real fear. That Lou had been in this building. That Lou had been in the middle of the action, as she was wont to do, and had caught the bomb full on.

  King couldn’t bear it.

  He couldn’t let himself believe that less than one day after losing Lucy, he would lose Lou too. Lucy had given up years of her life, her home, her time and her heart trying to do right by that girl.

  King wasn’t going to let that sacrifice be in vain.

  His large hands seized a piece of demolished stone and moved it carefully to the side, laying it on top of a more solid rock base.

  He kept moving, painfully slow.

  “Anyone under there?” he called. He shifted one stone. He was careful not to pull a stone that would compromise his own footing and send him sliding into the rubble himself. He knew firefighters suffocated under the ashen rubble when mistakes were made.

  King caught sight of a hand. A bloody hand, with one of its fingers twisted backward, broken at the second knuckle.

  He removed three more stones until a smoky white face appeared. The hair may have been dark once, but now it was coated in plaster dust and crumbled stone.

  It was as if the man had been turned over in a mound of flour.

  King didn’t dare pull him from the rubble until only his feet remained hidden.

  It wasn’t Konstantine.

  His eyes were glazed with shock and his limbs trembled.

  “Was she in there?” King asked, seeing a thick trail of blood running down the man’s head from his ear.

  The man didn’t answer. He continued to stand on top of the rubble, mumbling Italian to himself.

  Others were beginning to emerge from the rubble. Not many. Perhaps only one percent of the men who had entered the building with Konstantine now had two limbs to stand on.

  Another man was bleeding profusely from a wound in his throat.

  One was coughing up dark blood onto a pile of stones. King would’ve bet a thousand dollars he was hemorrhaging internally, and if he didn’t get to a hospital soon, he would die.

  But King didn’t care about any of them. He cared only about one person now.

  “Did anybody see a woman in there?” he called out. “Uh, una femma?”

  They didn’t seem to understand him. He spoke louder, his voice strident with his growing panic. “Lots of guns? Shooting?” He pantomimed the movement. “Anybody?”

  “Chi? Di chi parli?”

  “English, goddamn it! Speak English.”

  “She’s not here.”

  King turned toward the voice and found Konstantine pulling himself from the ashes. He beat the dust from his own clothes and turned to spit on the ground.

  “She’s not?” King asked. Relief washed over him. There is still time. There is still time to make this right.

  “No.” Konstantine beat the dust from his clothes. He looked like a ghost of his former self, a starving phantom. “But I know where he has her.”

  35

  Nico stood outside the padded room and spit blood onto the concrete floor. His face hurt like hell. It wasn’t only the broken nose that he’d been quick to reset, should it fuse crooked, it was his split lip. His swollen throat that hurt even to swallow. All of it.

  He’d sent all his men away, told them that he wanted a minute alone with the bitch to teach her a lesson about respect. They’d hesitated, but only until he’d turned his hateful gaze on them. Then they seemed to have no problem leaving.

  She’d come to consciousness much more quickly now.

  And she sat in the middle of the room, regarding him with her unwavering eyes. She seemed like a snake, unblinking, unmoving, lying in wait for the perfect moment to strike.

  Her unsettling gaze was only intensified by the blood smeared all over her thighs. The bottom of the straitjacket was also dyed bright crimson.

  Nico’s blood.

  If only she had some on her mouth, then the look would be complete. A lunatic sitting in a padded cell, and waiting for her chance to escape.

  He had tried to reason with her. Tried to appeal to the bloodthirst he saw so clearly in her eyes. But he knew that none of it mattered now.

  She wouldn’t serve him.

  He was beginning to doubt that she had ever served Konstantine.

  Perhaps their paths had simply crossed. Or perhaps they had been interested in the same end. It didn’t matter. It didn’t change the fact that Nico would have to kill her now.
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  He wouldn’t make the mistake of getting close to her again. He only needed to be bitten once, so to speak, to understand the danger.

  She hadn’t needed her weapons or her armor to kill him. She hadn’t even needed the use of her arms.

  No.

  He wouldn’t challenge her. He would electrocute her into unconsciousness, using this red push button beside the reinforced metal door. And when she was out, he would go in and slit her throat.

  He would watch the blood pour from her onto the padded floor, running along the creases where the cushions meet, as red as a Biblical river.

  Such a waste, he thought. But it was better than the alternative. That he let her live only to find his own throat slit in an alley hours, days, or weeks from now.

  His index finger went to the red button, hovered over it as he looked into those brown, unmoving eyes.

  She smiled at him. Smiled as if she knew what he was about to do.

  And he understood now why the men were so frightened of her. Why they called her Konstantine’s strega.

  He mashed the red button. Her back arched, body twisting. She was flung back, rolling on the padded floor, every muscle in contraction.

  “Agostino! Agostino!” the men called. Feet pounded down the concrete hallway, running toward him.

  He hesitated, looking away from her long enough to see what the commotion was about.

  “Someone is here,” they said. The youngest, a man with a buzzed haircut and beady eyes put his hands on his knees as if to catch his breath. He jabbed one thumb over his shoulder. “Someone is coming up the driveway.”

  Nico gave the unconscious woman one more look before turning away from the door.

  Slitting her throat would have to wait.

  Reluctantly he followed the messengers through the winding corridors, up the stairs to the atrium of the reception area. This had once been the main villa of this winery, no doubt overrun with tourists or wine enthusiasts. But no one had been here in a long time.

  They’d found over two thousand dusty wine bottles in the cellar and moth-eaten furniture covered in white sheets. The sheets themselves were splattered with bird shit and inches of dust.

  Sunlight spilled through the windows onto the portico.

  Nico stepped out of the villa and onto the stone walk, giving himself a full view of the driveway. A kilometer and a half, maybe two out, he saw what had frightened the guards.

  A line of armored trucks came single-file down the driveway, their tires spitting debris. Clouds of dust swirled up into the sky.

  So the bomb hadn’t ended Konstantine at all.

  He was likely too cowardly to go into the church himself. It was probably his men that were killed in the blast. Just as well. He would enjoy ending Konstantine himself.

  With his own bare hands.

  He was certain he’d enjoy it even more than murdering the little lunatic downstairs.

  “Tell everyone to suit up,” he said to the silent guards. “Konstantine is coming.”

  36

  The truck bumped along the country road, forcing the men to jostle back and forth on the opposite benches. Konstantine’s eyes were trained on the passing countryside outside the truck’s window. He kept opening and closing his fist, and then catching himself doing it, forced his hand motionless and flat against his leg.

  If Nico hurts her, so much as bruises her…

  He scanned the interior of the truck. Nine or ten men were in this van. Probably eighty in all, if he counted the entire 7-truck caravan. He couldn’t be sure how many men Nico would have at his disposal, but he expected as many as a hundred. He would be a fool to have fewer than a hundred in the event that she was able to rise against him.

  He would find one of three scenarios at the winery.

  In the first scenario, all of the men are dead. He imagined bodies strewn in the portico, pools of blood beneath them. Maybe he would find them slumped on the stairways or sitting against the wall with their brains drying on the stucco.

  If this was the situation, it meant Lou had saved herself. And no doubt, Konstantine would be dead before the sun reached high noon. She wouldn’t wait for him to explain himself. She’d end him before the moon rose.

  In the second scenario, he would fight his way through Nico and Nico’s men and save her from the padded room where he was no doubt holding her. And he would have a chance to explain what he’d done and why he’d done it.

  In the third and final scenario, King would succeed in severing the power to the building and the lights would be turned off. In that momentary blackness, she would free herself, join them in the fight, and no doubt slaughter them all. Hopefully she would see King, know that it was Konstantine who’d come to save her—and that might buy his life.

  He didn’t expect gratitude. In fact, he expected a knife to the gut. But at least he would have a chance to explain himself in the latter two scenarios.

  A chance to explain was the very best he could hope for now.

  He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. He surveyed the men sitting knee-to-knee on the benches. The men faced each other on opposing benches, bulletproof glass windows framing the passing world beyond. Those who met his eyes politely looked away. The American cop didn’t. But he wasn’t truly seeing Konstantine either.

  He wore his grief like a mask. The eyes fathoms deep and full of shifting shadows.

  “Are you sure you can do this?” Konstantine asked.

  King’s eyes focused, light sparking in them. “Another gun wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Of course. And I will send some of the men with you.” He quickly added, “For cover.”

  He didn’t want to insult the cop with words like for your protection or in case you fuck up.

  He suspected the American wasn’t fooled. He seemed to understand the implication clearly.

  “My entrance will be the diversion you need. Stick to the plan and you should be fine.”

  “You don’t think he will have someone guarding the box?” King asked, the purple bags under his eyes pronounced.

  Konstantine forced a patient smile. “That’s what the gun is for.”

  He hoped his façade of control remained intact. In reality, his nerves jumped and twitched beneath his skin. Sweat collected on the back of his neck. The interior of this truck was too hot. Too crowded. He wanted to open the back door and throw himself on the dirt road.

  He remained in his seat, reviewing his plan for the thousandth time.

  No doubt the power box providing electricity to the main house was guarded. And if Nico was aware of it, the generator as well. He hoped the man was oblivious to its existence, but in reality, the fact that he was here at the winery at all was evidence enough that he knew—and understood—Konstantine’s investment in the place.

  The winery lurched into view. A sprawling compound amongst the orchard rows. The green hills framed the ancient home beautifully. Sunlight shone on its sienna roof. He counted fourteen vehicles in the circle drive outside the exterior wall. Craning his neck, he looked out over the field to a structure in the distance.

  “Once I get out, the truck will carry you out to the…workhouse,” he said. He hesitated with the word workhouse, unsure if that was the best translation for the distant structure where the equipment and the generator were kept. The cop seemed to understand.

  To his own men, the few they’d saved from the rubble of Padre Leo’s desecrated church, he spoke Italian. “Tenetelo in vita se viene ucciso, dovete finire il lavoro. Tagliate il corrente.”

  He didn’t expect the men to give their lives for some American they didn’t know. But he wanted them to at least try to help him fulfill their mission. Though he wasn’t sure any of these men knew how to disable the electricity.

  The tires ground to a stop and the back doors to the truck swung open. They waited for open gunfire, for some retaliation. But they were only met with eerie silence. No bird song. No wind through the grass. It was the silence before the tempes
tuous storm tore off the roof. Dirt shifted as the other trucks pulled up beside them, mixing with those already parked.

  All the men filed from the truck with the exception of the driver, King and the two men that would accompany him. Konstantine’s boots hit the road and he turned back to the cop one more time. For now the open doors shielded him from any incoming fire, should they try to eliminate him before he even entered the portico.

  “Remember you must disable the generator first,” Konstantine said, unsure if he was saving, or damning his life with these instructions. She will listen. She will understand. Dio mio, he hoped so.

  King only nodded and the doors to the van closed between them. Konstantine hesitated, watching the van circle around the parked cars before pulling out of his sight, leaving a trail of dust in its wake, the only sign it had been there at all.

  Konstantine adjusted the body armor, checking the fit across his chest.

  I must look like Lou, he thought. His head to toe black clothing. Protective plating over his thighs and outer arms. The chest and groin protected as well. The six guns within arm’s reach and a belt’s worth of ammo.

  He saw men on the upper terrace then. Guns pointed at him from all directions.

  But calmly they crossed beneath the archway and through the courtyard. They moved through the portico.

  Nico didn’t let them get far.

  He stepped from the shadows and out into the early morning light.

  “Konstantine,” he said. His grin was wolfish, his eyes. “You didn’t get my message, did you?”

  Several of the men, more and more of them emerging from the shadows, laughed at their master’s teasing tone.

  Konstantine saw he was outnumbered perhaps three to one. But Ricci’s men were good at what they did. As well as those who’d remained loyal to Konstantine himself. He would have to hope it was enough. Or that they would get lucky.

  Nico’s gaze was malicious. Hungry. “You aren’t wanted, my friend. How embarrassing that you keep trying to take something that doesn’t belong to you.”

  Konstantine noted his swollen nose, the purple-black bruise spreading across his face. The way his eyes were nearly swollen shut.