Under the Bones

by Kory M. Shrum

  He smiled despite the rage wrenching his insides. He gestured toward Nico’s nose. “Looks like I’m not the only one trying to take something that doesn’t belong to me.”

  Several of Ricci’s men laughed and Nico’s eyes caught fire.

  Konstantine saw the shirt hanging from Nico’s pocket and the world stopped on a dime. It was the shirt he’d last seen on Lou that morning. It was bloody and torn.

  Nico followed his gaze and grinned when he realized what Konstantine was looking at.

  He pulled the shirt from his back pocket and lifted it up to his face as if to smell it. It was for show. That busted nose wasn’t smelling a damn thing. It enraged Konstantine all the same.

  “What did you really come for, Konstantine?” Nico asked, eyes ablaze over the bloody, ravaged cotton. “The Ravengers? The woman? Or your pride?”

  Konstantine pulled his gun in a single movement and before he’d even exhaled the air from his lungs, he fired.

  37

  A gunshot made King’s head snap up. He pivoted on the bench, craning his neck so that he could see out the armored van’s window. He saw nothing but the smattering of cars collected in the circle drive beside the villa. It was the sort of villa he’d expected to find in the Tuscan hills. Though he couldn’t be sure they were in Tuscany at all. They’d been in Florence that morning, but in what direction they’d driven after the church had been brought down, he couldn’t be sure.

  Thinking of the van rocking on its heels in the blast, the sight of that stone façade crumbling—not out, as one might think—but in on itself. It had triggered him. It gave him sweaty palms, a shallow pant and knocking heart.

  King could forget about his claustrophobia on most days, so it was always surprising when it reared up unexpectedly and seized him again. And here he was amongst all these unfamiliar faces…it wasn’t the time to fall apart. No matter how much his fear rolled him, or his grief.

  Lucy.

  He saw her beautiful smile. The way she’d looked when she’d slipped her arms around his neck and came up onto her toes to kiss him. First his nose, then each cheek, before impatiently, he seized her mouth with his own.

  That life seemed so far away. Like a vivid dream he’d had years ago, but could still remember with shocking detail. It shone in its strange way. And Lou…

  Where the hell are you?

  He didn’t believe she was dead. Couldn’t believe it. That she would leave this world at all was like seeing the sun gone from the sky. The Louie Thorne he knew wouldn’t miss this firefight for anything in the world. She was hurt or detained somehow.

  Had to be.

  The truck bounced to a stop outside a large shed. The back door opened and King slid from the bench into the open air.

  He saw the villa in the distance.

  Something whistled past his head and slammed into the armored door.

  A second bullet followed. It bit the metal five or six inches from his face.

  “Shit!” He ducked and took cover on its other side while the men around him burst into action.

  More bullets flew as King hurried toward the shed, his hands over his head as if that would stop a bullet.

  When he reached the wooden door of the shed, he found it locked with a large chain and padlock. King pressed the eye of his gun against the chain and pulled the trigger. Part of the metal was blasted away but he still had the slow task of getting it unhooked from the chain and unfastening the door.

  The firefight continued around him and he couldn’t be sure from which direction the men were coming. Only that they must be on the other side of the van. Something heavy slammed into metal. There was a distinct thump - POP and King suspected it was a body hitting the armored plating.

  If I don’t get inside, I’m going to be next.

  The last of the chain fell away and he pried open the door.

  The dark was nearly complete, with only thin beams of light filtering through cracks in the dilapidated roof above. King kept moving, heading toward the back of the shed where Konstantine had been sure the generator waited.

  King found it, a bulky black box in a corner, with only dirt beneath it and rough wooden walls on either side. He bent down, his fingers rushing to inspect the surface for a plug to pull or wire to disconnect—any hint at how it might be disabled.

  He found a thick cable running from the back of the machine to the wall. Then the cable continued up the wall, disappearing behind the landing above.

  He pulled the cable, trying to wiggle it from its socket.

  Nothing.

  Placing his boots on either side of the box, he pulled again, throwing all his weight into it.

  The cord popped free with a spark.

  The shed door bounced open and three men clambered inside. They weren’t Konstantine’s men.

  Before they realized where he was and what he was doing, he began to climb. He used a wooden ladder to follow the wiring up the side of the shed’s wall. He climbed quickly, pausing only when a bullet punched a hole beside his head, offering a bright pinhole of sunlight. Then he climbed even faster.

  He didn’t understand Italian and had no idea what they shouted. But with every bullet hole and new pinprick of light, the message was clear.

  Then he was shot.

  A bullet bit into the meat of his lower left side. Something in his back spasmed and he almost fell off the ladder. One hand released completely and for a moment he hung there, unsure if he would crash to the dirt below. Then more gunfire erupted and the shouts commenced. But they didn’t seem to be directed at him any longer. Someone else had entered the fray and was drawing the fire away from him.

  He resumed his climb and with much effort hauled himself onto the wooden platform above.

  His back burned. The fire in his lower back spread in all directions, sucking the air from his lungs.

  But he crawled forward, still following the electrical lines, hoping to find the place where they met some sort of circuit box. His shaking hands caught on the rough wooden floor. The dirt and grit dusted his palms. His chest constricted and he coughed.

  His hands grasped blindly in the darkness until his fingers found cool metal and then a switch. He flipped it, or he thought he did.

  His vision swam. His limbs were so heavy that he felt as if he were underwater, trying to swim toward a surface he would never reach.

  Just as well, he thought. It wasn’t worth it without you.

  38

  Nico saw the gun jump in Konstantine’s hand. Then the bullet slammed into the vest hugging his chest. He stumbled back a step, but didn’t fall. The sting was nothing compared to the joy he felt in seeing the hatred on Konstantine’s face.

  So calm, so collected. Padre’s perfect bright boy.

  A pleasant boy who made friends effortlessly with his easy manners. He was never rattled, never overcome by emotion. Nico had always known better. He might wear a mask for the men around him, but the woman was the key.

  She would be his destruction. The gap in his armor where Nico could drive the blade home.

  Both sides pulled their firearms and the shooting began.

  Gunfire erupted in the courtyard. Nico had time to dive behind a partial wall for cover. Konstantine’s eyes never left him. He dodged the crossfire and raging men to make his way closer. Nico followed his movements behind the lattice work, but it wasn’t possible to get a clear shot from here.

  He peeked around the corner, gun up. Konstantine fired at him immediately. His bullet bit into the stucco beyond his head, blasting a quarter-sized chunk of wall away. Nico fell back, rounded a corner and took off down the hallway. He would come around the other side, through the adjacent door and snare him from behind.

  Nico turned a corner, expecting to find another hallway. Instead he caught a fist to the face.

  He rocked back on his heels, his shoulder clipping the wall. A door behind him snapped open and they crashed into a kitchen. He staggered past the counter and stools. Nico tumbled, ta
king a stool down to the floor with him in a clatter.

  He opened his eyes the second before his nose was seized. Pain exploded through his face and he screamed. Two fingers squeezing the wounded bridge forced water from his eyes.

  “Brother,” Konstantine climbed onto the man’s chest. The light behind Konstantine’s head burned like a halo, wrapping his face in shadow. It could be anyone delivering this vengeance. His own father. God.

  Nico brought his knee up, felt it connect with its mark and Konstantine stiffened.

  Nico gained the upper hand. He rolled on top of the other man, pinning him down with his own weight. His head bounced off the floor. Now Konstantine was on the flat of his back, his face spotlighted by the overhead bulb.

  The gunfire and men shouting continued, but this was better.

  He could take his time in here. Enjoy this revenge that was always owed to him.

  How should he begin? In what ways could he hurt Konstantine the most, wring the most pleasure from this moment?

  “I don’t want you to worry about your woman.” Nico laughed, pulling his blade. “She’s cold now but any horse can be broken, if ridden hard enough.”

  Konstantine tried to buck him, his fury clear in his eyes. But Nico knew how to keep the other man down.

  “Since your gang is mine now, and your woman…” He pressed his blade against Konstantine’s face. “What is there left to take, Konstantine? Your pretty face? Your life?”

  He drew the blade across Konstantine’s cheek, splitting the flesh. He started at the chin and moved upward, toward the eye. Like unzipping a woman’s dress.

  Konstantine screamed.

  Maybe Nico would take it. The eye. Keep it in a jar on his bedside, even after he disposed of this corpse. Something pleasant to look at, to assure him of his power, before he drifted off to sleep each night. The tip of the blade had just reached the cheekbone when the light overhead clicked off.

  For a moment, Nico sat in the shadows, his blade hovering above Konstantine’s eye.

  Gunfire faltered and the house was filled with the sound of men running.

  The light overhead clicked back on.

  Konstantine laughed as blood welled from his cut face and painted half his face and ear red. “You lost power. Do you know what that means, amico mio?”

  The cut opened and spread as he spoke, blood pouring into the eye and over the cheek.

  Nico launched himself off Konstantine. He was down the corridor without looking back. Konstantine’s cruel laughter trailed after him, but he barely noticed. He hooked a right, another left and reached the cellar stairs. He took the stone steps three and four at a time, his hands pressed against the cool wall for balance. Then he launched down the lit corridor. The lights flickered. The hallway darkened and then it came on again.

  Something was wrong with the generator. That was why the overhead lights sputtered to life only to darken again. The flickering unnerved him. He expected the light to come on and reveal her there in the narrow hallway, standing before him as if from nowhere, a momentary phantom before she put a bullet between his eyes.

  Or maybe she was still unconscious. Maybe she hadn’t noticed the light had cut off at all and the generator would hold. He ran toward the door at the end of the hallway.

  He had to know.

  He had to confirm it with his own eyes. When he almost reached the metal door with its one viewing window, he slowed, his steps now cautious.

  The lights stayed on.

  He took a breath and cranked the large handle. The chamber door creaked loudly as it swung open to reveal the padded room. The room was lit again, but only partially.

  Shattered glass sparkled like glitter on the floor, the ripped and bloody straitjacket lay in the center.

  39

  She was so angry, it took her three tries to get her pants buttoned. Her trembling hands missed the buttonhole with each furious swipe. But as soon as Lou had a black t-shirt over her head, she descended the stairs into her armory. It wasn’t until she surveyed the shelves, counting gun after gun, that the calm finally began to return.

  She chose each weapon with Nico Agostino’s face blazing in the forefront of her mind.

  Grenades went into her pockets.

  She eyed the flamethrower lovingly, but had to be honest. It would limit her mobility. And with so many men crawling about that villa, she couldn’t be hampered. So she stuck to what worked. Kevlar sleeves and a vest—though not her father’s. And this loss only made her hatred burn hotter. As she loaded a new twin pair of Berettas and slipped them into hip holsters, she ran a list through her mind of all the little tortures she’d like to inflict on Nico.

  A belt sat around her hips. She filled it with the bullets to be pumped from her gun.

  She took a deep breath in the place that smelled of gunmetal and sawdust and the muscles in her back released. With more guns than hands, she felt like herself again.

  Let him go, she warned herself. Let him go for now.

  Her mind growled the way a dog would over a bone.

  But if she thought too much about Nico, about his momentary seizure of her power, the rage would overtake her. It would claim the reins of her mind and set fire to all the control she’d carefully built there.

  So she turned off her skittering thoughts. She gave her mind over to the dark, and shifted her compass to the foreground. It would be only instinct now. Instinct to carry her through the maze of this firefight and nothing more.

  It had never failed her before.

  Her armory dematerialized and in its place, a barn was built up around her. Or maybe this was a shed. The floor was dirt, the corners cluttered with unused machinery. At one end, twenty or thirty feet on her right, men clambered up a wooden ladder.

  Lou didn’t know what was so damned important on the landing above, what they were desperate to reach. She shot them anyway. The first, the one highest on the ladder, took a bullet to the back of his head and the force of it slammed his face forward into the rungs. The faceplant was followed by a limp, loosening of every muscle. When he fell, he took the two men from the lower rungs with him. He was dead before they hit the ground.

  One man lay on top of the other, like turtles stacked on their backs, arms paddling air.

  She shot the second man, who was trapped beneath the dead weight of the first, in his face. The gore exploded out the back of his head, and painted the face of the third. A crimson mask with wide, unblinking eyes.

  Lou shot him too. Then a second, third and fourth bullet were pumped into their faces as if it mattered. The trigger clicked, empty.

  Reload. She never took her eyes off the dead trio, waiting for even the smallest twitch.

  She was done fucking around. If only she’d emptied her gun into Nico’s face, she wouldn’t have been locked inside that wretched room.

  Blood dripped onto her outstretched hand. The droplet ran from knuckle to thumb. For a heartbeat, she thought it was from her kill. But gravity didn’t work that way. She looked up and saw blood pooled on the landing above. It had seeped through the space between boards and was collecting like condensation.

  The shadow where two shed walls met took her to the upper landing.

  It reminded her of the fish house in Miami. And having learned a lesson there, she crept forward cautiously, wary of any loose planks.

  King lay on his side, breath ragged. In one hand he held the end of a black cable. Lou understood now that it was King who’d freed her. When he cut the power, she’d been able to slip through the shadows to the butcher’s shop in Austin. One rip in the canvas and she had the jacket off.

  The smell of fresh air and dirt mixed with the scent of blood. An earthy, ancient scent.

  “King.” She knelt beside him. His skin was clammy and his pulse too quick. She pulled the cable from his weak grip. He stayed with Konstantine like you told him to. And it saved your life.

  A surprising wave of affection washed over her. “King. I have some beignets for
you.”

  He groaned.

  She smirked. “Hang in there if you want those beignets.”

  A tarp hung over a wooden bannister. Lou slid it off the wooden post and threw it over King and herself. She pulled him through the dark beneath it, no doubt resembling a magician’s disappearing trick.

  Now you see them, now you don’t.

  They appeared outside a hospital somewhere in New Orleans—at least, that’s what Lou had been aiming for.

  It was raining. Fat droplets beat the parking lot stretching out before her, the sound of tires treading shallow streams.

  “Excuse me,” she said.

  The man smoking beside the entrance jumped. “Holy shit!”

  His violent trembling caused the cigarette between his fingers to jump and fall to the sidewalk. He wore a white lab coat over turquoise scrubs. Dr. Jindal the plastic tag said.

  “He’s been shot,” she said. “Admit him.”

  “Where the hell—”

  Lou pulled her Beretta and pointed it at the doctor. “Admit him. Now.”

  The doctor howled and disappeared through the automatic doors. Light spilled onto the paved walkway where Lou crouched, protected from the rain. The cool breeze wafting through the walkway pushed the hair back from her face and chilled her cheek. It had the first promise of winter in it, a hint of ice behind the clouds.

  King’s eyes seemed to rove the mulched beds and bushy plants lining the sidewalk. His breathing was too shallow. Lou slapped his cheek, hoping to bring focus to that distant gaze.

  “I’ll be back,” she said.

  She moved to stand, but his hand shot out and seized hers.

  Now his eyes were perfectly clear. “Don’t.”

  “I’m not done with Nico,” she said, gently.

  “Don’t—”

  “I’ll be back,” she promised. She reversed the grip easily and squeezed him hard, giving him something to feel beside the pain. “I’m not done with you either.”