It’s nothing out of the ordinary, and certainly not as a victim caught between the teeth of organized crime.
After twenty or so minutes, I see a taxi stalking about the otherwise quiet streets. Without much prompting, the driver pulls up to me. “Do you need a ride to the hospital, sweetie?” he asks. “You look kind of rough.”
I’d laugh at the irony, being found out so quickly after pretending so hard.
“No, I need a ride to 108th and Cyprus, I have thirty dollars, please take me as far as you can,” I say, my voice wavering through the pain.
I climb into the back seat, and the driver looks back at me, a paternal concern coloring his expression. “Are you sure?” he asks.
I nod, affirming my decision.
As we drive, I revel in the anonymity of riding in a taxi, unknown to anybody, simply going about my business. The vibration of anxiety and impulse hum below the surface of my manufactured peace, but I refuse to allow them to overcome me. Not yet.
We emerge from an unassuming, quiet neighborhood lined with small shops and restaurants. The rain continues, and I don’t see more than a handful of other people walking outside. Though isolation has played a large, negative part of my life recently, there’s something about the barren streets, the quiet houses, and the overcast that pulls at me, creating a longing in me.
I watch the street numbers climb; 56th, 59th, 67th… and as we approach, a fire begins to grow in my stomach. I begin to sweat, and nausea creeps up my chest into my throat. My vision begins to waver, and I become enraged with myself.
How dare I allow my body to subdue me this way! My husband is within my grasp, and my neurons are choosing this moment to drag me to the floor. I slap myself across the face, right where it hurts. I yelp, but the swirling vision abates. My head is clear.
The taxi driver glances back at me through the mirror. “You’ve got me a bit concerned, and usually, I try to stay invisible to my customers. Why are you hitting yourself?” he asks.
“Oh, just trying to stay awake for finals, you know?” I lie.
The driver gives me a wan smile. “You kids work too damn hard. My daughter has finals this week too,” he replies.
We approach 108th and Cyprus, and my heart stops beating momentarily, the color washing out of my face.
“Here’s your stop, and don’t worry about the money. Just take care of yourself, okay?” the driver says, turning to look back at me.
“Thank you so, so much. I promise I’ll try,” I say as I exit the vehicle.
He drives away, and I look toward the red door that separates me from my goal. How am I supposed to get in? Why did I kill Benny? What was I thinking? I don’t even know how many rounds I have left in my hand-me-down pistol. I’ve made a grave mistake, and I have nobody to call for help. Not one person.
I slowly approach the house, and I listen closely. I don’t hear shouting or gunfire of any kind. I don’t see any vehicles parked nearby, though it’s not as if I’d know the difference. I don’t even know what these people drive.
I keep my hands on the pistol, cautiously pacing the walls to reach the back of the house. I see a back door, also red, likely used for receiving weapons. I step closer to it, and I notice that it’s been left unlocked.
How careless.
My heart jumps into my throat as I turn the handle slowly, pulling down on it to mitigate any noise from the door as I push it open bit by bit. I listen again for shouting, for any indication that I’ve been noticed, and I hear nothing.
I creep through the door, closing it behind me as I found it. The house smells like cigarette smoke, and it’s likely my father never comes around here. Michael probably runs every lower-level operation.
I find myself in the back of a mostly-empty garage, save for a table and some empty beer bottles. How gross.
Still, no noise, which perturbs me. Why wouldn’t they have someone keeping a post if Adrian’s family has made multiple attempts to get him back?
I’m more concerned now that I’ve got nobody to look out for, at least as far as I can tell. I continue to walk quietly and carefully through the garage to the other door, leading me inside. The house is furnished minimalistically, all form, no fashion; almost sterile, clinical, in a way.
The room I enter isn’t lit, save for the cloudy sunlight peeking through a pair of half-closed blinds. I glance around, still waiting to be attacked or shot by an unsuspecting guard. With my trembling hands gripping the pistol, I slowly step around a corner, scanning the room for movement.
Nothing.
I continue forward, my boots sinking into the carpet step by step. I remember the cut on my leg, and I look behind to make sure I’m not tracking blood on the floor. If I had left a bloodstain in that taxi driver’s car, I can’t imagine what he must have thought after he dropped me off here.
My pace quickens as panic begins to build at the base of my spine. Benny told me that Adrian was being kept in a basement, so logic would dictate that I’m looking for some kind of cellar door.
As I step carefully through a mostly-empty kitchen, I notice a door under a flight of stairs. It’s this door. It must be. Before I’m able to begin moving toward the door, I hear the door behind me open.
I freeze at first. After a breath or two, I’m able to break myself from my paralysis and turn, training the pistol on the door as I hear footfalls approach me. A single person is walking down the short hallway. My teeth vibrating in my skull, I pull back the slide on the pistol aiming directly at the doorway.
Before I can form a proper plan, I see Michael.
Our eyes meet, and something primal takes over in me. There’s time to be taken advantage of, no time to be beat.
I fire the pistol twice, once through his abdomen, the second narrowly missing his heart. Though I’ve never thought myself an expert marksman, my father ensured I was able to defend myself from the time I was young enough to understand my position in life.
Michael collapses, and I can see the pure, white-hot fury in his eyes, his anticlimactic end at the hands of his prey. Blood begins to spill from his mouth as he gargles obscenities, unintelligible, and irate, knowing his last words will never be understood or honored.
When I hear voices shouting close behind, I sprint for the door beneath the stairs. I close myself behind the door, listening for the voices to grow nearer, for potential gunfire.
Before I’m able to panic again, to consider my rapidly growing body count, I carefully make my way down the stairs.
At the base of the stairs is a large, unfinished room, only drywall, and tile flooring. A door at the far edge of the room stands out to me, and I immediately run towards it. Of course, it’s locked. Like an idiot, I continue to try to pry it open, hoping my first five attempts were simply a collection of random flukes.
No luck, the door is locked.
I feel like I could scream. All this pain, struggle, and risk could amount to a locked door preventing me from completing my mission, from saving my husband. Rage overcomes me, and all I see is red. Instead of attempting to break the lock myself, I listen for the panicked shouting, for the war cries. And with what time I have, I make a choice.
I creep back up the stairs, and as I open the door again, I’m met with the same group of hired bodies I had been beaten by. Confusion and fear color their faces, so defenseless without their leader to order them around. I make eye contact with the man that I recognize as Michael’s right hand man, the next necessary target.
I fire a shot at his head, missing the space I intended to hit, blowing shards of his skull into the wall behind him. He isn’t dead. He falls back, bracing himself on the wall behind him.
Another man reaches for his weapon, and I shoot him in the chest. I can’t leave any survivors, I know I don’t have the time to negotiate with them.
A second man to the left of Michael’s body reaches for his gun as well, realizing too late that he doesn’t have it. I see panic flow through him, his expression changing from one of malice and viole
nce to one of pleading and regret. I gaze down at him, contemplating whether or not he’s worth injuring.
I point the gun between his eyes. “Are there others coming?!” I shout.
He hesitates, unable to break himself from the existential horror that he was experiencing.
“Answer me!” I scream, all patience as dead and gone as Michael.
Chapter 20
The man charges toward me, choosing to give his life to a cause that would sooner see him murdered than avenge him if it served their greater good. He reaches for my pistol, and as I pull the trigger to sink a bullet into his chest, the pistol refuses.
I’m out of bullets.
Goddammit! I should have made sure I at least had enough to keep me out of such a preventable situation.
Cold sweat breaks open from my skin over my face like a controlled burn, quickly and evenly as I recognize my likely fate. They won’t kill me right away.
With a crack to my wrist, the man knocks the pistol from my hands. It clatters across the tile, interrupting the previously meticulous white of the floor. What was once a sterile landscape of exchange is now mingled with the sticky red smears and spatters of blood that have rained down, my own apocalypse.
He grabs me by the back of my head, slamming me into the wall nearby. I go deaf, and a streak of white flies into my peripheral vision as grey velvet encloses me. I choose to fall to the floor, eyes closed, dead to the world. I know he’s pleased with himself for putting me out so quickly, despite how many of his men I’d killed.
My head screams, and my body begins to turn cold as my adrenal glands push inhuman amounts of adrenaline into my bloodstream; despite this, I’m perfectly aware. His pride is his downfall.
I hear him run to the other room, presumably to find a few bullets to blow through my skull so that I match the rest of the men on the floor. It would be irresponsible to not ensure that I was completely, irrevocably dead.
As his footfalls become further and further from me, I gaze up. I’m the only living person in this room. My bones deny me my right to the use of my muscles as I drag myself up off the floor. With an empty pistol, all I have for a weapon is my broken body, unfit to win a fight against a child, much less a muscled soldier with shit for brains.
As I rise from the floor, I trip over Michael’s arm, lying sprawled out. I land on my injured wrist, and a shriek escapes me. Before the man has a chance to come back and put me out for good, I scramble to my feet, opening every drawer until I find something I can use: a hammer. I’d shot quite a few people in such a short amount of time, but I don’t know if I’m capable of-
The man appears in the doorway, and as my mind fails me. I throw the hammer straight at his head as hard as I can. I manage to hit him in the left eye, taking him completely by surprise as he growls in pain.
Lunging forward, I’m able to push him into the wall as hard as I can to break whatever is left of his balance. I retrieve the hammer from the floor nearby, and as my stomach lurches into my chest, I slam the hammer down into his right orbit, smashing it. He falls back again, enraged, indignant, blind.
The hammer feels one hundred pounds heavy as I swing it down toward his skull again, and again. I’m straddling his chest, bludgeoning him. The reptile in me takes over, and I continue to break his face open as flecks of bone fly at my face, a miasma of blood and lymph and death hanging in the air around me. Each nerve within my body vibrates and convulses as pure shock takes over, the steady hum of true terror ringing continuously in my head.
Pure silence deafens me.
I listen intently for sirens, for more shouting, for the last fifteen minutes of my ordeal to repeat and begin like a curse, as it seems to have done repeatedly since I got married. And to my surprise and abject horror, I begin to laugh.
I laugh harder and harder until I can’t breathe, until my stomach burns and I beg god, or the universe, or the sun, or whoever is listening to let me stop or to let me die. I feel tears begin to stream down my face, nausea crawling up into my mouth, transforming into the irreverent, inhuman howling of a woman with a broken brain.
Gasping for air, the laughing turns to sobbing; noiseless, gripping, angry sobbing.
I take the hammer from the man’s face, now a bizarre, unearthly red pool. With every faculty in me, I pull myself off his body, directly to the side of him, where I collapse.
For what feels like an eternity, I’m overtaken by a dissociative state where I can see faces in the topography of the ceiling. The faces do not speak, but they know. They know that I am evil and that I have chosen to forfeit my humanity for revenge.
I breathe deeply and slowly until the static builds in my empty vessels again, and I am able to close the eyes of the knowing faces. There are no voices, no sirens. All I can do is get up and complete what I’ve come here for.
Adrian.
With my growing but staggered mental clarity, I recognize that Michael is likely the person who was placed in charge of Adrian, given his mafia royalty. Being a self-serving pig, Michael would have never allowed anybody else the pleasure of abusing somebody above his rank. His body lies crumpled awkwardly on the floor, his legs jackknifed out in one direction.
I fish the keys out of his pocket, immediately noticing that one of them happens to be red. It couldn’t be the house key, that would be far too obvious. It needs to be the key to the room downstairs.
As I make my way back down the stairs to the main space, my body trembles under the weight of itself, fresh with contusions and hairline fractures. Stumbling slowly down the stairs again feels like reliving the injuries all at once.
I brace myself on the handrail, biting my lower lip raw, finally able to release my moans of agony. The floor beneath me is rigid and unyielding under my boots, and I groan out loud, imagining the hideous process of removing them when this is all over, whenever that would be.
I can finally approach the room where Adrian is being held, and all I can hope is that he’s still alive, even just enough to revive. I find the keys, withdraw them from my pocket, and turn the key in the lock.
It unlocks effortlessly, and I’m almost too scared to enter the room. I feel stupid. After all that I’ve seen and done in just a week, what could possibly be too much for me to handle?
When I open the door, I find myself engulfed in pitch black, surrounded by the smell of sawdust and damp carpet. “Adrian?” I say, my voice wavering. I stumble over something, and I scream in pain, my familiar song.
I feel along the wall for a light switch, and when I find one, I discover that the item that I had tripped over is a single step leading to a flight of descending stairs, each plateau dimly lit. My mouth runs dry.
Could there be some kind of black market torture chamber down there?
Am I going to find him strung up to a ventilator?
Or in a bathtub full of ice, missing a kidney?
I could scream at the idea of limping down more stairs. Nevertheless, I must.
There are guard rails on both sides of the steps, and I manage to step down, leveraging my weight against them. Just as I had with the scaffold, I quickly develop a system, just like walking on crutches. The rails bow under me periodically, and the imagery of my bleeding, shattered body at the base of the stairs keeps me vigilant.
The base of the stairs reaches me, and the bitter scent of rust assaults my senses. As I stagger down further, I find a hallway lit by red light bulbs, giving it an ethereal, forsaken atmosphere. I’m able to lean into the wall again.
“Adrian!” I shout, my echo deafening in the otherwise ghostly hallway.
I stop to listen.
“What?! Is there somebody here? Please, help me! I can’t see anything!”
This is the first I’ve heard of my husband’s voice in weeks. The tenacity in his voice lights up in my head, and for the first time in recent memory, I feel hope.
Despite my injuries, I almost run down the hallway toward his voice, and I find him in a room at the end of the hallway, o
ne of a series of four. He’s chained to a pipe on the floor, and from the looks of it, he’s tried to break free of it many, many times. His wrists are both bound by the chains, and they’re wrapped with tender, pink ligature marks.
With eyes hollow and gaunt like a dead man’s, he gazes up at me, and I struggle to look back. The formidable, strong man I had only briefly met weeks before hangs behind those eyes, begging to be released by his wife, this stranger set before him for a lifetime’s worth of misadventures like these.
“I… I don’t even know where to begin, Adrian. I don’t know what to say,” I stammer, holding myself back from outright falling to my knees to embrace him.
He sits up. “Don’t worry about that right now, we need to leave, now. You’ve gotta break me out of these chains,” he says, the commanding edge in his voice helping to fill out his broken appearance.
“How?! I can’t believe I even got this far,” I say.
“Yeah, me neither. Michael’s had someone on your ass since you got out of the hospital, they’ve been giving me updates,” Adrian says as he stretches his shoulders.
“Wow, how nice of them,” I scoff.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here before we get killed, okay?” Adrian says, a bit panicked.
I pause. “I think we have a bit more time than you might think we do, Adrian.”
His eyes narrow. “What do you mean?” he asks as he interrogates me.
“I killed them. All of them. I started with Benny, then Michael, then the other two. I beat one of them to death with a hammer. I really, really don’t want to talk about it right now, Adrian,” I say flatly.
Confusion and bewilderment wash over him. “Wait. . . you fucking killed four people? In one day? Holy shit, Gabriella!”
I breathe for a moment, staring him in the face as I collect my rebuttal. “Yes, Adrian, I killed four fucking people so I could save your life. So let’s leave now,” I say.
Adrian gestures vaguely at the chains around his wrists.
“Do you know if there’s a lock on them? Or a key?” I ask stupidly.
Broken King: An Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance Page 11
