41
MASSIMO
Earlier…
“What are you thinking?” Elio squatted beside me and Vittorio after checking the perimeter of the compound.
“I go in the front, Vittorio the back—he’s to look for Katarina—and you be my eyes in the sky.”
Elio nodded. He had his sniper rifle slung over his shoulder and an earpiece with his sister, Giada, on the other end. Between them, they could do a lot of damage.
“It would be less risky to sneak in, get Katarina, and sneak out.”
“But far less fucking satisfying,” I said with a grow. “Sergei Stoyanov isn’t just the man who’s taken my wife, he’s the man who created the fine institution that killed my mother. He dies. Tonight.”
Elio studied me for a long moment and then nodded.
“Go and get your vengeance, brother. You’ve waited long enough.”
“Got it, Commander,” I muttered, and saluted Elio before moving off, nearly missing his grin.
My former commander used to have quite the reputation for never smiling and basically being a serious stick-in-the-mud.That had changed slowly when he’d met his childhood sweetheart again. Not quite a storybook romance, but I’d never seen him so happy. And God, I wanted what he had. I wanted it so much, I could barely breathe. In a few short weeks, my life had turned upside down and reformed around a new purpose.
Her. My angel.
“Sergei isn’t home yet,” Vittorio whispered in my ear. He was busy making his way around the back of the house.
“We could get the girl and get out of here before he even got home,” Elio pointed out. “Take Stoyanov on another day.”
I tutted softly, closing in on the front door, coming from an angle to check out how many men I was dealing with before they could see me.
“Where’s the fun in that?” I mused, and chuckled when I counted the security presence. “Sergei left three guys on the door of the house where his precious daughters are inside. What a fucking moron.”
“To be fair, three hardened Bulgarian Mafia men is probably more than enough to deter most guys,” Vittorio whispered, sounding out of breath.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Elio demanded in a low voice.
Vittorio breathed heavily in our ears.
“There was a gate to climb over,” Vittorio wheezed.
“Jesus, you need to work on your fitness. You sound like you’re about to keel over.”
“There isn’t much time for going to the gym when you’re a priest.”
“Make time,” Elio argued back with the same uncompromising discipline he’d always employed as our commander.
As I listened to them bicker, I closed in on the men at the front of the house. I ran along the back of a low wall that framed the front door and vaulted easily over it at the last moment, crashinginto one of the men. They held semiautomatic weapons with laughable incompetence.
As soon as my boots crashed into the first guy, I was swinging for the next one. I lunged forward and cracked his head on the wall. The last guy turned slowly, and I pulled a knife from my vest and threw it.
Bullseye.
It hit him in the neck, and he pitched to the side. The first guy was attempting to get to his feet. I slipped the garrote out of my back pocket and came around behind him, sliding it over his head.
A short time later, I released his lifeless body to the ground. The second guy, the one who had been knocked out by the wall, stirred. I took my gun, fitted with a silencer, and stalked over to him. A shot to the temple, and he was gone.
A fine patina of blood sprayed over my chest and the mask over my face. It was a nifty piece of tech, giving me superior night vision, and it also used heat detection tech. I looked very similar to how I’d looked the last time I’d fought alongside both Vittorio and Elio, except instead of sand-colored camo, I was in unrelenting black, matching my soul.