The Salvation of Vengeance (Wanted Men #2) (13 page)

But faced with that photograph, that heartbreaking
before
, and the
after
now reflected back at her in the mirror, she couldn’t stop herself.

And through the powerful storm that had finally rolled in, her brother and his best friend knelt beside her, holding her, offering their strength, their comfort, in the form of soft, affectionate touches to her bruised back and stitched head. Gentle, soothing words brushed her ears, words she couldn’t hear over the thunder rumbling through her mind.

Where did she go from here? Where would she find a tether? Because as it was, she felt as if she were floating free of everything she’d ever known—even if throughout the past year the majority of that had been violent and negative. At least it was familiar.

Being free was not.

Walking through a warehouse that sat on that line separating Queens from Brooklyn, Gabriel noted the pleasing scent of wood and fabric still in the air from when the place had been used to build furniture. His expression was grim as memories danced around his head. The last time he’d come through a place like this it had been at his brother’s request. The same night Gabriel had delivered a truck filled with explosives to a factory in the Bronx, causing the blast that had killed his brother’s girlfriend. At their father’s orders. Well,
his
father’s.

He gave his head a shake, still finding it unbelievable that he and Stefano were only half brothers and not full, as he’d always assumed.

Where the hell was Stefano? No one knew. He’d yet to put Maksim on it, wanting to allow his brother as much time as he needed. But he was getting impatient. So was Eva. So it seemed Gabriel was going to have to go ahead with the promise he’d made to his wife.

Wife.

Man, that had to be the sexiest word ever created. To match the sexiest woman ever created. His wife.

What a sap.
Lucky that Vincente, who was walking next to him, and Quan, who was on his other side, couldn’t hear his thoughts.

He was definitely going to have to keep the promise he’d made to Eva and go hard-core after Stefano. He’d given his brother time to resurface. Now he’d hunt the idiot down and bring him home. Attempt to form some sort of relationship with a man he still considered his sibling—the “half” shit could bite it.

Would a man who’d hated him for the whole of their lives want that relationship?

According to Eva, Stefano had had some sort of epiphany last month when things between him and Gabriel had come to a head. So, yeah, he was pretty sure his brother would play nice. Maybe he would even come in and give Gabriel a hand dealing with the fuckheads he’d left behind in the family business. Though the lowlifes he and Vincente had been dealing with, for the most part, hadn’t been hired by Stefano but by his now-dead underboss, Furio. Nervy bastard had been running the more depraved rackets behind the boss’s back.

Gabriel’s fingers curled into fists at the thought of that Mohawked fucker, the urge to kill him all over again riding him hard as it always did. He refused entry to the memory of how he’d found Eva roughed up and on the verge of being assaulted—

“Who picked this asshole up?” he asked the boys in an effort to distract himself. If he had to use one of those fuckheads Stefano had left behind as that distraction, then so be it.

“I did,” Vincente grumbled, his mind clearly somewhere else.

“How’d it come about?”

“I noticed a discrepancy in the earnings coming from one of the bigger bookmaking operations you have in Newark. Snooped around to see if I could find the trail, and DeLuca’s name kept showing. Seems he siphoned off some cash so he could finance his own operation. I went to Jersey this aft and picked him up myself.”

“What was he doing on his own? If it was a gambling thing, I really couldn’t give a shit right now that he took a few bucks—”

“It wasn’t gambling,” V barked, his tone scraping Gabriel’s ears like a bladed Q-tip. “And it was three-quarters of a mil. He used it to buy a place over in Bushwick.”

Quan whistled as Gabriel stopped a few feet from what he had to assume was the interrogation room. The boys did the same. “If you give me details, am I going to want to take this guy’s head off?”

“You’re going to want to sever it clean, my brother.” Vincente was looking back the way they’d come, but Gabriel didn’t think he was seeing the abandoned forklift and dozens of stacked flats. Not unless the equipment had red hair and haunted eyes.

“V.”

“What.”

“Vincente,” Gabriel said, more forcefully.

A dark, exhausted gaze met his. “What,” Vincente repeated. Slowly. Through a tight jaw.

They stared at each other for a few heartbeats, and finally Gabriel just sighed roughly. “After this I want you to go home and get some fucking sleep. You look like shit.”

“Aw. That mean you’re gonna pass me up for someone prettier?”

“Stubborn asshole.”

They banged through the swinging door, but before even looking at the guy sitting in the middle of what had once been an office—judging by the file cabinet duo separated by a covered window and the dust-covered desk in the corner—Gabriel went over to exchange a knuckle bang and a couple of heartfelt embraces with the twins.

“Boys.”

The Berkman brothers had been with him for years, remaining at his back even during his time in Seattle. Two weeks ago, Gabriel had brought Eva to Astoria to show her a couple of apartments he and Vincente owned there. They’d christened one—all afternoon—and had gone down the street to a deli for sustenance after. The twins had been hanging on the sidewalk when they’d walked out. No warning. Just there.

“You okay to be here?” he asked Abel, who’d gone down in the line of duty last month with a serious knife wound to the chest.

“Don’t,” the bearded man warned in that soothing, peace-instilling voice he and his twin shared that never failed to loosen the muscles in Gabriel’s neck. “Jerod’s barely allowing me to wipe my own ass. Don’t need it from you, too, boss. I’m tight. If I wasn’t, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.”

Gabriel clapped Jerod on the shoulder in a job-well-done gesture. The overprotective routine was understandable. These two wouldn’t survive without each other; their bond was that strong. He turned, biting back a sigh before shoving anything soft out of his head, and heart, and went over to stand in front of who he instantly recognized as Tommy “the Shark” DeLuca. He’d known the guy for more than a decade. But not like this. He was a shadow of his former self.

“What did you do with my money, Tommy?” he asked quietly and without preamble.

“Gabriel, Jesus Christ, man, I’m not fuckin’ crazy. I didn’t take no money!”

Liars, they just didn’t get it. The Shark’s eyes were wild, pupils dilated. His sickly yellow skin hung off his bones like someone had sucked the flesh out from under it. Smelled like a toilet bowl. Junkie.

“Seriously, man,” DeLuca said when Gabriel motioned Vincente forward. In his periphery, he saw V already had his custom-made SIG in hand; a sweet-looking Grim Reaper was stamped into the grip of the weapon. Maks had one with a grimacing skull, the eye of which was an amethyst stone.

A flash of light winked off the blade that appeared in Vincente’s other hand.
Shit.
The Reaper meant business tonight. Which proved this definitely had something to do with females.

“What did you use the money for, Tommy?” Gabriel repeated on the downward slash from V’s arm that imbedded the sharp steel into the Shark’s thigh. The scream of pain had Gabriel’s teeth grinding and seemed to confirm what he thought he’d heard. Vincente had hit bone.

“I told you. I didn’t touch it! Give me a couple of days. I’ll find—”

The lie was choked off when Vincente twisted the blade and then raised his gun and leveled it in the center of a clammy forehead. The dribble of liquid hitting the concrete floor added to the steady drip of blood. Failed bladder.

Gabriel stepped closer so he could listen as V leaned in to whisper into Tommy’s ear.

“You sonofabitch. How many little girls did you ruin? Do you even know? You even think about the mothers and fathers you sent to sit in those pews and pray for their babies to come home to them? Do you even give a fuck that those prayers will never, ever be answered? Year after fucking year.” V’s black eyes were as cold as a Siberian river in January.

“Please, I didn’t do nothin’. I don’t know who did—I swear,” Tommy whimpered through his now-chattering teeth. “I’d tell you if I did—I swear!”

“You don’t have to tell me anything, you lying piece of shit. I already know. Why do you think you’re here?”

Vincente straightened, pulling his blade out as he did. He wiped it clean on the howling guy’s pant leg and raised his arm again. The muffled pop sounded flat in the small room.

As he had countless times before, Gabriel couldn’t help but wonder what had gone through this guy’s mind as he’d watched death come for him. Did he think of his loved ones? Did he have any? Anyone he truly loved? Was he capable of the emotion? Or too far gone? Did he regret what he’d done in his life? Send up a prayer for forgiveness?

Or did he simply sit there and scramble for a lie plausible enough to allow him to live another day?

It would be his wife and his crew that would travel through Gabriel’s heart and into his head when the time came for him. And it would. As it did for everyone. Maybe not in the violent way it just had for DeLuca, but it would still come.

Eva’s sapphire eyes drifted through his mind as he turned and walked a few feet away, his chest tightening to a painful knot at the thought of leaving her. A hundred years wouldn’t be enough time together. Not even close.

How much fear and revulsion would she show if she knew what had just gone down here? Which choice words would she use to end their marriage of only one week? How fast would she bolt out the door of their home and into the protective custody of her father—who’d been in a situation just like this too many times to count?

His gaze once again strayed to the corpse, and he noticed the eyes really did look like those of a shark. Flat. Dead. And now totally unseeing.

“Where are the girls, V?” he asked quietly.

“I had Alesio take Tegan to pick them up a couple of hours ago. She brought them to the Children of the Night rehab center in White Plains.”

Thank God for this man’s diligence. “Put the place he purchased with our cash on the market and donate whatever it brings to the same place.”

He looked over when no affirmative was forthcoming. The sight of V’s throat working through a swallow, his expression heavy with respect as he stared back at him, had Gabriel wanting to hug it out with his tortured friend.

What the hell must it be like living with those ghosts?

Vincente looked away from Gabriel’s sympathetic gaze and didn’t even have enough energy to tell him to bottle the shit up and send it out to sea. Respect for the new boss’s generosity was a warm blanket around his shoulders—he didn’t think Stefano would have done the same. Seven hundred Gs would go a long way toward helping those kids.

His attention settled on the brain matter splattered on the wall.

And Vincente didn’t feel a thing. Some might find his lack of distress at taking a fellow human being’s life alarming—no doubt Fan Boy’s redhead would run for the hills if she knew what he’d just done.

But in this case, Vincente didn’t see it as a bad thing. He considered this a justified execution. A favor to society. Because he knew exactly what kind of parasite DeLuca had been. Maybe not at first, when he’d started doing business with the Moretti family. But the man had clearly gotten involved in some shit over his head. And now? Vincente had seen for himself the guy trolling the broken-down neighborhoods of Morrisania, Brownsville, and Far Rockaway in search of young girls desperate enough to let Tommy and his crew prostitute them in order for them to make enough money for their next fix. In fact, Vincente had watched for the past week, thoroughly investigating before he’d made his move, seeing the dirty hovel the sick, drug-addicted females had been kept in; the lineup of horny johns forming at the door; the dirty mattresses covered in stains, ejaculate, tears. Blood.