“Come inside,” his former favela boss said. “Let’s have a chat.”
Wanting to get it over with, Antonio crossed the threshold.
The door slammed close.
One of Jacarés men took his gun.
“Charly!” Antonio called. “Are you all right?”
“Antonio?” Her voice washed over him and his team acknowledged that they heard her.
“You shouldn’t be here, Antonio, I’m infected,” she shouted.
“We’ll get you well. Don’t worry, gatinha.”
A man started laughing. He stepped beside Jacaré and Antonio recognized Lev Skoryk. The fucker was smirking at him.
“You really think you can save her?” he taunted.
Antonio kept his face bland. “You should call your mother.”
The confidence on the man’s face morphed into anger and fear. “Something happened, didn’t it?”
This time it was Antonio who smirked. “Your sister too.”
Lev lunged at Antonio, but Jacaré held him back. “Don’t let him get to you.”
“Did you see what I did to Luis?” the younger man spat.
“So, it was you,” Antonio said quietly even as rage started sparking like a live wire underneath his skin, making him aware of every person surrounding him.
“Yes. It was me,” Lev said proudly.
Antonio glanced at Jacaré. “So, what happened? Luis got cold feet and didn’t slit your throat?”
“No.” Instead of bragging how he escaped a certain death, his ex-favela boss said, “He wanted me to suffer. See this side of my face? The caiman did this. A fifteen-foot bastard.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Antonio taunted. “It was probably less than six feet.”
“He might even be twenty,” Jacaré countered.
Antonio’s brow arched. “Really?” He looked at Lev. “He likes to tell tall tales. You were having daddy issues? Was that how you ended up hero-worshipping a psychopath? Now, your mother and sister are going to jail.”
“Shut up!” Lev turned to Jacaré. “How do we get them out? Maybe the brotherhood—”
“Shut up.”
“Ah, the Ukrainian brotherhood?” Antonio repeated. “But tell me? How do you think you’re going to get out of here? You know you’re surrounded by the best of the LAPD, right? I don’t mean anything to them. Charly doesn’t mean anything to them. They’re just amusing themselves with our family drama.”
Lev lunged at Antonio again. “Give me that wire—”
Antonio cracked his head forward and hearing cartilage break was only the beginning of his rampage. Blood splattered. He drew back his hand and jabbed Lev in the throat, using the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. As Skoryk gasped for air, Antonio swung Lev’s body toward the third man in the room. A gunshot rang out. Lev became dead weight, so Antonio threw him aside and immediately tackled the third goon in the mix, sending them crashing to the floor. He grabbed the man’s head and cracked it against tiled flooring, all the while keeping his ultimate prey in his peripheral vision.
Jacaré retreated into a room while taking potshots at him and missing.
Antonio scrambled to his feet and heard gunshots in the back of the house as the rest of Jacaré’s men tried to hold off the CTTF team. He grabbed the gun from the unconscious goon, picked up Lev’s weapon and threw it over the back of the couch and followed Jacaré.
With his weapon raised, keeping the unconscious men still in his sight, Antonio followed the former crime boss to the room he’d disappeared into.
The door was open.
Antonio lowered his gun, blood turning into ice.
Jacaré had Charly in front of him, gun pressed to her temple.
Protective outrage roared inside him, and he struggled to contain it, keeping an impassive face.
The face of the enforcer he’d once been.
“Drop your weapon before coming into the room,” Jacaré ordered.
Antonio didn’t hesitate and did as he was told. He even raised his arms, glancing at Charly. “You okay?” Although he saw a touch of fear on her face, she looked mostly pissed. A good sign.
The other man tipped his chin toward floor. “Shut the door. Grab the key and lock it… Slowly!”
“Relax,” Antonio said calmly, doing as he was told.
It was down to the three of them. Not an ideal situation. However this was going down, one of them would die and in no scenario was it going to be Antonio or Charly.
“Kelso and his team are outside the door,” Bristow came over his comms.
“This is between you and me, Jacaré. Let her go.”
There were several acknowledgments from the CTTF team that they got his message.
“Does it matter, Antonio?” Charly croaked. Her statement took him by surprise, but he kept his eyes trained on his former boss. “You’re so arrogant, you didn’t even consider that you’re dragging me into your shit. And you say you love me? Now everyone in this room is infected. We’re all gonna die.”
“Shut up,” Jacaré growled, as he adjusted his grip around her.
Charly started laughing manically, and it gave Antonio chills. Had his woman gone mad?
“I’m dead anyway. Why don’t you just shoot me!” she screamed.
Fuck, woman! Antonio panicked. Shut up!
“Just shoot me! Shoot me!” she shouted.
“You’re crazy!” Jacaré’s eyes went wild and blinked in confusion, his arm around Charly loosening.
Antonio held his breath.
Charly’s laughter stopped and she bit her captor’s wrist like a zombie. Jacaré yowled and pistol whipped her.
With a roar of fury, Antonio surged forward, going after the gun. They crashed to the floor and grappled for control.
The gun fired and hit somewhere behind him.
“Stay down,” he yelled at Charly.
It fired again. Jacaré was fighting for his life, but Antonio was younger and stronger, and he had blind rage on his side.
Antonio wrested the gun away and threw it behind him.
He ignored the chatter in his ears asking for the ‘all clear’ to enter the room. Antonio wouldn’t give it. This ended now.
Pinning Jacaré down with one knee, Antonio drew his other leg in an angle so he could reach the knife in his boot. As he slid it out the other man
