Chapter 2: Aiden

Warm blood covers my hands.

Crimson, thick, sticky. Metallic.

The scent, a prelude to death.

Death is seconds away from the bastard I’m staring at with my knife plunged into his heart. My fingers linger in the pool of gurgling blood and press into the wound harder.

It will make him go quicker. Make him take that last breath faster, make him escape into the place I have to try my best not to go to yet.

I’m needed here in this world for a little longer.

I have a new purpose, and this asshole just pushed me further away from it.

As the light leaves his steely gray eyes and the color drains from his already pale skin, I hope he knows why I issued his end.

That hope isn’t so I can take comfort in knowing he understood why I had to do what I had to do.

I don’t give a flying fuck about that. I don’t want, nor need, anybody’s understanding of my actions.

What I hope is he knew I was the master of him in the end, and I gave him what he deserved.

More blood covers my hands as it pours out of the wound, and like a savage, I turn the knife in his heart bringing forth more and more.

The sight does something to my rage, reminding me of the thousand deaths I’ve seen.

I’m losing my mind again, going crazy, and losing control.

This time it’s worse because blood is what I got tonight.

Nothing more.

This fucking dog had the information I wanted and chose not to give it to me.

He knew even as I buried my knife deep into his heart that my son, Aleksei, didn’t die in the fire that night nine years ago.

The fire that killed Gabriella.

This asshole knew exactly how I could find my boy and chose to withhold that information from me.

His mocking grin was enough to tell me he knew the truth and would rather die than tell me anything at all.

So death was my answer for him, and I did not make it quick.

“Let’s go, Aiden,” Dominic says.

His voice sounds far away.

I look in the direction I heard him, and I’m momentarily thrown when I see he’s right next to me.

With his face stern, he looks from me to the man I just killed, and I see it in his eyes. It’s a flicker of something that might be fear, but it’s not. It’s something akin to it because this man has walked a similar path to me, and I know few things scare him.

What I see in his eyes is the worry of what I might become if I fail.

I look away from him when Massimo, his eldest brother, and leader of the Syndicate, approaches. There’s blood on his hands too. Not as much as mine, but it’s there.

As he gets closer, his shoes crunch against the shards of glass scattered over the stone floor of the warehouse.

“They’re all dead. I couldn’t get shit out of them,” he says with a shake of his head.

I could say the same thing, but the bodies of the ten dead men strewn across the floor with bullet holes in their bodies say it all.

“Same here,” Dominic replies.

I say nothing because such is the nature of those associated with the Order.

They would rather keep their silence and die than suffer the wrath of their leaders.

Knowing these motherfuckers will hold on to information like a drug addict to their fix is nothing new to us. We just hoped the fear of a slow, torturous death might convince them to talk.

Clearly, we were wrong.

The problem is these men knew death would be their fate one way or the other. They just chose whatever they believed would save those they left behind.

“Come on, old friend,” Dominic says, cutting into my thoughts. “Let’s go. There’s nothing left for us here.”

I hold his gaze and process his words.

There’s nothing left for us here.

Increasingly, day by day, that’s how I’m beginning to feel. I’ve walked this road before. The road the useless take when they know death came about because of their actions. That road is reserved for reckless devils like me.

“This one had information,” I mutter mindlessly as if it matters. Now it doesn’t matter one way or the other.

My eyes dart back to the man on the floor, and I pull out my knife from his heart, allowing any restrained blood to gush from his body.

“It was in his eyes,” I add, taking a measured breath. “Motherfucker was never going to talk, though.”

I rip the sleeve off the blood-stained shirt on the man’s body, revealing what I already knew was there.

It’s the tattoo of the dagger with the snake going around the handle.

Dominic looks at the tattoo and frowns. “Next time, old friend.”

When he rests a reassuring hand on my shoulder, I give him a nod and push to my feet, steeling my spine to regain my composure.

One last look at the man who used to have the information I needed, and we leave.

***

It’s nightfall by the time I step through the doors of my home.

My guards avert their gazes from me as I make my way past them. I would look away too if I were them.

I still have blood on me, and I probably look like I just stepped out of Hell.

I’m getting the same looks I used to get after Gabriella died, and I became a murdering bastard, killing anyone I thought had links to the Order.

I hit rock bottom, and the only way I knew how to deal with the pain was to turn to the hardest drugs known to man. I went down that road until I ended up in prison twice and nearly met my end.

I can’t do that now.

I won’t.

What I must do is stay focused on what I need to do, even though it’s fucking hard. Especially after a day like today where I got nothing but fucking blood on my hands.

Ever since learning the truth about Aleksei, the only thing I’ve wanted to do is spend every waking hour looking for him. I hardly want sleep to rob me of time.

I have the best of my brigadiers on the streets for this mission, but I want to be out there twenty-four -seven, leaving no stone unturned until I find my boy.

It’s been a little over six weeks since I began my pursuit to find Aleksei, and my patience is already gone.

He’s been missing for nine years, so I knew it was going to be difficult to find him. Knowing that, however, doesn’t make it any easier to deal with, and it’s torture knowing everything is out of my control.

The longer I search for him and turn up with nothing, the more fractured my mind becomes.

I march upstairs and get cleaned up. I’m going to see what little I can salvage with the remainder of the day.

When I step out of my bedroom, Irina is at the doorstep with a tray of food.

She looks at me with kind eyes and worry etched in her brows the same way she used to when I was a boy, and I’d get in trouble for one thing or another. She’s one of the few members of staff I have from my father’s house and one of the few who aren’t scared of me.

I see she’s brought one of my favorite casseroles in the hope I’ll eat tonight. But I’m going to tell her the same thing I have every night since I began my search.

“Take it away. I don’t want it.”

“But you haven’t eaten dinner in days,” she answers, her Russian accent strong even though she’s worked for my family in the states since before I was born.

“I’ll eat when I can.” I do to keep my strength up, grabbing what I can here and there. I can’t remember when I actually sat at the dinner table and ate, though.

I walk away from her, and she knows to leave me alone.

I’m not in the mood for shit from anybody, even if they’re showing concern for my welfare.

I make my way back downstairs and walk through the dining room, stopping when I catch sight of the only thing I was able to recover from the fire that destroyed the house I shared with Gabriella and Aleksei.

It’s a wrought iron figurine of a fairy with a little bird in her hands. I have it resting on the mantelpiece. I gave it to Gabriella when we got married.

When I first moved here a few years ago, I put it up as a reminder of what I had in the past.

Looking at it now reminds me someone betrayed me that night.

Betrayal is most assuredly the only thing that makes sense about that night so long ago when my family was taken from me.

Betrayal doesn’t excuse my guilt in what lured my enemies to my doorstep, but it’s something I need to be aware of if I hope to find my son.

Someone found out what I did and used it against me.

I don’t know who it was, but that someone could only be a person who was close enough to track me. And the only people like that are those I keep close.

I look away from the figurine and make my way to my office.

The window is still open from this morning, and the computer is ready and waiting.

I sit down, and I take out my files from the bottom drawer of the desk.

This file is where I always start when things go wrong.

Pulling out all the documents, I lay them out on the table.

It’s evidence of my boy’s survival.

And a name.

One fucker who’s dead when I find his ass.

Dale Pearson.

Dr. Dale Pearson.

That’s the guy we’re looking for, and the men at the warehouse were a Cartel gang who were members of the Order. They were setting up a shipment of drugs.

The documents before me are what Dominic D’Agostino found amongst Alfonse’s files.

Alfonse was a fucking spy who worked for our enemies. Enemies who allied with the Order to kill our fathers when they bombed the original Syndicate.

I teamed up with the D’Agostinos five years ago to bring those responsible to justice. My father, like theirs, had been a member all his life; as was my grandfather and great-grandfather before him.

The crusade for the perpetrators started with an anonymous letter alerting Massimo of their guilt. That letter is what led us to everything else, including the discovery of Alfonse’s files.

Those fucking files raised every skeleton from the closet. They all fell out screaming secrets our enemies wanted to keep locked away.

There isn’t anyone who didn’t get burnt with the truth.

I was just waiting for my turn.

This is mine.

Learning Aleksei was alive awakened something that had died inside me. At the same time it also ripped me apart, knowing my boy had been lost for nine years and I didn’t even know.

Worst is knowing that anything to do with the Order means serious shit like terrorism and human trafficking. Any kind of trafficking from women to children has their names all over it.

A one-month-old baby boy would have been gold dust to people like them. I can only assume he was sold. I need to find out to whom.

The documents we found are all Aleksei’s medical records. We’re searching in L. A. because they were all done here, and they have Dr. Dale Pearson’s name on every single one of them.

The first report is what put the wheels in motion. The dates on it show Aleksei alive a month after Gabriella died.

I’ve gone over these documents, so many times I know what’s on each sheet of paper, word for word.

However, I still feel like I’m missing something.

I just don’t know what it is.

I don’t know what more I can take from them other than the information that’s already there.

One lone name and the truth of the evil the documents signify.

The truth that my boy was taken away to punish me, and the same mother fuckers killed my wife.

People say emotions are a weakness, but the daily dose of rage filling me gives me strength.

My life has been one cycle of grief and loss where those I loved died gruesome deaths.

That cycle began when I was ten as I watched my mother and grandfather gunned down at a family wedding. My mother sacrificed herself to save me.

My next loss was Gabriella. Father followed next, then my brother, Viktor, who was shot right in front of me and died in my arms.

Months ago, I would have added Aleksei to that list, but he’s alive somewhere in this world, and I have to find him.

When I do, I plan to punish all those responsible for taking him.

Every motherfucker and anyone linked to the Order. They’re all dead when I get my hands on them.

Vengeance will be mine.

That’s one thing I can be sure of.