312

312
Betrayal Within

It took seven minutes to drive back to the warehouse. It felt like hours.

Lucas drove too fast, the city a blur. On the steering wheel his hands were white. His jaw was so tight Valentina could see the muscles jumping in his cheek. He was not speaking. He was barely breathing.

Valentina tried to call Alecia. The phone rang and rang, and went to voicemail. She tried Kennedy. Same thing. She tried Liv. Nothing. Nothing but the robot voice saying they weren’t available.

“They’re not answering,” she said, and her voice sounded tiny and distant.

Lucas did not respond. He simply drove faster.

He called for his men on the radio. The watchmen who were meant to be at the warehouse. Nobody answered. And in that silence, Valentina heard the truth. Her sister. Her friends. Gone.
When they arrived, the security doors were unlocked. Just … hanging there like the mouth of a dead thing. The gate was unmanned. The guard posts were empty.

They ran inside.

The warehouse appeared as if a war had gone through it. Furniture was overturned. The concrete floor was ugly with splattered blood. Two of Lucas’s men were sprawled out beside the main desk. Their eyes were clear and blank.

Lucas grabbed Valentina's shoulders. "Look at me," he said. "Look at me."

She forced herself to look into his eyes.

"Security footage," he said. “We need videotape right now.”

Valentina’s fingers trembled as she typed in code. The monitors flickered to life and Avery scrolled backward on the timeline. And there he was. Marcus. Lucas's second in command. The man who’d been laughing with Lucas that morning. The man she’d glanced at as they walked out of the compound.

Marcus had shot the guards. He had placed his gun to their heads and he had shot them. Then he had gone through the warehouse with his weapon out and discovered Alecia and Kennedy and Liv with their heads down behind the office dividers. He had not hurt them. Not yet. He had only aimed the gun and told them to come with him, and they obeyed because he had been armed and they were unarmed.

The video of him stuffing them in a vehicle did make for good TV. Then he drove away.

“I loved him with everything inside me,” Lucas said, and his voice was shattered in a way Valentina had never heard it. "I picked him up after Matteo screwed me over. How did I not see? How did I miss this?"

“No time for that now,” Valentina said, and then she took both of his cheeks in her hands and forced him to face her. "Where would he take them? Think, Lucas. Think. Where would Marco take them?"

Lucas closed his eyes. He lips moved, but no words came out as he considered. Then his eyes opened. "The mountains," he said. "Marco has a stakeout up in the hills. It is heavily fortified. “It’s where his family has evaded accountability for decades.”

“Then we go there,” said Valentina.

Elena showed up thirty minutes later with her laptop and her awful knowledge of things she didn’t want to know. She had translated the last two pages of Valentina’s mother’s evidence. She had verified that Marcus was in Marco’s employ from the start. She said Marco had been scheming this the entire time! If the raids were successful, Marco would be left with nothing. But if they did, he would still have them. He would still have leverage.

“I’m going with you,” Elena said, and she was already packing up.

"Absolutely not," Valentina said. “You just stay right here, and you work with the police.”

“No,” Elena replied, her voice carrying a decisiveness that Valentina knew. It was the voice of someone who had already made up his mind. "I know that compound. I have been inside it. I know its layout. You need me."

Lucas attempted to protest, but the way the computations played out across his eyes was visible to Valentina. He knew Elena was right. He detested that she was correct, but she was.

“I’ll come,” Valentina said, and when she said it, she looked straight at Lucas so he would understand that this was not a discussion. “They took my sister for me. I am ending this personally."

Lucas looked at Valentina for Space but then the moment ended. Then he gave her a weapon, and showed her how to hold it, how to use it. His hands were steady, even as his world fell apart. They drove into the mountains as the sun was setting, and the sky darkened to that of a bruise.
The building was positioned at the top of a high column, nestled between walls that were surrounded by armed guards. Searchlights swept across the grounds. Security cameras watched every approach. It looked impossible to enter.

But Lucas was a soldier, and Elena's memories were as old as the walls.

They reached the edge from the east, stealing through the black trees at night. Lucas and his team were outnumbered. The majority of his men were still covering sites of other raids or fending off the police. But they had what they had.

Lucas caused a commotion in the front gate. Gunfire. Explosions. Noise and chaos and fire that would have every guard coming toward the sound. As they were paying attention to that, Elena pushed Valentina and Lucas towards the rear of it where she remembered there being a service entrance.

The door was old, camouflaged behind vines. Elena had managed to find a key that ought not to have fitted after so long, but which did. The door opened onto darkness.

They glided through the compound like phantoms, killing guards who spotted them and slipping silently by those that didn’t. Valentina’s heart was in her throat; tension thrummed through her body. Her sister lurked somewhere in these halls. Among these shadows were her friends.

They discovered Marcus watching many monitors closely in a surveillance room. He didn’t hear them come on. He was too busy looking at the pictures in front of him. Glancing at them, Valentina understood that he was surreptitiously observing Alecia, Kennedy and Liv. They were locked together in a room. They were alive.

Lucas advanced and Marcus shifted to the side. His eyes popped open for a moment, then went red and hard against me.

“Marcus,” Lucas said, and his voice was a weapon. "Why?"

"Why?" Marcus laughed. It was the laugh of a man who had given up on life through his own decision. “You left me scraps to play house with your little bride. Marco offered me a kingdom. He guaranteed me Naples in its entirety once you fell.”

"Where are they?" Lucas asked. "Where are the women?"

"With Marco," Marcus said. "In the main room. He has been waiting for Valentina, specifically. He said that he wanted to see her pick.”

"Choose what?" Valentina asked.

Before Marcus could respond, the compound filled up with noise. Alarms. Screaming sirens. Red lights flashing everywhere.

“You activated the perimeter defense system,” Marcus said, his smile awful. The whole place is set to blow in precisely ten minutes. Marco is not intending to run off on these guys. He’s going down and he is taking everybody else with him, including those girls. Unless. …” He raised a tiny device with a display on it. "Free me, and I'll give you the master de-activation code.

Valentina stepped forward calmly. She raised her weapon. She shot Marcus in the leg.

He shouted and collapsed onto the floor.

"Where is my sister?" she asked him.

“North wing, third floor,” he croaked. “But you will never get there in time.”
Lucas and Valentina looked at one another over the topic. Then they ran.