Page 46 of Savage Claim

I stared at the man, squinting at the screen as my brain tried to make sense of what it was seeing. Then it clicked: brass knuckles. I didn’t even know those existed in real life. I had only ever seen them in shitty action movies.

I pounded on the door again. “Don’t let him do this,” I begged Santino. But the man smashed the knuckles into herface, shredding her skin into ribbons. Blood and thicker things splattered everywhere, and Gemma shrieked.

“Open the fucking door,” I screamed, hitting the door with all of my strength now. My hand was on fire. I kept my eyes on the screen and watched, helpless, as my mother was punched in the stomach over and over. She had gone limp in her bonds. I could hear Santino’s delighted laughter and my sister’s hysterical sobs.

The office door swung open, and instead of Lorenzo, it was one of his men. “What the hell?”

“Get the fuck out of my way.” I shoved at him, and although the man was twice my size, he hadn’t expected me to push him, and he moved just enough that I could slip by. “Lorenzo!”

I could hear the men around me, demanding answers, but all I could do was hold up my phone. My mother was soaked in her own blood. I couldn’t be sure if she was alive or dead. The camera moved again, and the last image I had was of Santino’s cruel smile. I looked at Lorenzo, whose expression was twisted and unclear. “Help,” I pleaded and collapsed to my knees.

CHAPTER 29

Lorenzo

Icouldn’t get Isabella to calm down. She was sobbing and shaking and begging for me to help her mother and sister. Renaldo offered to drive us back to the estate, and I sat in the back seat with Isabella wrapped in my arms.

“It’s going to be okay,” I murmured, rubbing at her belly. I had seen her do it countless times in an effort to self-soothe, so I mimicked it now, hoping to be able to do the same for her.

She shook her head. “He’s going to kill them.”

I couldn’t promise her that he wouldn’t. In all honesty, her mother was probably already dead. He’d had her worked over with a pair of brass knuckles. I’d seen men twice her size die from internal bleeding after a less savage beating than she got. The sister would certainly suffer the same fate, but I wasn’t going to tell Isabella that.

I hushed her softly, still rubbing her belly. “We’ll be home soon,” I promised her and hoped that Amalia would be able to get her to settle.

She continued to shake and sob for the remainder of the ride, and when Renaldo finally pulled into the driveway, Amalia and Elio were waiting for us. Isabella took one look at Amalia and broke down even more, and my cousin’s wife took her into her arms and held her, rocking her gently. “You shouldn’t have seen that,” she murmured and petted Isabella’s back.

Amalia led the way back into the house, wrapped around Isabella like a warm blanket. “Santino is alive?” Elio asked me.

I nodded. “I think Artem is too. The shooter at Castello’s was Russian, but Nikolai swore that he had never seen him before.”

Elio sneered. “You trust him?”

We walked into the house. Amalia dug out a tea mug from the cabinet and set the kettle on to boil. “Not completely, no” I explained as we watched her. “But Nikolai swore he didn’t recognize the dead man who conveniently wore his brand. With everyone assuming Artem is dead, it’s the perfect time to create a war. If we’re all distracted with each other, he could sweep in and set himself up like a king.”

Elio agreed with me. “Is that fucker a cat or something?” he asked. “Man’s got nine lives.”

Isabella sipped at her tea with shaking hands. All I wanted was to pull her into my arms and keep her there, warm and protected, but I had other things that I needed to decide on tonight. “We’ll make sure that this is thelastone he gets,” I said.

Isabella put her mug down on the counter and took a deep breath. Her cheeks were still wet, but at the very least, she wasn’t openly weeping anymore. “My mother is dead, isn’t she?” she asked. Her voice was hoarse.

I shrugged. “The chances of her taking such a beating and surviving is rare,” I told her. “I mean, I couldn’t say for sure, but?—”

“She would have catastrophic internal bleeding,” Isabella said. “Possibly even brain damage from the blows to her face and head.”

Of course, she would see it from the medical angle. Even if it hurt her to do so, she couldn’t help but assess what she could see with her nursing training. “Yeah,dolcezza, exactly.”

Isabella shivered. Her fingers tightened around her tea. “So, you need to focus the rescue on Gemma,” she said. “She needs to get out tonight. Before they do the same thing to her.”

“Dolcezza.”

She shook her head, and I could nearly hear the creaking of the porcelain in her hands, she was holding onto it so tightly. Amalia reached over and gently extracted from her. “Youhaveto,” she insisted. “Please, we can't leave her with him. What if he decides that Gemma is worth more to him alive than she is dead?” She was starting to look gray. The more she spoke, the more ashen she became. “Gemma is pretty. Prettier than me. What if he realizes that he could use her to pay off future debts? What if he has already?”

Before I actually met Santino Rossi properly, I might have disagreed with her. The drunk that talked me into taking Isabella to cover his million plus debt was not the same man who had become a loyal lamprey on a shark like Artem Volkov. He absolutely would keep his younger daughter for his own gains.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll go after her.”

Isabella shuddered. “Thank you.”

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