Page 60 of His to Destroy

If the possibility of Almeria and I staying together is hinged on bringing her the head of her abuser, I’ll be her knight. Redeem myself in her sights and chart a new guilt free course for the both of us.

I sit in my private office, the door locked, the blinds drawn. The lamp on my desk throws long shadows across the room, making the files scattered in front of me look like graves.

Each paper.

Each photograph.

Each testimony.

All of them are ghosts I thought I buried a long time ago.

I can still hear Almeria’s voice—soft, broken—when she told me about the night she disappeared. About how she’d been left alone. About the assault that ruined her innocence and nearly destroyed her life.

The guilt claws at my throat like a living thing.

I should never have dragged her to that alley. I should have let her be with her crush.

And if I’m going to call myself her husband now—if I’m going to be the man she trusts again—I need to set it right.

I owe her blood.

And I intend to collect it.

The first thing I do is peruse the old records and match them with what I recovered from the warehouse the day we rescued Luca.

Sancia brings more files in on my command, a grim set to her mouth.

“This is everything we have on the night Almeria vanished,” she says, dropping a thick file on my desk. “And a few reports that never officially made it into the books.”

I flip through the documents, my gut twisting.

I haven’t found anything noteworthy in the files from the warehouse. But there was a raid at the Colosimo’s as well that same night. So we have records of what went down that day.

I don’t want to believe someone from the Colosimo syndicate would be that cruel. But as I flip through page after page, I start to worry that perhaps the perpetrator had been right under my nose all this while.

I see familiar names. Men who are dead now. Some who switched sides. A few who disappeared without a trace.

But one name stands out even then.

Fernando Stark.

My right-hand man and confidant for years. Stark was literally my hammer and my shadow. He went everywhere I went back then, even when I told him to stay behind.

And somehow, he was always needed. He’d proved himself useful to me during his time to me. I still remember when he said he was leaving the city. His mother was sick and he was her only surviving family.

I’d expected him back but he’d vanished. That was barely a year ago.

Memory takes me down a path. The night of the raid, after everywhere had calmed down, he’d come home late into the night. Father had suspected he was on the raiders’ team because he wasn’t present during the raid.

And that’s when I remembered that he’d followed me to the Spadafora’s. But I thought he’d left after figuring out that I was being mean to a girl who only had a crush and was of no serious threat to me or the syndicate.

When I asked him in private later that night, if he’d truly been with the raiders, he’d assured me that the only place he was at was cleaning up my messes.

And I’d believed him.

Why wouldn’t I?

He’d been loyal. Brutal when needed. Efficient.

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