Page 9 of The Disputed Legacy
As we headed up to the café, ready to tell these Romano assholes to beat it and think twice about being on our turf like this, I shoved my jacket back and put my hand on my gun, unafraid to come in with obvious power.
The moment we opened the front door and entered, pandemonium ensued. Gunfire broke out. Customers screamed. Many yelled to run or hide or to get down.
The sight of seeing us coming in shouldn’t have spooked them this easily, but maybe this was what they’d been goading us into. I was one of the top men in the family, alongside my brothers and inferior only to Maxim because he was the interimPakhan. He was the boss, but Nik, Damon, and I were the next level. Formeto show up and be ready to handle an issue, it meant business. And maybe that was what these stupid fuckers wanted. They didn’t want to face off with the soldiers and spies we had employed everywhere. They wanted a big fight.
And they had it.
Fury swept through me at the thought of innocents being caught in the middle. They didn’t deserve to be collateral in what essentially was a small scrimmage like a turf war between rival crime families. And we didn’t need the hassle of any cleanup to do with citizens being killed. No one would be calling the cops for assistance here. And no one would welcome the law being near to interfere with their policies, rules, and protocols.
We operated with a sense of law and order thatwedetermined and oversaw. No one else.
Hugo and I fell back as the backup soldiers swarmed in.
Over the gunfire and shouts, I tracked the Romano interlopers trying to escape through a side exit. An Ivanov man captured them, and a gruesome fight with hand-to-hand combat followed.
“Help! Help me!”
Instead of rushing into the fight with my men and doing my part to bring in a Romano to torture in the basement, I turned and sought out the source of that desperate plea.
“Please, someone. Help us!”
It was a woman crying and begging for assistance.
“Go!” I ordered Hugo, directing him to go toward the men holding back the Romanos closer to the exit. Following the cries from this woman, I pivoted and crouched as I tried to see what had happened.
A trail of blood on the floor drew my eye first. Then I scowled at the wounded child. The young girl couldn’t have been more than five, but she looked so small, so delicate and vulnerable, as she curled against her mother’s side.
“Help!”
I didn’t think twice about stopping to do just that. Sliding into a kneel, I hunched over and pulled out a decorative handkerchief from the breast pocket of my suit jacket. Then I pressed it to the bleeding wound on the girl’s leg. A thick, angry gash showed on her thigh, but it looked like it was a through-and-through. Messy, but not fatal.
“Hold this there. Compress it,” I ordered the stranger.
She nodded shakily and accepted the cloth, comforting the child.
Seeing this young girl hurt lit the fuse of anger within me. I didn’t know who she was, where she’d come from. She had no direct or personal connection to me or my family. Nothing more than a stranger who’d chosen this café to stop at as a normal, ordinary customer. She bore no meaning to me.
But I saw what she represented.
This could’ve been Isabella. Or Olivia. My nieces came to my mind’s eye when I considered that this child had been hurt because of the Romanos’ obsession with coming at us.
And that was too much to bear.
This bullshit had gone too far.
It had to end.
As I heard one last pop of a gun being fired, I looked up and narrowed my eyes to track the damage. Hugo stood, his arm still extended as he held his gun out at the Romanos on the floor. With one sober look back at me, he shook his head, telling me without words that none of them had lived. We’d killed them all.
That sucked for Damon, who’d lead their torture at the building. He wouldn’t have anyone to try to get answers from. But I wasn’t convinced that we had to ask anything else.
It was clear that despite our annihilating the entire Kozlov family, the Romanos were due the same treatment.
I no longer cared what their game was.
They were going down, and the time to wage one final war against the Italian Mafia fuckers was now. With all the children being born, security was already running high.
It’s not enough.Just seeing a child being hurt bothered me too damn much, and I vowed that I wouldn’t slack in my duty to see our enemies removed, once and for all.
