Page 20 of Primo DeLuca

He shook his head. “No.”

“Pretending to be The Malizioso to throw me off is an insult to me and to that organization. You had to know I’d figure out you guys were pretending to be one of the deadliest death squads on the planet.”

He was too busy staring down at how wet his legs had gotten with accelerant to pay attention anymore.

I tapped the tip of my pistol to the side of my head in thought before I glanced up and met his pleading gaze. My hand rested on the switch that would ignite the fire and give this man a taste of hell on earth.

“Man, please! Don’t do this,” he whimpered. Fear had his legs trembling and his right eye twitching.

“Give me something.” I put pressure on the finger I kept against the switch, making him fold into his shoulders.

“I overheard some of the guys,” he gritted out. “They think the person who hired us was a DeLuca.”

I hadn’t expected him to say anything, and the fact that he did, had me thinking about the state of the hitman society. The bit of information about who may have hired them got my hackles up and confirmed my suspicions.

“We’re the middlemen, contractors. This shit is bigger than us. Once you’re gone, there are plans to take out more DeLucas, if necessary.”

My icy gaze locked on his shifting eyes, protruding from the sockets. “You see, that’s the fucking problem. You all are assuming that I will be killed.”

His face pinched, and I noticed the moment the impact of his hellish surroundings crushed the last bit of hope he foolishly clung to. He could have been mouthing off untruths to stir up more turmoil since his time was dwindling. Or there very well could’ve been someone out there with an ego the size of Texas who actually thought they were about to execute me and more DeLucas.

“Who the fuck are you? We’re usually hired one or two at a time, but never twenty of us for one person.”

Another secret revealed that let me know exactly how prepared I needed to be. I pressed my face closer to the glass so that he could get a good look into my eyes.

“I’m Primo. Your fucking beginning and your end. The only way I’m dying is when I get tired of running shit up here and decide it’s time to go and run shit the right way down there in hell.”

At those words, it appeared he’d swallowed a boulder. A smirk that I knew mirrored pure evil sat on my lips.

“None of you are going to get past me for the chance to take out another DeLuca. The person who hired you could have sent a hundred, and I would kill you all just to feed my ferocious appetite for the taste of death.”

His body deflated at the notion that he would die soon. His wide gaze lifted from the area where my hand rested on the switch to meet my eyes.

I flashed a smirk before I flipped the switch and walked away without even a glance back. His screams were the legendary stuff that gave a hitman a temporary high.

The strangled cries of the caught and the damned met me when I climbed out of the wall’s secret passage and walked into the open space of the loft. This was where the second team of two had ventured to and ended up fucked up.

One man was dangling from the ceiling, caught in my razor wire net. It had been activated after he’d stepped atop the camouflage netting that matched the flooring. The razor wire embedded in the net’s thick, hairy strings whispered the man’s fate into death’s ears.

He was on his stomach with his legs jacked up in the netting. His body weight and positioning had his face and the front of his body wet and red with blood.

His eyes were wide with enough fear shining in them that I read his unwillingness to move even a centimeter. His blood dripped to the ceramic floor tiles, tapping out an ominous beat from the multiple areas he leaked from. The floor below him resembled a sadistic blood-splatter painting.

A low chuckle escaped after I spotted his buddy.

“I see you’ve been introduced to my version of a glue trap.”

He had backed into a wall of glue, the consistency thick enough for a quarter of his body to be embedded within the thick wall of death. He sunk deeper with every move. Even his fingers were trapped where he’d tried to break free.

His large eyes followed my movements when I stepped closer, and the pleading in them was easily conveyed. With a flip of a switch, the square trap he was stuck in shifted about half a foot back.

“Let’s see if we can get you all closed up and cozy.”

The front of the trap was a mirror to the back. When it began dropping down on top of him from the ceiling, the man yelled, his voice projecting the fear he couldn’t express through movement. He was set up to be encased in a sticky situation, so hellish that I almost felt sorry for him. On second thought, it wasn’t sorrow, but reluctance at the knowledge that I’d miss out on his expression when he suffocated.

A peek at the monitors showed the bikers still in place outside the building, clueless that their friends weren’t succeeding at their tasks. Their motorcycles nearly blended into the shadows of the front of the building near a tight alleyway. The moonlight reflected off the exposed portions of their pale skin. With them in the crosshairs of my rifle’s scope now, I moved my aim back and forth between them.

“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” I sang. “One of you is going to die while the other runs and alerts the other guys.”

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