Lucien Delano.
He stared at his wife as she lay, a slight figure on the hospital bed. She had fainted in the corridor on hearing about Paddy and had been brought there. Seeing Claude sporting a thick bandage and lording it about in the corridor had only added to her distress, caught as she was totally unawares, for he had skipped telling her about their rash son and his actions.
Although she was showing signs of coming to, she looked so tiny and white as she lay there, helpless, vulnerable…
The Mafia Don sighed. F*ck, but how he loved her! And to think of the incessant pain she was being subjected to, mainly because of him, had him feel guilty as hell.
*
Now her lids flickered, the beautiful mocha-coloured eyes widening as the curling lashes lifted to look around the room and finally, to meet his gaze.
She lay for a while, blinking as memory returned to her, eyes going around the unfamiliar room in surprise and alarm.
Turning to him, she whispered, ‘Lucien?’
He sighed and she sat up slowly, leaning on his arm for support. Her small round belly protruded from under the coat and he felt again, the tenderness, which was such an unfamiliar part of his mental makeup, wash over him.
‘Woman,’ he grunted and took her in his arms. They sat for a while like that, each giving the other the comfort, the reassurance they needed in that weak moment.
Then he straightened up.
‘Claude was knifed at the bar when he went to find out about Paddy, earlier this evening,’ he said bluntly and she looked at his face, searchingly.
” Just a flesh wound,’ he added dismissively.
“And Paddy?’ she asked, her hand going to his face, begging him silently, to be honest with her.
Lucien Delano are held her wrist as he replied crisply,
“Paddy was attacked on his way home. Someone followed him, we believe it was a couple of cars, and they forced him off the road.’
She looked agonised as she went on after a pause, the bewilderment apparent as her large eyes fixed on him, earnest and trusting,
“But why? Why, Lucien ? Why would anybody want to harm him?’
She lowered her head, biting her bottom lip as she brushed her hair away from her face and spoke almost as though she was talking to herself,
“Why Paddy? He never hurt anyone!’
And she looked back at him mutely, begging him to tell her.
‘Woman, I swear, I shall find out,’ he grunted, his eyes on her face, ‘The people who are responsible shall suffer.’
There was a cold determination in his voice as he said it.
A chill swept through Proserpina’s body.
Her lover never made declarations such as this without meaning to carry them out.
*
Ria
She had been thinking hard as she paced around the large kitchen, a space that suddenly seemed so empty after her Mumma had left. Ria was unable to sleep. The woman who had been there with them for dinner with her family, Maja Nord, had come down and sat with her in the kitchen, silently offering support. Ria had paced feverishly as Beatrice sat watching her protectively. The old woman had donned her colourful old kaftan and she kept on making endless mugs of hot coffee. Camille hovered around too, but Ria was thinking all the while.
Why had Paddy been targeted?
*
What was so important that someone should want to kill him?
He was an excellent hacker and was part of a set of vigilantes who worked as a group loosely to help people, particularly young children, who were being targeted and groomed by sinister adults on the internet. Ria had also watched as Claude had ferreted out the information from Paddy on a couple of cases he had worked on, actually, helped with.
All the members of the group were generally an anonymous lot since they all had respectable, mundane lives outside of this exciting, secretive and dangerous work they did. But she knew that Paddy had had contacts with at least three such members and they knew each other’s real identities. One was an Indian-origin cab driver, another a woman who worked in a local Mom and Pop store and the third was a janitor in a school. One of them, the shop assistant, had been the Latino woman her brother had been meeting at the bar that fateful evening.
The woman who had been brutally murdered and her house trashed…
Reticent as he was in everyday life, Paddy had been extremely reluctant when it came to speaking about such matters but Claude had an amazing talent for catching people off their guard, a mixture of charm and sheer determination. He would chat them up and put them at their ease so effectively,
that they usually spilt their most private thoughts before they knew it. It always worked, thought Ria grimly as she remembered he was also in hospital after having survived a knife attack when he had gone to check on Paddy’s whereabouts.
Paddy must have come across something dangerously revealing, that had angered someone.
A very powerful someone who had not reacted well to having their truth probed.
Which was why that very someone had decided to silence him.
Or at the very least they had attempted to ensure that he would not be in action for a long while to come.
*
Even as her heart ached for her brother, she knew that he must have hit upon something while he was conducting one of his online searches.
Could it be something that had incriminated someone important? A person who held a grudge against Pappa, maybe?
She stopped abruptly.
That was it! Something he had found, on his searches on the computer!
This meant that there were very good chances of tracing what he had been attacked for, by going through his search history.
Grabbing her mug of coffee, she raced out of the room, heading for Paddy’s spacious basement apartment.
Beatrice gazed after her, the old woman’s brow puckered in worry.
‘I aint’ gonna sleep till that child comes back upstairs,’ she declared and laboriously rising to her feet, the old woman plodded to the hall to keep vigil.
Camille stomped off after her and with a yawn, Maja did the same. It was going to be a long night.
*
Ria knew what she wanted to do; she was going to check the search history, look up his recent activities on the giant-sized screens in Paddy’s basement.
As she hurried away, she sent a text message to her twin. He needed to be kept in the know.
*
Dusak Rudenko
Miles away, Dusak sat in his gaudily decorated room in the who*e house above his offices. He was naked and he had just finished breaking in a new arrival from the Indian sub-continent, a girl who had been lured by promises of marriage by a pimp. The pimp had sold her to Paval’s extensive sex trafficking network and made off with the money. Despite the betrayal and the heartbreak, the dark-skinned, doe-eyed girl had put up a spirited fight and Dusak had enjoyed the entire session of breaking her and making her understand, brutally enough, what was in store for her.
She had had to be carried out after the pitiless way he had used her during the sexual activities he had indulged in. Dusak enjoyed inflicting pain and he always chose the kind of rebellious immigrant girls who would scream the most.
Being in the white slave trade had its brownie points, he grinned. It meant that he could be the one to have first dibs, to break in some of the most spirited girls they had kidnapped or those who had been sold. What better way than to satisfy his sadistic cravings? He grinned again, his big bulky body glistening with sweat after the ordeal he had put the last girl through.
As for his uncle, Brother Paval was content to let him handle these things but he watched like a hawk to make sure that the deals were not messed up. The old man seemed to have no interest in sex, mused Dusak as he stood up and looked at himself in the large mirrors in the room.
The black eye patch Dusak wore all the time added to his striking looks and he knew that he was otherwise good-looking. It added to the mysterious glamour of his appearance and in the circles, he moved in, women were interested in him when they saw him.
Of course, he would choose a simpleminded, plaint woman to be his future wife as his uncle had instructed but he would continue to be the first to ‘inspect the goods’ as he put it.
His body was lithe and muscular and he had gotten used to having just one good eye. But his thirst for revenge grew with each day as did his craving for one particular blonde girl.
Lucien Delano’s daughter, Ria Delano.
Now he smiled.
He stood, studying the message his uncle had sent him. So the interfering autistic boy, Lucien Delano’s adopted son, was now in a hospital bed and would probably spend the rest of his life there.
Dusak stroked his member, smirking. Yes, the little faggot deserved it. He had been getting too close to revealing the truth about that fool, Cole. It would have spoilt all their well-laid plans and his uncle was not about to let that happen, he thought with a grin.
Tossing back the vodka straight from the bottle placed beside the bed, Dusak rose, stretching.
He was big-built and muscular and proud of his physical strength. Despite having lost his vision in one eye, Dusak had made it a point to work on his physique and he was strong.
Like an addict, he pulled out his private phone and flicked through the photos till he came to the picture he kept staring at hungrily, every chance he got.
Greedily, Dusak ogled at the picture, his breath growing uneven.
Ria Delano.
Daughter of the powerful Mafia Lord, Lucien Delano.
The man who was responsible for blinding him in one eye.
She looked defiant as she stared at someone across the street, her large grey-blue eyes flashing, the sultry, wide-lipped mouth pouting.
He grunted his shaft hardening again. The girl had inherited her mother’s curvaceous figure and the shirt she was wearing was stretched across her ample front.
Groaning, he knew he had to take out his frustration on a woman to relieve himself.
“Bring me another wh*re!’ he shouted and fisted himself in preparation for the day he would take the girl he had been fantasising about for years now.
*
For the moment, he would settle for some sorry immigrant who had been shipped across from the Continent, someone who would fight and scream till he had broken her.
Just like he would break Ria Delano in the future, he thought as he waited.
For Dusak had no doubts at all about that; he would have that girl in his bed, under him, soon.