Sempre (Forever Series #1)(142)

* * *

As soon as Vincent made it home, he slipped inside the room under the stairs and headed down into the basement. The place was cleaned out, the crates relocated elsewhere, so he had no problem navigating the room. He reached the large bookcase along the back and opened a metal electrical box on the wall beside it. He slid a section of panel down, revealing a small keypad, and punched in the numbers 62373.

There was a loud click. He slid the panel up, closing the electrical box as the bookshelf shifted a few inches. The door led into a safe room, or what his youngest referred to as the dungeon. The room, not much larger than a prison cell, had steel reinforced walls layered with bulletproof Kevlar.

It was the kind of room few men went into and even fewer came back out of alive.

He flicked a switch along the side, and fluorescent lights lit up the small space. He squinted and blocked out the blinding glare with his hand. Groans rang out from the corner where Johnny lay shackled to a table on the concrete floor.

“Vincent.” The voice was barely audible. “Help me.”

“I will,” Vincent said, “but first you’re going to help me.”

“I can’t move. I can’t feel my legs.”

“I know. The bullet hit your spinal cord.”

“A bullet? I’m paralyzed! Oh God, my legs!”

Vincent sighed with annoyance. “Toughen up.”

“What happened?” Johnny struggled to move. “My f**king legs!”

“What happened is I got a call that someone was at my house, so I came home to investigate and found my son unconscious, his girlfriend missing, an innocent kid dead in my front yard, and you injured. You, at the scene of an attack on my family. So how about you tell me what happened.”

“I, uh, I don’t know . . . I got shot, and I don’t know how or who . . .”

Vincent said, leaning against the table and crossing his arms over his chest. “I understand how this life is. We get drawn into things that get out of control, but it’s not too late to fix it. I need you to tell me what Nunzio wants with the girl.”

“I can’t!”

Vincent could sense his panic and fought to keep his expression calm so as not to alarm him further. “You have to be in pain, and you need your wound cleaned before infection takes hold. It’s your only option.”

“I can’t tell you anything,” he said. “I don’t know anything.”

“You’re lying,” Vincent said. “You wouldn’t go along with something unless you knew why. Where did he take her?”

“You have to believe me, Vincent. I can’t tell you!”

“You can tell me, you just won’t! There’s a difference, and that difference is as vast as life and death.”

“Please!”

He shook his head. “Don’t beg! It’s unbecoming of you.”

“You have to understand—”

“No, you have to understand. They’ve taken something important from me, and I’m not going to stop until I find her. If you want even the slightest chance of making it out of this room alive, you’ll tell me what I need to know.”

“If I tell you anything, they’ll kill me.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’ll kill you,” he said. “And I won’t take mercy on you. Every minute she’s out there, you’re going to be right here, and I’m not going to end your suffering until she’s back where she belongs.”

* * *

The tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Carmine had heard the phrase so many times, but it wasn’t until that moment, sitting in that immaculately clean car and fighting back nausea at the stench of fresh leather, that he finally understood what it meant. It was stifling, the hostility rolling from the man beside him too much to take.

Carmine had a fractured rib, a broken nose, and a mildly sprained wrist on top of the concussion. Vincent had called in a favor, and one of his colleagues agreed to see him off the record. Despite Carmine’s insistence he didn’t need any doctors, Vincent demanded he go, and when Vincent DeMarco demanded something, even Carmine couldn’t say no. So when Corrado arrived in town, the two of them had set out for a clinic while his father stayed back to deal with the devastation.

“You’re not gonna kill that doctor I saw, are you?” Carmine asked, the heavy dose of morph**e in his system clouding his thoughts.

Corrado said nothing, and Carmine wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad.

“I don’t think you should,” he said. “He’s just a doctor.”

“Carmine?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

Carmine decided then he should probably shut up.

Disoriented, he glanced at the clock on the dashboard and saw it was midnight. Haven had been gone for twelve hours, and the clock kept ticking as if the seconds didn’t matter.

He sighed, the strain in the car growing.

Carmine felt like he could breathe again when they reached the house and put some space between them. He headed inside and paused in the foyer as his father stepped out of the room under the stairs. Corrado shuffled in and closed the front door. “Has he talked?”

“No,” Vincent said. “He’s given me nothing.”

Corrado brushed past Carmine, giving Vincent a peculiar look before disappearing into the room. Vincent muttered something under his breath, refusing to look at Carmine as he strode away. Carmine sat down on the steps, putting his head down and rocking back and forth for a while, before pacing the hallway. As the morph**e faded from his system, so did his patience.