Chapter 139: Carnage

CASSIAN

I stood in the center of the room, my chest heaving, the metallic tang of blood filling the air. Four dead men lay scattered across the expensive Italian rugs like discarded trash.

I turned my head slowly toward the wall. Lorenzo Marchetti was backed into a corner, his hands shaking so violently he couldn’t even unclip his holster.

His face was a mask of pure, unadulterated terror. He looked at the carnage I had wrought in twenty seconds and realized he hadn’t invited a businessman to dinner. He had invited the devil.

I approached him slowly. I wasn’t even breathing hard. Blood was splattered across my suit, a dark, grisly map of the last twenty seconds. I looked like death personified, the “Prison King” energy radiating off me in suffocating waves.

I raised the gun and pressed the warm, smoking barrel directly against Marchetti’s forehead.

A sudden, sharp stench filled the air. I looked down. A dark, warm liquid was spreading down Marchetti’s expensive trousers, pooling on the floor around his shoes. He had literally pissed himself.

“Please,” he whimpered, his voice a pathetic squeak. “Please, I was just… I was just following orders.”

I leaned in, my face inches from his. I felt a surge of cold, jagged amusement.

“Not so talkative now, are you, Lorenzo?” I whispered. “Where’s that honor you were bragging about? Where’s the duty?”

I pressed the barrel harder into his skin, watching him tremble. The power dynamic hadn’t just shifted; it had been annihilated.

Lorenzo Marchetti, the man who had moments ago been lecturing me on the “code of honor,” was now a trembling, pathetic heap against the dark wood paneling.

The scent of his fear was sharp, mixing with the iron tang of the four bodies cooling on the rug and the acrid stench of his own urine.

“M-my men,” Marchetti stammered, his eyes darting frantically toward the closed doors. His voice was a thin, reedy thing, stripped of its gravelly authority. “They can still shoot you, Wolfe. You’re… you’re surrounded. You won’t make it out of here alive. My perimeter is—”

I let out a low, dry laugh. It was a jagged sound that didn’t reach my eyes. I tilted my head, the barrel of my gun still buried in the soft flesh of his forehead. “Really, Lorenzo? Are you sure about that?”

As if on cue, the silence of the restaurant was shattered by the muffled, rhythmic thwip-thwip-thwip of suppressed gunfire from the main dining area. Marchetti flinched so violently he nearly knocked his head against the wall. I didn’t even blink.

The doors to the private room were kicked open with professional precision. My security team flooded the space. They moved like shadows, their silenced weapons still smoking slightly. They didn’t need to say a word; the fact that they were standing there, and Marchetti’s “perimeter” wasn’t, said everything.

Marchetti realized it then. He was completely, utterly alone.

The last of his pride disintegrated. He slid down the wall until he was kneeling, his hands raised in a frantic, trembling gesture of surrender.

“Please! Please don’t kill me!” he sobbed, the tears carving clean tracks through the dust and sweat on his face. “I’ll do whatever you want! Anything! Just please, I have a family—”

“Quiet,” I said, my voice deadly calm.

He fell silent instantly, his chest heaving with hitching breaths.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” I continued, leaning in until the heat of the gun barrel was the only thing he could feel.

“First, you’re going to call off whatever else Emilio has planned for tonight. Second, you’re going to call that boy and tell him this was a catastrophic failure. You’re going to make it very clear what happens when people come for a Wolfe.”

Marchetti nodded so frantically I thought his neck might snap. “Yes! Yes, I’ll tell him! I’ll call it off right now!”

“And you’re going to deliver a message,” I added, pressing the gun harder against his skull. My voice dropped to a whisper that carried the weight of a death sentence.

“Tell Emilio if he wants me dead, he needs to do it himself. No more accidents. No more lackeys. Tell him to face me like his father did.” I paused, a cold, jagged smile spreading across my face. “Or tell him to stay in the shadows like a coward and wait for me to come find him first.”

“I’ll tell him! I swear!” Marchetti wailed, his dignity long gone. He was a broken man, a pathetic shell of the “traditionalist” who had greeted me at the table.

I stepped back, lowering the gun. I surveyed the room, the blood pooling around the legs of the oak table, the overturned chairs, the broken bodies of four men who had died because they followed a fool.

A dark, dangerous thought flickered in the back of my mind. I missed this. The violence. The simplicity of it. In the pits of Blackwood Prison facility, survival was the only currency that mattered.

There was no board of directors, no stock prices, no public image. Just the hunter and the prey. I was comfortable in the carnage, and that was the most dangerous thing about me.

“Get out of here,” I ordered, gesturing to the exit.

The old man stumbled to his feet, his legs barely working. He shuffled toward the door with wet pants and a tear-stained face, the very image of humiliation. I didn’t help him. I just watched him go, a predator watching a piece of carrion crawl away.

I turned to my team. “Clean this up. Fast.”

They moved immediately, no questions asked. They knew the drill. They were professionals at making the world look like nothing had happened.

I stepped out of the restaurant and into the cool night air, the silence of the alleyway a sharp contrast to the violence I’d left behind. I adjusted my cuffs casually, as if I’d just finished a tedious business merger.

I pulled my phone from my pocket. My thumb froze over the screen.

Missed Calls (4): Noah Bennett.

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