CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
“HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”

SCARLETT DEL GATO

My phone clatters to the ground as I stared at the guy standing in the doorway in front of me.

His light green eyes were piercing right through mine. He found my astounding expression amusing by the smirk glued to his mouth.

“How is this possible?” I manage to ask. “I saw you get shot right in front of me.” I swallow air, feeling fear bubbling up inside me with each second that passed.

“I’m amazed that you remember me, dear Scarlett.” He says, inching forward until he was mere inches away from me.

When he was standing in front of me, towering over me like his brother did earlier today in the bathroom, I feel my knees trying to buckle out from underneath me.

He was nothing like his brother.

Diablo wanted to mess around with me to get a reaction out of me.

Vincent? Vincent was here for revenge.

If it wasn’t for my hands clutching Antonio’s desk at my sides, my legs would’ve already caved out from underneath me.

Vincent saw the sheer terror written across my face.

My hands were shaking, clutching the desk. My heart was pounding inside my ribcage and my hands were slick with sweat, they would slip every now and then off the wooden desk.

My phone vibrates on the floor.

Vincent smirks, looking down at my phone lying face-up. I saw a message, well multiple messages from Giovanni in my notifications bar. I wanted nothing more than to pick up my phone and to tell him what was about to happen, but I was glued to the spot underneath Vincent’s piercing gaze.

He looks up from the floor to meet my eyes. “Who messaged you?”

I think he knew who messaged me by the look on his face, in his eyes. He was angry. I could see it in those light green eyes of his. But yet he had a smirk on his face.

“Hmm?” He asks, lifting his hand to wrap a strand of my loose hair around his finger. “Who messaged you, dear Scarlett?”

I swallow hard, looking at my phone as another message came through from Giovanni. His name was in bold letters and the nickname I gave him the other day popped up on the screen again. Asstiglione.

“G-Giovanni.” I stutter, trying to avoid Vincent’s piercing gaze but he lets go of my hair to tip my chin upward with his forefinger, his thumb held my face in place. I couldn’t look away now, not even if I tried.

“You’re going to pick the phone up from the floor and you’re going to tell him that you are fine.” Vincent says, the tone of his voice demanding but at the same time amused. He found it amusing that I was so afraid of him.

I nod as he lets go of my chin so that I could pick the phone up from the floor. I go into the chats of Giovanni and message him back with shaking fingers. The palms of my hands were covered in sweat. I nearly dropped my phone as I typed a message to Giovanni to tell him that I was fine.

I send the message, swallowing hard. I see my message being delivered and not long after, Giovanni has read the message. But he doesn’t respond to it.

I hope he has figured it out—that the message I sent him was strange.

Vincent snatches the phone from my grasp and throws it against the hardwood floors of my brother’s old room. The phone cracks in a lot of places and I was surprised that it didn’t break in half.

Vincent smiles at me before he grabs me around the arm. He twirls me around so that my back was flush against his chest. I feel his warm breath fanning the side of my neck—close to my ear—when he speaks.

“Night, dear Scarlett.”

That was all I remember before I blacked out.

• • •

I woke up when I hear a pan, or something metallic of some sorts, clanking against a hard surface. There was a door directly in front of me, that’s where the smells of burnt toast and eggs came from, and so did the sounds.

I was in a seating position, my hands tied to the wooden chair’s armrests and my feet were tied to the legs of the chair so I was practically moulded into the chair itself. I couldn’t move my hands or feet, and when I managed to move just slightly, barely, the rope dug into my wrists and ankles more.

I focus on my surroundings seeing that the door was still closed. I was in some sort of garage. There was cement floors below my feet, stained with oil stains and there were muddy tracks of a car.

There was metal shelving all around me against the walls with power tools resting atop each shelf—drills, a circular saw and even a damn sander. There were also motor oils, tubs of nails and cardboard boxes with contents unbeknownst me resting on the shelves.

There wasn’t a car, though.

The entire garage smelled like motor oil, dust, cold cement and then I caught an occasional whiff of breakfast being made through the door directly in front of me.

The smells of the food made my mouth water and my stomach clench. I don’t remember the last time I ate or how long I have been tied up to this chair. It could’ve been hours. It could’ve been days. I don’t know.

The metallic clanking stops, coming from the kitchen I assume, and the door to my front opens. Vincent steps out with a tray of food in his left hand and a glass of water in his right.

“You made me breakfast?” I question, eyeing the tray with food in his hand.

“Dear Scarlett,” he says in a whimsical tone, “you better be grateful that you’re getting anything to eat at all. It is breakfast in bed,” he says but then a frown settles between his thick eyebrows but then he smirks again, “or should I say breakfast in chair.”

He sets the tray and glass of water down on one of the unoccupied shelves before he walks back to the chair where I was currently sitting on. “I am going to let your right hand go so that you can eat. But try anything, anything at all, and I will tie you up again and I’ll make sure you only it in three days again. Got it?”

I gulp.

How long is he planning on keeping me here?

I nod slowly and watch how he takes out a pocketknife from his boot so that he could cut the rope to my right hand free.

One tug and cut later, the rope dangles off the chair and my wrist was free. It was raw and sensitive and red all around, but it was free and it felt as if I could feel the blood rushing through to my fingers again.

He smiles when my hand stays against the armrest of the chair. He walks over to the shelf and grabs the plate of food before he brings it to me. I couldn’t hold it myself, so Vincent had to hold the plate for me.

He was crouched in front of me, holding the plate out toward me.

I eye the eggs sceptically. It was perfectly cooked, but I don’t know if he poisoned it or not. My stomach growls loudly. It didn’t care if it might have been poisoned or not. It just wanted to eat something—anything.

“Eat it,” Vincent urges, “you’ll like it.”

I take the fork from his extended hand and started to eat the eggs as slowly as possible even though my mouth just want to gobble everything up at once. Even the slightly burnt toast went down my throat thankfully.

I was done chewing when I lifted my head to look Vincent directly in his light green eyes. I wasn’t even surprised to see that his eyes were already on me, a small smile on his mouth.

“I know that you were involved with my brother.” I tell him, remembering Antonio’s letter he left me back in his room. “Was he part of the White Pistols?”

He laughs bitterly, the plate in his hand actually shaking. “It’s a shame that he chose wrongly.” Vincent says. “He could’ve thrived with us. But he chose to use our plans against us instead.”

“What plans?” I ask him. “Does this have something to do with the Castigliones?”

Vincent nods. “It’s always about them.” He says, his lip curved into a scowl. “You see, the brothers own a large part of this town—the entire town of Eckerton, really. We wanted to take them down to take their part of the two for us, but your sweet little brother had other plans. Right when we plotted out first move against the Castigliones, your brother sent Giovanni to jail. That completely threw all of our plans in the mud.”

“How?”

Vincent laughs humourlessly. “When someone is in jail, dear Scarlett, you need to pay a lot of money to take someone out within the walls. But no one was willing to take out the infamous Giovanni Castiglione. There was no price high enough for someone to take him down. They’re all cowards.” He says, scowling.

“They also have the cops wrapped around their fingers. Giovanni probably had a lot of protection inside the walls.” I whisper to myself.

“Indeed.” Vincent nods. “When Giovanni got thrown into jail, it completely threw our plans for this town in the mud. Antonio knew we couldn’t reach Giovanni in jail, so he sent him to prison to protect them.”

“And no one was willing to go down? No one was willing to kill him? So you had to back off and think of another plan?”

A plan I don’t think they have yet, and that scared the living shit out of me.

“Take the punch, as they say.” Vincent says. “And not only that, he was protected inside that penitentiary. It won’t even surprise me if he lived like a fucking king inside that place.”

“Why didn’t you take out the rest of the Castigliones while Giovanni was in jail?” I ask him.

Vincent drops the plate to the ground. It surprises me by not shattering. He gets up from his crouching position and starts to pace around the garage. “The Castigliones were on edge after the whole Giovanni-going-to-jail thing.” Vincent explains. “The Castigliones expected a war. They expected us to attack them, but we didn’t. We couldn’t. We couldn’t do anything about it. Our plans… the ones we worked so hard on… it was useless.”

Vincent stops pacing to look at me. His eyes were lighter somehow underneath the dim lights. “They key was to throw them off guard. But your stupid brother had other plans. Send Giovanni to jail as a cover up to send some underlying sort of message that we were going to attack them. It’s just a shame that Giovanni never knew the real reason to his betrayal.”

My brother sent Giovanni to jail to protect them.

The White Pistols would’ve attacked them if my brother didn’t step in.

My brother saved them all.

He saved the Castigliones but it came with a price.  The price of death. He was shot trying to protect the person who meant the most to him, all because Giovanni didn’t know why he did what he did.

“Now,” Vincent continues to pace, “you must be wondering why I brought you here.”

“Giovanni shot you and now you’re going to hurt me, is that it?”

Vincent looks at me as he chews on his bottom lip. “Ding. Ding. Ding.” He claps his hands together proudly. “I couldn’t attack him directly, but I can hurt the person he cares about most. You.”

I clench my jaw to keep my chin from quivering. “If you’re going to kill me, then kill me already.”

Vincent chuckles. “No. No. No, dear Scarlett. I have other plans for you. The hurting part comes only later, if you choose to make the right decision, that is.” He smiles wickedly. “Have you ever heard of the saying, ‘kill or get killed’? This is going to be one of those cases.”

“What do you mean?” I ask, swallowing the bile that rose in my throat.

“You’re so impatient.” He smirks, walking over to me before he crouched down in front of me again to be face to face with me. “I just wanted to have some fun before I reveal the big plan to you, but seeing that you’re so impatient, I’ll reveal the big plan now only because I long to see how you would react.”

I press my lips tightly together to keep them from trembling. That earned a chuckle coming from Vincent. He liked seeing me squirm.

“I,” he pauses, lifting his hand to touch the side of my face with the back of his hand, “want you to kill them. I want you to kill the Castiglione brothers.”

I try to move away from his hand, but the tightness of the rope around my other wrist and feet prevented me from going very far. I could’ve slapped him across his face, but that would literally mean the death of my life today.

“Why would I do that?” I ask him, feeling terror bubbling up inside me.

Vincent laughs, throwing his head back when he did. “This is the part where I tell you that your brother isn’t dead. He never was.”

I shake my head violently. I didn’t believe him. My brother was dead. He was shot. He bled out and he died on my kitchen floor. Antonio was dead.

“You’re lying.” I say through clenched teeth. “He was shot.”

Vincent moves closer an inch. His face was mere inches away from mine. “I think it would be a good thing to remind you that Giovanni never pulled the trigger, dear Scarlett. He wanted to. He was determined to pull the trigger, but he never did. Right when I saw his forefinger squeezing the trigger slightly, but not enough for the gun to go off, I let mine go off, making him think this entire time that he was the one who shot your brother.”

I knew it.

I knew that the silhouette I saw in my dream wasn’t Giovanni.

“You asshole!” I slapped him across his face just like I wanted to before. My palm connects with the side of his face, stinging my palm in the process. “I knew it was you! I dreamt about the silhouette! I saw the White Pistol tattoo! I knew he didn’t shoot my brother!”

He ignores the red mark across his cheek and turns his head to look at me again. “I knew you were as clever as you seemed. Now I know that you learned from the best. Your brother was just as good as deceiving people, and to put two and two together.”

“You wanted me to hate him so that I could kill him. But I never did, and that threw your plans into the mud yet again.”

“You fell for him instead.” He scowls. “You fell for the person who supposedly shot your brother. You’re just as sick as I am.”

“And now you’re going to threaten me to kill them in return for what? My brother who may or may not be alive? I don’t believe you. I won’t kill them until I have proof that my brother is alive.”

Vincent chuckles. “Ding. Ding. Fucking ding.” He gets up from his crouching position yet again. “You’re going to kill them or I kill your brother, but this time I won’t miss his face.”

“I want to see the proof.”

“You’ll get your proof once one of the brothers is dead.” Vincent says.

I shake my head. “I don’t trust you.”

“Who does these days?” He shrugs. “But if you don’t trust me, you’ll never know if your brother is alive or not. So you’ll just have to trust me, dear Scarlett.”

I glare at him.

“So, dear Scarlett… what will it be? Will you take their lives in exchange to save your brothers, or do you want to attend your brother’s real funeral this time round?”

I close my eyes tightly.

I could finally get my brother back.

I nod at him.

“Good.” He says, waling over to one of the metal shelves. He grabs a piece of dirty rag and some sort of chemicals before he walks over to me again. “Now you might want to close your eyes for this. It stings when it gets into your eyes.”

Before I could process his words, he presses the dirty rag against my nose, preventing air to flow when the strong chemicals fill my nostrils.

I didn’t struggle for long before I blacked out yet again.