Page 35 of Beautiful Villain
“Go back into your room, Mikayla,” I said.“Stay there.”
She studied my face for a brief second—long enough to read what I hadn’t said.To understand the risk without me spelling it out.Then she nodded once.
She stepped back, closed the door quietly, and vanished from the hall as if she’d never been there.
That restraint lodged somewhere in my chest, sharp and unwelcome—but there was no time to examine it.
The house responded instantly.
Doors opened and closed without a sound.Men moved the way they’d been trained to move—quiet, purposeful, already halfway to their positions before the order fully left my mouth.Munitions bags appeared from nowhere.Weapons were checked by feel alone.Slides racked.Chambers confirmed.Safeties came off.
Comfort was discarded without discussion.There was no space for it now.
Then the gunfire hit.
A sudden burst at the front of the house—sharp, violent, concussive.The sound tore through the walls and ceilings, amplified by stone and glass.It was too close and too loud.
We dropped as one.Bodies hit the floor, smooth and practiced, crawling toward the sound with weapons up and eyes forward.Training took over completely.Without panic, we covered all angles in our controlled advance toward the front door.
And then—just as abruptly—it stopped.
The silence that followed was wrong.Heavy.Foreboding.
A second later, car doors slammed.Tires shrieked against asphalt.An engine surged and disappeared into the dark.
It sounded like a drive-by.This hadn’t been an attempt to breach, but a warning.
We stayed down for long seconds that stretched into something denser, heavier—guns fixed on the door, bodies coiled, waiting for the second wave.The follow-up.The part where more unexpected gunfire erupted.
But nothing came.
I rose slowly, keeping my weapon trained ahead of me as I moved toward the front door.Every step was measured.Every sound catalogued.
The wood was torn apart.Bullets buried deep, splintering the frame, gouging the surface like bite marks.This wasn’t random or rushed.Whoever shot at my home knew exactly what they were doing.
The damage was ugly.It was also intentional.And it meant to intimidate.
I stood there with the weight of the gun steady in my hand, the house breathing quietly around me, already stripping the moment down to its meaning and mapping what came next.
“Who shoots up a house then runs?”Enzo said, coming up beside me at the door.His voice was careful, but I could hear the unease threading through it.I was already thinking the same thing.
Three feet from the front door, the window lay shattered—glass glittering across the stone floor like ice.It had been broken deliberately, violently… but not breached.
That was when I heard Dunn.
“Boss?”
I turned.
Dunn stood near the broken window, staring down at his hands.One of them was clenched around something dark and heavy, his knuckles white.For a moment, my brain refused to finish the picture.
Angelo looked too.
“What the fu—” he started.Then he gagged.He turned and bolted down the hall, the sound of retching echoing behind him.Picking up strays in this life always came with a learning curve.It took time to build the kind of stomach this business required.Some never did.
Dunn didn’t move.I’ll give him that.Whatever he was holding, he held it steady.
It was a human arm.Severed at the elbow.The cut was crude—jagged bone, torn muscle, tendons hacked through with something rough, which could have been a hacksaw.
