Page 50 of The Enemy of My Enemy: Pt. 2

Chapter 24

Aurora~

Seriously, it’d been too easy.

After I’d gotten the call that Decio had agreed to meet ‘Darya’, I had wasted no time lying to Viktor in order to put the second part of my plan into action.I had pretended to be hungry, and with my refusal to eat anything in his house, he’d been fine with me going out to grab something as long as I’d had Isaak and Dima with me.

Now, as for Isaak and Dima, their mistake had been in not questioning the details.When Viktor had given them permission to take me to get some food, they had accepted his direction blindly, not questioning me when I’d said that I was going to meet my father for dinner.It had also helped when Marco and Georgio had already been waiting on Ivory Street for the exchange.

Once I’d gotten in the car with my guards, I had called my father to inform him that I’d had a hunch about something and that I was checking it out.Trusting me as always, he had quickly agreed to let me handle my business, making me promise to relay the details once I was finished, to which I had readily agreed.

So, once Marco and Georgio had dropped me off at my condo, I’d gone inside, then had gotten prepared like so many other times in my life.As if Astaroth had been summoned, I had made sure to dress the part, and I’d had enough firepower on me to take out a small army.

At any rate, as luck would have it, I wasn’t the only woman on the planet that men constantly underestimated, and so Decio had taken no precautions in regard to his meeting with ‘Darya’, and like always, that easy feminine dismissal had worked out in my favor.Decio had come to the meeting with an empty suitcase and only one gun inside.His plan had been predictable, if only to me.Taking ‘Darya’ for a fool, he had planned to lure her in with the contents of the suitcase, only to open it, pull out the gun, then kill her with it; easy, peasy, right?

However, while he’d been waiting for her to drive down the deserted road to the river embankment, I’d been sneaking up from behind the derelict barn, Decio mistaking any noises for rats, snakes, or whatever.

Again, it’d been too easy.

With him so focused on waiting for ‘Darya’ to drive down the dirt road, it’d been too late by the time that he’d felt my gun against his left temple, and the rest of what had followed had been just as easy, leaving Decio tied to a chair right now, spitting mad, and I didn’t blame him.To be outsmarted by a woman was not the thing for an Italian man who believed in traditions and gender roles.

“Now, I could ask you the obvious question of why, but I’m pretty sure that I already know the answer,” I said lyrically as I sat down across from him.“Though you weren’t vocal about it, I’m very aware that a lot of people were not happy about my marriage to Viktor Korolev.”

“We should have gone to war,” he spat.

“Oh, well...that’s easy for you to say,” I replied steadily.“As one of my father’s most trusted guards, you would have been tucked away safely with the rest of us until it could no longer be helped.The war could have easily been over before you’d even have to get your hands bloody.”

“We would have won,” he said with enough conviction that he made me a believer.

“Maybe, maybe not,” I remarked.“It’s something that we’ll never know, and quite frankly, it’s pretty irrelevant at this point.”

“You’re laying down with the enemy,” he sneered.“That’s hardly irrelevant.”

“And what does killing me accomplish, Decio?”I asked evenly.“How does killing me fix anything for you?”

“It would get rid of the shame,” he answered, sounding a bit unhinged.“It would get rid of the dishonor.”

“The dishonor?”I echoed.

“You’re nothing but a Russian scum’sputtana,”he said, disgust lacing each word, and while he wasn’t the first man to ever call me a whore, he was the first of our trusted family to do so.“You’re spreading your legs for him, and that’s the most dishonorable thing that aprincipessa mafiosacan do.You’ve shamed us all.”

I stood up, then beat the side of his head with the butt of my gun before he even knew what hit him, and it wasn’t because he had called me a whore.Truth be told, I loved every bit of what Viktor did to me in the bedroom, so I was perfectly fine with being his whore; looked forward to it even.

No, this was about how fucking stupid he was, and for that alone, Decio didn’t deserve to live.Granted, there’d never been any chance of that happening, but still.

I sat back down as he turned his head to keep the blood that was currently seeping from the gash on his head from getting into his eyes, and that was only the beginning, something that he was very aware of but didn’t seem to care.