Page 114 of The Viper's Wife

We drive for an hour until we’re on the outskirts of the city. My phone buzzes with two notifications—Valeria has left the apartment, and Salvatore said Giovanni is acting with his permission.

Thesecoincidencesmake me nervous.

I call her, and it immediately goes to voicemail.

My nerves ratchet up, adrenaline flooding my veins.

“Just so you know,” I say, staring at her location as it moves, fast like she’s in a car, “if she doesn’t make it out of all this mess perfectly intact, neither will you.”

Giovanni steers off the road, parks next to the woods, and gives me a deliberate look. “I told you, I am not worried about myself.”

“Matassa’s Bitch always comes out on top.”

“Come.” Giovanni steps out of the car, a black flashlight in hand.

My boots crunch into the frozen grass on the edge of the highway. Giovanni walks straight into the forest, guided by a pale beam of light.

I have my gun and my knife, but it’s Giovanni’s unwavering loyalty to my father that I place my trust in. He won’t kill me. He’ll just take me to the middle of the woods for some undoubtedly horrifying reason, and then I’ll go back to the city to figure out where he sent Valeria in the middle of the night. And if anyone touched a single hair on her head, they’ll find out how much of my father’s son I can be.

With one last glance at her location, I switch on my phone’s flashlight and stride into the undergrowth, sticking to Giovanni like a shadow as we pick our way through the dense, pitch-black woods. There’s no real path to follow, so I track the moon’s position in case I might need to find my way back. Just as I consider the possibility that he could be planning to finally shoot me in the middle of the forest, a sliver of light slices through the trees. Up ahead, someone’s whistling.

Giovanni turns off his flashlight. I follow suit.

We break into a small clearing lit by a single electric lamp placed on the forest floor. Outside the ring of light, trees press in with thick, clawing shadows.

Dom the Butcher, Salvatore’s right-hand man, whistles cheerfully as he launches a dart at a bloody man strapped to a tree trunk.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Dom says and fires another dart. It lands straight into the man’s thigh, and he jerks with a muted scream through the cloth binding his mouth. “That’s thirty points.”

“Nico,” Giovanni says, “you remember your father-in-law?”

Fuck me.

Phil Aceto is almost unrecognizable. From the smug, confident man who tried to overthrow Salvatore, to the mutilated outcast, andnow—he looks like an animal with wide-open, crazed eyes and blood smeared across his face.

“He tried to make a run for it,” Giovanni says in Italian. “Don Salvatore and Don Ottavio are in agreement. They want him dead.”

Giovanni reaches into his coat pocket and holds a knife out to me.

Aceto gives a muted scream as Dom lands another dart—into his chest. It sags heavily from the tip, embedded in the skin above his heart.

“Fuck, I’m out of darts,” Dom mutters.

I shove my hands in my pockets, my heart pounding. “I’m not doing that.”

Giovanni sighs. He retrieves his phone, taps a few buttons, and holds it out to me. Even Aceto falls silent as the phone rings.

“Nico.” The sound of my father’s voice crashes against me like a bucket of ice water.

I let out a harsh laugh. “And here I was thinking you’d forgotten me.”

“I’ve stepped back,” Father says through the phone speakers. “I needed to see how you’d respond to my absence.”

I close my eyes, willing myself to stay calm.

Games, always games with him. Always another puppeteer behind the first, always another layer of shit to uncover.

“You’ve done well, Nico,” he says. “I’m proud of you.”