Arnau did exactly what Riccardo had done, and what Alfredo Colombo had tried to do to Stefano’s cousins. He lifted the gun and began spraying the house in the hopes that a bullet would find his elusive target. Suddenly the gun was turning toward him. Hard hands covered his, holding his finger to the trigger and preventing him from letting go. The bullets smashed into him, tearing through his body, up his chest and into his throat.
A man seemed to emerge right out of the shadows as the gun dropped into his lap, but he couldn’t tell if he was real or part of hell. Elie looked at Ricco and Mariko. “One more stop and we can go home.”
They found Izan Serrano at his home, an apartment in the middle of Barcelona. He had a small rooftop garden and that’s where he was sprawled in a lounge chair listening to music and idly throwing knives at a wooden target several feet away from his chair. He had bundles of ropes, handcuffs and a ball gag beside his chair. His head bobbed up and down to the beat of the music as he threw his knives.
“You aren’t very good,” Elie observed. “You’ve missed the target more times than you’ve hit it.”
Izan spun around, falling out of the lounge chair to his hands and knees, his head swiveling this way and that to try to see where the voice was coming from. Elie stepped out of the shadows right in front of him, causing him to sit back on his butt, eyes wide with shock.
Ricco stepped out of the shadows just in front of the target, crouching down to examine it. He sighed and shook his head. “Good thing the wall is here or you’d have complaints from the neighbors. What’s your average? One hit for every three or four misses?”
“Who are you?” Izan sputtered, trying to recover, pushing up with his hands in an effort to get off the ground.
Elie scooped up the throwing knives, testing the weight and balance of them in his hands as he stepped into Izan, making it impossible for the man to rise. “You should know me, Izan.” In rapid succession he threw all three knives he’d taken off the chair, picked up the last two from the small end table and threw them as well, all without a single pause. “Archambault. Elie Archambault. The man married to Brielle Couture. The Brielle Couture you put on a hit list that you sent to your good friend Riccardo Santoro. Sent her photograph to him, too. It was a beautiful picture of her. I decided to keep it for myself.”
Izan shook his head and kept backpedaling, pushing with his heels in an effort to get away from Elie. He looked from Elie to the target board and then let out a squeak. Every knife had lodged in the smallest circle, dead center. Each blade sunk to the hilt, although Elie had merely appeared to flick his wrist when he’d thrown the knives so casually, not putting any real effort into it.
“She has scars from your little edge play with her. She said no. It was a very firm and clear no, but you had her tied down and you used your knife on her anyway, Izan. Is that your thing with women? You like to cut them up after they tell you no?” Elie kept his voice very mild.
Izan shook his head and looked behind him, shocked that Ricco now stood there. He had no idea how Ricco had gotten there. “I—she—she’s different.”
“Be very careful how you speak of my wife.”
“They were going to traffic her, and I was going to buy her. Save her. I would have saved her.” Izan puffed out his chest and managed to scramble back onto his lounge chair, sitting sideways, facing the two men.
“I see. You were going purchase a woman from an auction and keep her for your own. That was your version of saving her.” Elie raised an eyebrow. “What about the other women? Weren’t some of them really young?”
Izan shrugged. “I couldn’t save them all. They weren’t my concern.”
Mariko slid out of the shadow directly behind Izan.
“That’s too bad, Izan,” Elie said. “I think all of those women should have been your concern. At the very least, you could have tried turning the Tosellis in to the cops in a different city. You knew enough to save at least one shipment of girls.”
Mariko caught the man’s head between her hands and wrenched. “Justice is served,” she whispered and then gently guided the body down to the lounge chair.
“These gloves are not the best,” Ricco complained. “We need to tell our cousin to go back to the originals. Either of you having a problem with them?”
Mariko inclined her head. “They make my hands itch.”
“Mine, too,” Elie said. “I was just thinking I couldn’t wait to get back to the plane so I could take them off.” He stepped into a shadow and streaked through the city toward the airport.