CHAPTER 23 - AMBUSH

The world came back to Elena in pieces, sound before sight, sight before feeling, each sense arriving separately and without any clear order to make things easier.

She heard shouting first, several voices overlapping, none of them Marchetti's steady, controlled cadence from before the impact.

Then the sharp, close crack of gunfire, close enough that she felt the concussion of it in her chest before she registered the sound had come from directly beside the car.

Then, finally, pain, a deep, throbbing ache along her ribs where the seatbelt had caught her hard in the collision, and a warm, wet trickle above her eyebrow that she understood, distantly, was blood.

"Elena." Her father's voice, close to her ear, low and urgent. "Elena, stay down. Don't move."

She turned her head slightly, enough to see him crouched beside her in the wreckage of the back seat, the door on his side already hanging open at an unnatural angle, and understood, through the fog still clouding her thoughts, that the car had come to rest at a steep angle, tilted into the shallow ditch running alongside the tree line.

Through the shattered windshield, she could see Marchetti slumped forward over the wheel, a dark stain spreading fast across the shoulder of his jacket, his chest still rising and falling in short, shallow movements that Elena, in her panic, almost missed entirely.

"Marchetti." Her voice came out cracked, barely a whisper. "Marchetti, are you.."

"He's alive," her father said, his hand closing around her arm, not gently. "Barely. Elena, listen to me. We need to move, now, before.."

A shout cut him off, close, sharp, a man's voice she didn't recognize calling something urgent toward the wreckage. "There! Back seat, move!"

"Copy," a second voice answered, rougher, already closer than the first. "Both guards down. Driver's hit bad, won't be a problem. Passenger's still breathing, but he's not getting up either."

Elena twisted, ignoring the pain screaming through her ribs, and saw Torres sprawled half out of the passenger door, blood soaking through his sleeve where a bullet had torn through the meat of his shoulder, one hand still weakly gripping the frame of the car as though some stubborn, unconscious part of him was still trying to fight even with his body no longer capable of following through.

He wasn't dead. Elena clung to that single, thin fact the way she'd clung to nothing else in the last unbearable minute, watching his chest rise and fall in shallow, ragged movements, blood pooling dark beneath him against the gravel.

"Get her out," the first voice said, closer now, footsteps crunching over broken glass and scattered debris. "Boss wants her in the second car within the minute. We're behind schedule as it is."

Rough hands closed around Elena's arm before she could fully process the sentence, hauling her out through the broken door with a force that tore a cry from her throat, and she found herself, for one disoriented, terrible second, staring up into the face of a stranger, broad-shouldered, expressionless, entirely unbothered by the chaos surrounding him.

"Let go of me!" Elena wrenched against his grip, some old, desperate instinct finally breaking through the shock that had held her still until now. "Let go.."

"She's got fight in her," the man holding her said, glancing over his shoulder at someone Elena couldn't see. "You said she wouldn't."

"Doesn't matter what she's got," a third voice answered, unhurried, closer than Elena expected. "Get her in the car. Now."

She twisted again, searching wildly for her father in the chaos, some old, desperate hope still clinging to the version of events where he was as much a victim of this as she was, where he'd fight beside her, or at least try to, and found him instead standing several feet away, upright, steady, entirely unrestrained, watching the scene unfold with none of the panic that should have gripped a man caught in the middle of an ambush.

"Dad!" Elena's voice cracked on the word. "Dad, help me, please..."

He didn't move. He stood very still, his face pale but composed, watching the men drag his daughter toward a second car idling on the shoulder of the road, and for one suspended, disbelieving moment, Elena searched his expression for any sign of the fear he'd worn so convincingly for the entire drive, any trace of the man who'd cried at the gate, who'd spoken of her mother's failing breath with a voice that had cracked exactly the way grief was supposed to crack.

She found nothing there at all.

"Marco." One of the men, the one who seemed to be giving orders, nodded toward her father, brief and businesslike. "Get in your own car. You know where to go."

"I understand." Her father's voice had gone flat, stripped of every trace of the panic he'd performed so convincingly for the last half hour.

"Dad?" Elena's own voice had gone very small, the last of her fight draining out of her all at once, replaced by something colder and more disorienting than fear had been a moment before. "Dad, what's happening? Please, just tell me what's happening..?"

He didn't answer her directly.

He only looked at the man giving orders, something unreadable passing between them, and turned toward a battered car parked further down the shoulder that Elena hadn't even noticed until now, moving with the unhurried certainty of a man walking toward something he'd already accepted rather than something he was fleeing.

"Wait." She twisted hard against the hands dragging her, some last, desperate reserve of strength surfacing all at once. "Dad, don't just walk away, tell me what's happening, please.."

"That's her," her father said, finally, to someone Elena still couldn't see clearly through the chaos and the blood running into her eye. "That's the one you want."

The words landed somewhere far past ordinary fear, cold and absolute, and Elena, still fighting uselessly against the arms hauling her the last few steps toward the waiting sedan, understood, with a sudden, sickening clarity, exactly what those five words meant, even without yet understanding the full shape of why, or who her father had said them to, or what price had already changed hands to arrange this exact moment on this exact stretch of empty road.

"No" She kicked, twisted, every ounce of strength she had left thrown against hands that didn't so much as loosen in response. "Someone help me, please, someone.."

"No one's coming," a voice said, close now, unhurried, a voice she didn't recognize at all, low and certain in a way that made her stomach turn even before she'd fully processed the words. "Get her in."

The door of the second car swung open ahead of her, dark and waiting, and Elena threw her weight backward instinctively, some animal part of her recognizing the door itself as a kind of ending, a line she understood, without being able to explain how, she would not be permitted to walk back across once she crossed it. It didn't matter.

The hands holding her didn't strain at all against the resistance, simply lifted her the last few inches off the ground and folded her into the back seat with the brisk, practiced efficiency of men who had clearly done this before, to other people, on other roads, and felt nothing about doing it again now.

She caught one last, fractured glimpse of the world outside before the door swung shut, her father's car already pulling away down the empty highway without a single backward glance, Marchetti's slumped silhouette still visible through the ruined windshield of the wrecked car, Torres motionless beside him, and the flat, gray afternoon light settling over all of it as though nothing unusual were happening here at all, as though the road hadn't just swallowed her whole life a second time in the space of four months.

"Please," she said, to no one in particular, her voice barely a whisper now, the fight finally, entirely draining out of her. "Please, just tell me what's happening."

No one answered her. The car began to move, gravel giving way to smooth asphalt beneath the tires, and Elena, dizzy from the blow to her head and the blood still trickling warm above her eyebrow, felt the world tilt sideways around her, consciousness slipping further away with every passing second despite her best efforts to hold onto it.

The last thing she registered clearly, before the darkness finally closed over her entirely, was the low, unhurried murmur of a stranger's voice somewhere in the front seat, relaying a location to someone else on the other end of a phone call she couldn't follow, and the terrible, sinking understanding that wherever this car was about to take her, no one in the world currently knew enough to come looking.

~~

Marchetti didn't remember, afterward, how long he'd sat slumped over the wheel before the sound of an engine, not the attackers' cars, something smaller, a passing truck slowing on the empty road, finally dragged him back toward something resembling consciousness.

His shoulder was on fire. He understood, distantly, that the wound went deeper than a graze, blood soaked through most of his jacket by the time he managed to lift his head, his vision swimming at the edges every time he tried to focus on anything beyond the shattered windshield in front of him. Beside him, in the passenger seat, Torres had gone gray-pale, his breathing shallow but steady, unconscious rather than gone, a fact Marchetti clung to with the same stubborn, single minded focus he was applying to everything else in this moment.

He forced his mind back through the last several minutes anyway, cataloguing what he could while the details were still sharp enough to trust.

The man who'd wrenched Elena out of the car had a tattoo running up the side of his neck, distinctive even in the chaos, a coiled serpent wrapped around a blade.

Marchetti had seen that same mark exactly once before, months ago, on the wrist of one of Dante Conti's men during a tense, unfriendly exchange over a shipment that had gone sideways at the docks.

He'd filed the memory away then without much thought, the way he filed away most details that didn't immediately concern him. He held onto it now like it might be the only thing worth anything at all.

The truck driver, an older man in a work uniform, had already pulled over, already on his phone, already shouting something toward the wreck that Marchetti couldn't quite parse through the ringing in his ears.

Marchetti fumbled for his own phone instead, his hands clumsy, uncooperative, and dialed the only number that mattered right now with fingers that left smears of blood across the screen.

Elias picked up on the second ring.

"Report," Elias said, brisk, expecting nothing more than a routine confirmation of an uneventful drive.

"We were hit." Marchetti's voice came out ragged, barely holding together. "Ambush, planned, professional. Torres is down, alive but bad. I took one in the shoulder. Elena's gone."

The silence on the other end lasted less than a second, but Marchetti heard, even through his own pain and the ringing in his ears, the precise moment everything in Elias's voice changed.

"Say that again."

"They took her, Elias. Multiple vehicles, forced us off the road, hit us clean." Marchetti's vision swam again, and he forced himself to keep speaking anyway, understanding, dimly, that every second he stayed conscious mattered now in ways it hadn't a minute ago. "Her father walked away from it. On his own. No one grabbed him. He just walked to his own car and left."

"He set it up." Elias's voice had gone flat, cold, the particular stillness Marchetti had learned, over years working under him, meant something dangerous was assembling itself behind the calm. "Do you know who hit you? Anything on the vehicles, the men?"

"Conti's crew." Marchetti forced the words out, certain of them even through the pain fogging everything else. "I saw the mark on one of them, snake and blade, same ink I saw on that shipment dispute back in the spring. It's Dante Conti's men, Elias. I'd bet my life on it."

A pause on the line, brief, and Marchetti heard, faintly, another voice cut in sharply in the background, urgent, unmistakably Luca's, demanding to know what had happened before Elias had even finished relaying it.

"Location," Elias said, back to business, though something in his tone had sharpened further at the name. "Everything you can give me. Now."

Marchetti gave it, the mile marker, the direction the second cars had gone, every detail his battered, bleeding mind could still hold onto, and heard, in the background of the call, the murmur of Luca's voice growing louder, more insistent, before Elias's attention snapped fully back to the phone.

"Stay conscious, Marchetti. Ambulance is already being routed to your position. Don't you dare close your eyes before it gets there."

The line went dead, and Marchetti let his head fall back against the seat, the truck driver's shouting growing louder, closer, sirens somewhere in the distance finally beginning to rise over the ringing in his ears, and thought, in the last clear moment before the pain finally, mercifully pulled him under, that whatever waited for Dante Conti, once Luca Moreau finished the drive back to find out exactly what had been taken from him, it would not be anything close to mercy.