Like Father, Like Son

Chapter 27

The Beretta 92FS sits heavy in my palm, seventeen rounds of hollow-point conviction that I've never fired at anything breathing.

Three hours of YouTube tutorials taught me the basics—grip, stance, sight picture—but they didn't cover how your hand shakes when you're planning to use it on flesh instead of paper targets. The gun belonged to Salvatore, hidden in a compartment behind Neruda's poetry collection, because of course a man who dealt in death would hide weapons behind love poems.

The IP address burns into my laptop screen like coordinates to my own damnation. Caronte's digital ghost finally materialized into something physical—a farmhouse forty-three miles north of the city, buried in hills where cell towers don't reach and neighbors don't ask questions. The kind of place where screams get swallowed by trees and bodies become fertilizer for next year's wildflowers.

Thunder rattles the mansion windows as I pack—black clothes that won't show blood, gloves that won't leave prints, a flashlight for when civilization's lights stop reaching. The baby shifts inside me, this tiny passenger on a journey toward its first murder, and I wonder if violence travels through umbilical cords like nutrients.

"Your grandfather would understand," I tell my stomach, though whether this child carries Salvatore's blood or Marco's remains the eternal question. "This is what love looks like in our world—bloody and absolute."

The Mercedes keys feel alien in my hand. Marco's at another late-night "business meeting"—the kind where he hemorrhages money to contacts who promise to solidify his crumbling authority. These meetings run until dawn now, his desperation stretching longer as his power contracts. The staff wouldn't dare question the grieving widow who needs to visit her father-in-law's memorial at midnight, driven by insomnia and sorrow they think they understand.

Rain attacks the windshield with biblical fury as I navigate roads that narrow from highway to two-lane to something barely paved. The GPS gives up twenty miles in, displaying that patronizing "no route available" message that might as well say "you're on your own now, killer."

But I memorized the route, traced it seventeen times on paper maps like a meditation on vengeance. Left at the dead oak. Right after the abandoned gas station. Straight through the valley where FM radio turns to static and God stops listening.

The headlights catch the farmhouse through sheets of rain—a two-story insult to architecture squatting behind chain-link fence topped with razor wire. Security cameras pivot on poles like mechanical owls, their red recording lights bleeding through the storm. This isn't some innocent farmer's retreat. This is a bunker dressed in barn-wood drag, trying to look harmless while screaming danger to anyone who knows how to read the signs.

I kill the engine half a mile down the road, letting darkness swallow the Mercedes whole. Rain soaks through my jacket in seconds, but the cold helps—it sharpens everything, strips away the last hesitation that might have saved my soul.

The fence is eight feet of "keep out" that I navigate with surprising grace, the pregnancy not yet heavy enough to slow me down. One camera tracks left to right in a pattern I timed from the car—seventeen seconds of blind spot every rotation. I move through its gaps like threading a needle with my body.

Thunder covers my footsteps across gravel that would normally announce visitors like a doorbell. The house grows larger as I approach, revealing details that confirm everything—reinforced door frames, windows with subtle armor glazing, a satellite dish pointed at angles that have nothing to do with television.

Through the lit window, a shadow moves with the casual comfort of someone who thinks they're untouchable. Masculine shoulders, medium height, gestures that speak of someone making dinner without fear of interruption. Just a man in his kitchen, living off blood money, probably calculating his next extortion payment while the man he murdered turns to memory in other people's minds.

"That's him," I whisper to the storm, certainty hitting like lightning finding ground. "That's the hand that pressed the detonator."

The gun comes out smooth, safety off, finger alongside the trigger guard like the videos taught me. Three deep breaths that taste like rain and rage, then I'm moving toward the door with the inevitability of a terminal diagnosis.

My boot hits the door right below the lock, and wood splinters inward with the crack of breaking bones. I follow through, gun raised, rain streaming off me like I've emerged from drowning, my voice tearing from somewhere primal:

"Turn around," I command.

The kitchen smells like garlic and gun oil, that particular combination of domestic and deadly that defines men in our world. He freezes at the stove, spatula suspended mid-flip, his back still to me. The muscles in his shoulders tense—recognition of a moment that was always going to arrive, just not tonight, not like this.

"Face me, you bastard!"

He sets down the spatula with deliberate calm, movements slow enough not to provoke the armed woman vibrating with adrenaline behind him.

My finger finds the trigger, that few pounds of pressure that separate conversation from conclusion. The baby moves, reminding me I'm about to commit murder while creating life, that beautiful paradox that defines everything I've become.

"Turn around," I demand again, now calmer, needing to see his face, needing him to see mine—the last face he'll ever witness.

The adrenaline makes everything hyper-real. I can hear his breathing, count his heartbeats in the pulse visible at his neck. My own pulse thrums in my ears like a war drum, and I've never felt more alive than in this moment before dealing death.

He starts to turn, slow and deliberate, and when his face emerges from shadow—

"You tracked my IP address." His voice carries the calm of someone who's had guns pointed at him before, who's calculated odds of survival in seventeen different scenarios before I even finished breaking down his door. "Through seven proxies and three jurisdictions. Either you're exceptionally talented or exceptionally lucky."

"I'm exceptionally motivated," I counter, the gun trained on his center mass. "You killed Salvatore Caruso, and I am here to pay you back."

"Did I?" He leans back against the counter with the casual comfort of someone discussing weather, not death. His face is partially obscured by shadow and the baseball cap pulled low, but I can see the smile playing at his lips. "And you thought the smart play was coming here alone? Pregnant, by the look of it. In a thunderstorm. To confront a professional killer in his own house?"

The observation about my pregnancy makes my trigger finger twitch. The slight swell is barely visible under my rain-soaked jacket, but of course he'd notice. Men like him catalog details the way others breathe.

"I'm not here to play it smart," I tell him, feeling the high of adrenaline mixing with rage into something that tastes like metal and divinity. "I'm here to watch you die."