My grip on him tightens, my knuckles digging into his bloodied skin. But I don’t squeeze.
Because Sofia is behind me, moving.
Because the explosives are still armed.
Because if I kill him now, we might all go with him.
My mind sharpens, slicing through the haze of rage. The detonator. Where is it?
I turn my head just enough to see Sofia scrambling toward the control panel in the corner of the room, her fingers already flying over the wires.
"The countdown is still running," she says, her voice tight with panic. "Some of these are disconnected, but some—some are still live."
Shit.
Vittorio laughs.
It’s a weak, gurgling sound, but the bastard still finds amusement in this, even as he’s pinned beneath me, his blood pooling against the cold floor.
"You can’t stop it," he croons, his lips curling in satisfaction. "Takes more than cutting a few wires to kill the monster, Salvatore."
I slam my elbow against his ribs, hard enough to crack something. His breath leaves him in a sharp wheeze.
"I’ll show you what it takes to kill a monster," I snarl.
Then I look back at Sofia.
"Sofia," I bark, my voice a whip.
She doesn’t flinch.
She doesn’t hesitate, either.
Her hands tremble, but they don’t stop as she yanks open a metal casing on the detonator. Inside, a tangled mess of wires and circuits glows under the dim emergency lights.
I study the setup, my brain piecing together the logic, the mechanics, the way one wrong move could turn this entire villa into a crater.
"It’s a secondary trigger system," I say, my mind working fast. "The Lombardis built in redundancies—if one fails, another goes off. That’s why cutting the first set wasn’t enough."
Sofia swallows hard. "Then what do I do?"
"Follow my lead," I order.
I keep one knee pressed into Vittorio’s chest as I move just enough to get a better look at the control panel. The seconds tick by, each one a death sentence if we don’t move fast enough.
Red. Blue. Green. The wires coil together like veins, some already severed, others still humming with the potential to end everything.
"See that switch on the lower right?" I ask.
Sofia nods.
"Flip it. It should cut the relay to the secondary detonators."
She does.
The small screen flickers. A countdown flashes in red, less than two minutes.
Sofia looks at me, her breath shallow. "It’s still running."
