For the first time in my life, I was in love. I didn’t simply have a crush on somebody, I wasn’t on the outside, I was in love. Jace loved me right back.
There’d been times when I’d lay by myself in bed wondering what it felt like to be in love, to be in one of those exclusive two-person clubs. It was hard to remember exactly what I’d thought, but it probably involved running through a field of flowers in slow motion and soft-focus, before Prince Charming lifted me up and we twirled around.
The reality was so much better, yet so much more difficult. Most of the time I was so excited that I could have burst. I wanted to scream it from the rooftops, stay in bed with him every moment of every day, have silly little talks in hushed whispers in the dark that nobody else would ever hear, and bask in his love forever.
All that and more was beyond my wildest dreams, but the fantasies didn’t prepare me for everything. They didn’t tell me that Prince Charming might not have grown up in a castle with loving parents. They didn’t tell me that he might have had to fight for his life before, maybe more than once.
I’d felt helpless and alone for so long that I felt almost ashamed of myself when I managed to put enough pieces of Jace’s early life together. Somewhere along the line I’d become so scared and wrapped up in my own issues that I’d forgotten that other people were hurting too.
So I told him some things that I wished somebody had told me. I couldn’t do anything about where he came from, but I hoped the words combined with all the love I had for him would be something at least.
I was pretty sure it wasn’t too late to help heal some of those old wounds, because I knew in myself just how different I felt about everything now that we were together. He seemed so relieved that day after we visited Wellfort too, like a piece of broken glass had been pulled out after hurting him for years.
If life was even a little bit fair, that should have been the only issue Jace had to deal with, but there were other things blatantly weighing heavily on his mind. The resurgence of Mafia violence that had started with the biker bar had escalated. The Picolli Crime Family seemed to take extra special interest in hitting locations that were, via various holding companies and other complicated corporate structures, ultimately owned by Jace.
It was really terrible luck. At work, Lucile was scrambling to follow up with her flop of an article by covering the new crime wave, and the police were saying that the Picollis were probably targeting businesses that refused to pay for protection.
Several times I asked him about it. I could see he was down and all I wanted to do was make him happy again. My own happiness depended on it. That was a cliché I’d heard but, again, I couldn’t have been prepared for the reality.
More than once he looked like he was going to answer, as if he’d come up with this big speech to explain to me what was going through his head. Every time, he seemed to think better of it, told me not to worry. It was just boring business stuff.
Today was no different. This afternoon, officially, we were celebrating the impending publication of my article, which had been written, re-written and polished to perfection by myself and Mr. Kinsley, and appropriately fact-checked by the research department.
Jace didn’t look to be in the celebrating mood though. He sat there, looking out at the city as it went by the tinted windows of the town car, alternately looking sad, pissed off and frustrated. Hopefully our evening at AquaVell would relax him a bit.
A blowjob in their Zen Garden would probably cheer us both up. I stifled a laugh and was just about to reach out and touch his knee to tell him my great idea when we stopped at an intersection and he looked in my direction with fierce concentration.
At first I could have sworn he was about to accuse me of something, but then I realized he wasn’t looking at me, he was looking out the window on my side. I turned just in time to see the windows rolling down on a black SUV that had pulled up alongside us.
“FUCK! Floor it!”
The driver, behind the privacy barrier, couldn’t hear him and was probably looking ahead at traffic rather than the horrific sight of men with big guns leaning out of the SUV. Panic so intense that it transcended any ability to react gripped me, and I sat there with wide open mouth and eyes as they swung their weapons around to point right at me, though I was probably invisible behind the window.
Jace dived across the car and pulled me towards him as a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard before almost deafened me. If somebody had told me that this was what it sounded like when the earth ripped open and all the demons of hell were unleashed, I wouldn’t have argued.
“Go! Go! Go! Fuck!”
My eyes were shut so tight that I thought my face was going to cramp up. I could barely hear Jace above the cacophony, as a thousand bullets hammered into the side of the car.
It might have been a few seconds or it might have been an hour, but although the assault continued, I was still breathing. Our car leaped forward and crashed straight into the back of the lead car in the convoy, coming to an abrupt halt again.
“Get outta the fuckin’ way!”
If I could barely hear him, the people in the front car had no hope. I cracked my eyes open and peered out in terror through the narrow slits. Jace was holding me against the far side of the car from where the men in the SUV were attacking, covering me as much as he could with his back to them.
Under his armpit I could see that the windows on that side were all rendered impossible to see through because they were shattered with a fine network of cracks. Somehow, aside from the occasional tiny chip that launched off as a bullet hit the outside, they were still intact.
The driver floored it again, and the lead car must have moved out of the way because we didn’t crash into anything this time. Suddenly a bright orange flash coming from behind us lit up the inside of the car, and a split second later I heard the rumble of an explosion. Even in our car, accelerating at top speed, I felt the explosion too.
I was breathing so fast, and my chest hurt with the ferocity of my pounding heart. That was one of the only things that led me to believe I was probably still alive.
Jace pushed himself up and looked back as the car weaved through traffic that I couldn’t see. I tried to get up, but Jace held me down, never taking his eyes off the scene behind us.
I didn’t have the strength, coordination or coherent plan to struggle against him. I was delirious and might have just opened the door and stepped out while we were going full speed.
Through back streets and over sidewalks, Jace’s driver managed to get us back to Jace’s building in record time, driving down the ramp into the underground parking lot so fast that the car bottomed out and I screamed.
We came to a screeching halt and Jace pulled the door handle, forcing it open with his shoulder and stepping out with the same motion. He slipped his arm around me and lifted me out before mostly carrying me towards the door.
A small army of people was swarming around us and Jace was barking instructions that I couldn’t really make out. Under flailing jackets, I saw flashes of holstered handguns as the men hurriedly reported whatever information Jace asked for.
Once inside, we were surrounded all the way to the elevator, where only three of them joined us. Jace leaned me against the wall in the corner and grabbed one of them.
“You and you join the other two upstairs in the choke point. You, head back down and tell them that nobody, nobody, else comes upstairs until I give the OK. Fucking nobody, you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” came the ragged chorus.
“Triple the guard downstairs, get our sharp-shooters in their rooms in the surrounding buildings. Anything could happen tonight. Be ready for it.”
“Yes, sir,” they repeated.