I shook my head. “That’s it? I’ve got a tighter grip on this city than the Mafia has had for over two decades, but this isn’t the way it should be done? This isn’t ‘pure’? You stupid motherfucker. You’ve never even been to Italy. Why the fuck now?”
“Sickening or not, nobody could say you haven’t run a tight ship. Until that pussy got into your head. Things have been slipping and you don’t even care. I noticed. The Picollis noticed. They started poking around a bit more. Word got to me that the person who served your head on a silver platter would be made consigliere when they took their territory back. That sounded a lot better than being a babysitter for a piece of shit.”
“So why didn’t you bring my head on a silver platter? You could have shot me in the back like the chickenshit you are a thousand times by now.”
“That wouldn’t have sent the right message, wouldn’t have made the right example of you to anybody else who thought they could get rid of the Picollis so easily. They wanted it to be out in the open, and they wanted your whore to go down with you.”
“Language, motherfucker. Where are the Picollis based now?”
“Fuck you.”
“Fuck me? Had enough talking? Fine.”
I stood up and walked over to him. He spat at my feet and looked up defiantly. I could only see the fear in his eyes because I knew him so well.
“You deserve to be with the Picollis, so I’m going to send you to where most of them are. You fuckin’ stuck-in-the-past assholes and your fuckin’ symbolism and etiquette. If you had any brains, this is what you should have done.”
I aimed my gun at his head and fired. The first shot killed him instantly, the second added insult, the third proved he did have some brains in that head. At least he used to, now it was sprayed all over my couch. I kept on going.
Chapter 25
Kendall
The feeling that something wasn’t right crept into my dreams and turned them into nightmares long before I was awake. Endless gunfire, explosions, running away from men in pinstripe suits with tommy-guns. I was thankful when everything faded away and I felt myself back in Jace’s bedroom.
I reached out for Jace under the warm covers, but his side of the bed was empty. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and looked around. It was still early morning, if the light was anything to go by.
The silence was better than normal, it was positively soothing to my ears. The way yesterday ended was so loud. Bullets, explosions, hard fucking and screaming orgasms. So damn loud.
This was the first time the whirlwind of events had stopped spinning me around long enough for me to look at my surroundings. The feeling of wrongness followed me from my dreams.
I bunched up my eyebrows as I thought about it. It wasn’t the obvious, getting shot at by a bunch of mobsters wasn’t right, but there was more nagging at me, screaming at me to think.
Mobsters, the Picollis of course. They were the crime family that had been responsible for all the stuff happening lately, but it was hard to imagine what they were coming after Jace for.
The kinds of businesses that Jace was directly responsible for weren’t the kinds of stores that required Mafia protection from common street crime. Had they got pissed off about all the businesses that were refusing to deal with them that were ultimately owned by Jace?
Had Jace turned them down too? He was the kind of man that wouldn’t give in without a fight, so were the Picollis trying to teach him a lesson?
I sat up and winced. My muscles were aching as if I’d spent all day and night in the gym. Shuffling backwards, I arranged the pillows behind me and leaned against the headboard. There was no need to rush this awakening, I supposed.
On Jace’s pillow was a piece of paper with a hastily scribbled note. It said “Wait here. Back Soon. Love, Jace.” A man of few words, but he said the ones that mattered at least.
That sense that something was wrong kept worrying at me. I would ask him about whether he was in trouble with the mob when I saw him. Surely he’d be able to explain it away and I’d feel silly for bringing it up. It sure felt silly when I heard myself asking the question in my head.
Then I remembered how troubled he’d been ever since the Mafia revealed to the world that they were alive and well, despite what the police were telling Lucile and all the other journalists who crowded around at every statement they made to the media. My brow furrowed again.
The police. Why hadn’t we spent all night at a police station giving statements? It wasn’t like they could have failed to notice all the machine gun fire. Something exploded in that street too.
My heart sank. All at once my silly question seemed deadly serious. My Jace was in trouble with the Mafia, he’d refused to make a deal, or he had made a deal and it went bad. That was how these things went, right? Bad?
I gulped. Note or not, I had to ask him, and I had to do it sooner rather than later. Since I’d started staying at Jace’s penthouse more often than my own crappy apartment, I had a small selection of clothes here in a set of drawers against one wall, so I went for that.
As I dressed, I tried to brace myself for the worst. If he had made a mistake and got involved with these people before things went “bad,” that would explain why we hadn’t gone to the police.
What would I do if he’d done that? He could go to jail, couldn’t he? The thought of only being able to see him through a bulletproof glass window, as we spoke to each other over a prison phone, broke my heart.
After pulling on a t-shirt, I took a deep breath and stood as tall as I could. I would stand by him. I’d hold his hand as he went to court. When he faced the media afterwards. Forever. He was the best person I knew, and even if he made that mistake I would stand by him.
With that promise to tell him, in addition to the questions, I stepped out of the bedroom with a renewed sense of purpose. Jace wasn’t in the main open-plan area of his penthouse, it was almost eerie how silent and still everything was.
I peeked around a few corners to the various nooks and blind spots he might have been doing something in, but there was no sign of him. The guns weren’t on top of the bar anymore.
Remembering his face when he was retrieving them made me shiver. Had he ever even shot a gun before? He looked like he knew how to use one, but I hoped he wasn’t planning on doing anything crazy like taking on the mob.
The spare bedroom, also known as the room where we went when the sex was going to get messy like with chocolate body paint, was as empty and quiet as the rest of the penthouse. The only room left was his office, and he’d told me never to go in there because of confidential documents and things that he worked on in there.
The last thing I wanted to do was to cause him to be in breach of some non-disclosure agreement or anything like that, but stakes had been raised to the level of life-or-death yesterday. Every passing second I wasn’t with him made me more nervous. Suddenly, from behind the office door, I heard a strange sound.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
A deep, airy, percussion, over and over again. It sounded like a helicopter’s rotors in super-slow-motion. I gripped the handle and turned it, opening the door on silent hinges.