BOW DOWN: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Barone Crime Family) (15 page)

I
t was
around two in the morning when I was woken up by the sound of someone pounding on our hotel room door. Groggy, I rolled out of bed and slipped into my gym shorts. I took a pistol from my side table and stepped out into the living room.

Ethan was already there, a gun in his hands. He looked through the peephole then looked back at me, grinning.

“It’s for you,” he said and walked off, back into his room

Confused, I went to the door and looked out.

Louisa was standing there, looking angry. I’d never seen her look so fucking angry before, and for half a second it turned me on. I wondered what could possibly piss her off so much, and what she would be like to fuck while she was in such a state.

Smile on my face, I pulled open the door. “Good evening, Louisa,” I said.

“Inside.” She pushed in past me without so much as a greeting.

Frowning, I closed the door behind her and followed her in.

“Drink?” I asked, pouring myself one.

She whirled on me. “Fuck you, Wyatt.”

That was confusing. “Well okay, if you insist.”

“You asshole. Was this a setup the whole time?”

“Now you’ve lost me.” I sipped my drink and took a closer look at her.

She was clearly exhausted and sweaty. I knew that the attack on the ship was tonight, but as far as I knew, she was safe back in her house the whole time. Instead, she was wearing a combat outfit, and I was pretty sure she had blood splattered on her pants.

“The ship was a decoy,” she said. “It was a fucking trap.”

“What?” I nearly dropped my glass.

“It was a trap,” she repeated. “Do you now how many people we lost tonight?”

“No,” I said softly.

“Too many.”

“Is that your blood?”

She glanced down at herself. “No, it’s not.”

“Louisa.” I stepped toward her.

She recoiled from me. “Don’t come near me, you bastard.”

“Do you think I had something to do with this?”

“You’ve been working with my father for a long time, Wyatt. He’s given you a lot of money. I trusted you, but this? It’s too convenient.”

“I had nothing to do with this,” I said simple. “I’m not working for Arturo. Everything I’ve told you is true.”

“Bullshit. How could he set this trap up? You’re the only person that told us about this.”

“Louisa, listen to yourself. Why would I risk all that I’ve risked just to send you to some stupid trap that didn’t even catch you?”

“Because you’re a stupid, petty man only interested in himself.”

I clenched my jaw. “You’re going too far.”

“Too far? I lost lives tonight, Wyatt.”

“Arturo lied to me. How he knew that I was working with you, I have no idea. But he must have figured it out, because I had nothing to do with this trap.”

She stepped toward me, anger still in her eyes. “Everything you’ve told me to do has been wrong. Everything. The men, the money, the guns, it was all wrong. We were better off before you showed up.”

I knocked back my drink then put it down on the table. “You’re wrong,” I said. “You had no chance of beating your father without me. I got you manpower, I got you money, I got you guns, and I gave you a good plan. I couldn’t have foreseen this, but you’re not beaten yet.”

“No, we’re not. But we’re not going to have anything to do with you.”

I stared at her, shocked and angry.

I couldn’t believe she was accusing me of this. It was absurd and fucking insane that she would think I had anything to do with setting her up. Arturo must have known that I was working with the Spiders somehow, or maybe the ship was always meant to be a trap for them. Maybe I was just one bait among many.

Either way, I risked myself for them. I exposed myself to Arturo. He knows that I’m a spy now, and I’m going to have to run. I can’t stand up against the whole mafia on my own, even as an elected official.

And clearly Louisa wasn’t going to help me now, either. I was betrayed by Arturo and I was betrayed by Louisa, all because of a misunderstanding.

She didn’t even want me to explain. I could see it in her eyes. She wasn’t going to listen no matter what I said. As far as she was concerned, I was the enemy, and that was the end of it.

“Okay Louisa,” I said to her. “If that’s all you have to say, then please leave.”

That seemed to surprise her. She shook her head after a second. “Of course. That’s enough of an admission for me,”

“Don’t misunderstand,” I said forcefully. “I had nothing to do with Arturo. But now he knows I was working with you, and I need to get the fuck out of town before he kills me.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I know. But do me a favor and leave so that I can save myself, since you’ve decided to betray me.”

She opened her mouth to speak then thought better of it. “Okay Wyatt,” she said, calmer than before. “Good luck to you.”

“Goodbye, Louisa.”

She gave me one last, lingering look, and then left the room. The door clicked softly shut behind her.

I stood there in the dark, feeling like a wrecking ball destroyed me. I felt like my guts were ripped out and shoved back down my throat.

I didn’t think I’d be this hurt by her leaving, but it fucking destroyed me. I hadn’t realized how deep into that I had gotten.

But she thought I was a traitor, and that broke me the hardest. I’d done nothing but try and help her and her girls, and now she was casting me aside.

My plan was fucking good. We got fucked one time, and suddenly she decided that I was the problem.

I wasn’t the problem. Arturo Barone was.

But now I couldn’t do shit about that, or at least not yet. I had to get out of Chicago alive before I could worry about hitting Arturo in revenge.

Ethan stepped from his room. “We need to go,” he said.

“I’ll pack. We’ll leave in ten minutes.”

He nodded and disappeared back into his room.

I slowly walked toward mine. I put on some clothes and slipped the gun into the waistband of my pants. I threw my shirt into a suitcase, or at least everything that wasn’t already packed. I took one last look around and then left.

Ethan was waiting for me in the hall. We quickly got into the elevator and rode it downstairs.

Hotels are strange beasts late at night. They aren’t completely dead and asleep, because there are always at least a couple of people on-duty, especially at the expensive places. There are usually a few drunks sitting around the lobby, too, waiting to sober up, or maybe just unwilling to go face another night of sleep.

Once we got into the lobby, we went out the back way. Ethan scouted out ahead while I hung back in the shadows, my mind racing, worrying about Louisa, shocked and angry that she had betrayed me like this.

That’s what happens when you let yourself get close to someone. They break you and betray you.

I was angry, but I wasn’t angry at Louisa. I was angry at Arturo Barone for making me look like a fucking fool.

Nobody did that to me, not to Wyatt Carter. Nobody made me look foolish. I didn’t care that Arturo was the leader of a powerful mafia family, I was going to find a way to bring him down. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon I’d plunge a knife into his chest and smile as he bled to death in front of me.

That fucking bastard deserved it.

Five minutes later, a car pulled up in front of me. Ethan rolled down the window. “Get in,” he said.

“Stealing cars now?”

“Best way to get past the mafia thugs stationed all over the fucking place.”

I quickly went down and got into the car.

“Understood.”

“Sit low.” He began to drive.

As we drove, I moved forward in my seat. I caught a glimpse of a car with two men sitting in it as we drove out of the exit and headed down the highway.

“Stay down,” Ethan said. “We have a long drive. Might as well get some sleep.”

“Where to?”

He shrugged. “We’ll figure that out in the morning.”

“Alright.”

“I’ll keep us alive for the next few days. You figure out how to keep us alive well into the future.”

“I will,” I grunted.

We drove in silence from there, back out into the night, and I began to plan my revenge.

I
couldn’t find
his computer on the internet anywhere. When I finally managed to track his cellphone signal, all I saw was that he was headed west out of the city before it mysteriously vanished.

I had no clue where Wyatt was going, but there was some voice in side of me that kept saying that I had made a horrible mistake.

As a few days passed, that feeling grew stronger. Kasia was adamant that it was Wyatt who betrayed us, and wouldn’t hear a single word about maybe looking into it. As far as she was concerned, Wyatt was dead and that was the end of the story.

But I knew that it wasn’t. So much didn’t make any sense. For example, if he was playing us, why did he get me that money to buy those guns? Why did he introduce us to the Swede? He didn’t need to do that. My father would never ask him to do that because it was just completely unnecessary. He could have done something else that wasn’t arming his opponents. Instead, he gave us guns and ammunition that we were going to use to kill the people he worked for.

There were other things, little things, like the way he looked at me or the way he kissed me. Maybe he was faking all of that, but I couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t that kind of man. I believed him when he talked about his past, and told me that he never wanted to become like his parents. He wanted to help the city, to make it better.

The question was, did he think that working with my father was that way to do that?

I couldn’t imagine that was true. The only thing that suggested he was working with my father was the ambush. But there were other explanations for that.

For example, my father somehow figured out that Wyatt was working with me. Or maybe he didn’t, and was just trying to find a leak in his organization by letting slip things like that then seeing who leaked it to us. Or any other number of issues greater and smaller could explain it.

Or he was a traitor. I kept coming back to that, but the way he made me feel, the way he touched me, I just couldn’t see it.

A few days after the attack, we began to pack up the safe house. Kasia insisted that we move. Wyatt had seen too much, knew too much about it. Even though the building had been built at incredible expense and was essentially a fortress, we couldn’t risk it. The mafia could easily trap us in there and starve us out slowly.

Leaving that safe house wasn’t an easy decision to make. It was one of the first projects I undertook, and it had saved many, many lives. But I knew Kasia was right. If Wyatt was a traitor, then my father knew about the safe house.

But if Wyatt was a traitor, why was he on the run?”

It only took us a day to pack the essentials. The gravely injured men had both died, and so we didn’t have to worry about transporting them. The men that were left remained loyal, or at least Roger Dean assured me that. We were paying them more, since we had excess cash now that the other mercenaries had died before getting their payment.

We had other places scattered throughout the city. It felt strange to be moving to one of those houses, one that wasn’t nearly so protected, but at least it was more secret.

Kasia and I stood together in the first underground room, surveying the empty space. Most of the girls had been packed away and were already moving, spreading throughout the city.

“It’s strange, leaving here,” she said to me.

“I know.”

“This is the first place you brought me. Remember?”

“I remember a scared little girl that didn’t know how to use a Kalashnikov.”

She smiled. “That girl is long gone.”

“Good.”

“She was weak. But that weakness is gone now.”

“Don’t get too hard, Kasia.”

“We need hardness now. I’ll be too hard so that the other girls don’t need to be.”

I smiled at her sadly. “I hope you don’t need to do that. I hope you let someone in one day.”

“Like you did?”

That stung. “Yes, like I did.”

“He’s gone, Lou. He’s gone and he isn’t coming back.”

“I know that.”

“He was a traitor. He got your people killed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Not maybe.” She turned to me, her expression serious. “You have to let it go. You have to let him go. We can still win this, but we need you.”

I nodded. “I’m here. I’m not leaving.”

“We need all of you. Please. This is for the best.”

“I can’t say that I agree with you. But it’s what we’re doing.”

She sighed. “I used to think you were strange. Did you know that?”

I grinned at her. “No way.”

“You come off as very detached and weird to the people that meet you.”

“I had no clue.”

She smiled softly. “But since getting to know you, I’ve realized that you’re the most passionate woman I know. You care more than I can ever understand. It’s because of you that we’ve survived this long, and that we continue to fight. That mind is beautiful, Louisa, and we need it. Let go of that man and come back.”

I understood what she was saying. I knew that she meant well. But I felt things with Wyatt that I never thought I’d feel again.

I had closed off my heart. I shut out the world. I locked myself in my room and hated men, hated the way the world worked, and from that hate I birthed the Spiders. That hatred was a powerful thing, an incredibly powerful thing. It gave me strength that I never knew I could have.

But Wyatt gave me something else. I didn’t know how to name it, maybe didn’t have a name for it anymore, but it was more than desire. It was different from hate. It was an entirely different kind of strength, maybe even more powerful than my hatred had been.

That was gone now. I had a hard time accepting that the man who could make me feel something again would betray me, but I had no other choice. I forced him to leave, and now I was forced to leave as well, or at least to leave my home. He was on the run, and I was going to have to run, too.

That was my only option.

“Come on,” I said to Kasia. “Let’s get out of here. We have some bastards to murder.”

She smiled. “Sounds good to me.”

We walked together to the elevator. I said goodbye to my home in my mind as the doors slowly shut.