Still a Bad Boy: A New Adult Romantic Suspense (13 page)

Jace

I didn’t get much sleep that night.  Between rage-fucking Kendall and a few phone calls, I had more than enough to keep me occupied.

After Kendall fell asleep the first time, I talked to the guys downstairs to check the damage on the other decoy convoys.  They didn’t get hit, just mine.

None of my guys
in
the convoys knew where we were going or who was driving me until I arrived and told them.  The only other person, aside from me, who knew ahead of time which convoy I’d be in and where I was planning on going was the man who made the security plans.  Lorenzo.  Fucking Lorenzo.

I was lucky he had no idea just how extensively modified all my cars were, or the Picollis might have got some bigger guns.  Or a rocket launcher like my men in the rear car used on that SUV.  That would have been a different story.  I’d be dead.  Kendall would be dead.

The thought made me fucking seethe.  He’d told me that no good would come of my getting mindfucked by a girl.  He’d told me to mark his words.  Well, I was going to mark that motherfucker’s
last
words today.

The sun was coming up now, and Kendall was in a deep slumber next to me.  After last night she might be walking funny for a while, but there wasn’t a scratch on her from the attack.

That was Lorenzo’s saving grace.  For that reason, and because we’d been through a lot of shit together, I was going to give him a chance to go out with some dignity and I wasn’t going to make his execution a public one.  He could still fuck that chance up though.

I carefully swung my feet on to the floor and wrote a short note for Kendall, leaving it on my pillow, before walking into my wardrobe.  What do you wear when you’re about to kill the man who has been the closest thing to a friend you’ve ever had?

The answer is, the same thing you’ll wear to his funeral.  I picked a dark suit and shoes polished so well that their surface looked like deep, wet, ink.  The gun holster even matched.

Kendall didn’t stir as I slipped out of the bedroom.  The first thing I did was call Stefano, one of my senior men who was currently running the team downstairs.  I told him that if Lorenzo tried to leave, to haul his ass up here by any means necessary.

Then I called Lorenzo, who I knew from earlier calls in the night was in a suite downstairs.  I knew now it was because it would have looked suspicious if he was anywhere else but here after what happened yesterday.

“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he answered.  “About time, we need to do some damage control, huh?”

“Yeah we do.  Come on up.”

“Be there in a few minutes.”

I waited by my door until I heard the elevator play the arrival tone and opened up before security could give him the spiel about nobody being allowed in under the boss’ orders.  Lorenzo walked in, putting on a good show of ignorant business-as-usual.  I held my finger up to my lips.

“Shh.  Kendall’s still asleep.  Into my office.  After you.” I gestured in the general direction and Lorenzo led the way.

I kept my eyes glued to him like a hawk.  Even after we were in my office, when he was heading towards the far couch and I was screwing a silencer on to the end of my gun, I watched that sneaky motherfucker.

By the time he sat down and looked up again, I was standing over him and the muzzle of the gun was about an inch from his head.

“Jace, what the f-”

“Shut up, cunt, and listen carefully.  I want you to know something.  I know what you did, and you are going to
die
today.  Nothing can stop this.  You have no control over that.  What you
do
control is how much it hurts, how many more minutes you’ve got, and how much dignity you go out with.  All of those things depend on how much you’ve got to tell me and how much I like what I hear.  We’ve been through some gruesome shit, Lorenzo, but I promise you, you have no idea what I’m capable of.  You don’t want to find out.  Got it?”

This was it.  On the slim chance that I was wrong, he’d protest his innocence to the grave.  If he did what I thought he did, he knew me well enough to know when I was serious and I knew him well enough to know that he’d go out like the stoic Mafia tough guy he always saw himself as.

I could see a thousand possible outs flash through his mind.  He started almost as many words, but never got them out before he calmed down and resignation washed over him.

“Fuck you, you had it coming, kid,” he said.

“Gun.”

He handed it over.

“Other gun.  Knife.”

I brought all his weapons back to the couch opposite him and took a seat, my own gun on the armrest and still pointing right at him.

“Why?” I said.

“I may not have liked every decision the Picollis made, but at least they weren’t disrespecting our heritage, the families back home, everything we ever fuckin’ stood for.  These bullshit deals with redneck motherfucker biker gangs, all this money you flash around acting like a playboy.  It makes me sick to my fuckin’ stomach how close you are to having a reality TV show.”

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.

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.

The scene inside wouldn’t have been out of place in a horror movie.  A corpse that looked like it might have been Jace’s colleague, Lorenzo, was slumped on a couch with blood and gore sprayed out behind him on one side, bright red on the white fabric.

Five or more bullet holes peppered his chest and standing over him was Jace,
my
Jace, reloading a gun before pointing it at Lorenzo and pulling the trigger again and again.

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!

Lorenzo didn’t even twitch when the bullets hit him, he was dead, but Jace emptied his gun anyway, like a madman.  A psycho with no regard for human life. 
My
Jace… oh God.  I let out a horrified strangled sound as my trembling hands covered my mouth.  He looked at me, gun still pointing at the corpse, and I froze.

“Kendall, I-”

Hearing my name shocked me out of whatever daze I was in and I screamed, spinning on my heel and scrambling for grip with socks on the smooth floor.  For the second time in as many days, I was running for my life.

My heart almost overheated and ground to a halt while I was fumbling at the front door and I could hear him getting closer and closer.  I opened it and fled into the hallway, seeing Jace’s security team reach for their weapons and then think better of it, merely moving to block my path to the elevator.

The closest one stopped me in my tracks, holding me by both arms as I struggled to fight him off.  The others crowded around, trying to control my flailing arms.

“Let me go!” I screamed.  “I’ll call the cops! He’s killed him!”

“Sir?” one of them asked.

“Let her go, right now,” came Jace’s voice.

“Are you s-”

“Right
fucking
now.  Kendall, please, let me explain…”

The men let me go and I pushed between them in a mad dash for the doors ahead of me.  I pressed the button and, mercifully, the elevator made its little beep sound straight away and the doors opened.

“Wait-”

Somebody’s phone rang as I entered the elevator and one of the security guys answered it.  He listened for a moment, cursed, and then paused again.

“Sir, you need to listen to this,” said the guard.

With eyes blurred from tears, I turned to press the button for the ground floor and took my first and only look back.  Jace was standing between the elevator and his security guards, looking at me with a phone pressed to his ear.  My vision was too fuzzy to catch his expression, but I could see he was still holding that gun.

I slept with a murderer…