Chapter 25
TWENTY-FIVE
MARCELLO
I’m in my office watching the camera feed from the kitchen. Blair came over to do Ellie’s hair, and hearing the laughing and happiness coming from both of them makes my heart happy.
I’m trying to distract myself from what I need to do.
Call Dario and his crew in for help.
I want to live in the delusion for a day, so I plan to do just that. I’ll call him later when the guys are back home.
Home .
? * This isn’t their home, but a part of me wants it to be. Even with both of them living across the hall, I can’t lie and say I don’t like having them in my line of sight, knowing all three of them are safe. With the camera feed from the kitchen on half of my screen and the stadium feed on the other half, watching Nash and Zamir’s practice, I can relax and get some much-needed work done.
Before I know it, a couple of hours have passed, and my phone vibrating on my desk pulls my eyes off my computer screens. I look over, and it is Nash. Sliding the bar to accept the call, I answer, “Are you okay, Il Novellino ?!”
I look over, and the stadium is cleared out. The background noise coming through my phone sounds like they’re in the car. “Right now, yes. But Zamir and Rhett think we’re being tailed.” I sent Rhett and Dino with them today for protection, not really thinking anyone would pop out so soon after us finding Nash and Ellie, but apparently, they’ve had other plans ready to go.
“Did they not learn the last time they pulled this shit?” I huff through the phone. I’m up out of my desk chair to go see what Ellie is doing.
Nash says, “Apparently not.” And I can hear the gears shifting in whatever car they decided to take today.
“I’ll call Noah and get him to pull from the cameras around to see if we can figure out who this is coming after us now,” I say as I walk out to the kitchen.
“Blair, can you get Noah on the phone? We need him to run cameras, but I don’t want to hang up with the guys.”
Ellie snaps her head over, asking me, “Are they okay?!”
“Yes. They have a tail right now. Nothing has happe—” I’m cut off by gunshots ringing through the speaker. Ellie gasps, then snatches Blair’s phone out of her gloved hands.
She dials Vin from what I can see over her shoulder, but Noah answers instead, “Butternut Biscuit, did you already miss me?”
The growl that comes from deep within my chest catches even me off guard, but we don’t have the time to focus on Noah’s tomfoolery right now.
“Noah, it’s Ellie. Nash and Zamir are being tailed as we speak, coming home from practice. Can you pull from the cameras around there and see if you can figure out who it is?”
“On it, boss.” I can hear his keyboard clacking away, and then he adds, “Marcello is Boss Daddy… you know what that makes you, Ellie?” He pauses a beat. “Boss Mami.”
Everyone besides me starts laughing, even Nash on the phone while he’s actively getting shot at. “You are all children.” I focus back on what’s happening. “Who’s driving Nash?”
“Zamir is.” I can picture him looking over at him in this moment. “He’s doing a damn good job at it too.”
“Nash, your teeth are next. You were not this happy while I was driving the getaway car.” Ellie huffs like she is serious, but the smile on her face says otherwise.
“Rhett, Dino, keep them safe.” I think for a second and then tell them, “Give Nash a gun and let him shoot.” He can put some of those sharpshooter skills to good use.
I hear the telltale sound of metal crushing. “Update—I don’t like not being able to see this.”
Noah walks through the door with his laptop, flipping his screen around. “Eyes are on them.” I watch as Nash’s window rolls down. He has his black hood up so you can’t see his face, not that Noah won’t be scrubbing all of this footage in seconds anyway, but they can never be too cautious. His body is out the window, and he aims at the driver’s side of the windshield and fires.
The black unmarked car looks like it stops gaining on them and eventually steers off into the sandy shoulders of the road.
Fuck, that was probably the first time he’s shot someone and not just a target at a range. Noah’s now sitting in front of Ellie at the table, working on what I’m sure is scrubbing the guy’s existence from ever being there. “Run that plate, too,” I instruct.
“Already did. Stolen car, so that doesn’t help us.”
If I had been with them, I would have turned the car around and dragged them from the car, but I didn’t want to risk Nash and Zamir, especially with them not being heavily armed. I need to keep them in this apartment until we can figure out where Zamir’s dad is hiding and end this all once and for all.
Ellie’s voice pulls me out of the spiral I was heading down in my mind when she says to Blair, “I want to chop my hair.”
Blair hesitantly agrees. “I only feel okay about doing this during a menty B because I’m just as good with extensions.” I would say she got her cockiness from my sister, but I think it may just be the one trait she got from me… and she’s not wrong; she is just as good with extensions.
I’m watching Noah’s screen with the phone trackers on Nash and Zamir, ensuring they’re almost here. I have messages from Rhett and Dino filling me in on what happened in code words, in case anyone ever gets through Noah’s encryption, per our protocol.
Ellie and Blair are done rinsing her color out, and Blair has the back of her hair chopped off as the guys enter the door.
“Honey, we’re home!” Nash yells through the apartment, then abruptly stops when he sees everyone right in front of him.
“For what I’m guessing is your first kill, you sure are peachy,” I joke but with a slight edge to my voice. I don’t want him hiding and shoving these feelings down. I know that had to be a big deal to him. So I add, “We’re all here for you if you need to talk. All of us have killed in some way. Don’t stuff these feelings down. That never works well for anyone, I promise.”
“I won’t. I know it should probably be a bigger deal to me… but after going through what we just did”—he looks at Ellie with the saddest puppy dog eyes—“I refuse to let anyone even threaten our safety. I don’t really care if that makes me a bad person or not.”
That brings a shocking smile to my face. I love this little bastard already, but I’m sure as hell keeping that to myself… for now.
I wake up covered by the limbs of the large bodies surrounding me, but I don’t try to free myself. That was the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a long fucking time. I’m basking in each of their presences and trying my hardest not to move and wake any of them up.
Thirty minutes pass without any of them moving, and I have to call Dario to fill him in, letting them know we need his crew up here to take Zamir’s dad down. He might be in deeper than I ever imagined, especially since he’s taken his own brother out for more power.
I also want Alex to fly in since he’s the only one in the ranks left, and we need to protect him if he truly doesn’t have anything to do with any of this. The way they kept him in the dark, though, I highly doubt he has any information, let alone had his hands in all of this. But I don’t doubt for one second Agron doesn’t want Alex dead too. That man is the epitome of power hungry, willing to get rid of anything in his path to more money and power.
It makes me sick to think of the resemblance to my father. All of our fathers are cut from the same cloth, the harshest synthetic fabric of your nightmares.
Somehow, I slither to the end of my bed, freeing my body without waking them. If I didn’t just get my shit knocked in by Ellie, I would have a little fun with my Ragazza Dolce while she’s sleeping so peacefully.
Standing at the end of the bed, I admire her little sighs of breath and her bare chest moving up and down. I let my eyes roam over Zamir’s body next and briefly consider what it would be like if he let me play with his beautiful body while he’s sleeping. The body of a trained killer and professional athlete. Just the thought of him trusting me that much sends a flicker of power through me that I know is only a fraction of what I’d feel in that moment. It’s almost unspeakable. But my eyes always land back on my Ellie. And my mind races back to that intake kink quiz from Sin’s.
But I would like to keep the rest of my teeth intact…
She’ll work up to loving it again, I know it.
Floating into my office, I feel rested and ready to tackle the pile of emails that I still have in my inbox. It’s truly astonishing how many emails I deal with, and I am seriously contemplating getting an assistant solely to deal with my inbox. But I’m too much of a control freak regarding my businesses… I never want to become so desensitized to what’s happening in the day-to-day and how my employees are being treated by the management I have in my establishments.
Before I know it, hours have passed, and there’s a knock on my office door. Ellie walks in holding a plate of food that smells way too good to be anything I had in the freezer and a huge glass of water. “Nash and Zamir are right where they belong… the kitchen.”
I smile up at her as she sets my plate down on my desk. “This isn’t poisoned, is it?”
“Damn it.” She smacks her leg. “I missed my perfect opportunity.” She fake pouts. “And it wouldn’t be poison… it would just be something to make you a little sleepy so I could play.” The playful but equally wicked grin should scare me, but she’s so fucking cute when she acts like this.
“You would never.” I side eye her, acting like I’m actually suspicious, but this isn’t her game. She does things in front of your face. She’s sure as hell not the sneaky type. She shrugs and walks out the door before I can ask her any more questions.
“Eat, and drink your fucking water, dick head, or I really won’t have to poison you, you’ll end up killing yourself.”
Aww, she cares about me.
Nash and Zamir just got back from their late practice, and they walk in with some delicious-smelling Thai food. Thankfully, while they were out, there weren’t any tails or shootings tonight.
That reminds me, I need to call Dario.
We all eat in relative silence, and once we’re finished, I quickly pull my phone out and finally decide to call Dario down in Texas. I question Nash as I’m listening to the ringing coming through my phone speaker, “Nash, have you talked to your sister since you and Ellie have been back?”
The worry on his face says it all. “No… I completely forgot to call her and tell her what happened. Why?”
“I have a close friend down where you’re from in Texas who owes me a favor. So I called him up, letting him know we may need help because you and Ellie were taken from us, and he knew exactly who you were…” I refuse to be the one to rat out his sister for being in a relationship. To my knowledge, he has no clue about it.
His brows pull together, but Dario’s voice answering the phone breaks the silence. “Barone.”
“Ramos.” He doesn’t say anything, so I don’t waste any more of his time. “Nash and Ellie are safe, but we need you up here. This is all running deeper than I ever imagined possible.”
“We have a bigger issue down here…” Well, there goes that idea of them coming up here to help. “Willow and Sonny have been taken too. They’ve been gone for two days. We’ve been tearing this city apart looking for them, but?—”
“We will be down there in a couple of hours. Let me call my pilot.”
“I’ll fill you in on the rest of the shit we’ve figured out, but I think all of this may be linked to the same people.”
* ? Lithonia - Childish Gambino