Levi #6
“You have been recovering from dying...three times!”
He blinked. “I died?”
“Did you not read your discharge papers?”
“Mmm, I did not.”
I squinted at him. “You...oh God, they didn’t discharge you, did they? You just left.”
“Hey, we both know I’m too big and not sneaky enough to do that.”
“Not without help. Who the fuck helped you? Couldn’t be your siblings, no way any of them would have helped you if they thought for a minute you were going to find me and.
..how did you find me?” I asked, and when he didn’t respond, I started putting the pieces together.
My location would have been known to a handful of people, but what specific people would have known?
Who would have suspected something was wrong on my end and thought to call Dom? “Will. I’ll kill him.”
“It is hot and scary how quick you pick up on shit sometimes,” he said with a smile. “But not as much as what you’ve been doing. Which we are going to talk about after this is over, you got it?”
“For fuck’s…” I growled. This definitely put a dent in my grand finale, but that could wait. It was more important to get Leo to agree to my demands and get him out before I dealt with my survival. “Let’s get this over with. You should be glad you’re crippled right now.”
“I’ll be sure to add a thanks for being hit by a van to my prayers,” he said, rolling his eyes. Then he frowned. “Wait, why are you covered in blood?”
I stared at him. “You just now saw that?”
“I was focused on you being alive and not blown the fuck up,” he hissed, picking my hand up and examining it. “What happened?”
“It’s not mine,” I said with a huff. “When we get back to what I was doing, pay attention to the floor beside the table for your answer.”
We walked back out, and before I could say anything, I heard Dom mutter next to me. “Holy fuck, like a goddamn fish. Was that you?”
Leo gave me a deadpan stare. “Are you finished?”
“Yes,” I said calmly, knowing I was caught out in a vulnerable moment and there was nothing I could do but own up to it. “Let this be a lesson...stay single.”
“My ex-wife was a strong enough lesson,” Leo said wryly. “I have to say you are as good a negotiator as you are a general. Augustine chose wisely to invest in you.”
Reg was staring at him, and he didn’t seem to have moved much, but something was bothering me. “I would pass the message along, but if I can be blunt, he wouldn’t put much weight on your words.”
“Augustine is clever enough to know that respect from an enemy should be taken into account,” Leo said as he got to his feet.
“So that brings us to the conclusion and my response to your demands…” It was the knife, the knife wasn’t on the ground anymore, and Reg was closer than he had been when we went behind the board and…
“You have made your point enough for me to—”
Reg’s cry was as insane as it was feral as he leaped forward, the knife covered in his.
..friend’s, lover’s blood? Dom flinched, but this world was mine, and I had already realized what was going on, even if it had been a frenetic jolt of understanding.
I would never have been able to move Dom before, but he was already weak and off balance.
When I yanked on his arm, he yelped in surprise and pain, but he was moved away from the slash that would have caught him across the throat.
I wasn’t as lucky, and I cried out as molten pain flashed across my face and I stumbled, my back slamming into the corner of the table.
Instinct took over as I felt myself topple towards the ground.
I reached out, snagging myself on the table as Dom gave a war cry that would have sent trained fighters scattering.
I kept my footing and flinched as another roar filled the room and made me cringe.
Opening my eyes as best I could, I looked around, the smell of gunpowder acrid in the room, and I looked to see Reg on the ground.
I couldn’t see the hole, but I could see the way the gunshot wound was pouring blood, soaking his shirt, mingling with the splatter of Luis’ blood I had put there.
My vision was blurry, and my face ached, but I clung to the table, shuffling my legs under me to stand, and I never looked away.
Hatred filled his eyes, but there was something else as well.
..despair. I didn’t need to look at Leo to know he had fired the gun, and considering there had been no follow-up shots, he had hit his intended target.
Reg had lost Luis, and I didn’t know if that was a brother, a best friend, a lover, or what, but he had been vital to Reg.
And then he had watched and listened as everything he’d worked for was torn down by the man who was his mentor, and realized his mentor was willing to sell him out and give in to my demand.
Now he was dying and helpless to stop it, betrayed and completely alone, broken even as his body was giving in to its wound.
I would never feel sorry for the pleasure that filled me; it wasn’t nearly as good as the feeling of Dom’s arms wrapped around me in the middle of the night while he slept, but God damn if it wasn’t better than any high I’d ever experienced.
“Levi,” Dom whispered, struggling to get up off his knees. One of his legs was in a brace, and his ankle had been almost broken when he’d been hit. It was a miracle he’d been able to walk at all, and I reached to stop him, then stared at the object on the ground.
“Wait, what the fuck?” I hissed, forgetting about Dom for a moment, or the pain in my face, or the fact that one of my eyes wasn’t working...at all. I bent down, snatching up the detonator and giving it a frustrated shake. “What in the fresh hell?”
“All that planning and you ended up with a defective detonator?” Leo asked.
“No, it was tested, repeatedly,” I growled, giving it another shake.
Dom somehow got to his feet, glancing at Reg, who was gurgling. He winced before looking at me and reaching out. “Levi—”
“It’s gone, I know,” I said, thinking of the eye I couldn’t see out of. “What the fuck?”
Dom sighed. “God, why are you like this? Look.”
I did, with the one eye that was working and squinted, winced when I realized that made my screaming eye want to shriek, and I sputtered. “Is that a fucking signal blocker?”
“Keyed specifically to the frequency used in detonators,” he said with a smile, and then held it up to Leo. “Which can be turned off if I hit this switch, so don’t get any ideas.”
Leo gave a world-weary sigh and gestured to Reg.
“That is my answer to your demands, Levi. I will be lucky to keep my head after all this. Without either of these two to take the blame for their failures, it will fall on me. But you will get what you demanded. We cannot manage the force to come to Cresson Point, and you have played Russian Roulette with the lives of who knows how many of our leaders. They will not risk it.”
“That was the point,” I said, adrenaline no longer pumping through my system, and I could feel the pain in my face and my goddamn eye growing stronger.
I grit my teeth. “And point out that they have been punished. Luis was gutted by someone he thought was weak prey, and he died realizing he wasn’t as great and invincible as he thought.
And let’s be honest, Reg died a failure, having watched Luis die in front of him, and killed by you, absolutely betrayed. ”
“There is that,” Leo said thoughtfully. He looked me over. “You’ll get an official response from us, and I expect you’ll hear what you want. But...is there anything else?”
“No, but you’ll find your escort is gone,” I told him with a shrug. “I wasn’t going to risk the men those two definitely brought with them, storming the building before I conveyed what I needed from you...or forcing me to blow the building before you passed along my contingencies.”
Leo sighed. “I can drive myself. A shame, some of those men were still useful.”
“If I’ve learned anything, it’s that good men might be hard to find, but they can be found,” I said, really wanting him to leave so I could properly deal with everything that had just happened.
“We’ll see,” Leo said. “I won’t say it was good doing business with you, Levi. But it was...educational. At this point, all I have left is the hope that you choose this one instead of The Family.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, the pain growing stronger than my ability to focus and keep up with the conversation.
He chuckled. “What? You think you can stay in The Family and keep this one? Do that for too long, and everyone will agree he’s going to be part of The Family, even if he denies it. And when enough time has passed—”
Leo left it at that, but I didn’t need him to finish to keep up with his train of thought and let the implications sink in as he stepped over Reg and let himself out of the room, his amusement lingering.
There was nothing I could say to counter what he’d said, and I was left to stand there, stunned as I realized that although I had won this battle, it had not been a flawless victory.
“Fuck,” I whispered.
I was going to have to move out of the country and change my name if I didn’t want Dom to hunt me down, because there was no other way I was going to get away from him, obvious threat or not.
At least he and the others are safe.
Yes, there was that. Even with my original plan, I wasn’t going to have him anyway, but once again I felt a spark of hope, and the disappointment that followed those moments never failed to sting.
I hissed, my hand coming up to gingerly cover my face as I bent down and hung there for a moment.
My face was on fire, and I didn’t dare touch anything for fear of making my injury worse, but I knew I was forever going to be seeing out of one eye.
I knew part of the wetness against my hand wasn’t just blood, but the useless sack of eye that. ..God, what a mess.
“Levi...Levi, I need you to get up because I’m not sure I can get you up by myself,” Dom said, sounding desperate. “Please.”
It was that admission of weakness more than anything that made me suck in a breath and get to my feet so I could look at him.
He looked like absolute hell, but he was there, he was alive, he was in one piece, a recovering piece but whole all the same.
I couldn’t say the same about myself, and I held my hand to my face as I stared at him and felt.
..oh, I felt one eye pricking with the sharp needles of tears that wanted to slide down my face.
“I lost my eye,” I said, and the sound that came out of me would have been better suited to a particularly moody donkey.
“Shh,” he said, his eyes wide as if bewildered, and pulled me in close. “I got you, Levi. I got you. It’s going to be okay.”
“I don’t think it is,” I muttered against his chest. “You ruined everything, you asshole.”
“I’m good at that, just ask Micah.”
“I don’t think I like being compared to your moody teenage nephew.”
“Well—”
“Bastard,” I muttered in a thick voice.
“Come on, we need to get you to the hospital,” he said. “I don’t think your personal doctor is going to be enough for this.”
“Probably not,” I said softly. Nic would have been able to do it. I knew she could reattach limbs if she was paid enough and given what she needed, but I didn’t have the strength to argue.
“Come on,” he said, and helped me along, or tried to anyway. It was a miracle he’d managed to walk as much as he had on his own, so it was really both of us walking out of the building and into the parking lot where his truck waited.
“I can walk, unlike you,” I said, moving toward the driver’s side.
“Okay, Cyclops, but I have two eyes.”
I turned toward him. “Really?”
“What?”
“Jesus. Fine. You drive, clearly you can do that much.”
“Someone’s cranky.”
“I’m sure if you think hard on that, you’ll figure out why my mood might be soured,” I grumbled as I got into the passenger seat, the truck rocking as he got in on the driver’s side.
“So who exactly were those two guys?” he asked as he started the truck up.
“When was the last time you had this truck serviced?” I asked as I heard a clicking sound that definitely shouldn’t have been there.
“Levi.”
“That was Reg and Luis. Remember the explosion that scraped me up weeks ago?”
“Right...them?”
“Them.”
“And the guys who hit me?”
“Theirs.”
“Right. And the first dead guy?”
“Yeah, that was me.”
“Sheesh,” he said with a frown as he drove off. “I’ll get back to you on that one. Right around the time that the image doesn’t make me want to throw up.”
I couldn’t help but smile. “Normally, I’d say you get used to it, but that’s a lie; you never actually do. But even so, I’d never want you to get used to it.”
I was forgetting something.
“I don’t like that you’re used to it,” he said.
No, we were forgetting something.
I leaned the good side of my face against the window as he rolled to an unnecessary stop at an empty intersection. “Better that I’m used to it than you ever needing to try to get used to it. I would do all this again if I needed to.”
What the hell was it?
“That’s sweet and all, but—”
“Dom?”
“Don’t pull a speech on me, Levi. I’m not in the mood.”
“Where’s the signal blocker?”
“The—”
We both flinched, the truck screeching to a halt as a ball of fire flew into the air above us, and I watched debris rain down through the side mirror.
It wasn’t enough explosives to destroy the entire office building, but there was a giant flaming hole in the middle of it for sure.
It had been more than enough to take out anyone in the meeting room and anyone unlucky or stupid enough to be outside it as well.
“Does your insurance cover uh—”
“Acts of gang war?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
“It’s nice to see insurance is just as useless for gang bosses as it is for the rest of us.”
“At least clean up will be easier. I’ll have Will work on handling the investigation.
..and arranging a few meetings with the police to make sure they know everything has calmed down,” I said, wanting to scowl but knowing that moving my facial muscles might make me pass out.
“That is, if I don’t strangle him first, interfering busybody. ”
“I should probably call him, get our story straight. Because this was definitely not the kind of rescue mission I thought I’d be doing.”
“Say what now?”
“I’m not good at this shit like you are, but hey, there might be a way to get you back on the right side of things.”
“Excuse me?”
“God, Augustine is going to have a field day with us after this.”
“Fucking what?”