Chapter 6
Savvy
“You should get some antibiotic ointment on that cut,” Cassie says, staring at the slice a tree branch took out of my cheek.
I glance down at the iPad propped up against the mirror of my bathroom while I’m trying to clean it to find her frowning at me.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, what? You obviously want to say it, so say it.”
She laughs. “If you want me to tell you I told you so, I will, but I don’t think it would make either of us feel any better.”
I grab the tube of ointment from the medicine cabinet and show it to her so she can see I’ve taken her advice about the antibiotic.
“Why do you need to feel better? It wasn’t you who was kidnapped and—” I cut myself off, remembering I didn’t tell her about what happened when Gabriel came to the room I was being held in.
How exactly do you tell your friend you were spanked and then almost brought to the most intense orgasm of your life as punishment for trying to scam one of the most powerful mafia families in Chicago?
Once I had his name, everything clicked into place.
The Valenti family runs almost all of the underground gambling rings in the city, along with a handful of clubs to keep them legitimate in the eyes of the IRS. I’ve heard the name uttered with fear laced through it.
If I’d known that pawn shop belonged to the Valentis, I wouldn’t have even gone inside. But I didn’t have time for the research. And now, I’m out the money I owe Vincent Ricci, and I’ve made an enemy of the Valenti family.
“Kidnapped and what?” Cassie asks when I go silent. “Did he do that to your cheek?”
“No,” I answer immediately. I have no reason to believe it, but I know in my gut he wouldn’t hurt me like that. Which is stupid, because the man had no hesitation ripping off his belt to spank me.
And not just a little warning tap, but an actual punishing, bruising spanking.
I have a small mark on my left cheek to prove it.
My face gets red just thinking about it.
Ugh! Something is wrong with me, and more than I usually think.
“How did you cut yourself then? Start from the beginning.”
“I already told you what happened at the beginning. This happened when I climbed down the tree to get out of the house.” I touch the edge of the cut and hiss.
I should have cleaned it right away when I got home. But the five-mile hike back to my apartment after my escape left me exhausted. By the time I got home, the sun was almost up, and I collapsed onto the couch for a five-minute nap.
Cassie’s call five hours later woke me up.
“I feel like you left a few things out. Like, did you talk to him when you were at his house? Did you even see him after he threw you in that trunk?”
A banging on the front door of my apartment distracts me from her question. I pull back from the mirror, going to the bathroom door to listen for more noise.
The neighbors slam doors when they’re fighting, and they fight a lot. But the noise comes again, and it’s definitely coming from my front door.
“What is that?” Cassie asks from the iPad.
“I don’t know. Someone’s at the door.” I pick up the device and bring it with me.
“Ask who it is first,” she chimes in as I approach the door where another set of bangs happen.
I bring the screen up to my face so she can see my eye roll clearly. Then put it down on the small table next to the door where I keep my keys and purse.
“Who is it?” I’d check the peephole, except there isn’t one.
“Savanah. Open the door,” a deep, rumbling voice demands. My blood runs cold.
I don’t need the peephole for me to know who it is. The tingling down my spine has already identified the threat.
Gabriel.
“Who is it?” Cassie asks.
“It’s him,” I whisper, hoping my voice doesn’t seep through the paper-thin door.
“How’d he find you? You said you didn’t have your real address on any of those IDs.”
“I didn’t. I don’t know.”
“Savannah, you have until the count of three.” His voice comes through crystal clear.
“I’m not opening the door!” I yell back at him. “You should leave! I have…a…I have a gun, and I’ll shoot!”
Cassie’s eyebrows are raised, and she’s covering her mouth with her hand. I tried shooting a gun once in my life. Cassie thought we needed protection, but after nearly shooting my own foot off, we decided it was safer to not have one in the apartment.
“Savanah.” He drops my name like it’s a bomb. I can almost hear the ticking of the clock. “Open. This. Door.”
“No!”
“Open it or get away from it.”
“Dammit, just go away!” I fist my hands at my sides and retreat several steps. He wouldn’t kick it in, but it’s probably better to be safe.
Just as I get clear of the space, wood splinters, and the door swings in. The doorknob goes straight through the wall behind it, latching it open.
“Are you insane?” I yell, covering my head as fragments of the wood frame fly across the room.
When the last piece of wood hits the floor, I open my eyes.
Huge mistake.
“Holy shit,” Cassie whispers from the iPad.
She’s not wrong.
The devil himself would be shaking in his hooves if he were to come face to face with Gabriel Valenti at this moment. The muscles in his neck are strung tight, his jaw the same way; but his eyes are where the real terror lives.
He looks down at the iPad. “Who are you?” he demands of Cassie, who suddenly forgets how to speak.
It’s a reasonable reaction when the devil strikes up a conversation.
“Leave her out of this.” I snatch the iPad. “I’ll call you later.” I hit the end button and drop the pad back onto the table.
I peek out into the hallway expecting to see at least one neighbor checking on the noise he’s made, but not a single eyeball. Good to know.
“Look what you did to my door.” I grab the handle and yank it free from the wall, only to have the hinges give out completely and the whole thing come down at me.
He snatches it from behind me before it knocks me to the floor. “Move.”
I step to the side, and he picks up the door and leans it against the open doorway. Once he’s satisfied it’s not going to fall, he turns back to me. His heated stare fixes on me.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” I say when he seems content to burn me with his glare.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he counters.
“It’s my home.”
“It’s not where I put you.” His eyes narrow more, and he’s on me in a flash. His hand snakes behind my head and fists my hair, pulling my head back and to the side. “What happened to your face?”
My face? What happened…oh right, the cut.
“It’s a little cut.” I slap at his wrist, but I’m about as dangerous as a fly to him.
“It’s not little. How did this happen?”
“Let me go.”
He turns my head again, bringing his eyes level with mine. A shiver courses down my spine. “Tell me.”
“A branch on the tree hit me on my way down.”
“On your way down from the roof you climbed across from the window you climbed out of?”
“You seem to have pieced it all together already.” I try to smile, but his hand grips my hair tighter.
“It needs to be cleaned.”
“I was just taking care of that when some crazy man started banging on my door.”
He closes his eyes, inhales so deeply his nostrils cave in.
“You ran away.”
“No.” I slap at his wrist again. “I escaped.”
He studies me for a long moment, as though he’s weighing his options. Then he gives a curt nod. Whatever he was deciding, he’s decided.
He releases my hair, only to grab my upper arm and drag me across the living room and into the bathroom where I’ve already laid out the first aid kit.
“Sit.” He points to the closed toilet.
“I can handle this myself. I want you to leave,” I demand boldly while staring at his chest.
He knuckles my chin up until our eyes meet. “You’re in enough trouble. You should cut your losses before you find yourself in even more.”
“You say that like I’m any of your business. I’m not. You had your fun last night. I won’t go back to your shops. I’ll steer clear of you and anything involving you. Just leave.”
He leans into me. The warmth of his breath brushes across my face.
“You’re right about one thing, you won’t be going back to any of my shops. But that’s the only thing you got right.”
“I don’t understand. Why won’t you just leave?” I can’t help the little whine in my voice. The man is infuriating.
“Sit down so I can clean your cut, and I will explain how you don’t have to worry about Vincent Ricci, and how you are going to repay me for all the trouble you’ve caused, and then when you’re all fixed up, I’ll tell you how I’m going to punish you for running away and hurting yourself.”
There’s a short circuit in my brain. Almost none of what he said made any sense at all.
“Why don’t I have to worry about Vincent anymore?”
He points at the toilet again. “Sit down. Now.”
With one shove he could have me exactly where he wants me, but I get the feeling it’s important to him that I do it on my own. If it will hurry up this little encounter, I can give him that much, so I sit.
He picks through the items on the small countertop of the sink.
“I already cleaned it. I was just about to put the ointment on when you broke down my door. How am I supposed to explain to my landlord how that happened? He’s not going to believe I bumped into it.
If I tell him some crazed man showed up and kicked it down, he’ll throw me out of the building.
I’ve seen him do it more than once to women whose boyfriends have caused trouble in the building. ”
I’m rambling. And he lets me continue as he cleans the cut for a second time.
“He doesn’t want drama; that’s what he says. So if I can’t come up with something plausible, he’s going to boot me out, too. And then I’ll have to move. Do you know how hard it is to pick up and move?”
He smears the ointment onto his fingertip then applies it to the cut. His touch is gentle and precise. Not something I would associate with the big brute who has barreled his way into my home.
“Why won’t you just leave?” I breathe out the question when silence falls between us.
He finishes with the ointment and places two Band-Aids side by side to cover the superficial wound.
“I don’t want to,” he says simply, dropping the Band-Aid wrappers into the small trash bin. “Now, you’re going to listen to me.”
He squats down in front of me, placing his huge hands on my knees.
“I don’t want to.”
A ghost of a smile tugs at the side of his mouth.
“I don’t care. Do it anyway.”
I want to argue, to demand he leave, to make him stop all of this madness, but he launches into his own tirade before I can open my mouth.
“Ricci isn’t going to come looking for you, so you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”
“Why?” I cut him off before he can move off. “How do you know that?”
“Because I paid him what you owed him. And made sure he wouldn’t be bothering you again in the future. Your services are no longer available to him.”
“Why would you do that? No. You can’t do that.”
He lifts a shoulder. “I already did. Now, onto the next bit of business. Your debt to me.”
“My what?”
“You’re going to work off the money I paid Ricci by working for me.”
Of course there’s a catch. There’s always a catch. No one does anything without wanting something in return.
“What does that mean, working?”
“You’re good at what you do. The fake IDs, the certificates of authenticity. If I hadn’t already seen them before, they would have fooled even me. My family does a lot of business; sometimes we need papers.”
“I’m guessing there isn’t an option to say no.”
He flashes an arrogant smile. “No. Not an option.”
I nod and lean back against the tank of the toilet. In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it’s not a horrible idea. Although I had promised myself I wouldn’t be working with organized crime anymore.
However, I’m nothing if not flexible. You don’t grow up in a system that brings nothing but uncertainty without learning to pivot at the last minute.
“I guess I can do that.”
He chuckles. “You guess? You haven’t heard the rest of it.”
“The rest of what? I’ll work for you until I’ve made back what you paid Ricci. That seems fair enough. I can do that while I’m still working on my own.”
He’s already shaking his head before I even finish speaking.
“No.”
“No?”
“That’s right, no. While you’re working for me, you won’t be doing anything else. I can’t protect you if you’re on your own half the time.”
“How am I supposed to pay my bills if all I’m doing is working for you, for free?”
“You won’t have any bills.”
“You’re not making any sense. I have rent and electricity and car insurance—”
“All of that’s taken care of. You’ll be staying with me, so no rent. And your car…that piece of shit was about to die, so I took care of it.”
“You took care of it?” I squeeze my eyes shut. “Why would you do any of that? I’m not your concern. I can stay here and do the work for you. I don’t need—”
He brushes his fingertips across my jawline, distracting me. “You need a safe place to work from; that’s not here. And while I was able to get Ricci to agree to back off, that doesn’t mean you don’t have anyone else trying to track you down after you scammed them out of a lot of money.”
“I…how do I get you to understand I’m not doing that? I don’t want to do that. I want to stay in my own place.”
“In the twenty-four hours that I’ve known you, you’ve tried to con a mafia run pawn shop, you’ve toppled over a hundred- and fifty-pound bookcase that could have crushed you, and then you climbed across a roof and shimmied down a tree that could have also gotten yourself killed.
You haven’t exactly shown me you’re able to keep yourself safe.
And if you’re going to earn me back the money you’ve cost me, I need you alive. ”
“Well, when you list it that way it sounds bad. But I’ve been on my own my entire life and I’ve done just fine. I don’t need you to protect me.” I raise my chin. “I don’t need anyone.”
He eyes me for a moment, like he’s sizing up a snack. “Fine. If you agree to live somewhere safe, you can stay on your own.”
Relief washes through me. Finally, he’s seeing some sense. “Yeah. Of course. I mean, I get what you’re saying. I can’t live up to my end of this deal if I’m not alive.” I try to laugh it off, the idea of me being killed, but it only seems to darken his mood further.
“Good.” He stands up. “Pack up what you want to bring, and I’ll have it brought the house this afternoon.”
He puts his hand out to me, and like the stunned lunatic he’s made me, I take it.
“What are you talking about? You just said I could stay here.”
“I said you could stay somewhere safe.” He leads me out of the bathroom, stopping in the living room. “You don’t even have a front door.”