Chapter 10 Annetta #2
I grip my seatbelt with white knuckles as Checkers drives us down a dark neighborhood street. Music blasts through the car, and the guys are all laughing and joking at Checkers striking out with some girl at the last bar.
“I told you she was a fucking bitch,” Checkers says.
Carlo punches his shoulder with a raucous laugh, making the car swerve.
I squeeze my eyes shut. My heart is a ticking bomb.
“Watch it!” Russell barks out from the middle seat, next to me.
I’m crammed against the door with my forehead leaning against the window, but Russell’s thigh is still pressed against mine.
I offered to drive because they’ve all been drinking, but they laughed at me. When I asked Carlo if he could take me home, he promised me he would after one more stop.
“You okay?” Russell murmurs. He captures my knee in his hand.
“We gotta turn back,” I say to the others.
“It’ll be quick!” Carlo says.
I cram myself against my car door. Russell slides his hand up an inch higher.
I can barely breathe. The car stinks of men and alcohol, and my chest is tight. I want to go home, but I don’t know how to find it from here.
Checkers swerves into a parking spot in front of the Velvet Kitty.
“We’ll be right back,” Carlo shouts and stumbles out of the car.
Checkers follows suit.
Panic seizes my lungs. I’m going to be stuck in here with dead-eyed Mark or handsy Russell.
I fumble for the door handle and throw myself out of the car into the freezing night air. I don’t want to go to a strip club, but it’s better than being stuck in the car.
“I’m gonna get a smoke,” Russell calls out in a raspy voice. He nods to Mark. “I heard Tatiana’s gonna be here tonight.”
That seems to capture Mark’s attention, because he stumbles to the club entrance after Checkers and my brother.
Of the four, Russell’s had the least to drink, but it hardly puts me at ease with the hungry way he looks at me.
“Want some?” he asks, offering me a freshly lit joint.
I shake my head, tightening my coat around me. I glance at the bandages wrapped around his throat and quickly look away.
He laughs and holds his joint away from his clothes, leaning against the car door next to me. On this side of the building, it’s just us in an empty parking lot. A lone car drives past on a faraway street. “You couldn’t get enough last time.”
For a moment, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Then I remember.
He still thinks I’m Serafina.
“Last time?”
He flicks off the bright red cherry and hides away the joint in a tin in his pocket.
He got it out just for Serafina.
“I’d never seen you so high.” His voice drops low. “Or so horny.”
Liar. He’s lying. “What?”
“Is your new husband mad you’re not a virgin?”
No.
No fucking way Serafina had sex with this fucking wispy-mustached loser.
He rakes his bug-eyed gaze over me with an unearned familiarity, and even though it makes my skin crawl, I don’t back down.
“Don’t lie,” I say.
He laughs. “One of us is a liar here, and it’s not me. I know you haven’t told your husband about us, or else I’d be a dead man. You still got a soft spot for me, Serafina?”
I find my voice after a moment. “No. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
He shoves his hands into his pockets. “Always fucking lying.”
Serafina never lied.
“I’m not a liar.”
Russell scoffs. “You lied to your sister, didn’t you? Made her get married instead of you, because you were so fucking scared they’d find out you didn’t have a cherry—”
“Stop.”
“—and you’ve made up this whole scenario to Carlo just so I’d come over.
And now you want to be a little tease about all this?
I wonder what sort of lie you’d tell your husband if he drug tested you.
Bet he’d be pretty disappointed to find out his sweet wife’s sucked dick more than once for a little bit of weed. ”
Russell leans in, bathing me in the sour scent of beer and weed. “Can that old man even get it up, or are you already missing what I can give you?”
Something like anger licks through my veins. How dare he? Russell picks up on my quick breathing and misinterprets it.
He chuckles. “That’s what I thought.”
Just when my hand twitches with the urge to slap him—hurt him, somehow—he takes a step back.
“I have to go make sure your brother’s not being a fuck up. Sit your pretty ass in that car and think about who knows the real you.” He leans in and touches my hair. His breath reeks. “We both know it’s not that husband of yours. Ask yourself who loves the real you.”
He inhales and tilts back to give me a long, searching look before brushing past and disappearing into the strip club.
I turn in the other direction. For a silent moment, I stand out in the cold, staring at the dark, empty storefront windows across the street, willing my breath to slow, for my hands to stop trembling.
Was he telling the truth?
Did my pure, sweet sister let me sacrifice myself to my bastard ex-husband so she could get her rocks off with this loser?
Angry tears spring to my eyes. I exhale through gritted teeth.
How dare she?
I shake my head. No. Russell was lying.
I’m going to tell someone, Dad maybe, about all this, and then he’s going to break Russell’s legs for what he said. First, I need Carlo to take me home.
Quick footsteps striding across the asphalt warn me of Russell’s return. I don’t turn, forcing myself to calm the rage vibrating through my veins.
He crashes into me, throwing me into the car and pressing his body against mine. My head bounces off the hood, and a flash of pain blinds me.
“Got you, bitch,” a strange man says.
Fear plunges me into cold shock, freezing me to the spot. The man has my whole body pinned to the car like a bug. I can’t move. I cry out in a weak voice.
“This is for Frederico.”
My heart stops. The stranger’s hot breath ghosts over my cheek, and he slides me across the car door. I scrabble at the metal, barely able to gain purchase in a seam of the door with my acrylic nails.
His hands jerk away from me, and the weight of his body disappears. He spits out a curse.
I don’t do anything brave. I don’t even beg. I tuck into myself against the car door and cower, anticipating more pain.
A familiar, booming laugh sounds behind me. “Of all the stupid motherfuckers they could’ve sent. Are you fucking kidding me, Mikey?”
Dom?
I hold my breath and turn.
Dom, looking like an angry grizzly bear in his brown fur-trimmed coat, pins a smaller man I don’t recognize onto the road. The other man—Mikey—struggles, and Dom laughs cruelly as Mikey’s cheek grinds into the asphalt.
A huge, ugly gash rides up Dom’s swollen left eye to his hairline. His face is covered in blood, but that doesn’t stop him from grinning at the man underneath him.
Red flushes Mikey’s face, and dark blood streams from his nose as he fights against Dom. The parking lot’s empty. Carlo and his friends are nowhere to be found.
A few feet away, a knife glistens in the streetlights.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Mikey spits.
He cries out as Dom scrapes the side of his face into the road. I glimpse Mikey’s scarlet cheek—raw like ground beef. Dom’s palm is cut and smears more blood onto Mikey’s face.
My stomach churns, but I can’t look away from Dom’s brutality.
He’s doing this for me.
“Is that what they told you?” Dom laughs like Mikey told him a great joke. “You wanna know why they picked you? Because you’re the only man fucking stupid enough to go after the Butcher’s wife.”
Dom glances up at me, his one open eye dark and hard like flint, and his grin falters a little. My breath catches.
“Let me go,” Mikey says. “I didn’t know!”
Dom’s grin grows wider as he looks back down at him. “Of course you didn’t. Now, Mikey, where am I starting? Your fingers? Nose? How about a foot? Maybe I cut off your dick and call it a day, huh?”
Mikey’s eyes go wide, and he flounders against Dom with renewed effort. “No, no! Come on, Dom! Please, I’m sorry! I didn’t know!”
With some effort, Mikey scrapes his face against the road to look up at me. The look he gives me freezes me in place—the Hail Mary of an evil man.
But I don’t want to save him. He was going to kill me.
Dom pulls out a wicked-looking knife from a holster on his leg.
“You’re dying tonight, Mikey, make no bones about it.
But you can do one useful fucking thing in your life and tell me who gave you this job.
You know who I work for. I’ll find out either way, but I sure will be grateful to get a faster answer from you.
Maybe you can make it to hell with all your parts intact. ”
Mikey groans through gritted teeth, his facial features squeezing together in agony.
“Time’s up, Mikey.”
“Wait! Wait,” Mikey screams. “The Chiarellis. The Chiarellis have a hit out on her.”
Dom’s gaze cuts up to me, and we lock eyes. Even with a man wriggling underneath him, his muscles straining to trap him down, and half his face covered in blood, Dom’s expression is relaxed—amused, even.
“And why would the Chiarellis have a hit out on Serafina?” he asks me.
“I-I don’t know.” Mikey starts to blubber. “But it’s not Serafina—I-I mean, she’s not that they—who they w-wanted—”
“Dom,” I say. It’s almost a whisper, and Mikey stops struggling to look up at me, hope shining in his eyes. “Hurry up.”
A wail bursts from Mikey’s mouth as he thrashes against Dom.
“You see my car?” Dom calls over Mikey’s cries.
I look up sharply. It’s not far away, only a few parking spots from us.
“Go sit inside,” Dom says while Mikey wriggles under his hand like a worm on a hook. “Lock the door until I get there.”
Mikey looks up at me with pleading eyes for the briefest of moments, until I turn away and do as I’m told.
His muffled cries follow me as I take thirty-four steps to Dom’s car, counting each one. I open the passenger door and lock myself inside.
I stare straight forward through the windshield out onto the dark scene.
Dom rises from the shadow that is Mikey’s body, where it lies there, unmoving.
I expect Dom to come to me, but he goes to the strip club instead. For a long, breathless moment, my vision locks onto the club’s door as my imagination runs wild at the thought of beautiful women rubbing themselves against him.
But it’s not beautiful women he comes back outside with.
Russell has his hands hooked onto Dom’s wrists as Dom drags him outside by his throat.
Carlo and the rest of his friends follow behind.
Checkers is stumbling so much that it looks like he might fall over.
Dom tosses Russell toward Mikey’s dead body, points at it, and walks toward me.
His wild grin fills my body with sunshine. He’s got one of those perfect smiles—a wide mouth, brilliant white teeth, and a hint of dimples hidden beneath his salt-and-pepper beard—that make it impossible not to smile back. The corners of my lips raise.
Then he seems to remember himself, and his mouth plunges into a deep scowl.
He throws himself into the driver’s seat of the car, turns the radio on, and drives. “Start talking.”