CHAPTER NINE
Tierney
We landed in a small, private airport on the outskirts of Naples.
Feeling self-conscious and more than a little used, I pulled my hair up into a hair clip to hide Achilles’s artwork.
There was no need to advertise what we’d been up to in the lavatory.
Now that I had the time to digest the denied orgasm and mortification, I was plotting his slow, violent murder.
Only killing him wouldn’t be enough. Too quick and impersonal. He thought I’d hurt him with my first betrayal? Well, he better buckle up because I had something much worse in store.
He’d pay for what he did to me. For everything he did to me.
A private air hostess lowered the stairway, and we poured out into the sweltering heat. A driver in a black Cadillac waited on the tarmac and drove Achilles and me to a hangar a few miles away. His soldiers stayed back, taking care of the cargo.
From my place in the back seat of the Cadillac, I spotted two sleek, black SUVs already parked inside the hangar. Two Camorra soldiers leaned against them. Both middle-aged, dressed to the nines, with large golden cross pendants on their chests.
I wasn’t normally a fidgety person, but being smack in the middle of two Camorra families just looking for an excuse to off one another wasn’t exactly a lifelong dream of mine.
Achilles unzipped the backpack between his legs and took out a gun. He checked the chamber, loaded, and cocked it. “Stay here.”
“Like I have anywhere else to g—”
I didn’t have time to finish the sentence. He’d already slid out of the car and slammed the door in my face.
Not one to sit around and wait, I reached for the door handle before hearing the automatic click of the vehicle locking from the inside. I flashed the driver a scowl through the rearview mirror. He shrugged. “Just following orders,” he said in English.
I redirected my attention to Achilles and the men.
He reached them, his gun concealed in the pocket of his hoodie, where his hands were casually stuffed.
Words were exchanged. Achilles appeared standoffish and bored, whereas the men furrowed their brows, exchanging confused glances.
I rolled down the window, hoping to hear the conversation, even though my grasp on the Italian language was minimal at best.
“C’è stato un cambio di programma,” Achilles announced. Change of plans.
The men answered in a rush of heated words I couldn’t decipher, but I did recognize some of the curses thrown in. Then one of them spat out, “Siamo qui per prendere la rossa.”
Rossa. Redhead. Me.
My heart doubled over. They were Coppola’s soldiers, not the Ferrantes’. And they were here to collect me. I slouched in the seat, trying to make myself as invisible as possible. The angry, pissed-off men craned their heads to catch a glimpse of me in the car.
I reached for the asshole’s backpack in search of another weapon, but there wasn’t any. Fuck. I was decently trained in martial arts. Could probably fight them off if things went south. But if they drew a weapon on me, I was toast.
Achilles’s voice remained calm as he spoke, which only seemed to aggravate them further.
One of the soldiers—the bulkier man, the muscle—gave him an aggressive shove.
Not enough to move him a millimeter but enough to piss him off.
Achilles pulled his gun out and put two bullets between his eyebrows.
The second man tried taking his gun out, but Achilles was faster, shooting him twice in the throat. They both dropped to the ground.
What the ever-loving fuck?
What the hell was he doing? Fuck. Could this man go through a twenty-four-hour period without reenacting the Red Wedding?
Achilles’s soldiers materialized from the open mouth of the hangar.
They got down to business wordlessly, taking care of the two bodies like nothing was amiss.
Jeremie knelt and quietly collected bullet casings.
Nico rubbed a spatter of blood with the tip of his shoe, pressing his phone to his ear as he barked orders.
Finally, His Highness waltzed over to the passenger door and threw it open.
“Out.” Achilles pushed the gun into his waistband.
I stayed put, arms folded over my chest. “Nice way to start our weekend sexcapade.”
“Thought you wanted out of your marriage with Stefano.” He grabbed my arm and yanked me out of my seat. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
I wanted him to negotiate a different deal with the don. Not to go on a killing spree and make everything worse for everybody. Vello was going to blow a gasket when he found out.
“Doesn’t it screw things up in the Alliance even more?” I stood up and smoothed my dress over my legs.
“Don’t look so fucking concerned. Watching my blood shed is your favorite hobby.”
Achilles turned his back to me and strolled over to a parked freight truck. He stepped on a ramp, rolled up the door, and got inside.
A Ducati identical to the black one he had at home was parked there, facing us.
He picked up two helmets from the floor and put one on.
He mounted the bike and revved it up, riding it the short distance to me.
When he reached me, he pushed a black helmet on my head and adjusted the straps under my chin with a rough tug.
My hair clip fell to the ground, and he leaned down, picking it up and securing it over the hem of my dress.
The small gesture made my pulse stutter in my chest. It was the kind of thing the old Achilles would have done.
He patted the space behind him in a silent demand. I climbed up, the place between my legs raw and throbbing, reminding me how rough he was when he took me on the plane.
“Heading home?” Jeremie asked, a skull bandanna tugged up his nose to protect himself from the fumes he was about to breathe. He was already pouring detergent over the bloodied concrete. Another soldier was wheeling in an electric pressure washer.
“Hotel. Gonna drop her off, then we’ll head downtown for our first meeting. Stay close.” Achilles flipped down his helmet visor. “I want six men patrolling her floor at any given time when she’s out of my sight, armed to the fucking heavens.”
“Yup.” Jeremie tossed the empty detergent tank against a wall, fishing a blue Bic from his pocket. “She’ll be in good hands.”
“No one’s allowed to touch her but me,” Achilles growled.
“It’s a figure of speech, Scarface.”
“Don’t like you saying the word figure when speaking about her, either.”
How this jackass thought he was capable of handing me over to another man was a case for the FBI. I was surprised he let me get a manicure without killing my nail technician.
We took off, with me hugging Achilles’s torso from behind.
Because of the anatomy of the motorcycle, I was perched slightly above him, almost on top of him, and could feel every individual muscle in his back and stomach.
His scent drifted into my system, mixing with the heady smells of summer and beach and mouthwatering dishes as we wove into the narrow cobblestone streets of the city.
My hips involuntarily clasped around him, enjoying the heat of his body, the sturdiness of it, and every time we reached a traffic light, Achilles dropped one hand from the throttle, casually stroking the sensitive spot behind my knee.
We rode for a while, with him taking small side streets and hidden pathways of the city.
I had a feeling he was throwing any Coppola people following us off our scent.
If so, he’d succeeded because, by the time he merged onto a turnpike curving away from the city and onto a mountain, we were alone on the road.
He parked on top of a cliff overlooking the city. Killing the engine, he didn’t take off his helmet or flick open the dark visor, which mirrored whatever he was looking at.
“Are you going to hurl me off a cliff?” I reached to unclip my helmet, pinning it between my arm and waist. “Because I’m sure open to it if it means not having to fuck you again.”
He dismounted, turned around, and climbed back on the bike so we were facing each other. He grabbed my ass through my dress and slid me down so I landed in his lap. He was hard as a rock. His thick shaft pressed against my panties.
“Why’d you do it?” His tone threw me off. It was soft but still deadly. Another hint of the old Achilles I used to love.
“Why did I do what?” I playfully curled a piece of hair over my finger.
“You know what.”
I did. I had tried to explain myself to him countless times, though I knew nothing would justify my behavior. It’d been over a decade, and I still mourned ruining the only good thing that’d ever happened to me.
I regretted what I’d done to him every moment of every day of every year of my existence.
But telling him that after he screwed me roughly just because he could and came in my hair was beyond the scope of my abilities. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing how much betraying him destroyed me.
I shrugged. “I didn’t want you, and you didn’t get the hint.”
My throat burned with the lie. I knew I’d hurt him. Moreover, I knew the only reason he asked was because I couldn’t see his face and what was written on it.
“Did you ever fucking care?” His voice was thick, muffled by the helmet and something else I didn’t want to think about.
“No,” I said coldly, pushing the word out to hurt him like he’d hurt me for the past few years. “Not really. At first, I was lonely, and you were a nice distraction. But afterward? You were deadweight. I needed to get rid of you. But you were so damn persistent.” I rolled my eyes.
Another loaded silence and one with enough tension to be cut with a knife.
“Well. Didn’t work quite as well as you hoped, did it?” he said, reaching between my open thighs and tugging my underwear to one side. “Take out my cock.”
I looked around with uncertainty. “Here?”
“We’re alone. Even if we weren’t, it’s not like you have a reputation to uphold.”