Chapter 3
REM
She’s a liar. A threat to the Family.
A dead weight in my lap, leaking blood all over my clothes and the back seat of my really fucking expensive car.
“How bad is it?”
I meet Johnny’s eyes in the rearview mirror, give him a blank stare. The it in his question is hard to define. This fucked up situation? My target? The shit that’s gonna roll downhill when Ari finds out about this?
Vaffanculo. He’s going kill me when he finds out about this.
“The girl, boss,” Johnny prompts. “How bad is the girl?”
Lena. More woman than girl, I’d say. Unconscious, she’s sitting sideways across my lap, injured side out. I’m not dead or losing blood, so I’m also not oblivious to how the curves of her hip and breast are pressing against my body.
She groans as I twist slightly, awkwardly retrieving my phone from my pocket. I swipe on the flashlight to get a better look at her wound and try to tamper the sudden and surprising anger that hits when I see the shallow gash in her side.
“The bleeding has almost stopped,” I tell my number two. “Definitely a bullet graze though.” I let a string of expletives fly, the harshness of my language at odds with how gently I re-cover her wound. Even so, I hear her suck in a sharp breath.
At the same time, Johnny takes us fast around a curve and I have to grab Lena before she flies off my lap.
The movement wakes her just long enough for her to groan in pain.
She pushes weakly against my chest and demands I let her go.
A few hours ago, I would’ve happily obliged.
Quite frankly, I would’ve tossed her as far away from me as possible. Probably with the car still moving.
Now? Fat fucking chance.
“Easy on the turns, fratello. We don’t want to make the wound worse before we have a chance to patch her up.” I don’t want the woman bleeding any more. I need her conscious, not passed out from blood loss.
“Sorry, boss. Just thought you’d want to clear that part of town as fast as possible. With a shooter on the loose and everything.”
“Si, si.” Merda. The farther we get from her apartment, the more clearly I can think through what just happened. Problem is, I have no fucking clue where to start.
Neither does Johnny. “What the hell was that boss? Who the hell shot her?”
“Fuck if I know.” I’m always honest with Johnny. We live in a world of murder and mayhem, crime and chaos. You gotta trust someone to have your back and, for me, Johnny Giordano has always been that guy. So, I tell him the truth. If I don’t, he usually figures it out anyway.
“It was supposed to be a clean sweep through the apartment. No one inside, no contact, no body count. Straight up recon. And other than you, no one else knew I was going to be there. She wasn’t even supposed to be there. Why the fuck did she come back like that?”
We pause at a red light, both of us scanning the near-empty city streets for potential threats. It’s January in Chicago and colder than a dead guy’s balls at the bottom of Lake Michigan, the streets empty. Small mercies—it makes it easier to spot someone coming at her with a gun.
“I still don’t get it,” Johnny says. “Recon is miles below your pay grade, boss. And on this one?” He thumbs in Lena’s direction. “What could she have possibly done to warrant that kind of attention from you?”
Okay, so maybe I’m not entirely honest with Johnny.
Some shit is on a need-to-know basis and the intel I’ve seen on the woman in my lap falls firmly into that category.
So, I give him only half the truth. “It’s a whole fucking army below my pay grade, man, but you know how it goes when the capo gives an order.
He has his sights on this one and since he’s out of town, Ari is being a total pain in the ass about it, making sure I handle it. ”
“And when your brother wants you to handle something…”
“It’s best I do it, no questions asked.” There are only two men in this world who can expect that from me.
My older brother, Ari, and the capobastone of the Cerreti crime family and our adoptive uncle, Aldo Cerreti.
Since the day Aldo took Ari and me in as his own, we’ve been unfailingly loyal.
My brother and I know that the man we call uncle is the only reason we’re still alive.
That’s the kind of debt you pay back with everything you’ve got, including blood.
And when Aldo Cerreti made my older brother his sottocapo, his underboss, my loyalty to Ari became one of Family business, not just blood.
I am their maestro di giornata. Their right hand man. The general of their soldiers. Their most lethal weapon in our family’s most brutal battles. The protector of all that’s ours. For Aldo and Ari, I do as I’m told, full stop. And report back only when the situation is handled. Except…
My current situation is unconscious in my lap, bleeding from a gunshot that literally came out of nowhere and behaving nothing like the woman—the threat—my capo has labeled her to be. In other words, she is the exact opposite of handled.
Johnny seems to realize the problem the same time I do. We’re blocks from my apartment when he abruptly pulls to the curb.
“Uh, boss—where exactly are we going?”
Fuck. We can’t take her to mine. Ari would be sure to find out and then all hell would break loose. We can’t take her to a hospital because this shit just got extremely complicated and the last thing I need is the police questioning her. Which just leaves…
I lock eyes with my soldier, my brother by choice, my best friend, and give him a look I know he’s seen a million times. A look he knows better than to refuse. “How would you and Bianca feel about a house guest?”