Chapter 16 Rem
REM
Idisconnect my call with Aldo feeling even more on edge than when I left Ari’s office. My uncle’s parting words ring in my head.
I’m trusting you, nipotino. I need you to find la traditrice, velocemente. You’re the only one I can ask. Don’t let me down.
Just before Aldo left for Italy he tasked me with tracking down a traitor, someone who escaped him years ago. He gave me clear instructions that no one was to know of my search.
In the Family, when your capo gives you an assignment, you get it done.
In my family, when my uncle asks me to do something, I always follow through. Always. Except, I haven’t been able to make any headway. Hearing his disappointment at my lack of progress was gutting.
I promise, I told him. I won’t let you down, Uncle. I’ll find your traitor. You can trust me, always.
I know, nipotino, he said. I know.
“Fuck!” I punctuate the curse with a punch, my fist putting a dent in the wallboard. A cleaning bucket topples from the nearby shelf and crashes into the collection of mops at my feet.
“You okay in there, boss?” Johnny asks through the closet door.
“Yes, fine,” I growl, like I’m not pacing a three-foot circle in a supply closet in the back of one of our clubs.
As soon as I got Aldo’s message I came down from Ari’s office, which is several floors up, and locked myself in the closet.
The one place in this building that isn’t wired for surveillance.
Not because we trust our staff not to steal the toilet paper (yes, even the mafia suffered during the pandemic), but because I removed the security from the room myself. At Aldo’s insistence.
He demanded I had a place to take his calls without risking being overheard and I needed to stay on premise to get my fucking work done.
So here I am, a grown ass man and one of the most feared fixers in the Western world, hiding amongst the cleaning supplies as I run through every excuse for why I’m failing.
Failing the head of the family. Failing the war against the Paganos, the surveillance on Lena.
Fuck! Just…Lena.
The woman has me twisted in knots. I want to protect her, and I want to fuck her. I have to figure out who the hell wants her dead, and I need to know if she really is colluding with the Paganos. God help me, I think I want to keep her, but I don’t dare trust her.
These wants, these needs, go around my head like a carousel from hell, never letting me off, never letting me have any peace. Not unless I have her in my arms, her body hot and willing beneath me.
An excuse I could not give Aldo when trying to explain why I haven’t made any progress in my search.
I have to make headway. When Aldo returns to Chicago, I need to be able to give him some real answers or I won’t be able to look him in the eye. Failing is not an option.
Staying in the closet a few minutes longer, I send messages to two of my best freelance hackers. I don’t have a lot of information to go on, but tax records might just give me the lead I need.
“Boss, you gotta get out here.” Johnny’s voice comes through the door, tension audible. I unlock the door and step out, finding him staring down at his phone in the dark hallway.
“What is it?”
“There’s been another attack.”
I can tell from his stance alone it’s bad. My best friend’s jaw is ticking in a way that puts all my senses on high alert. “Who? Where?”
Johnny opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. A second later he just holds up his phone. It’s an alert message from one of our guards.
911 Bianca Lena Milk Stop Cafe
“How long ago did he send it?”
Johnny checks the time stamp. We both pretend we don’t notice how his hand shakes. “Forty seconds.”
“That cafe is on the other side of town. We need to be gone. Now.” I grab the car keys from his hand.
I turn, about to run down the hall when Johnny stops me.
I look from his white-knuckle grip on my arm to his face.
He’s alarmingly pale. “Bia…she’s pregnant,” he says, his voice catching on the word.
“She thinks I don’t know. She’s waiting to tell me.
But I know, Rem. I know. Bia is pregnant and if anything happens… ”
I don’t care what preconceived notions anyone has about men and women.
I don’t care who you love or how. I’ve seen love build a person up out of nothing, and I’ve seen it bring some of the strongest humans on this planet to their knees.
When someone you love more than life is in danger, a different type of fear takes hold.
The kind that warns of annihilation. Because, heaven forbid, if anything happens to that person, you might not survive.
That’s the fear staring out at me from Johnny’s eyes. I’ve seen him cut down countless enemies without batting an eyelash. But the idea that his wife and unborn child could be in danger is almost too terrifying to face, even for one of the strongest men I know.
“We’re running out of here, Johnny,” I tell him, dragging him down the hallway until his legs start to function and he’s running faster than me. “We’re going to get to them in time, brother. There’s no other choice.”
There isn’t.
Not for Johnny and Bianca and their baby.
And, I’ve realized, swallowing back a hint of the same fear, not for me and Lena either. Logic and family and duty be damned.
“Bianca! Baby!” Johnny pounds on the elevator door. We hear a muffled response but can’t tell who it is or what they’re saying. “Sweet girl, it’s me,” he continues. “We’ll have you out in a second.”
“It has to be them.” I’m looking at my phone screen and Johnny’s, both open to the tracking app. The signal from Bianca’s phone and Lena’s ring are pinging from almost exactly where we’re standing. “The two of them are in the elevator, I just can’t tell more than that.”
“You LoJacked your fake fiancée?” Johnny asks while trying to pry open the doors.
“You LoJacked your wife, so shut the fuck up.”
Any hesitation about Lena being my fiancée, fake or otherwise, jumped off a cliff when I realized she was in danger.
She’s been headlining my thoughts for weeks, months.
I’ve been following her every move, studying her every breath, and I can’t think of her as anything but mine.
I’m done wasting time pretending otherwise.
A truth she and I are going to discuss fully once I get her out of here and punish her for sneaking out of my fucking penthouse in the first place.
The enjoyment we’ll both get from the sensual torment stamps a twisted smirk on my face.
Which is why I’m smiling when some asshole sweating through his balaclava comes racing up the stairs, bloody hand pointing a Glock at my chest.
This is the man who attacked Bianca and Lena, no question in my mind. I pull my Beretta, overcome with an irrepressible need to put a bullet between his eyes.
The other man hesitates.
I have a clean shot but, my brain finally kicking in, I resist the instinct to pull the trigger. If I kill him, we’ll never find out who hired him or which of the women was his target.
“Rem, don’t,” Johnny urges.
“I know. Cazzo!” I lunge forward on the curse, ready to knock him unconscious when a blur shoots out of the side stairwell, taking the guy down to the ground before I have the chance.
There’s a crack and a grunt and then Bruce gets off the floor, leaving the man unconscious as our guard looks at us wildly. “Bianca, Lena, where are they?”
“In there.” I point at the elevator where Johnny’s trying to pry the doors open. “Alive, at least as of a few minutes ago when emergency services received a call from a woman saying there’s a fire. Both GPS trackers are sending a signal from just the other side of this wall.”
“Meno male.” Bruce joins Johnny at the door, jabbing thick fingers into the widening gap. “Boss, punish me however you want, but only after they’re safe.”
I look up at Bruce from where I’m zip-tying the shooter’s arms behind his back. I have no idea how Lena ended up outside the safe confines of my apartment, but judging by Bruce’s pained expression, Bianca definitely had something to do with it.
That woman can get him to do practically anything, but he’d also lay down his life for her in a heartbeat so I’m not going to ream him a new one.
At least not until I get the full story.
“Get this asshole out of here. Bring him to the club, lock him in one of the basement rooms, and get a doctor to look at him if you think he needs it. He needs to be alive, Bruce. We need to know who sent him.”
The soldier nods once. “Understood, boss.”
I take his place at the elevator and Bruce slings the unconscious man over his shoulder like a wet noodle. A second later they’ve both vanished down the stairwell to what I assume is the parking garage.
“Johnny, is that you?” Bianca’s voice reaches us through the one-inch gap between the elevator doors.
“Yes, sweet girl. It’s me.” Johnny pulls harder on one door, and I yank the other one toward me, widening the gap. “We’re here, Bia. We’re gonna get you out.”
“Oh, thank God.” Bianca looks up at us from the bottom of the elevator. It’s stuck between two floors so she’s several feet below us, clothes streaked with dirt, hair disheveled, but with no obvious signs of injury.
“Get us out of here. Bianca first.” Lena gives Bianca a gentle shove forward and Johnny crouches down, hands outstretched. They intertwine arms and Johnny hauls her up, the two of them tumbling into a tight embrace as soon as she’s free.
“Your turn,” I say to Lena, cataloguing every scrape and streak of dirt on her hands, face, and neck as I pull her out of the elevator.
She’s on her feet the second I get her to solid ground. And in my arms a second after that.
I don’t know who reached for who first, but we hold each other tight for several breaths, my own heart pounding as fast as hers.
“I’m so fucking mad at you,” I say into her hair.
She nods and buries her nose in my chest. “I’m so fucking happy to see you.”
That earns her a tighter squeeze, my body greedy to prolong the contact as long as possible. To prove to myself that she’s still with me, still breathing. Still alive.
“Boss.” Johnny clears his throat behind us. “Rem, we gotta go. Firetrucks and cops are pulling up. We don’t want to stick around and answer questions, do we?”
“Absolutely not.” The women are starting to feel the aftereffects of the attack, the blood draining from Lena’s face as Bianca sags against her husband.
“Johnny needs to get her home,” Lena whispers to me, her arms still locked around my waist. “Bianca needs to get some rest. Maybe even checked by a doctor.”
The concern in Lena’s voice is apparent. Perhaps my little one has learned Bianca’s secret during this ordeal. A question we can deal with after she tells me what the hell she was thinking leaving the apartment.
“Here, this way.” I lead our foursome down a hall away from the building’s main entrance where the firefighters are starting to rush in.
There’s a service exit at the back and it takes us out to a side street.
Johnny’s car is close and we walk to it in pairs, pace normal, as if we haven’t a care in the world.
Johnny bundles Bianca into the passenger seat, but she stops him from closing the door. “I’m sorry, Rem. This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have taken her out of the penthouse.”
“No, stop.” Lena holds up a hand, cutting the other woman off. “None of this is your fault.”
“Debatable,” I mutter. Lena smacks me on the chest and carries on.
“I doubt the Secret Service does advance work as well as you, Bianca. Between the private elevators, armored car, back entrances, and Bruce, there’s no way you could’ve guessed we’d still be at risk.
” Lena hauls in a huge breath, her eyes filling with tears as she looks down at Bianca.
“It’s all my fault. Really. If anything had happened to you… ”
“But nothing did.” Bianca shushes her, grabbing Lena’s hand and pulling her to the side of the car. Since I don’t let Lena go, I come along too. The women share a silent exchange, gratitude filling Bianca’s expression. “Thank you for what you did. Truly.”
“What did you do?” Johnny and I ask at the same time.
When Lena stays silent, Bianca answers for her. “After Bruce got knocked out, Lena put herself between me and the gunman. Made sure I got away first.” Bianca’s voice wavers. “She put my safety over hers and I’ll never be able to thank her enough.”
Before I know what’s happening, Johnny has wrapped Lena in a giant hug. Bianca is still holding one of her hands. My arm is still wrapped around Lena’s waist. We’re all twisted up, emotions thick.
“Grazie mille.” Johnny drops a peck on Lena’s cheek and hustles back to the driver’s side before I can smack him. “Be good to her,” he says, pointing at the woman I’m cradling against my chest. “Or you’ll have to add me to your long list of people to deal with.”
I give him the middle finger as they drive off, even as new appreciation for Lena blossoms in my chest. She’s a fighter, this woman. So brave. And in so much fucking trouble when we get home.