Ryker

Chapter Eight

I rip the car door open and pull Marcello out of the backseat, throwing him onto the ground. He scrambles backward, trying to get to his feet. I snarl at him and lean down, grabbing him by his collar and punching him hard in the nose. I spit in his face.

He screams, grabbing his nose, which now has the crimson dripping from it. “I had no choice!” He whimpers.

I look up at his Capo Howie, whose eyes are red from crying. He’s glaring at Marcello, and I know he isn’t happy about the current events either.

I clench my jaw and pull him up to his feet, staying close to his face. “There is always a choice.” I hiss, and his eyes begin to water. From fear or the pain of his broken nose, I’m not sure, but this man has shown me, once again, that he is weak. I can’t wait to tear him to pieces with a smile on my face.

“He killed my wife! He was going to kill me!”

“So it was you or her?” I cock my head and narrow my eyes as he nods frantically. I grip his shirt tighter, trying to restrain myself. I haven’t felt rage like this since my mother’s death. My hands are shaking, and It’s taking everything in me to restrain myself from snapping his neck. I look over my shoulder at Lincoln. His hands are balled into fists at his side, his face is in a deep scowl, and his jaw is clenched so tight I can hear his teeth grinding from here.

When I shift my gaze to Hawkins, his face is pale, and a pile of vomit sits at his feet. I turn my attention back to the man in my grasp .

“Please…. I didn’t want to…” He holds his hands up in surrender.

“You are her father! You were supposed to protect her.” I spit in his face, and he starts to shake, blood and snot dripping from his nose.

“I tried…” He mumbles, but before he can continue, I lose the restraint I was holding on to. I punch him over and over and over. His bones break with the force of the blows, and his yells are muffled by the sound of the adrenaline pumping in my skull.

Someone grabs my arm, and I whip my head around. Blinking a few times, I snap out of my blood-lust haze to see Lincoln scowling at the piss-poor excuse of a father.

“As much as I would love to skin him right now, we don’t have time. Manzo will be back in a few minutes, and we need to check her room for the case.”

I clench my jaw and take a few deep breaths, trying to get my blood pressure back to normal. I lean down, looking at the man before me. He curls into a ball. Holding his face to his knees, his whole body starts to shake.

I grip him by the shoulders and drag him so we are face to face. His nose is hooked to the right and is dripping blood down his lips. His eyes are starting to swell, and he has a cut from the corner of his left lip to the center of his cheek. It looks as if my ring caught on his lip, and when I pulled back, it took some of his cheek with it.

I smile, gripping his throat, and the blood coating my hand drips down my arm. “You think you escaped death by turning her over to Manzo, but it will come for you. And it will be by my hand.” I drag him over to the car, throw him into the back seat, slam the door in his face, and stalk to the motel room.

My family has morals. They are low. Very low. But we don’t hurt innocent women. Some women earn their place in the mob. If they steal, lie, or kill, we get involved. If they want to act like one of my men, then I will treat them as such. They get the same punishment, death.

Some have a small enough debt that they work it off in a few of my strip clubs. We use top-of-the-line security and cameras that cover every inch of the clubs, ensuring our women stay safe. They still get a choice on what work they want to do in order to pay back their debts. They hate it, but they’d rather do that than die.

I will never get behind what Manzo does to his women, what he did to Bianca. She was sold, and I guarantee she was held there against her will until she was able to escape. Her father failed her, betrayed her. His one and only duty as a father is to protect her, but he watched as Manzo violated her in front of him.

I try to shake every emotion roaring through me as I tear her place apart. Ripping off her bed sheets and emptied everything out of her almost completely bare drawers. As I’m about to head into her bathroom, I hear Hawkins curse from the connecting room.

“He’s alive!” Hawkins shouts.

I make my way into the bathroom, where the bloody and beaten bartender is lying. The man’s eyes open, and he groans. I can tell he’s lost a lot of blood. His face is pale, and it would be so easy to just let him die. To walk out and let the maid find his decomposing body. If this shit place even has one. I let out an annoyed sigh and turned to Lincoln, who walked in behind me.

“Call an ambulance,” I mutter as I run a hand down my face. Hawkins runs out of the room without hesitation, already connected to an operator.

I can tell the man put up one hell of a fight. Maybe he could be of some use. I lift up his shirt and curse. There is a stab wound in his chest right above his heart. There is a lot more blood than usual, but considering he isn’t dead is a sign it didn’t hit anything important .

“You ass,” he whispers, spitting blood as he does. “I knew you were trouble.”

“You’re lucky to be alive. I wouldn’t press your luck. I could just leave you here to die.”

“She’s dead, isn’t she?” he coughs.

“No… She got away.” I stand, adjusting my leather jacket, which is now coated in blood.

“Good.” He smiles and looks up at the ceiling before his face falls, and a coughing fit ensues. “He raped her. I watched. I heard her screams.” He swallows. “I can’t leave her like this. You need to protect her.” He turns his head towards me. “She doesn’t deserve this. She’s good.”

I don’t answer, and we sit in silence. His eyes drift closed, and his breathing turns shallow. It isn’t until I hear the sound of the ambulance pulling into the parking lot that I head out of the building, letting Lincoln deal with the paramedics.

I head back to the car to deal with Marcello. When I round the car, I tense. The backseat door is open, and blood leads away from the car. I slam my fist on the hood and growl.

The paramedics are loading Bianca’s friend into the back of the ambulance as Lincoln and Hawkins come running toward the car. I slip into the driver’s seat and grip the steering wheel so tight my knuckles turn white, not that you can tell since every knuckle is covered in Marcello’s blood. Next time I get my hands on him, there won’t be any blood left in his body.

“We looked everywhere for the briefcase, but it’s not there,” Hawkins says as he slips into the back seat. Lincoln takes the passenger seat but doesn’t say a word as we drive back to Manhattan.

I throw my keys to the driver, and we all gather in the elevator. Vivian is pacing in my penthouse’s living room when the doors open. “Oh, my god.” She gasps as she runs to me and grips me in a tight hug. I stiffen and pull her back.

“Did she say anything to you?”

“Other than fighting stuff, no… what happened?” She looks down at my bloody hands, scowling.

“Hawkins, take her home and meet me back here. We need to talk about what the fuck we are going to do now.” I say as I walk to my liquor cabinet.

Vivian scowls, crossing her arms over her chest. “No. You guys brought me into this, and I’m staying. You obviously need my help.”

“You don’t need to be more involved in this,” I grumble as I head over to the couch, where I meet Lincoln, who has two glasses ready for us.

“Yes, I do. I’m invested.” She sits down next to Lincoln, who shoots her a glare, but she rolls her eyes. “Tell me what happened,” she demands. When I don’t answer, she tilts her head up, looking back at Lincoln.

He’s always had a soft spot for her. He became a brother to us when we were kids, and she likes to pull at his heartstrings. Family is everything to us, and he can’t seem to deny her.

He shoots me a desperate look, and I just sigh and lean back on the couch, bringing the bottle to my lips, not even bothering with a glass. He simplifies the events that took place less than an hour ago so she doesn’t have to hear the gruesome details about what Manzo really did to her.

When we were outside, listening to her screams, we thought she was just putting up one hell of a fight. Then she left the building in nothing but her t-shirt, and I knew he had done something much more sinister. I had this overwhelming desire to run to her, to protect her. Those eyes. If it weren’t for Hawkins holding me back, I would have killed Manzo right then and there. He deserves a fate much worse than death.

Marcello’s words keep ringing in the back of my mind. “ He won’t have trouble starting a war over that girl .”

Is she worth starting a war over? What makes her so special to him? He has hundreds of whores to play with, so why is she so important?

“Lincoln.” Vivian’s voice pulls me out of my thoughts.

“Hm?” He looks over at her, grabbing the bottle from me, and brings it to his lips, taking a long pull.

“What are you going to do now?” He lets out an exasperated sigh and puts the bottle back on the table. Hawkins picks it up and takes a swig before returning it to me.

“We did our part,” I say after a beat. “Go home, Viv.”

“You’re just going to leave her out there?” Vivian gasps, and my scowl deepens. “You can’t do that!”

“Why the hell do you care? Aren’t you terrified of her?” I seethe.

She brings her hands up to her neck and glances at the floor. “Yes, but maybe she’s not always so…” She trails off, and Hawkins speaks up.

“What did she do to you?” He stands and walks over to her, pulling her hand off of her neck and pushing her hair back to give us a better view. There is a faint red handprint around her neck. I stiffen. She lets out a sigh and holds up her hand.

“Nothing I couldn’t handle…” She looks between the three of us and shakes her head. “She’s acting like a feral dog because, from what I’ve seen, that’s all she knows. She attacks first and asks questions later. Just like the three of you.” She focuses her attention on me, “If you don’t get her to safety, I will never forgive you. Nobody deserves to be hunted like that.” When I don’t answer she crosses her arms over her chest and pins me with a stare that reminds me of our mother’s. “What if it were me? Wouldn’t you want someone to save me?”

She doesn’t even know half of what happened to her at the motel, and she cares for her. She’s getting soft, and she needs to be careful.

“Going after her, protecting her, it’s a bad idea. Manzo will start a war for her. Are you prepared to lose everything to protect one woman?” I ask.

She narrows her eyes and puts her hand on her hips. “I might not like that woman, but that doesn’t mean she deserves whatever it is you’re hiding from me. I know something else happened. I won’t press you for that information, but it was obviously bad based on this.” She waves a hand over my bloody clothes. “Manzo doesn’t have to know you’re protecting her, but you need to find a way, Ryker. Or I will.” She narrows her eyes at me and without another word, she leaves.

“She’s Marcello’s fucking daughter,” I mumble, and Lincoln stiffens.

“Do you remember her?” Lincoln asks.

“Vaguely. We were seventeen when she supposedly died, but I don’t think we saw her for years before that.”

He nods, “The last time we saw Bianca was a dinner party your parents threw where they introduced me to everyone as their new son.”

I nod, remembering that night. “Then the war started.”

“I saw her body.” He says right before chugging the bottle. “I mourned her.”

We all did. I don’t bother saying this out loud because he knows. It was hard on everyone. But I remember Marcello’s face that night. He was burying his wife and daughter. He was pale, and his cheeks were streaked with tears as he sat at the edge of his wife’s grave, watching as it was slowly lowered into the soil. The only sound was his sobs as they began lowering his daughter. Back then, we were told they had both been shot and killed.

My mother sobbed for days. She lost her best friend, and the thought that Vivian might wind up like Bianca one day, nearly broke my mother. Other than Lincoln’s crush on Bianca, I hadn’t known much about her. But to think that the wars got so bad that women and children were dying for powerful families spoke volumes. It was a reminder that we aren’t invincible. Our loved ones aren’t either, and we shouldn’t make rash decisions, or the next one to go might just be someone we care about.

Hours pass before I hear anything about the man’s condition. It's around five in the afternoon by the time the hospital calls to let me know he has gotten out of surgery and is going to wake up within the next couple of hours. Even though the stab wound nicked his heart, he managed to pull through. While it was only a small tear, it was the cause of his major blood loss. He would have bled out if it had been an inch to the right.

I’m not sure if he’ll be happy he’s alive. He witnessed his girlfriend being raped and beaten in front of him as he lay on the floor, bleeding out, unable to help, and now he’ll be indebted to us for the rest of his short life.

I slam the car door, pissed to all hell about having to be at the hospital. I have about a thousand other things to be dealing with right now. After Vivian left, I got a call from one of my workers at dock five, informing me that four of his men were picked up by the DEA, and another two men who worked at dock seven were picked up by the FBI. Add finding a snitch to the to-do list.

I avoid the front desk, making my way into the lobby, and instead head to the ICU. Lincoln, Ace, and Hawkins follow close behind. I scan the rooms and find Jeremy in a bed with a tube down his throat and wires attached to his body. Before we can enter the room, a swarm of nurses and doctors come running down the hallway towards the lobby to tend to an incoming patient.

I take a seat next to the window, waiting for his doctor to come back to give us updates.

“So, what’s the plan?” Hawkins asks as he takes the seat next to me. I rake my eyes over the man, contemplating the question.

“Depends on him.” Everyone’s eyes flicker to him. “If things go according to plan, then he will start training with your men.”

“Have you found anything on him?” Lincoln asks Ace as he shifts in his seat. He’s been on edge all day waiting for Ace’s detailed report. Since he’s a computer genius, we figure he’d be the one most likely to find useful information.

He nods. “His name is Jeremy Peterson. He will be twenty next week…” He pulls out a piece of paper and starts reading off of it. “His mother and father owed Hawkins about $120,000 in debts, ranging from drug debts to gambling. They met their maker about five years ago. Since then he’s been in school, good grades for the most part, and he’s obviously smart. His school noted that they were concerned about his living situation but took no action to look into it. He dropped out for a few years before he started working on his GED last year, and he started working as a bartender about three months ago.” He shrugs, “Other than that, there isn’t much on him.”

I slowly nod, taking in the information. Maybe he will be more useful than I gave him credit for. He’s built like a fighter, but maybe he has the brains, too. I know he is close to Bianca. Maybe he could give us some useful information on where she might go to speed up the process.

There is a knock at the door and everyone in the room stiffens, reaching for their guns on instinct as the door opens. “Mr. Domincio. ”

“Doctor Hoffman.” I stand and extend my hand for him to shake. He’s one of the doctors we tend to go to when we need things kept under the radar. His father was a surgeon who worked for mine, and now he works for us.

“Sorry for the delay.” He runs his hands through his hair as he takes in the wall of muscle around him. “Busy day.”

“What’s the prognosis?” Hawkins asks as he stands.

“He should be waking up in the next couple of minutes. I know you like your men to get out of here as quickly as possible, but he should stay for at least two days. His heart needs to be under close watch.”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” I grab Ace by the shoulder in a tight grip. “He will stay here until he’s ready to be discharged.”

The doctor looks over Jeremy’s vitals and checks a few things on his chart before turning back to us. “There are going to be a lot of questions surrounding this. The police are here for another patient, but I think you should try to avoid them.”

The police are nothing more than a hassle. They like to ask dumb questions and press my buttons from time to time but we have enough leaks in the precincts all around New York to keep them off our trail. As if Dr. Hoffman can read my mind, he shakes his head and opens his mouth to speak, but he was interrupted by a knock at the door. A young redhead covered in freckles cracks the door open and stares at us with wide eyes as she takes in the scene. “Sir. The woman from downstairs is awake.”

His eyes widen in shock. “Already?” He sets down Jeremy’s chart and runs a hand through his hair. “Vitals?”

She steps into the room tentatively, scanning her eyes between all of us. She begins to pull out Jeremy’s breathing tube and he chokes as the foreign plastic is removed from his throat .

“Blood pressure is high but is stable for now. She didn’t know about the stab wound. We should check her head again…” She pauses and looks at all four of us, swallowing nervously. “She… She didn’t want the kit.” She says as she scurries back to the door.

Kit? As in rape kit? I pull my eyebrows in confusion. There are thousands of women in New York, and rape happens every day. Bianca wouldn’t be stupid enough to go to one of the main hospitals, would she? I look over to Lincoln, who stiffens and gives me the same confused look.

Dr. Hoffman nods and groans, mumbling something about HIPPA to himself before dismissing the nurse. She doesn’t hesitate in closing the door.

“Who's the girl?” I ask first.

“Jane Doe. Rape and battery.” The doctor looks between us and frowns. “Was this you?” He asks in a whisper.

I narrow my eyes and lower my voice to a warning. “Describe her.”

“White, dirty blonde hair, thin, blue eyes, and covered in scars.”

Lincoln’s jaw ticks as he stands. “What room?” He asks as he starts for the door. I move to follow after him.

“Room 6.” He says as he steps in front of us and shoots me an apologetic look. “You can see her after I do. Once I look her over again, you can do whatever you need to, but she almost died on my table. Twice.”

I clench my hand into a fist and growl. A protective instinct flows through me. “I want to see her chart.” I lift my chin, and he nods and slips out of the room.

“He stabbed her?” Hawkins looks at us in shock. “When did he do that? ”

“Inside the motel room, probably. Otherwise, we would have seen it.” Lincoln says.

I look over to Ace, who is looking at all of us in confusion before a flicker of recognition flashes across his face. “It could be someone else.” He offers, but none of us acknowledge that. The minutes slowly tick by, and Lincoln begins pacing.

When I glance up at Lincoln, I know he’s about to run out of this room and into hers. I shake my head at him. She doesn't know we are here, and if she does, she will run, and we will lose her. I haven’t decided what I will do, but I know the decision has already been made based on Lincoln’s expression.

Lincoln raises his chin in defiance, but before I can reprimand him for the disobedience, Jeremy stirs in the bed, and everyone’s focus turns to him. His eyes crack open and then widen in shock before inevitably falling to confusion.

“How the hell am I alive?” He croaks in a raspy, dry voice.

“I can’t do this,” Lincoln mutters and makes it into the hallway before Ace catches up to him.