Chapter 12 Noah
I leave the house with the intent of going into my garage, but I sit in my truck, thinking about the woman in my home.
My dick is stiffer than it’s ever been so much so that I’m so close to nutting without even touching the greedy bastard.
Being around her has me so hard up I can barely breathe.
I have to control myself. I can’t keep fucking her all the damn time. I’ll tire her out.
I pull out onto the road and drive off to the garage. The second I arrive, Knox my manager, is waiting with some papers. “You’ve got some work that needs to be taken care of here.”
“Well clear it up, find someone to do it, I can’t be here all the time.”
“You know it’s you the customers are asking for right”
“Thorn’s been calling too,” Knox adds, flipping a page. “Says the Mercedes is running better than the day he bought it and he wants to know if you’ll do the same magic on his fiance’s car before the wedding.”
A month ago, I would’ve been the one calling Thorn back myself, walking him through every bolt we’d tightened.
Now I can barely remember what the Mercedes looked like before we started on it.
“Tell him yes. Whatever he needs, on the house. Man kept this place afloat with referrals when I couldn’t be bothered to answer my own phone. ”
“Fuck. Doesn’t matter. Get one of our best guys to handle it. I have personal matters to attend to.”
“What’s wrong? Is there a problem?” he asks, following me into my office.
“No, everything is fine.
“Well, you can push up a few projects, but the rest I’ll have to delegate them”
“That’s alright. Call me if there’s a major problem. Everything else can wait.”
I pull my jacket closer around me as I cross the street near the swanky bar with the music, lights, and people spilling into the street.
I’ve almost caught up to him when I spy a shadow across the street, one that shouldn’t be here.
I stop, allowing them to continue on, and pretend to make a call on my cell phone, watching the shadow all the while. It eases behind cars and the trunks of the old oaks that line the streets, each step drawing it closer to the girls.
My charade continues as I watch a man dart across the road, his clothes dark and something about his manner reminiscent of a soldier or perhaps an assassin.
My body tenses as I stow my phone and ease across the street.
I duck behind a car and call Matteo. Matteo picked up on the first ring, same as always, a man who’s never once in the years I’ve known him let a call from me go to voicemail.
It’s the kind of loyalty you can’t buy, only earn, and I earned his a long time ago in ways I don’t let myself think about too often.
He’d had names for me within the hour of Lily giving me the little she knew, faces to match them by morning.
Whatever this was going to cost me, I’d already decided it was worth it before I ever left the house.
Sorrentino. Of course it was Sorrentino, running his little collection racket through the same low rent enforcers I’d already put down once outside Lily’s restaurant.
My father did business with the old man once, back when the two families kept an uneasy truce over which streets belonged to whom.
That truce died with my father, and I’ve spent ten years pretending I don’t miss the structure of it, the predictability.
There’s no predictability in a man like Sorrentino deciding my girl’s mother owes him enough to justify snatching a teenager off a public sidewalk.
That’s not collections. That’s a message. And I intend to send one back.
“Need backup, there is more of those goons from the information you sent me. I’m sending you my location.” I cut the call and pull out my knife the one intended for that psychopath lurking around my house.
This man, the one ahead of me now leaning in a dark doorway, the rest of the goons walking away and entering a building with a side door, beside the swanky bar.
He must be dealt with first. Then the party of motherfuckers.
They think they can just hurt my woman and get away with it.
Matteo’s team should be two minutes out, maybe less if the traffic on Fifth stayed light.
Two minutes is a long time to stand here doing nothing while the men who put their hands on Lily walk around like they own this block, but I’ve learned patience the hard way, in rooms far worse than this alley.
Rushing gets people killed. Usually the wrong people.
There’s a version of my life I don’t talk about, not to Lily, not to anyone who didn’t live through it alongside me.
Before the garage. Before I told myself I was done with all of it and came back to my grandparents’ house to build something quiet and honest with my hands.
My father’s company wasn’t just construction and real estate, not really, not underneath the paperwork.
It was a front for moving things people didn’t want moved through legal channels, and I spent my twenties learning every ugly corner of that business because he insisted his only son understand exactly what kept the lights on.
I got out the only way you get out of something like that.
Not clean. Never clean. Just alive, with a short list of men who still owed me favors and an even shorter list who wanted me dead for knowing too much.
Matteo was one of the ones who stayed loyal.
I’ve spent ten years trying to convince myself that walking away meant something, that fixing engines and flipping the occasional property made me a different man than the one who used to make problems disappear for a living.
Standing in this alley with a knife in my pocket and murder in my chest over a girl I’ve known less than two weeks, I’m starting to think I never really left that man behind at all. I just gave him a nicer garage to work out of.
When I’m close enough to the man, I pull out my phone, pretending to scroll through it.
I can feel the man’s eyes on me.
“Hey, do you sell any drugs” my hand touches the knife in my right pocket. Ready to strike out at any moment.
He shakes his head, his voice gruff. “No. What do you think you’re doing? You look familiar. Yeah I know you. You’re that guy who lives in the cabin”
“You certain?” I stumble closer, the knife warm in my hand. He doesn’t see it coming.
“Yes, I’m certain, you own that garage and you’ve got something of ours. Our boss was going to pay you a visit tonight but since you’re here, let me give you a piece of advice. Hand over the girl to us and you’re safe.” He steps out, coming closer.
“Something of yours? She’s mine” I lunge before he can answer and make sure he never hurts my sweet princess ever again.
I lean back against the concrete building and exhale, anxious to be back home with my woman.
With her head tucked under my chin, an arm wrapped around her waist. After the way we made love tonight, I’m hungrier than ever for her pussy.
If I was home right now, I’d be teasing her clit with my middle finger, arousing her while she’s sleeping.
She’d be rolling over on top of me, half asleep and humping me, confused and disoriented to wake up wet and throbbing, whining until I took care of business.
Keeping an eye on the building where my targets are. I can’t tell how many men are in there. I recognize the man from the information Matteo sent me and two other guys he was with. Where the fuck are those reinforcement I asked from Matteo.
I look down at the shot gun that I had picked up from the idiot I had killed.
Killing wasn’t new to me. I had once killed a man in self defense before, he was raping an innocent girl in an alleyway one night as I was walking back to campus.
We struggled with his gun, after he tried to shoot me with it for a while before the gun went off, killing the rapist immediately.
I hadn’t been arrested since the girl testified that it was in self defense.
I hear movement behind me and see five men jump out of a car.
I recognize one of them as Matteo’s right hand man, Evan.
Evan nods at me once, sharp and professional, the way a soldier greets a commanding officer he hasn’t seen active duty with in years.
That’s what this always was underneath the garage and the small town anonymity, a chain of command that never actually dissolved just because I stopped answering to it daily.
My father built that chain link by link over thirty years.
I inherited it whether I wanted the inheritance or not, and tonight, for the first time in a long time, I’m grateful for every link of it.
She would leave me if she knew what I was doing right now.
I am obsessed beyond measure. My every waking thought is about her. But if she were to find out the truth, would she understand the love is real? This connection between us cannot just be the delusions of a sick mind. She feels it, too.
Evan nods at me and we enter the building silently. I walk beside as we go deeper into the building, discovering a few goons and disarming them or killing a few. We see that the building is a drug operation hideout.
Moving further, we see that a room is occupied by a few men, including the big boss of those loan shark goons.
I recognize him from the information Evan sent me.
I wonder what the hell Lily’s mother got my sweet girl into.
A few of his men spot us but we fired shots at them before they could rain down bullets on us.
The men gathering soon raise their guns at us, resulting in a standoff.
The boss doesn’t move a muscle. Evan nods at me when I look at him. That’s his signal.
The big boss just sits there smirking at me. “Who are you? What gave you the right to walk into my territory and shoot my men?” Anger shines in his eyes. That smirk still in place.