Chapter 19
Luke
W hen another man rushed up to join the fight, I growled and wondered when I’d get lucky. When something could go right, for a change. It turned out that moment was now.
This newcomer hurried close to fight with me. He didn’t enter the foray to further stack the odds against me. He fought back these Giordino assholes who thought it would be fun to attack Jimmy and goad me into proving myself.
It was just as well that this man came to my assistance when he did. One of the guards whipped out a gun while another brought a knife into the fight.
I dropped the man with the knife. The thug with the gun didn’t get far. This other guy who helped me shot him first.
Turning slowly, still in a crouch from kicking the last man standing so hard that he cracked his head against a low guardrail near a nasty dumpster, I looked up at Sean. The capo who was supposed to be Jimmy’s assistant.
I heaved out a long exhale. Peering up at him, I strained to catch my breath.
“Thanks, Sean,” I said, meaning it. I wasn’t here to worry about my ego. I’d take all the help I could get.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. I came when John called—the guard back there at the accident. He said you headed this way and...” He sighed, looking down at Jimmy still on the ground. “He’s still tied up back there, but I drove another way. We need to go.”
I winced as I straightened. “We need to find my mother.”
He nodded, helping Jimmy up. “But she’s not here. That was what I was doing, following the leads Leo called in. He wasn’t mistaken. The Giordinos captured Nina. But they handed her off to someone else.”
“Fuck.”
I missed my simpler life, where all I had to worry about before was if she had her medications and affording them. Limping toward Jimmy, I helped Sean get him upright. I’d have to carry him out of here. He was half asleep from that last hit to his head. One of the guards had kicked him when he was down, and I wasn’t quick enough to stop the hit.
“I couldn’t keep him safe,” I said as Sean and I worked together to get my uncle off the ground. “They got him in the head.”
“You can’t save everyone, Luke,” he coached. His tone was firm and kind, not scolding. “I recall the first time you saved someone.”
“You mean the first life I took?” I raised my brows. Up close, as we teamed up to move my uncle, I saw him clearer. He’d aged. So had I. But Sean had the same features that stood out to me the day we met.
“He had to die,” Sean said, referring to the rapist I’d killed. “That’s just life.”
“Or death?” I quipped wryly.
On my walk home from working at the Tropican, the under-the-table gigs I had to make money for Mom, I came across a man raping a young woman in the alley. I was filled with such rage at him controlling her that I attacked him. I hadn’t been able to stop though, too furious and determined to finish him off. The thought of him doing this again, to another woman, pushed me to kill him. I was just a teen though, a minor, a child, really, but it didn’t hold me back from killing that rapist.
That was where Sean came in. He spotted me from a distance, hearing the sounds of the struggle and hurrying to save me . As soon as he realized what was going on, he helped me clean the blood off my fists and remarked that I was a brave boy.
We never spoke about that incident since then, but the next time I saw him, he had Jimmy with him. Because I’d proven how hard of a fighter I could be, intervening to help a stranger in the alley, he thought I warranted an introduction to Jimmy, who took me under his wing and trained me to be the fighter I was now.
“You didn’t just happen upon me in that alley, did you?” I asked, realizing some seventeen years too late that it couldn’t have been a coincidence for Sean to be in that alley that day.
Holding up Jimmy between us, we moved him toward the SUV Sean drove.
“No. I didn’t,” Sean replied. “Ever since your birth, Jimmy wanted to keep an eye on you. When you got older, and started working, it was too easy for you to slip past. Like that day in the alley. I was rushing to check in on Jimmy’s behalf and arrived too late.”
I let that sink in. It felt weird to think that I had a guardian angel all this time, but now knowing Sean and Jimmy were Rossini mafia men, that term didn’t apply all too well.
A guardian...demon?
“I was the one who suggested we train you to fight.”
Sean had been involved in the beginning. This man, alongside Jimmy and others who were likely Rossini soldiers, had begun the art of morphing me into a fighter, not just a killer.
Over the years, as I got better and faster, Sean slunk out of sight and was less involved. Like Ben and his workers said that time at the club, Sean used to be a familiar face in the fighting circles, but he retreated gradually.
I imagined he’d be involved in my life once more. He already was, helping me get my beaten uncle into the car. As he drove away, I worried that I was pulled in the wrong direction again.
“What about my mom?” I rubbed my hand over my face, slouching in the passenger seat while Jimmy lay in the back. “I have to find her.”
Sean nodded, driving quickly but with utmost concentration. “We will. Leo’s back out there tracking where the other drivers took her.”
“It sounds like Damon ordered her to be taken.”
“No doubt in retaliation to you interfering with Emmalina’s engagement to Antonio.”
“She wasn’t engaged. Not yet.”
He shrugged. “Same thing. She was promised to him.”
“Fine. But she promised herself to me. She’s engaged to me.”
“So I’ve heard.” He glanced in the rearview mirror at Jimmy.
I wasn’t going down this path of defending my commitment with Emma. Not again. I had to focus on my mother until I knew she was safe. “Damon ordered my mom to be taken, but someone else took over. If that fucker has been working with the Marchese family, then...”
“Then you’d be correct in assuming she might be at the Marchese residence. That’s where Leo and a crew of others are trying to investigate next.”
I let out a long, hard breath. Recalling how challenging and dangerous it was for me to sneak out of Antonio’s custody, I hated to think of having to go back. I would, for my mother. That Marchese fucker wouldn’t scare me off.
But dammit, I was sick of that guy. I couldn’t wait until he was no longer an issue, but I realized that I couldn’t barge in and kill him. He was too heavily protected and guarded, not at all accessible for an easy hit. I wasn’t even used to holding or firing a gun. I killed with my bare hands, in close combat. That would be harder to make happen with someone as protected and unreachable as him.
“Let’s get him home,” Sean said, tipping his head in the direction of Jimmy in the back. “By then, I should be getting a call from Leo. With his intel, we can form a plan and go from there.”
I nodded, glad for his perspective. While being delayed in going to find my mom wasn’t what I wanted, I didn’t think it would be productive to search for her in the wrong place or to look for her blindly.
Sean had a mind for strategizing, like me, and as we rode back, I considered how he’s always been there in the background, as a resource I hadn’t realized I needed.
We reached the Rossini estate, and the guard who let us in acknowledged Sean with an affirmative to his question.
“Has anything happened?” he asked the guard.
He shook his head. “Not a thing. One man took an SUV out, but I believe that would’ve been Frank, heading to that meetup with the MC about the drug route changes.”
Sean dipped his chin. “Thanks.”
I breathed easier with that news. If that main gate guard could attest that nothing happened here while I was gone, that had to mean that Emma would be inside, safe and sound behind these locked doors.
She wasn’t though.
“Emma?” I called out, seeking her in the mostly empty house we’d started to clean up. She could help Jimmy again, using her abandoned nursing skills and knowledge to make sure he was comfortable and not in need of going to the ER.
“Emma?”
Sean helped me set Jimmy on his bed. Then he followed me through the house as I called out for her.
She wasn’t in our wing. She wasn’t in another secluded part of the house, deep in the zone as she cleaned to stay preoccupied. I wasn’t thinking that she’d be here waiting with her arms wide open for me upon my return, but I did expect to find her somewhere. The longer I looked and didn’t encounter her, the more deeply I worried.
“She’s got to be here somewhere,” Sean said.
She did. “But it doesn’t seem like she’s here.”
“Could she have...” He grimaced, glancing at me. “Could she have left?”
“Me? Could she have left me ?” I shook my head. “No.” We were in this together. I couldn’t have been wrong about it. A nagging thought persisted in the back of my mind though, reminding me that she was quicker to raise doubts about how we could make this work with everyone out to stop us from being together—or alive.
“But no one came here to take her,” Sean said.
A guard approached, oblivious to Emma being missing. He focused on Sean, addressing him. “I’m going to meet with the MC.”
Sean furrowed his brow. “Frank? But you already left.”
“No...” He raised his brows. “I’ve been here patrolling the back portion of the property all day.”
The guard at the gate said someone left...
“Fuck.” I clenched my jaw, wondering why Emma would have taken off.
I was firm in the belief that she wouldn’t leave me, not like this.
Which meant something had to have drawn her out.
I swallowed hard, worried that she’d fallen for a trick. The only way I could see her willingly leaving was if she’d been coaxed to step out from beyond my reach or out of my range of protection.
Emma. Where the hell are you?
I feared the worst, wondering if she—and my mother—could be at the same hellhole I wanted to storm.
With the Marcheses.