by S. Massery
I growl when the man fond of flipping his knife over his knuckles saunters toward me.
He crouches at my side. “I went to med school.” His voice is as flippant as that knife. “One nice thing they teach you is where all the organs are.” He digs a finger into the flesh of my stomach. “Your liver is here. That’s no good. That’d kill you in minutes.” He drags his finger down. “No, not here, intestines, nasty suckers to cut open.”
His eyes are fixated on my skin.
“Ben!” The second man scowls. “Boss is on the line.”
“Give me a minute,” Ben yells.
“Now!”
Ben uses my leg to propel himself upward and flips the knife in his hand one more time.
The last thing I see is the butt of the knife in his fist, flying at my head.
29
DELIA
I don’t have a plan. I don’t have a fucking plan. I don’t have a—
“Oomph.”
I’m lifted clear off my feet. Instead of hitting the ground, I get thrown over a shoulder, and suddenly the person beneath me is running.
“What the hell!” I yell. I thrash. I did not make it this far into my rescue mission to—
“Easy. It’s Zach.”
I freeze and relax against him as his gait smooths out into a fast jog. It feels like we’re floating along the ground. I have an eyeful of his ass and his heels. His booted feet snap up from the ground. Dusk has fully settled in the mountains, and we’re losing too much light.
“What are you doing here?” I call.
“Saving your ass.” He smacks said ass.
“Real nice,” I huff. I choose not to be offended, because I’m fucking relieved. “You alone?”
Zach slows to a stop. He got us farther than I would’ve got in that time. He lifts me off his shoulder, and I look around.
We’re on the backside of a ridge, close to the top. I’d imagine on the other side of the hill is the warehouse. There are a few bags on the ground, some supplies already pulled out, and two dirt bikes on kickstands next to a four-wheeler. There are four night-vision goggles resting on top of each of the bags.
“Don’t you just love a Mafia warehouse in the middle of the desert?” I ask him with a bite of sarcasm. I bend over and try not to pass out, white spots taking over my vision.
He rolls his eyes and wipes sweat from his brow. “Running with you is fun. We should do this more often.”
I take a step back, just in case he gets any ideas. “I think not. Where’s everyone else?”
“Here,” Dalton says behind me. He’s picking his way down the steep hill from the top of the ridge to us, and he looks ridiculous.
“What are you wearing?” I blurt out.
Dalton cracks a smile. “A ghillie suit.” It’s sand colored, covered with what appears to be actual sand. He spins to show me the back, which has a dry, pale-green brush growing out of his spine. It rustles when he shimmies.
“For camouflage,” I guess, earning a wink.
“You found her,” Griffin calls. He comes toward us from the same direction we came. “I took care of the guy.”
“Oliver?”
Griffin focuses on me. “Would you be opposed to him dying?”
“I don’t know.”
He shrugs one shoulder. “Well, he’s alive. I just put him in the trunk and moved his car off the road. We should be good for a while.”
“They’re expecting me,” I say. “But, uh, thanks for saving me.”
Zach laughs. “You’re welcome. What do you need?”
“What do I need?” I repeat.
Griffin steps forward and taps under my chin. “You’re about to fall over. Zach’s right. What do you need? Water? Food?”
Right.
“I haven’t eaten in a while. Where’s Mason?”
“This isn’t his type of mission.” Zach digs out a granola bar and a water bottle, handing both to me.
“Saving Jackson isn’t his type of mission?” I roll my eyes and tear open the wrapper. I waste no time shoving half of the bar into my mouth. “What type of morality is causing—”
“Spike,” Dalton interrupts. “Spike knew Mason didn’t live by the rules in the past, and he also knew he couldn’t ask Mason to leave that completely behind.” He shakes his head. “When they moved in together, Spike told Mason if he ever did anything illegal in Spike’s territory, their relationship would be over.”
“So he was allowed to come help us in Salt Lake City,” I say. “And he does the underground fighting with Jackson because it’s never in Vegas.”
“Bingo,” Zach says. “We respect that, so beyond Mason calling us back in and tracking Jackson’s phone, he couldn’t do anything.”
“What’s the plan? If I don’t go in there, they’ll kill Jackson.”
Dalton gestures up to the top of the ridge. “I’ve got him in my scope. He’s in the warehouse tied to a chair. There are two men who alternate interrogating him. No one has left in twenty-four hours.”
“I should go,” I say. “I feel better.” It wasn’t part of the original plan. Beyond getting away from Oliver, I didn’t know what I was going to do. Let’s face it, my plans haven’t really been coming together all that well, anyway.
Griffin grabs my arm to keep me from marching straight down there. “What did you do to make Elvira take you to the warehouse?”
I tilt my head. “I told him I’d tell him the truth about what happened.”
“And he expects you to say what?”
I shrug. “I don’t fucking know. But I do know he wants the whole family to think I was working with the Castillos to plan my father and uncles’ deaths.”
Zach’s phone rings. “Mason,” he tells us.
We all get closer as Zach answers and puts him on speakerphone.
“Glad our boys were able to intercept you, Delia,” Mason says.
“She kicked ass on her own.” Zach laughs.
“Even better. Listen, you have six cars headed your way.”
My eyes widen. “That fucker,” I breathe.
“What?” Zach asks.
“It’s probably the whole family. He was never going to let me or Jackson live. He’s going to have me admit—or almost admit—that I orchestrated everything. And then he’s going to kill both of us.”
“We won’t let that happen… but you need to beat James to the warehouse.”
I raise my eyebrow. “How far out are they?” I ask Mason.
“Twenty minutes, maybe fifteen.”
“I’ve got a plan,” I tell them. “And it involves one of those bikes.”
They gave me a shotgun. Zach said it’s easier to hit targets in the dark with a shotgun because of the spray of buckshot. I rolled my eyes at them. I would’ve preferred the semi-automatic that Zach kept touching like it was his lover, but I relented.
Night has fallen, but the bike has a headlamp that illuminates three feet in front of me.
The gun is slung across my back. I nudge the bike over the edge and shoot down the hill. It’s a rush, and at one point the wind whips past me so hard, it grabs at me like it wants to keep me. Sand kicks up behind me, and I swerve a few times to miss brush and rocks. Most impressively, I make it to level ground in one piece.
One of the doors opens as I get close, and a man steps out. He points a gun at me, but I fly toward him too fast to stop. Not that I want to stop.
A shot shatters the night, and the man falls backward into the warehouse. There’s no fear, no hesitation in me. I skid the bike to a stop feet from the door and hop off of it, pushing it inside the building. I cast one last wave in Dalton’s direction before I close the door behind me.
This is the same door I came in with my father the night he killed Anthony. That night, I was naive, in a dress with a full skirt that swirled around my calves and peacoat. I felt pretty. Tonight, I feel wicked.
I pull the gun off my back and double-check that there’s more than one shell in it. There’s o
ne more man, and that should be it—at least, for the next five minutes or so. Theoretically, that’s enough time to get Jackson out.
The door is open, and I creep through it slowly. Jackson is in almost the exact spot where my father had tied Anthony. There’s a glaring light on him, and he looks semi-conscious. His head lolls to one side, his eyes are closed, and his breathing is shallow.
“Jackson,” I mutter, keeping my gaze on the entryways into the warehouse. Dalton warned me he wouldn’t be able to guarantee a shot from his angle.
“Delia?” He struggles against the ropes.
“Shh, shh,” I mumble. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Not so fast, now,” the second of Jackson’s captors says from behind me.
I spin around and hoist the gun, but my blood runs cold.
“Benjamin?”
Kaitlyn’s husband. She’s Alexa’s older sister. He flips a knife along his knuckles—it’s a trick he taught me how to do when I was eighteen, except he made me use a nail file until I got the hang of it. Truthfully, I was never very successful.
I shake my head. “You?”
“You can’t betray our family and expect not to pay for it,” he says.
“I didn’t.” I don’t know why I say it. It isn’t part of the plan. “Please, Benji, you think I’d kill my father and uncles?”
He shakes his head. “You’re always going on and on about your father and uncles. But what about Margaret? She was your stepmom. You loved her.”
“No,” I say. “No, I just—”
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, then snap them open. He’s taken two steps forward, and it’s enough to spook me.
I pull the trigger. The buckshot hits his chest, a thousand shots embedding into his skin.
Once a murderer, always a murderer, a dark voice in my head tells me.
Jackson flinches, and I drop the gun.
Benjamin falls.
I rush to him and snatch the knife from the floor. He gasps for breath, his mouth opening and closing like a gaping fish. At such a close range, the spray got his chest, his face…
I turn away from him before I can regret my actions. Back at Jackson’s side, I make quick work of cutting him free. I pull him up and put his arm around my shoulders.
“Careful,” Jackson murmurs.
The beams from car headlights swing into the warehouse. The cars circle around and park facing the door, and I count them silently. “You’re telling me to be careful?” I ask him. “Are you okay? Can you shoot?”
He wobbles when I leave him to retrieve the gun. He takes one look at it and laughs. “Who the fuck gave you a shotgun?”
I just shake my head. My whole family is here. They’re going to storm in with guns blazing—and if they don’t, they’ll take in the scene pretty quickly and escalate it to that. “Stay here,” I tell Jackson. “I’m going to go talk to them.”
He huffs. “Yeah fucking right. I’m going with you.”
He adjusts his grip on the gun and freezes. “This is my gun,” he says, disbelief tinting his voice. “I lost it in a bet to Zach forever ago, which means…”
I wink. “Yep. They’re around here somewhere.”
Jackson suddenly becomes someone else. He shakes off the dazed look and grabs my arm, pulling me into a crouch. “Why haven’t they come in yet?”
“My family?”
“What are they waiting for?”
“I don’t—”
He drags me toward the back of the warehouse. We round the corner and the front windows explode in glass. He covers my mouth, halting my scream, and yanks open the back door—the one I came in. He waves like a madman, and suddenly a light in the hills flashes.
“Okay,” he says, “it’s time for you to run.”
I stare at him. “Excuse me?”
“Run, Delia,” he says, giving me a little push.
The gunfire decimating the warehouse doesn’t even rattle me anymore.
“They’re going to come in and see neither of us, which will mean you escaped with me, or they’ll come in and see that I got loose and murdered their family, and that’ll give you time to escape.”
My mouth drops open. “That’s the stupidest—”
He hauls me forward and kisses me roughly. “I love you. Just run. Please.”
Before I can blink, he shoves me backward and slams the door in my face.
“Bastard,” I whisper. Weaponless, bike-less, and entirely unsure what to do, I stand and stare dumbly at the side of the warehouse.
The gunfire cuts out, and when it does, the silence hurts.
One more shot, and I sink to my knees. No, no, no.
I’m not running. I refuse. And I know that this is some fucked-up Romeo and Juliet scenario, but I can’t stop myself from falling on the sword for him like he’s currently trying to do for me. So I pick myself up and dust off my knees. The knife that I used to cut Jackson free is in my back pocket. Edging toward the corner of the warehouse, I peek around just as the last of them steps through the door.
I follow behind them, and no one seems to notice me join the crowd. I feel like a dusty, bloody mess, but I remain undetected.
Jackson and James are squaring off. Jackson is still standing, still breathing. He has the shotgun aimed at James. He doesn’t look like he got shot. James points a revolver at him, and my heart catches in my throat.
“Where is she?” James asks. “She’s a promise-breaker, just like I’ve been saying.”
The crowd of cousins murmurs.
I roll my eyes and step forward. “I’m not a liar, James. Not like you.”
Jackson groans, so softly that I can’t imagine anyone else hears it. It sounds like agony in my ears, but I smile at him. I hope I translate the love I feel in that smile, because he didn’t let me say it before he tried to get me to run, and I can’t say it now—I can’t give that sort of leverage to James.
“We had a deal,” I say, loud enough that the cousins snap to attention. “I tell you what happened the night our family was murdered, and you let Jackson go.”
“That wasn’t—”
I tilt my head. “I held up my end of the bargain. I’m here, ready to talk, but you had my family try to kill us before that could happen.”
His eyes narrow.
“Someone grab her,” he says.
No one moves.
“I want to hear what she has to say,” someone calls.
We all turn toward the new voice. Edgar Castillo steps through the warehouse entrance, kicking glass aside.
“Well, this is just a party now.” I almost smile. Our contingency plan paid off. Relief—foolish, but true—fills my chest.
Edgar winks at me. “I brought a party favor.”
He jerks his head, and two men bring in his father, bound and tied.
“But please, Delia, tell your story. You promised me you’d only tell it once, and I intend to hear it in its entirety.”
I take a deep breath and cross the room to stand by Jackson. Ever since Edgar and his men entered, the gun in James’s hand has lowered. I’m not foolish enough to yank it out of his hand, but Jackson is. His hand snaps forward and twists the gun out of James’s grip. He stares at Jackson stupidly, but I just shake my head.
I have too many eyes on me. Too much pressure. What choice do I have?
I have a story to tell. The truth, finally.
“I came home and saw a Castillo in a car across the street.” I don’t mention it was Edgar. He doesn’t need that weakness bestowed on him. “Instead of going inside, I went around to the shed and got one of my father’s guns.”
He had been teaching me how to shoot my whole life. I knew my way around a revolver the same way I knew my way around a rifle. How to clean it, load it, take it apart and put it back together again. How to fire it into a target, and later into a person. That has clearly come in handy later in my life, but at the time it felt like too heavy of a responsibility.
“I kept it i
n the front of my pants as I slipped inside. One of Jorge’s men grabbed me almost immediately, dragging me into the living room.” My vision blurs, and that day plays out again.
The man threw me onto the couch next to my father. We shared one glance, and then he faced forward again. Jorge Castillo paced in front of us like a lion waiting to pounce. Anxious energy ran through him. On the other side of my father, Margaret was calm. Only my father’s hands were bound.
Then they brought in my uncles.
“This is your second-in-command, no?” Jorge asked, the barrel of his gun brushing against Uncle Ricco’s forehead.
No one reacted.
Jorge came at my father and hit him in the jaw. “You speak, or he dies. Your choice.”
My father grunted. He was weary of this. “Why are you doing this, Jorge? We’ve lived peacefully for years.”
Jorge’s gaze darted to Margaret, then returned to Father. “Peace? You suppress us, old man. We want liberation.”
One of Jorge’s guys grabbed my father and yanked him up. “This is for Papi,” he muttered, driving his fist into Father’s stomach.
My father exhaled sharply, bending almost in half. The guy’s knee snapped up, straight into his face. Blood gushed before my father even hit the floor.
I lunged forward, screaming.
It was Margaret who caught me around the stomach, surprisingly strong. She lifted me nearly off my feet and dragged me backward, away from the men.
“Leave her,” Margaret snapped. “I’ll take care of her.”
Jorge looked at her and inclined his head.
Margaret pulled me into the kitchen, shoving me against the sink.
“Are you sparing me from watching my father die or sentencing me to a worse fate?” I asked her.
She shook her head. “You are a dramatic child. Did you think your father could hold on to his crown forever? With sharks in the water? No.” She laughed. “No, your father believed in peace. Peace. That isn’t our way.”
“Whose way?” I asked, keeping the island between us. I still wasn’t sure she was the bad guy.
“Delia,” my father yelled from the other room, “run!”
Someone snatched my arm. A man dressed in black. I kicked at him and screamed when he got ahold of my hair. His meaty fingers bit into the back of my neck, forcing me ahead of him into the living room.
