by Mae Doyle
Normally I didn’t like to spend this much time talking to someone before I just killed them, but there was something that I had learned about the staff in houses.
They always knew more than they let on.
Just as I suspected, the woman nodded, a nerve in her jaw jumping from how hard she was clenching it. “They have her in the main room. They’re all up late because of it. It’s a big deal.”
“Big deal? What are they going to do to her?” Was I wasting time talking to her? My finger squeezed the trigger just enough to remind me that I was still in control.
“They’re making her his. I have to make her something to eat so that she won’t be too tired in the morning.” The woman looked almost dead on her feet herself as she gestured at the stove. I didn’t bother glancing down to see what she was cooking. It didn’t matter – Isabella wasn’t going to have any of it pass her lips. She’d be back at my place before long.
“Making her his,” I repeated, my voice low. I didn’t like how that sounded at all, and when the woman nodded in confirmation, I felt rage burst through me.
I didn’t want to hurt her. Usually I had a scorched earth policy when it came to shit like this, but she was about to piss herself. I sighed, lifting my pistol up. She flinched, but instead of shooting her in the head like I had originally planned to do, I slammed the grip of it down on her temple.
She crumpled straight to the ground and I knelt down, feeling for her pulse. It was there, but faint, but she’d be fine.
Standing back up, I stepped over her body and headed across the kitchen for the other door. I had to loop around the island and past a huge wine refrigerator to get there. The floors were marble and must have been freshly mopped because they squeaked a little under my feet.
Carefully I pushed the door open and found myself peering out into a brightly lit hallway. There were doors at regular intervals down the hall, and I paused as I walked by each one, listening for the sounds of voices.
By the time I got to the end of the hall I haven’t heard anything, but there was still more one set of double doors to check. I leaned forward, holding my breath so that nobody would hear me.
The double doors had amazing carvings decorating them, but I ignored how elaborate they were while I listened. There was definitely more than one person in the room. It was easy to hear one main voice, an angry man, over everyone else.
And then the sweet lilting tones of Isabella.
Except she didn’t sound so sweet. She sounded pissed off and ready to do something stupid, and I couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride when I thought about that. She was definitely a hellcat, that was sure, and there wasn’t anything that could slow her down.
Once I got her out of the mansion, I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do with her.
I turned the handle slowly, pausing for just a moment after the door clicked. The last thing that I wanted was to draw attention to myself before I was in the room and had time to figure out just how fucked up the situation was.
But that wasn’t what happened. Some asshole by the door heard me open it and reached out, pulling the door open the rest of the way so that I was suddenly exposed in the open space.
Fucking hell. That was not how I wanted it to go, but I knew better than to just panic and start shooting. As calmly as possible I put a bullet in that asshole’s forehead, enjoying the soft thud that he made when he hit the ground.
Isabella was crouched on the floor by the boss, fear splashed across her face, wearing a fucking dog collar. I caught her eye for just a second before two guys rushed me.
“Nicolo!” Her voice snapped me back to reality and I stared at the two assholes coming at me. The more I learned about this Marino dick, the more I realized that I just wanted to put a fucking bullet in his brain. That was the absolute best thing that I could do.
The two assholes were practically tripping over themselves for the opportunity to shoot me. The one closest to me raised his gun, a sick grin slowly spreading across his face as I locked eyes with him.
But they didn’t stand a chance. I shot the first, landing the bullet right between his eyes, but the second managed to take a shot. Ducking, I swore as it flew past me and imbedded in the wall behind my head. A moment later, I swung my arm up and shot him in the face.
Blood splattered everywhere and someone screamed, but I was happy to hear that it wasn’t Isabella. My hellcat wasn’t afraid of this. This was right up her alley, and when I glanced over, I wasn’t surprised to see her stand and attack the boss.
She threw a punch, landing it straight on his face. His head snapped back and his arm flew up, grabbing her on the bad shoulder and squeezing tight.
That time, the scream that echoed through the room was hers. My stomach dropped and I fired in their direction, taking out his two bodyguards.
Running across the room, I joined them right as Isabella clawed at his face with her free hand. Angry red stripes appeared across his cheeks and he cried out, letting her go.
“Isabella!” I cried, pulling her towards me and raising the pistol so that it was up against his head. The motherfucker didn’t flinch.
“You don’t have the balls.” He leaned forward so hard that the pistol bit into his skin.
What he didn’t know was that I was perfectly willing to do anything necessary to keep Isabella safe. I didn’t give a shit who I had to murder or what I had to burn down.
“Why her?” I asked, pressing harder into his forehead. He flinched at the way the metal cut into his skin, but he didn’t pull back. “Why Isabella?”
Instead of answering me, he twisted his face into a sneer and laughed. “The fortune, you dumbass. I couldn’t let it go to her, could I? She was to live here with me, be mine. Make sure that I had the money.”
“You killed her dad.” Rage poured through me, but I had a feeling that Isabella needed to hear this. She needed to know that I was on her side and that I wasn’t going to let the asshole get away with what he’d done. He needed to admit it, own up to it.
“And I would do it again.” This time when the boss sneered, he leaned forward like he was going to grab at Isabella again.
“You won’t get the chance. She’s worth it.” I pulled the trigger, feeling the impact as my gun shifted back in my hand and the bullet slammed into the asshole’s head. His head slammed back and his hands fell uselessly into his lap.
Isabella screamed and turned, burying her face in my shoulder for just a moment before she turned back to his body and spat on him. The spit ran down his cheek and mingled with the blood pouring from the wound in his head.
“Are you okay?” I turned to her, taking her gently by the shoulders. She flinched when I touched her but nodded at me.
“I am. He…he hurt my shoulder, but he didn’t get far. I thought he was going to kill me.” Her eyes were wide and she reached up to touch my hands, but when she felt the collar, I saw her face harden. “Get this fucking thing off of me.”
Working quickly as a possible, I unhooked the collar and handed it to her. She threw it at the asshole, then turned back to me. “What do we do now?”
“We get the fuck out of here.” There wasn’t any reason for me to believe that we’d somehow managed to kill all of his family and crew. The mansion was huge, and it was ridiculous to think that there wouldn’t be someone else in it looking for us.
She nodded and slipped her fingers through mine, giving me a little squeeze. “Do you have another gun?”
I didn’t, but I unhooked the knife from my leg and handed it to her. She tossed it lightly in her free hand for a moment before nodding at me. “Let’s go. Get me out of here, Nicolo.” She hesitated and I wondered what she was going to say. “Take me home.”
“Sounds good to me.” I dropped my head to give her a kiss. Her lips were warm and hungry under mine, her tongue slipping easily into my mouth. I wanted to run my fingers through her hair and lay her down. I wanted to take her here without anyone around to stop us.
But
I pulled back, my eyes still locked on her. “I’m going to get you home,” I promised her, “and then I’m going to make sure that nothing bad ever happens to you again, okay?”
She bit her lower lip and nodded. That was when the first bullet came in through the open door.
Chapter 19
Isabella
“Get down!” Nicolo screamed, throwing his arm around my shoulder and pulling me down to the floor with him. We both it hit hard, pain ricocheting up through my knees, but it was a hell of a lot better than dying.
Another volley of bullets came flying through the door and we army-crawled closer to the table, taking cover behind some chairs.
“What the fuck do we do now?” The knife he’d given me felt flimsy and useless in my hand as bullets soared past us. Everyone knew the old adage about never bringing a knife to a gun fight. There just wasn’t any way that this was going to work out for the two of us.
I knew it.
He had to know it.
But looking at him, you wouldn’t think that he was going to give up. His jaw was set, and there was a hard glint in his eye. I couldn’t tear my gaze away from him, not even when he stood and fired back into the door.
That gave us a few moments of blessed silence without being shot at, but we both knew that it wasn’t going to last forever.
“What do we do?” I was trained to fight hand to hand. I was trained to kill and trained to protect myself, but combat in close quarters was totally different than being shot at by someone you couldn’t even see. My palms felt sweaty and I dropped the knife to the floor to rub them on my jeans.
“You need a gun.” Nicolo was scanning the room, obviously looking for the closest fallen asshole where I could grab one. “There to your side. Roll over there and get it and then set up behind the sofa. I’ll cover you, okay?”
Okay. I was going to do this, but first, I reached out and slipped my hand around the back of his neck, pulling Nicolo to me. I kissed him lightly, then nodded.
“Do it,” I whispered. Immediately, he popped up on his knees and fired off a few shots through the open door. I rolled, crying out as I hit my bad shoulder, and took the gun from the asshole who had tried to shoot Nicolo.
The guy was missing part of his head. I didn’t think that he’d miss his gun.
As soon as I had it, I posted up behind the sofa. “Nicolo!”
He stopped firing and slid back behind the table to look over at me. Holy hell, he was hot. The fact that he had come in here, all by myself, just to save me? It blew my mind and was almost impossible for me to believe, but the proof was right in front of me.
I didn’t know what I was going to do if we ever got out of the mess we were in, but I already knew that I wanted to do it with him. I’d never felt that way about someone – never wanted to spend time with them like that, but it felt different.
Even though I wanted to tell him how I felt, I knew that it wasn’t the time. The best thing for me to do was try to keep my head on and make sure that we both got out in one piece. The thought of him sacrificing himself to keep my alive turned my stomach.
I’d never had someone love me like that.
“You ready?” Nicolo called, and even though I was scared, I nodded. As long as we made it out of the mansion together, I had no doubt that we could handle anything that was thrown at us. It was just going to be hard to make it out when everyone else wanted to kill us.
I nodded at him, my grip tight on the pistol, then I checked it quickly. Lots of ammo. Hopefully enough for us to get the fuck out of there.
“Let’s go,” Nicolo mouthed, and stood, firing into the door. I followed his example, but instead of shooting through the door, I ran up to the wall, pressing my back hard against it. He followed me, scooping up a loose gun on the way.
We pressed our backs against the wall on opposite sides of the door, both of us trying to slow our breathing to make sure that we could make it through the rest of what had to be done. Suddenly, Nicolo nodded and spun around, pistol first, to go through the door.
I followed him. My heart was pounding in my chest and it was hard for me to swallow, but I knew that he needed me to have his back. Somehow along the way we’d become a team.
It was probably when I realized that he was the only person on earth who was willing to die for me.
Nicolo fired off two quick rounds and I heard a body hit the floor. Turning as I followed him out of the door, I spun around to look behind us.
I was almost too late.
The man there raised his gun to hit me with the butt. We were so close to each other that he didn’t even try to shoot me. Adrenaline coursed through my body when I saw what he was going to do, and even though I knew that it was going to hurt, I threw myself towards him, not away.
He didn’t expect me to launch myself at him. He certainly didn’t expect me to throw myself around his neck, which was exactly what I did, right as I used my leg to sweep his out from under him.
The man fell back with a crack, his gun skidding away from him when he landed. I wanted to pick it up, but I’d somehow managed to hold onto mine, and I pressed it against his temple.
Blood pounded in my ears and I closed my eyes as I tried to force myself to squeeze the trigger. This exact thing had happened to be before. It was the reason that I couldn’t kill the first three assholes who kidnapped me.
I was great at taking people down. I was great at attacking them and getting their weapons away, but I’d never actually killed someone. I honestly wasn’t sure if I was ready for that, if I could handle it.
If I could wake up in the morning and still feel like I was me.
Nicolo stepped over the guy I had pinned to the ground. He must have seen the look on my face.
“Isabella, it’s okay.” His voice was quiet, but still loud enough to penetrate my thoughts. I opened my mouth and looked up at him. He had his gun pressed to the guy’s forehead, so I rolled away as he shot him.
The blood immediately started to pool around the body, and Nicolo reached down for me, pulling me up to him and wrapping his arms around me. “Give me the gun,” he whispered into my hair.
Before, I would have hesitated. I would have thought that he was just going to take me back to his cabin and handcuff me back to the bed, but I handed it over willingly.
Honestly, I didn’t care if that was exactly what he did. I just wanted to get out of there, and I wanted to leave with him. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly when I stopped behind afraid of him, but it had somehow happened.
“Let’s go.” He slipped my gun into the waist of his pants and took my hand, pulling me along behind him. Every time we reached a corner in the house he paused and looked around it, sometimes shooting, sometimes nodding and pulling me with him.
It felt like we weren’t ever going to make it out. I thought that we were going to be stuck forever in an endless maze of corridors and turns, but finally we reached the foyer of the house. There were lights outside, cars and trucks that had just pulled up, and I felt my stomach sink.
There wasn’t any way that the two of us were going to be able to make it through all of that. We’d barely made it out of the house as it was, and being surrounded wasn’t a good feeling.
“Oh, good,” Nicolo said, running his hand through his hair. “They came.”
“They?” I asked, trying my best to keep my voice calm and steady. “You want to kill more of them?”
He chuckled and looked down at me. “They’re on our side, Isabella. Let’s go.”
It was scary walking out of the mansion into the lights of so many cars, but as we did, other men poured from the vehicles. They had guns strapped to them and nodded to Nicolo. One man jogged up and we stopped. I recognized him, but I hadn’t seen him in a while, and I couldn’t seem to place his name.
“Sorry it took so long, boss. Wanted to make sure that we had more than enough firepower.”
Nicolo nodded. “You’re fine, Freddy. Lots of cleanup in there.” He paused, li
ke he was trying to think of what to say next, but then let the words out in a rush. “Cook in the kitchen got knocked out. Make sure she gets out of there alive and unhurt. I don’t want her blood spilled.”
The guy, Freddy, looked at Nicolo with a bit of surprise on his face but recovered quickly and nodded. “You got it, boss.”
◆◆◆
“Tell me about the cook.” We were back in Nicolo’s cabin, both showered and clean, and he was making something for the two of us to eat. So far, I’d seen onions and peppers, and I was beginning to think that it was fajitas.
Hell, I hoped that it was fajitas.
“The cook?” Nicolo sounded surprised and then started to nod. “Her, yeah. I just…it wasn’t her fault, you know. She wasn’t the evil one there and I didn’t think that she deserved to die.” He dumped some steak into the pan and it started to sizzle as he stirred it.
“You don’t think that she’ll come for you? For us?” Even though I liked that he hadn’t hurt the cook, part of me was still worried. “How do you know that she won’t try to get back at us?”
“For killing her asshole boss?” Nicolo shrugged and pulled some tortillas out of the oven. They were soft and smelled amazing, and my stomach rumbled as he plated everything. “I guess that she could, but I don’t think so. She wasn’t evil, and she didn’t deserve to go down with everyone else.”
“Would you have killed her before?” I asked, gratefully taking the plate that he handed me. He walked around from the kitchen and slipped into the seat next to me before answering.
“Before? Before you, do you mean?”
I nodded and took a bite. Oh, hell, it was a flavor explosion. I’d never had fajitas like this and I let out a little moan. They were hot and spicy, and I hoped that Nicolo had more ingredients tucked away somewhere, because I was definitely going to want seconds.
“Before I took you, would I have killed her?” He took a bite too and slowly chewed it while he thought. After a moment, he swallowed and nodded. “Probably, yeah. I didn’t believe in letting loose ends live. People like to talk, but I don’t think that it can hurt us this time.”
