by Shandi Boyes
Roxanne
The Italian Cartel #2
Shandi Boyes
Edited by
Nicky @ Swish Design & Editing
Illustrated by
SSB Covers & Design
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Shandi Boyes
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Written By: Shandi Boyes
Editing: Nicky at Swish Design & Editing
Proofreading: Kaylene at Swish Design & Editing
Beta Reading: Carolyn Wallace
Cover: SSB Covers & Design
Contents
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Also by Shandi Boyes
1. Roxanne
2. Dimitri
3. Roxanne
4. Roxanne
5. Dimitri
6. Roxanne
7. Dimitri
8. Roxanne
9. Dimitri
10. Roxanne
11. Dimitri
12. Roxanne
13. Dimitri
14. Roxanne
15. Dimitri
16. Dimitri
17. Roxanne
18. Dimitri
19. Dimitri
20. Dimitri
21. Dimitri
22. Roxanne
23. Dimitri
24. Roxanne
25. Dimitri
26. Roxanne
27. Roxanne
28. Dimitri
29. Roxanne
30. Dimitri
Acknowledgments
Also by Shandi Boyes
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Also by Shandi Boyes
Perception Series
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Saving Noah (Noah & Emily)
Fighting Jacob (Jacob & Lola)
Taming Nick (Nick & Jenni)
Redeeming Slater (Slater and Kylie)
Saving Emily (Noah & Emily - Novella)
Wrapped Up with Rise Up (Perception Novella - should be read after the Bound Series)
* * *
Enigma
* * *
Enigma (Isaac & Isabelle #1)
Unraveling an Enigma (Isaac & Isabelle #2)
Enigma The Mystery Unmasked (Isaac & Isabelle #3)
Enigma: The Final Chapter (Isaac & Isabelle #4)
Beneath The Secrets (Hugo & Ava #1)
Beneath The Sheets(Hugo & Ava #2)
Spy Thy Neighbor (Hunter & Paige)
The Opposite Effect (Brax & Clara)
I Married a Mob Boss(Rico & Blaire)
Second Shot(Hawke & Gemma)
The Way We Are(Ryan & Savannah #1)
The Way We Were(Ryan & Savannah #2)
Sugar and Spice (Cormack & Harlow)
Lady In Waiting (Regan & Alex #1)
Man in Queue (Regan & Alex #2)
Couple on Hold(Regan & Alex #3)
Enigma: The Wedding (Isaac and Isabelle)
Silent Vigilante (Brandon and Melody #1)
Hushed Guardian (Brandon & Melody #2)
Quiet Protector (Brandon & Melody #3)
* * *
Bound Series
* * *
Chains (Marcus & Cleo #1)
Links(Marcus & Cleo #2)
Bound(Marcus & Cleo #3)
Restrain(Marcus & Cleo #4)
Psycho (Dexter & ??)
* * *
Russian Mob Chronicles
* * *
Nikolai: A Mafia Prince Romance (Nikolai & Justine #1)
Nikolai: Taking Back What’s Mine (Nikolai & Justine #2)
Nikolai: What’s Left of Me(Nikolai & Justine #3)
Nikolai: Mine to Protect(Nikolai & Justine #4)
Asher: My Russian Revenge (Asher & Zariah)
Nikolai: Through the Devil's Eyes(Nikolai & Justine #5)
Trey (Trey & K)
* * *
The Italian Cartel
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Dimitri
Roxanne
Reign
Maddox
Rocco
* * *
RomCom Standalones
Just Playin’ (Elvis & Willow)
The Drop Zone (Colby & Jamie)
Ain't Happenin'(Lorenzo & Skylar)
* * *
Short Stories
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Christmas Trio (Wesley, Andrew & Mallory -- short story)
Falling For A Stranger (Short Story)
K (A Trey Sequel)
* * *
Coming Soon
Skitzo
One
Roxanne
As Dimitri’s eyes bounce between mine, I shake my head, denying the claims I see in his narrowed gaze. There’s no doubt my face is visible in the image that’s so zoomed in, the pixilation that should make me unrecognizable to anyone who doesn’t intimately know me, but I’m not present in the physical sense. My face is being bounced off an industrial-size filing cabinet. The same filing cabinet I saw stacked behind my mother when she FaceTimed me the day after my failed meet-up to reconnect with my father.
She said she was sorry he had made me upset, and that she was determined to mend the rift between us. I told her not to worry. My father was the same cruel man he always was, so I wasn’t interested in rebuilding bridges that had burned years earlier.
Our conversation barely lasted a minute, but if the anger teeming out of Dimitri is anything to go by, my last contact with my mother is more significant to him than it was to me. He’s blistering mad. Our combined dispositions are enhanced beyond reproach.
“That isn’t me,” I hiccup through a sob.
When anger flares through his eyes, making them dark cesspools of annoyance, I realize my error. Denials won’t get me anywhere. I need to prove to Dimitri I’m on his team. That’s the only way I’ll come out of this exchange with my life intact.
“It’s me, but I wasn’t there when they took Fien. You can see it’s a reflection. Even a surveillance novice wouldn’t be able to deny that…” My words trail off when Dimitri releases the first surveillance image from his death-tight grip to reveal a second, more terrifying one. It shows a tiny baby covered with white goop and blood being dangled mid-air by her feet. She’s as still as a board, her only coloring coming from the cruel grip her captor has on her feet. He’s clutching her so tightly, the blood that’s supposed to pump around her feet pools in them instead. Their red hue matches the flames tattooed on the man’s wrist—the same flame tattoo barely noticeable on my father’s blood-smattered arm since he had it recently covered with a much bigger design.
If that isn’t concerning enough, a tiny hand in the very far left of the image has an identifiable feature. It isn’t a birthmark like Fien has on her stomach nor a tattoo. It’s a ring—a ring that feels like it weighs a ton when Dimitri’s eyes lower to take in its uniqueness firsthand. He glares at the custom jewelry piece I inherited from my grandmother, his blazing stare heating it up as effectively as his evidence makes my stomach flip.
I can’t see the face of the man in the image, it’s covered by a balaclava, but both his tatto
o and his eyes are familiar to me. As are the hands of the woman reaching out to remove Dimitri’s daughter from his clutch.
As tears flood my eyes, horrified I have any association with people capable of doing such a horrendous act, I blubber out a string of apologies. I’m sickened my parents would do something so inhumane, but I also don’t want to be punished for something that wasn’t my fault. They’re my parents, but their actions don’t lie on my shoulders.
When my apologies reach Dimitri’s ears, he leans into me deeper, stealing both the words from my mouth and the air from my lungs. “They killed my wife. Your parents killed my wife!” He screams his last three words in my face.
“I know. I am so sorry. I had no idea they were capable of doing such an appalling act. I swear to God, I don’t condone a single thing they’ve done. If I had any inkling they were involved, I would have told you.”
“You’re lying.”
Tears fling off my face when I shake my head. “No. I had no clue. I swear I was in the dark as much as you.” I am shocked I can talk. I’m not just stunned at the evidence he’s presenting, I am also shocked we’re holding this conversation in the room my father was murdered in. The anger emanating from him has vomit racing up my food pipe. It’s seconds from being released. “I’m as angry as you.”
Air traps in my throat when Dimitri interrupts, “Prove it.”
“W-what?” I stare at him, utterly lost. How can I prove I’m as devastated as him? He killed my father. I can’t display my anger as brutally as that. The person deserving of my wrath is dead. There’s no one left for me to take my anger out on.
Oh no.
As the truth smacks into me, the door we walked through only minutes ago pops open, and a woman with reddish-blonde hair and arms scarred with track marks is thrust into the room. When my mother lands on the floor with a thud, first instincts have me wanting to race to her side. The only reason I don’t is because I can’t get the images Dimitri showed me out of my head. Although most of my focus was on Fien and my parents, no amount of shock could stop my eyes from drinking in the blurry person behind them. Dimitri’s wife wasn’t treated with any respect, so why should my mother be given any leeway?
An idealism on who our parents are supposed to be is embedded in us when we’re kids. If you’re lucky, your unfounded hopes might stack up. But for the most part, you’ll be lucky to stumble out of childhood unscathed. Have you ever heard the saying, Just because you can have kids doesn’t mean you should? That resonates well with my parents. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them, but Fien would be. That, in itself, explains Dimitri’s fury.
My heart tries to break out of my chest when Dimitri steps back, unpinning me from the wall. The anger radiating out of him isn’t responsible for my heart’s thuds, it’s the angst he strikes it with when he digs his gun out of the back of his jeans and shoves it into my hand.
I could direct it at him as he did to me days ago, I could save my mother before saving myself, but for the life of me, I can’t. I’m not a parent, but that doesn’t mean I can’t understand what Dimitri is going through. He was barely holding on last week, so I can only imagine how thin the thread is now. The images he showed me were horrific, and the pain in his eyes tells me they were just the beginning of the horrendous things he has seen.
“Please don’t make me do this,” I beg when he slides off the safety on his gun, so it’s ready to maim. I’m shocked at how fast he moves. I am shuddering like I’m in an ice bath. The gun isn’t close to stable—and neither am I. “I can make it up to you. I’ll do anything you ask.”
“You’re already doing everything I ask.” His words snap out of his mouth like venom, both vicious and maiming. They have nothing on the hate in his eyes, though.
“I’ll do more—”
Dimitri whips around so fast, the waft of his quick movements blasts my face with the scent of a pricy aftershave. “More what, Roxanne? More trouble? More hurt?”
“Anything! I’ll do anything you ask.”
Tears roll down my cheeks unchecked when he says, “Kill the woman responsible for my wife’s death. That’s all I want you to do.”
Ignoring the rapid shake of my head advising him I could never do that, he grips the scruff of my mother’s shirt. His brutal strength forces her eyes from the floor. When they collide with mine, I almost become one with the wall. I don’t recognize her in the slightest. She isn’t close to the woman I remember. Her eyes aren’t lit with life. They’re shallow and lifeless, as bleak as my father’s now are.
That doesn’t mean I want to kill her, though.
“I can’t,” I whimper on a sob. “She’s my mother.”
“She’s a kidnapper and a murderer. She deserves to die!” After dragging my mother to within an inch of my feet, Dimitri screams in her face. “Tell her what you told me.” When the quick shake of her head grates on his last nerve, he backhands her so hard, my teeth feel the collision. “Tell her what you told me!”
I stare at my mother, begging for her to do as asked. If she wants to live, she must jump on cue, and even then, it may not be enough. Her death certificate was signed the instant she went against a man more powerful than she’ll ever be, and no, I’m not solely referencing Dimitri.
While scratching at fresh needle marks in her arms, my mother stutters out, “We had to give them someone. W-w-we couldn’t arrive empty-handed. We owed them money. Lots of money.”
“So, instead of selling them your daughter as arranged, you convinced your husband to take my wife instead!” Even if we weren’t in a small, concrete room, I’d still hear Dimitri’s roar twice. That’s how loud he’s shouting.
“They wanted someone who could have children. They didn’t care who they got. As long as she was fertile, they’d take anyone.” My mother’s cracked lips quiver as she locks her eyes with mine. “I just couldn’t give them my child.”
Dimitri is as unbelieving of the remorse in her tone as me. She was never overly motherly, so why would she start years after she abandoned me? “So, you gave them mine instead after cutting her out of my wife’s stomach!”
“No.” She adds to her denial of Dimitri’s claim by shaking her head. “That was never the plan. They were only supposed to take your wife. T-t-they weren’t supposed to take your daughter. I didn’t know Ian’s plan. He kept me in the dark.” Against her better judgment, she slants her head to the side so she can peer at me past Dimitri’s brimming-with-anger frame. “That’s why I ended our call so fast that night. I heard screaming. I tried to stop him, Roxie, but I couldn’t. You know what your father was like. He didn’t listen to anyone, not even me.”
She speaks about her husband as if his corpse isn’t in the room with us, her disrespect as telling as the expression on her face. She once loved the man bound lifeless to the chair, however that was a very long time ago.
“Nothing I could have done would have changed anything. Once they realized who Audrey was, they were never going to listen to me.”
I unconsciously shake my head, my body choosing its own response to the lies I see in her eyes. Audrey was eight months along. Her pregnancy was noticeable, so although she’s pledging she had no part in what happened to Fien, she is responsible for her captivity—even more than me.
I try to make sense of the mess. “Why didn’t you call the police? Or reach out for help? You can’t live with a secret like this and not expect it to eventually come out, so why not come clean when it could have done some good?”
“I couldn’t.” When she shuffles closer to me, Dimitri raises his hand back into the air. It stops both the scuttles of my mother’s knees and my heart. A slap is almost caring compared to how he could handle her stupidity, but I’d rather not witness her torture. She may not be the woman I once remembered, but she’s still my mother.
With her hands clutched a mere inch from my bare feet, she locks her eyes with mine. “I haven’t seen the sun in months. I don’t even know what month it is, so how could
I have sought help? Why do you think I didn’t call you back that night, Roxie?”
I want to say because she abandoned me like she did when I was ten, but since that would swing the pendulum in Dimitri’s favor, I keep my mouth shut. My stomach won’t quit flipping from the smell emitting off my father. I don’t want to see my mother killed the same way. I hate what she did, but turning into a monster to kill a monster won’t stop the vicious cycle. It will continue circling until everyone is extinct—even the good monsters.
My queasiness takes on an entirely new meaning when Dimitri strikes my mother for the second time. “I told you to tell the truth, not the shit you tried to spurt earlier.”
“Don’t!” I shout when Dimitri raises his hand for the third time. His second hit split my mother’s cheek. She won’t come out of a third one without irreparable damage. Although she deserves his anger, a small part of me wonders if she’s telling the truth. It’s minute but undeniable.
