And that killer was touching her. Rendering Vincente impotent with that gun he held to her head.
The roar that burst from his mouth was savage, sounding more animal than man.
“Get the fuck out of here!” Caleb yelled, his voice barely working anymore.
“V. Back up. At least one step.”
Maksim’s calm voice came from the small speaker in his ear.
He backed up.
Nollan ducked, moving Nika in front of him when he saw that Vincente had palmed his SIG. “You know what? This is good,” the abuser drawled, teeth clenched as if he was in pain. “This is real good. Now we can have a little fun. A choice. See who means more to who.”
The coward’s words were superfluous. Completely meaningless. So Vincente treated them as such and ignored them. “Let her go. Release her and step back. Right. Now.”
That muzzle pressed harder into Nika’s temple, causing her to wince. “Don’t think so. My wife is where she belongs. Even if she has been an unfaithful whore. Now, get on your knees, spook, before I change my mind about my plans and put a hole through her head.”
“Got him.”
Vincente had seen the red dot come down from the ceiling—so as not to alert the target by shining it into his eyes—and settle in the center of Nollan’s forehead even before Maks’s composed words echoed through the earpiece.
He narrowed his eyes. Wait. If Nollan moved, even one step—Nika was taller, and Nollan was ducking, which meant the shot would hit—“Maks! No!” he yelled when he saw Nollan twitch as if to take that deadly step.
“Take him.”
Gabriel’s words had bile flowing into his mouth. “No!” Vincente roared. He went on roaring because that’s when Nollan moved.
Vincente dove forward, too slow, trying to get in front of that red dot that was now centered right over who he now knew was his life’s beautiful heart. In a distant corner of his mind he thought he heard the shot go but couldn’t tell for sure because he was still screaming. Disbelief hammered him as Nika was hit, her blood brilliant red where the stain slowly spread on her white shirt. He saw her jerk from the impact, heard her shocked cry of pain that blended with her brother’s shout of distress. Nollan looked around in confusion when his arm jerked to the side, the gun coming off Nika’s head, just before his eyes flared and then died. He fell to the floor right next to her; the entry wound in his nearly shaved head was from a bullet that had come from the opposite direction to where Maks was.
“Nik!” Caleb screamed, drowning out the scrape of his chair along the floor. “Jesus Christ, Nika . . . no! Don’t go . . . Vincente! Untie me, goddammit!”
“No, babe, no. Please . . .” Vincente’s words were pain-filled whispers, prayers, pleas, entreaties. Please be okay. I can’t live without you, Red. I can’t. Please be okay. Not you, too.
It was only when he landed on his knees next to her that he realized he hadn’t been thinking the words but saying them out loud. He snatched her up, watching as that tumble of flaming hair swept up from the floor. He had to check her wound. Had to stop the bleeding. Had to see where she’d been hit. But he couldn’t, not when her eyes, those emerald eyes now so dull, too dull, connected with his.
“Love you, Vincente. Can’t . . . live without you . . . either,” she whispered right before her head lolled to the side.
“Niiikaaa!” her brother roared as Vincente hauled her close to his chest, trapping her in his arms as all the pain in his heart thundered from his throat. The agony of a loss realized.
And the misery of what remained for him.
CHAPTER 23
Gabriel looked at Maksim, their horrified expressions without a doubt mirroring each other’s as the excruciating sound of Vincente’s and Caleb’s grief reached their ears.
“Maks,” he began.
“No. I—I couldn’t have.” Maksim shook his head as if he couldn’t compute the goings-on and scrambled back, falling to his ass. His rifle skittered off to the side, the tech falling from his ear to land in the dust next to him. Not at any time in the almost twenty years he’d known him had Gabriel ever seen the guy so undone.
“I didn’t.” He spoke in Russian now. “I didn’t take her. He moved—holy hell. I didn’t take that girl from Vincente, Gabriel. I couldn’t have.”
After shuffling over, Gabriel grabbed him by the jaw and brought his head back. “Hey! We’ll go see. Right now. You and me. It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be. You know that.” He held that wild silver gaze, afraid if he dropped it they might lose their already so badly damaged friend forever. “This wasn’t your fault!”
“Holy fuck. What did I just do? To Vincente. To your wife. To the biker. I just killed an innocent girl.”
“We don’t fucking know that!” Gabriel insisted. “Let’s go down and find out. I’ll be right beside you, brother. Come on.”
Maksim’s eyes went wide, and he reminded Gabriel of a spooked horse. “Can’t. Can’t do this . . .” His hands came up to hold his head as he shook it back and forth.
“Maksim!”
Tegan’s voice reached them, and Gabriel shouted back from their perch on one of the crates. “End of the crates, T. Hurry!”
More than one set of footsteps took off.
He put a hand under his friend’s arm. “Maks.”
“Go.”
“Kirov.”
“Go! I’ll be there . . . Just go.”
The whispered plea had Gabriel going against his better judgment. He went over the side of the shipping container and dropped down to land on the dirty floor, praying things weren’t what they’d looked like from their vantage point.
Dr. Tegan Mancuso raced down the makeshift corridor, Vasily and Alek at her side. She spotted the biker first, face a gruesome, bloody mess and struggling so hard at his bindings he was leaving a trail of blood from his wrists as he inched toward his sister and Vincente. Sympathy rolled through her as she waved Alek over to untie the distraught guy before he did permanent damage.
She followed Caleb’s stare to where Vincente was bent over Nika, cradling her and mumbling as if he was begging the Lord above not to take her from him. Tears burned in her throat as she joined him, skidding to a bump against her friend’s thick thigh. “Lemme in, Vinnie,” she commanded.
He ignored her.
“Vincente! Let me in. I can help her.”
The eyes that turned on her had her blood running cold. Savage, ready to kill. A deadly predator fiercely protecting its mate. But there was more. Layered beneath the feral darkness was an incomprehensible sense of loss.
Alarmed, Tegan put her hand out slowly, running it tenderly down Vincente’s cheek. “Let me see if I can help her, Vin. Please.”
His tormented eyes blinked, which made the hovering tears fall. “Please, T. Don’t let him take her from me.”
As Vasily’s hand landed on Vincente’s shoulder, she vowed, “I’ll do my best, hon. Now let me see her.”
He finally relaxed his tight hold, placing his woman on her back. Seeing blood, Tegan immediately tore Nika’s thin shirt down the front and breathed a quiet sigh of relief. One: blood would be pumping out of her like a sieve if an artery had been hit. Two: the wound was well over an inch up from where the bullet could have lodged in, or passed through, her heart.
“She should be fine, Vin.” Should be, because one never knew. She got to work, opening her bag to withdraw a package of sterile gauze patches. She tore it open and pressed one on the front, shifting Nika up to see the very pleasing sight of an exit wound, covering that with another. “Hold these for me. Pressure around, not on. And keep a tiny opening on one side of each.” Vincente’s big hands were there before she’d finished speaking.
“She’ll bleed out that opening.”
“It’s okay.”
“She’s losing blood out of those openi
ngs, T,” he repeated.
“It’s okay, Vin. That’s less of a concern for me.” While she talked, she yanked her stethoscope from around her neck and plugged the buds in her ears. The second she heard that racing heart, she fixed a needle and injected a sedative in Nika’s vein. Then she listened to the girl’s lungs, which seemed to be working fine, judging by the steady rise and fall of Nika’s chest. She explained herself to Vincente because he was the type to want the information. “You’re supposed to only cover three sides of the wound, leaving one open so air can escape. Because if a bubble of oxygen enters the pleural cavity, the lungs can collapse. Bare bones, but there you have it.”
“Okay.”
See? He’d needed to know.
A waft of air behind her precipitated Caleb’s arrival; Alek hung back a little, expression as concerned as all the others. “Jesus Christ, Nik,” Caleb whispered hoarsely as he grabbed her hand, his wrists looking as if they’d been gnawed on by a wild animal. “Why the fuck did you come here? You shouldn’t have fucking come . . .” He seemed to choke on his own words. “Is she . . . ?”
“She’ll be okay,” Tegan assured him, too, before turning her head toward Vasily, while keeping her eyes on the task at hand. “Shouldn’t Yuri be here by now? Would you send someone out to see? We’ll need the stretch—”
“I’ll carry her.”
She glanced at Vincente. “She’ll be better laid out. Sorry.” Her attention went back to Vasily and she told him what Yuri should bring in with the stretcher. He gave her a nod and went off himself. See? That’s what she liked. No questions. Just action. Now if only she could get the nurses at the hospital to react in the same manner, her life would be so much easier.
“Who had the gun?” The strain still evident in Caleb’s voice had Tegan looking over. Maybe she should sedate him, too.
Vincente brushed the hair back from Nika’s face, allowing for a better view of the true damage her husband had done.
The poor biker sounded as if he was swallowing vomit as he rose and walked over to who had to be Nika’s abuser and started whaling on the corpse with his booted foot. Over and over. Until Gabriel showed up and yanked him back.
“That’s over,” he said to Caleb before meeting her eyes. “How is she?”
“She’ll be okay,” Tegan reassured, hoping the biker had found some much-needed closure with that morbid display. Not that she blamed him in the least for wanting to obliterate that scumbag.
Gabriel sagged. “Thank fuck. Maks is freaking out.”
Vincente made a rough sound, and Gabriel looked at him. “Can’t control it all, right?” he said, parroting Vincente’s favorite expression. He let that settle in and turned back to the biker, looking at the mess his face was in. “You okay, brother?”
Caleb ignored him and came down beside Nika again to rest his palms lightly on the sides of his sister’s head, almost as if he were trying to absorb her pain. “Who had the gun?” he asked again.
There was a pause and then Gabriel said, “Kirov.”
Caleb nodded once. “And the other one?”
“What other one?” Gabriel frowned.
Vincente looked up in confusion.
“Who took the shot that killed Nollan?” Caleb asked impatiently.
“I did.”
They all turned at the claim, and Tegan felt her mouth pop open in a very unprofessional O. As in oh, shit and not oh, baby, she assured herself.
Detective Lorenzo Russo of the New York City Police Department stood, surveying the scene with a look that had Humphrey Bogart’s voice sounding off in her head.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world . . .
Lore had absolutely no need to ask even one question. He’d gotten all that was necessary from watching the grisly scene play out from behind one of the crates near the back door to the abandoned building.
The redheaded victim being treated by Tegan Mancuso—Lore’s fucking chemistry partner back in junior high—was clearly the muse for the murders he and the FBI had been investigating. The man he’d shot had made that point more than evident when he’d confessed to them in a way that had made Lore want to rip him a new asshole.
I’ve killed you, you know. Over and over again. Five times since you left me I’ve killed you.
Obviously, forensics would have to confirm, but it certainly sounded as though they’d gotten their guy.
Now, did he want the specifics? Did he want to know why the deceased had been killing prostitutes, imagining it was this beaten girl?
As he looked around, he again took in the lighting sets, camera equipment, two rumpled beds, and a desk full of papers.
And several vials of an unidentifiable liquid that could very well be a drugging agent.
He was pretty damn sure he’d closed his porn case, too. Or someone else’s.
“Lore?”
He looked across and met Gabriel’s eye. The overturned chair the biker had been strapped to lay in the dirt between them. The new boss to the Moretti crime family, whose underboss was very obviously involved, deeply involved by the looks of it, with the victim.
“Lore?”
He continued to process, ignoring Gabriel, a guy he’d known since he was eleven years old. They hadn’t hung out until high school, but by then Lore had known Gabriel Moretti was a good man. As good as a mobster could be anyway. As most of them gathering around the scene right now were, despite what they did for a living.
Vincente Romani, who’d dealt with loss after loss; mother, father, sister, and now, possibly, his woman. For fuck’s sake. How much tragedy could one man handle before he lost himself for good?
Quan Mao, one of two men who’d walked away from a Triad organization a few years back because he hadn’t wanted to travel down the road the leaders were taking. Lore respected that. But barely.
Alekzander Tarasov, nephew to Vasily Tarasov, the Russian leader whose daughter Gabriel had married. Both Alek and Vasily were now standing side by side behind Vincente. Strong support.
The biker, the one hovering over the victim, was wearing a vest that claimed him as an Obsidian Devil, VP patch clearly visible. The MC’s strength and influence was coming to rival the families of those around him in the organized crime world these days. It was this club that Smythe was trying so desperately to take down.
The guy had clearly been another unwilling victim in this incident.
And finally, Dr. Tegan Mancuso. Beautiful girl. Lore had had the hots for her all through high school, but she’d been tied up in knots over another guy. Jakson Trisko, if Lore remembered correctly, which he did because he never forgot a name or face. Talent of his. Probably a good thing she and Lore had never hooked up. She was in deep with the men surrounding her. Didn’t stop that dirty part of his mind from tucking her and those scrubs she was wearing into his fantasy slot for later.
He scanned the faces all staring at him, faces that belonged to men who’d continuously managed to toe the line between good and evil for a lot of fucking years now. Yes, Lore knew some of what they did in the underground circles they moved in. Saw some of what they left behind, but only when it suited their purpose. Most times they cleaned up their own shit.
And sometimes, like today, some of the NYPD’s.
“Lorenzo.”
Gabriel had approached and now stood in front of him. Lore raised his eyes because, even though he was a respectable six feet, Moretti was a good chunk bigger. He sighed good and long, just to be sure the boss got that this wasn’t an easy decision for him to have made.
“You and your crew need to get gone. You’re going to wipe the weapon that took the shot that hit them and give it to the biker. You”—he pointed to Caleb—“shuffle around over top of where they’ve walked. And she brought the gun”—he pointed to Nika—“but you used it. I’m sure it’s not registered anyway.” He looked at
Gabriel again. “They were clear victims; you boys were not. You should be gone already. You,” he said to Tegan, getting a bit of a poke when she met his eye, “will have to remain with her to add a little respectability to this situation. And take her to your hospital. It’s close.” Had he just given away that he knew where she’d ended up? “Vincente—since I doubt I can get you to budge—you can say you met them at the hospital.” He went over and stood looking down at the corpse and felt a blip of satisfaction that he was finally going to get some answers to his thousand questions.
“Name’s Kevin Nollan. Seattle address. His wife.” Gabriel motioned to the redhead dead-guy had gone after, his brows coming down when he noticed how Vincente now had her cradled against his wide chest as he headed for the doors; an empty stretcher was being pushed behind him by a man Lore didn’t recognize. A private ambulance was waiting just outside. Man, having money, dirty or clean, came with some perks, huh? Had to be Vasily’s.
He inclined his head to Gabriel in thanks for the info. “That’ll make things move along.” He put his hand out, waited for Moretti to shake it, and then walked away, tossing over his shoulder, “Get you and your boys out, Gabe. Now,” he warned, pausing to turn back and meet the boss’s serious gaze. “Because if I embarrass my mother by getting pulled in with questions about why you and yours are showing up in my case, I’ll sink all of you.”
The back alleys of New York could be special places, where a guy could grow up with a great group of friends, meet the girl of his dreams, fall in love, and live happily ever after. But they could also be a cesspool of drugs, prostitution, and murder, and if these made men were the only thing lending Lore and the NYPD’s struggling ass a hand? He’d take it, by walking away with his blinders firmly in place.
He left the warehouse through the same door he’d entered and crossed the parking lot to where he’d tucked his unmarked behind a detached trailer someone had dumped, making for good cover.
He took out his phone and sent a text to his brother and sister, asking for yet another rain check. He had to work on his official story and get a crew set up in time to take down the videographer when he eventually showed.
The Salvation of Vengeance (Wanted Men #2) Page 35
