Assassin's Heart

by Ella Sheridan

  Abby’s gasp echoed the shock I’d felt earlier. I wasn’t shocked anymore; I was pissed.

  Leah’s hard swallow was audible. “Leah is my real name.”

  “You don’t want to play games right now,” Levi said next to me, his words arctic. “Tell us what we want to know.”

  Leah’s wide eyes shifted to him for a long moment before she slumped back in her seat. “My name is Leah Windon.”

  “Why isn’t there any record of a name change?” I asked.

  “You already know why,” she said wearily.

  I did. I knew she was on the run. The question was, from what.

  “This man”—Eli waved a hand at the paper I still held—“is your brother, Ross Windon Junior.”

  A statement. We knew he was; she couldn’t deny it.

  She didn’t try this time. Instead she stared at the face, shadows drifting in her gaze. “He is.”

  The short answer gave away nothing. She was going to lead us around like dogs, barely giving anything away, wasting time we didn’t have. I was done.

  “Enough!” I yelled, satisfaction seeping in when Leah’s eyes became saucers. “Stop fucking around and tell us the whole story, or I’ll escort you to the gate and you can find Brooke on your own.”

  It was an empty threat; even with my head filled with a red haze and a fucking two-ton anvil sitting on my chest, I knew that much. My mother had been taken from me when I was ten. I could never leave a child separated from her mother if I had the power to fix it.

  That didn’t mean threats weren’t effective every once in a while, no matter how empty. As Leah proved.

  Her entire body rounded in on itself, her gaze dropping to the hardwood floor. “Yes, he’s my brother.” She paused, cleared her throat. “We were raised in DC.”

  “By the police commissioner,” Levi pointed out.

  “He wasn’t the police commissioner when we were kids. That came later.”

  “But Ross is a cop as well.”

  “He is.” Leah shook her head. “My dad has nothing to do with this, I promise. If he knew...” She raised beseeching eyes to me, eyes that touched me despite my efforts to block them out. “This would kill him.”

  I fisted the paper in my hand, satisfaction filling me as it crumpled beneath the pressure. “Start from the beginning and tell us everything.”

  Leah stood. I tensed, but she only began to pace the length of the room. Trying to get her thoughts together? I forced myself to watch her expression, searching for any hint of a lie, rather than watching the easy grace of her body as she moved. How could I notice something like that and be as angry as I was? It made no sense, but then my feelings for this woman had never made sense.

  “Angelo, Brooke’s father, and I met when I was seventeen.” She glanced at Abby, and from the look on Abby’s face, they’d discussed this already. “He was much older. We fell in love immediately.”

  The knife in my heart was harder to ignore than her body.

  She shrugged, a self-deprecating smile curving her lips. “I had no idea what he did for a living; I didn’t care. There were so much more important things to think about.”

  Like sex. I didn’t want to go there. Unfortunately my brain seemed intent on torturing me.

  “We’d been together for a few months when he told me he was an enforcer for the Fiori family. By then I was pregnant.” Leah’s chuckle came out strained. “The police commissioner’s daughter, raised to excellence, to service, to justice, pregnant by a mob enforcer.”

  “Your family didn’t suspect?” Abby asked quietly.

  “No. God, no.”

  “But your brother is in on this,” I pointed out. There were a lot of ways a cop could be turned, but a commissioner’s son...

  “That came later.” Leah turned to the window, and I noticed her palm smoothing over her belly. “We hadn’t meant to get pregnant, but Angelo... He wanted the baby so much, wanted us to get married, be a family, but I refused to put my child in danger.” Up and down, over and over, her hand stroked her belly, right where her baby had been. “He could get out, he said.”

  Levi and I exchanged a look. With the mob there was no getting out, except in a pine box.

  “He kept telling me I just needed to be patient,” Leah was saying. “So I tried to be. I wanted to believe him.” Her eyes sparkled, unshed tears catching the artificial light as it filtered through the window.

  “What did he do?” I asked, the sight of her pain and my own lingering anger roughening the words.

  She turned to lean a shoulder against the wall. “He’d made recordings, apparently.”

  Curses rang through the air. My brothers knew as well as I did that this wouldn’t end well.

  Leah ignored our response. “He told his boss he was leaving, that the recordings would never see the light of day if they just left him alone. And that’s what they seemed to do.” She shrugged. “I realized later they were just biding their time, watching, waiting. They wanted the tapes, and they’d use anything they could to get them.

  “One night they broke into Angelo’s apartment.” A shudder rocked her body. I wanted to go to her, make the memory stop, soothe the turmoil ravaging her—but I couldn’t. That intimacy wasn’t mine to take. That closeness would only lead to more mistakes. I wouldn’t risk my family again.

  “They...” Leah brought her fingers to her mouth, covering their trembling as she visibly pulled herself together. “They tortured him. In front of me. And when that didn’t work, they started on me.” Leah’s eyes went blank, her focus somewhere in the past. “Angelo managed to break free. He fought them so that I could get away. And they killed him.”

  “But they knew you were involved,” Eli said where he sat on the end of the bed. “They would come after you.”

  “They did. So I went to the only person I thought I could trust to help me.”

  The weight on my chest shifted from anger to dread. “Your brother.”

  Leah looked down, her hair sliding forward to conceal her expression. To hide her innermost thoughts from me. “My brother.”

  “He was recognized for his work on a national drug task force,” Levi pointed out. “That’s how the mob found him?”

  “Yes.” Leah raised her head, squared her shoulders. “They found him and they flipped him.”

  He’d been working both sides. What better way to control what the local police knew, to learn of possible actions against them, than to own the commissioner’s son?

  “He kept telling me if I would just hand over the recordings, everything would be fine. That’s what he said, fine.” A laugh escaped her. “What he meant was, he would protect me if I would just cooperate.” Her eyes met mine for the first time since I’d walked into the room, allowing me to see the burn of determination flaring there. “I saw what they did to Angelo. I refused to trust my child’s future to a traitor. So I ran.”

  Successfully, too. She’d hid herself well enough that a well-connected cop and a dangerous mob hadn’t found her. On top of that, she’d had all the struggles of a more typical single mom—caring for a child, educating herself, finding work and supporting them both.

  Christ, Leah. Who held your hand when you delivered Brooke? Was there ever anyone there for you?

  “Ross said an informant told him about you being on the news,” I reminded her, as much for my brothers’ benefit as anything else. “We are the ones who exposed you.” It was important that everyone knew that, our role in this problem.

  And she had every reason to blame us, but that wasn’t what I saw in her eyes when they met mine.

  “It is what it is, Remi. I just want my daughter back.”

  “So we hand over the recordings and you get Brooke back safe and sound,” Levi said.

  “Do you really think it’s going to be that easy?” The look in Leah’s eyes said she didn’t.

  Levi’s brow scrunched together. “I think your brother came here instead of sending mafia thugs to kill his sister and n
iece and take what they want. Ross obviously doesn’t want the two of you hurt; some protective instinct still lives in there. Just give him the recordings.”

  “I can’t.”

  The four of us glanced at each other before staring back at Leah. “Why not?” I asked.

  The arms around Leah’s middle clenched, holding her together. “Because I don’t know where Angelo kept them. I never have. And they’d never believe that. That’s why I had to run.”

  Chapter Eight

  Leah —

  It was past midnight before I insisted everyone leave. We weren’t going to figure out in a few hours what I hadn’t figured out in seven years, and I’d spent plenty of time thinking about it. Sometimes I wondered if the recordings had even existed.

  I hoped to God they did; otherwise Fiori would never leave us alone.

  Remi was the last to go. “Call if you need me during the night,” he said, pointing to the house intercom near the door.

  “I won’t.” Need him, that was. I wouldn’t allow it. I spent years handling things on my own. I wasn’t calling in backup to help me sleep at night.

  Not that I’d be thinking about sleep if Remi were here during the night. All the more reason not to call.

  Remi’s jaw ticked in that way he had when there were things he wanted to say but wouldn’t. Good.

  “We’ll talk more in the morning,” he finally said.

  I gave him a big smile and shut the door in his face.

  The possibility of sleep was unlikely, but the nurse in me knew rest was essential if I wanted to think clearly, if I wanted to go after Brooke when the time came, so I went through as much of my nighttime ritual as I could, then crawled into the bed. On my side, a pillow hugged tight to my chest, I closed my eyes and forced some of my tension out with a hard sigh.

  And another.

  And...

  I knew it was a dream the minute I saw Angelo’s face. It was always Angelo in my dreams—the bad ones, at least. For the past year another face had invaded the good dreams, the sensual visions that snuck into my sleep. Remi’s face. I knew I shouldn’t think about him, dream about him, but found it impossible to stop.

  This wasn’t one of those dreams. I looked around at the pale walls, the brick of the old warehouse that had been converted to create the apartments Angelo had lived in on the farthest outskirts of DC. Our safe haven. The place he’d wanted me to share as his wife, with the extra room we’d planned to convert into a nursery.

  Those walls were splashed with red. Angelo’s blood. My blood.

  My chest hurt, feeling like I’d run a hundred miles, my heaving breath doing nothing to fill the lungs in desperate need of air. Heavy cords bit into my skin, holding me down, the perfect target for every punch that came my way. And Angelo’s eyes... They burned with anguish, with remorse. The most powerful man I’d ever known, helpless. The knowledge was killing him almost as surely as the blood loss stealing his strength.

  “Look at this, John! We’ve got a pink room with a crib.”

  Bile rose to the back of my throat. Angelo had been so certain the baby was a girl. It had been too soon to know for sure, but he’d insisted on the pink. We hadn’t had time to put the crib together yet.

  We should’ve had time. All the time in the world. Now there was no more time.

  “Stand her up,” the man said, polishing the brass knuckles gleaming on his fingers. “He might not talk for her, but maybe he’ll talk for it,” he said, jerking his chin toward my slightly rounded stomach.

  No. No no no no.

  John undid the cord. I caught a glimpse of Angelo as I was jerked to my feet, and what I saw chilled my blood. Resignation. Fire. Grief. I love you, he mouthed. A tear wet the corner of his eye. Take care of her.

  And then a mask descended over his face and he charged, chair and all. Joe and I were knocked off our feet by the impact.

  I had to get away. I knew it, told my feet to move, stumbled around the breakfast bar to reach the apartment door—but all the while I braced myself for a grip on my shirt, dragging me back. A shout to stop or they’d fire. A gunshot sending agony through my body.

  Only the last actually came, but it was Angelo who screamed in agony.

  I shot upright in bed, that scream—the last sound I’d ever heard from the man I’d loved—mingling with my own. I couldn’t tell which was real and which was a memory. Both echoed in my ears, the sound of a life being ripped apart.

  And then the door to the room slammed open, bouncing off the wall to almost hit the man filling the doorway. “Leah?”

  I brought my hand to my chest, fighting to slow my breathing, to bring my body back under control. To hide the things that made me vulnerable. “I’m all right.”

  “Like hell you’re all right.” Remi crossed the room to loom over the side of the bed, his silhouette blocking the light. “You were screaming like a banshee.” He thrust his fingers through thick, messy hair. “Nightmare?”

  I nodded, not wanting him to hear how hoarse my voice was. My throat felt like someone had sandpapered it. I knew from experience that I’d have that deep phone-sex quality to my voice for the next day or two. Too bad it wasn’t sex that had caused it.

  The sound of that gunshot, the remembered smell of heated blood came rushing back. A whimper escaped against my will.

  “Fuck!”

  The word sliced through the air, and then the covers were lifting and Remi’s big body was crowding me back from the edge of the bed. “What are you doing?”

  “Getting in. What’s it look like?”

  He wasn’t wearing his shirt. I couldn’t see much in the dim light of the room, but I didn’t need to see; all I had to do was feel. I brought my hand up to ward Remi off—and met hard, hot flesh that pebbled with goose bumps beneath my fingers. Remi hesitated for barely a second, then used the bulk of his body to force me back onto the pillow.

  Now both my hands were on his chest, and my heart was racing triple time for a whole different reason.

  “Get out of my bed!”

  I managed to keep the hysterical virgin out of my voice—I passed that stage a long time ago—but the indignant sex kitten came through loud and clear. Talk about mixed signals. I could read a five-page drug formulary in this voice and it would sound like a come-on. It also hurt like hell, so I shut my mouth and scrambled for the opposite side of the bed.

  Remi’s log of an arm blocked my retreat before I could escape. “Be still,” he growled.

  I was pulled firmly back until my spine hit his stomach, until the heat of his breath washed over my neck.

  Until a solid rod nestled between the cheeks of my—

  “Hey!”

  Remi pushed his opposite arm beneath my neck, surrounding me, laying back a bit so I was forced to use his body as a pillow. “Hey, what?”

  “Hey, this.” I wiggled my butt against his erection.

  Remi grunted as if I’d kicked him in the gut. “Ignore it. I am.”

  As if I could ignore a bat jutting into my backside. I mean, I’d seen Remi naked, but he’d been unconscious, relaxed. I knew he was built proportional to his body, but I hadn’t expected this.

  Maybe you’re just out of practice.

  Of course I was, but still...

  Remi’s broad palm flattened over my stomach, his heat seeping into me as he rubbed up to the underside of my breasts, then down to my pelvis. Up and down. Up and down. He was so warm.

  God, it felt good. I could feel my muscles trying to relax, to give in, and I stiffened up again.

  Remi’s palm hesitated on my stomach. “I’m trying to comfort you, not rape you. Settle down.”

  Settle down? The words got my back up, but... Remi shifted, throwing a heavy thigh over both of mine. His hand took up its rhythm again. “I don’t think you’re trying to rape me,” I said.

  His thigh clenched, tightening around me. “Then why won’t you be still?”

  A huff escaped me, part irritation, part embarrassment
. “Maybe because I’m too busy thinking about things I have no business thinking about?” I half yelled. Especially with him semi-naked and holding me down and— God, he really did feel good.

  Remi went still, even his breath ceasing as he held me curled against him.

  “At least I’m not thinking about nightmares,” I muttered, a shudder working through me.

  “Don’t go believing I’m nice, Leah,” he said, the words gruff in my ear.

  “Right. You just rush into rooms with screaming women to, what, take advantage of them?” I shook my head. “You already denied that one. Relax, Remi. I won’t make more of this than you do.”

  “Good.” He shifted a bit, molding me closer to him until I could feel his heartbeat against my back. “Just doing the right thing.”

  Of course he was. I breathed in his scent—man and musk and something a little bit spicy—feeling it seep into the corners of my being. I firmly believed men like Remi were not to be trusted, but I also believed people weren’t black-and-white. Remi hadn’t kidnapped my child; he was trying to help get her back. He’d been stalking me, but now the intel he’d gathered could lead us to Brooke. He could be taking advantage of having me vulnerable in bed, but instead he was making me feel safer than I’d felt since those long-ago nights when Angelo had held me in his arms.

  Angelo.

  Remi went back to stroking my stomach. “Want to tell me about it?”

  “About what?”

  A chuckle tickled my ear. “You have to be the most contrary woman I’ve ever been this close to.” He nipped the lobe, a sharp reprimand. “Your nightmare.”

  I shook my head. “Old memories.”

  “About Angelo’s death?”

  “Yes.” But... “I should have known.”

  “Known what?”

  “From the very beginning, Brooke has been seen as a pawn. That night...” I swallowed hard. “The men threatened to punch me in the stomach if he didn’t talk. Until then, I think he’d thought he could get us out of this. He gave his life so I could escape with her.” A shaky breath left me. “I’ve only ever wanted to protect her, but my choices keep finding her. Us. Again and again.”