Guns n' Boys: Swamp Blood (Book 3) (gay dark mafia erotic romance)

by K. A. Merikan

  Ryder took a deep breath through his bloodied teeth. “Jed, shut the fuck up.” Clearly, he was the sane one. With his eyes wide, he raised his empty hands and nodded at Domenico. “I’m sorry for him. He’s just... worried. You two go wherever you want. I just want to gather my brother from the floor and have a beer at the end of the day.”

  Domenico squinted. “Someone still has some brains.” Slowly, he looked down at Jed, who still glared at Domenico with his teeth bared like a rabid pit bull.

  Seth took a few steps toward the exit, and then a few more. “Come on, Dom,” he whispered.

  Domenico smirked at Jed and slowly moved to his feet, still pointing the gun straight at the man’s forehead. The pleasant buzz in his brain was like a drug he didn’t know he missed. “If all of you dogs are like the two of you, I would forget about us, for your own sake. You’re not the first to threaten me or my family. I am still here. They are not.”

  Jed glanced at his brother and then back at Dom. “Fuckin’ psycho.”

  “Dom, let’s go…” Seth pleaded, backing out.

  Domenico raised the stolen gun to his lips and kissed the barrel. “I’m taking this,” he whispered as he made his way to the door, keeping his eyes on the two brothers, frozen in one position like two statues. He could have broken their necks. He chose not to.

  He pulled the safety on and followed Seth outside, with a warmth in his chest even as he looked at that lying prick.

  “We were supposed to lie low! Are you fucking happy?” Seth yelled in Italian as he ran toward his bike. “Get on. Where’s the car?”

  “Your fucking stray took it. Yet another decision you totally blew!” Domenico exploded with anger as the truth in Seth’s words stabbed into his stomach. They were fucked. There would be police on their tail soon enough. They needed a new place to stay ASAP. Even before he reached the motorcycle, he had already chosen Dana’s number as the addressee of a text message. Blood was thumping in his veins, his head was light from being high on adrenaline for the first time in months, and the motorbike reminded him of another escape long ago.

  Seth pushed the spare helmet against Domenico’s chest and put on one himself, mounting the bike in rapid moves. “Ungrateful motherfucker.”

  Domenico exhaled and slid into the slot at the back of Seth’s bike. He put his arms around Seth’s midsection and pulled hard, now knowing his ribs were fine. He’d been lied to for so long he didn’t even know what to say now that he had already expressed his anger toward the two brothers in the gym.

  With his other hand, he quickly typed: Emergency. Find us a secluded spot. We’re moving. He sent it as Seth sped down the main street of the quiet town where they stood out like sore thumbs.

  The heat of Dom’s body behind Seth was both exciting and unnerving. Seth couldn’t believe the outburst at the gym. Dom had actually knocked out Ryder. Sure, Ryder attacked Dom as well, but the whole mess wouldn’t have happened in the first place if it weren’t for Dom following him. So fucking typical. Seth was sure that the moment they got off the motorcycle, Dom would blame him for all of this. As if Seth didn’t have the right to any privacy.

  Blood was rushing through Seth’s veins at a rapid pace, quicker than the motorcycle wheels could ever spin, and the grip around his body was burning him through the clothes. They were finished in this town. Lying low. Fuck. Dom could just never keep his crazy jealousy in check.

  And on the topic of lying low, Dom wouldn’t even grow a beard. When they moved down here, he’d given it a week but got so angry with the hair on his face he shaved it all off and hadn’t tried again ever since.

  As Seth arrived at the house, the stolen pickup was nowhere to be seen, and the door opened, spitting out Dana, who walked off the porch and straight at them. “What’s wrong?” she asked before Domenico even dismounted the bike, as if he didn’t want his body touching Seth’s anymore. It stung more than Seth dared to admit.

  “We need to go,” he grumbled, running into the house.

  Seth got off but wasn’t sure what to do with himself. All that he had now could fit into a backpack. He followed Dom inside along with Dana. Maybe he could pack some cans for wherever they were going.

  “I’ve put out a few feelers, and there’s a place not far from here that we can go to if things get desperate,” Dana said. “But it’s not a place to stay at. It’s a shed in someone’s summer house. They could be coming there at any point, and then we’d be screwed. Where’s the car? Is the kid dead?”

  Seth grabbed his backpack and started stuffing it with food. “He stole our pickup after Dom decided to pull a gun on two bikers in the middle of town.”

  Dana frowned, straightening up, as if she wanted to seem taller than Dom. He did exactly the same thing, and for a total of five seconds, they tried to stare one another down like two roosters. It was ridiculous.

  “Not a word,” hissed Dom in the end and burst into the bedroom, where he opened the wardrobe and yanked everything out, like a teenager throwing a tantrum.

  Dana walked off to the living room with her face neutral, as if expressing any emotion was a foreign concept to her.

  Seth bent over to grab his leather jacket from the floor. “Watch it with my stuff!” He grabbed his mother’s cookbook and stuffed it into the backpack.

  Domenico pushed him on the bed, moving around with his face red and a big bulging vein on his forehead. “You have no right to tell me what to do, you fucking liar!” he screamed in Italian.

  Seth squinted at him and rubbed his ribs. They still hurt from where Dom had hit him. “I’m not obliged to tell you about everything I do!” he responded in the same language. “What were you thinking bursting in there like that? Now we have to move again! Ryder isn’t even gay! He’s been very kind to me, and you mess him up.”

  Domenico grabbed the sides of Seth’s head and looked at him with so much venom it almost felt as if Seth’s skin was burning. “Kind to you? I bet he was! I just wanna peel away all the skin he ever touched on you!”

  Seth gasped and tried to pull away from his grip, but Dom only tightened it on Seth’s hair. “Let me go,” Seth hissed and pushed on Dom’s shoulders. “All I did with him was gym.”

  “Right. You have me here, and you go and fool around with some local? I call this bullshit!” growled Domenico and pushed Seth on the bed so hard all the old springs squealed under him.

  Seth gave up and watched him from the bed. “I wanted to do it on my own!”

  Domenico paced around like a wounded panther, hissing and heaving as he took brief glances at Seth. The sudden movement back toward the bed was so unexpected it had Seth curling up even before Domenico’s hand squeezed at the front of his throat and pushed him down.

  “Stop lying to me! I deserve the truth! You deserted me and went off with some meathead. What was it that I did, huh?” he screamed, yanking Seth up and pushing him back on the mattress repeatedly, as if he wanted to punch a hole through the bedding. “You don’t trust me to keep you safe anymore? Is that it?” he roared, looming above Seth like a furious animal.

  “I didn’t desert you! I live here!” Seth grabbed on to Dom’s wrists, trying to contain him somehow. A part of him believed that Dom would never truly hurt him, but another part recognized that something might happen to him before Dom calmed down. In moments like these, Seth was reminded that he wasn’t on vacation in Louisiana, but on the run from the mafia with his assassin boyfriend.

  “You can’t keep me safe from you!” Seth yelled back at him with a scowl.

  Domenico pulled back in one violent move that sent him into the open wardrobe. He grabbed one of the emptied shelves and watched Seth from beneath his thick brows, breathing hard, as if he were about to have a heart attack. “Nothing’s left if I can’t even trust you.” His eyes were intense and piercing even in the shadows.

  Seth got up cautiously, rubbing his throat and fighting the stinging in his eyes. How did they get to this point? “You can trust me. Why are you so mad?�
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  “No, I can’t. You’ve lied to me,” hissed Domenico, but instead of breaking into yet another tirade, he wordlessly grabbed a black sports bag and started randomly stuffing his clothes into it.

  Seth swallowed, unsure where to even start picking up the pieces of what had just happened. If he told Dom what his trips to the gym were about, Domenico would regard him as weak. Soon enough, he would resent Seth, and in no time, they’d have no future left at all.

  He just stood there with his backpack, but distraction came on its own accord. “Mark pulled up,” Seth said, watching the pickup through the window, even though that fact only made him number.

  Domenico dropped the bag to the floor and left without a word, gaining speed as he passed the open doorways one by one. Seth followed him like a sheep, but with the tension in Domenico’s shoulders, he was now more worried for Mark than for himself.

  Domenico jumped off the porch and ran up to the boy, who just exited the cab and backed away against the vehicle with his hands up. His obvious surrender didn’t stop Domenico from delivering a punch so hard that it knocked Mark down to the asphalt. The boy tumbled with a sharp cry and curled into a ball, hiding his head.

  “You little shit!” hissed Domenico. “You fucking coward. We could have died!”

  “Dom! Stop it! He’s just a kid!” Seth ran over to him, fearing what could happen next.

  “I’m sorry! I panicked!” Mark cried from the ground, but Domenico still kicked him right in the ass, so hard it moved the curled-up body by a few inches.

  “He is not just a kid! He’s a young man,” Domenico hissed at Seth, looking back with the wide eyes of a madman. “You could have died because of him!”

  Seth grabbed Dom under the arms and pulled him back. “He could have disappeared, but he came back with the car.”

  “So what? He took it in the first place. It wasn’t even his! We could’ve been shot by some fucking village thugs!” spat Domenico, suddenly hitting the side of the car hard.

  Mark yelped and crawled under the pickup. “I didn’t know what to do! I felt so guilty after!”

  Seth put his hands over his face, and Dom kicked one of the tires. “What did that biker want from you anyway? I’d have protected you, you dumbass!”

  Mark peeked out from under the car with his eyes red. “I stole his phone… I pushed it out of his hand when he tried to film me.”

  Seth groaned. This was the last thing they needed.

  Dana spoke from the porch. “We should just get rid of him.”

  Domenico let out a groan and looked between her and Mark, clearly torn. He was actually considering going with her suggestion!

  Seth stepped between Dom and Mark. “Are you out of your mind? We don’t need to do that. All we need to do is move. And you were supposed to be on that!” he yelled to Dana. “Not fucking drinking your protein shake!”

  Dana shrugged and looked at the glass in her hand. “Not drinking it won’t speed up anything. I’m waiting for people to call me back.”

  Domenico sighed and combed back all his hair. It was the most nervous Seth had seen him in a long, long time. “Whatever. Let’s just get our stuff in the back of the car, and we’re going. We can’t stay here.”

  “I know a place we could go to,” Mark said in a tiny voice, sticking his head from under the truck, with a bruise already forming on his cheek.

  Seth stepped away to have a better look at him, and even Domenico slowly sank to one knee.

  “Where?” he asked in a tone so calm, it jarred with his red face and sweaty hair.

  Mark swallowed, curling his shoulders in anticipation of another punch. “A few days back, I stayed in this house deep in the swamps. The guy who lived there died, and no one found his body. It was old and dried up, so no one knows about it for sure. But it freaked me out, so I left.”

  Seth pursed his lips at the thought of staying in the same house with a corpse, but he supposed they could get rid of the body. “He did confess about the phone…” he said to Dom, trying to catch his gaze, but it was useless. Dom hated him now.

  Domenico took long, deep breaths. The tension in his shoulders eased, and he reached out to Mark. When the boy took his hand, Domenico pulled his whole body from underneath the pickup. “Will you show us where it is?”

  Mark nodded. “Yes, I remember well. I think the biker dude wants to kill me.” He slowly got up and hugged himself.

  Seth shook his head. “After Dom’s stunt, I’m sure he wants to kill us both, too.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” growled Domenico in Italian, before nodding at Mark. “Good. If this works out, think of yourself as forgiven,” he said and headed toward the house, followed by Dana.

  Seth sighed and stayed by the truck, unsure where to go. “Do you want me to do anything?” he yelled after Dom, but truth be told, he wasn’t in the mood for talking.

  “Get our fucking stuff on the back,” yelled Domenico from inside the house. Seth whimpered and looked around, stopping when he noticed a face in one of the neighbor’s windows. He forced a smile and waved at the woman before casually striding into the house. Sweat slowly beaded on his back. They had made so much noise. What if someone called the police? Domenico would confront anyone he considered a threat, and that included public officials. They needed to get out of here, and fast.

  Domenico and Dana rushed outside with some plastic bags, and when Seth walked into the bedroom, it became clear his stuff was all that was left on the floor. Domenico had already taken all of his.

  He took a deep breath and gathered the rest of his belongings in haste. So they were now set to entrust their lives to the memory of a sixteen-year-old. Seth hoped he wasn’t placing too much hope in the kid. He put his stuff in the cargo bed and sat on its floor, unwilling to face Domenico again.

  Dom didn’t question his decision about brief separation either, and it almost seemed as if he chose not to look at Seth anymore. He insisted Seth get into Dana’s car, and it seemed like the ultimate token of displeasure, but Seth chose to take it like a man and pretended she wasn’t there as they drove silently behind the truck. He wasn’t alone in this pursuit, which predicted a very long, nervous, and boring afternoon.

  There they were, moving again.

  The smell of the swamp around them was weirdly pleasant, even though the air was damp and hot. Seth even got a tingle of excitement when he saw a small alligator run into the water when they stopped in front of the wooden house that could only be reached by following a road designed for a comfortable ride in one car. Seth supposed two cars could technically pass one another with their side mirrors folded, but even as Dana drove behind the pickup, it was impossible to avoid touching the overgrown branches of trees growing on both sides. The drive through this green tunnel lasted about twenty minutes after leaving the nearest asphalt road, and clearly no one remembered the dead owner of the place too fondly if his body was still there. In other words, it was just the kind of place they needed.

  Just as Mark had warned them, the house wasn’t much. It was a wooden shack with a few windows, a door that didn’t correctly fill its frame, and a large porch area built on stilts that emerged from the murky water. This part of the house was made of wood that looked newer than the walls, and with propped roofing over an area with a rocking chair and a small table, it actually looked cozy. There was even a dirty grill they could use.

  Seth started unpacking their stuff without a word, replaying the scene from the gym in his head over and over again. Was there something he could have done differently? He wasn’t willing to go into the house just yet, not looking forward to seeing the corpse.

  “Was he a Christian?” asked Domenico, nudging Mark’s shoulder. He already told Dana to look inside, and she hadn’t yet run out screaming, which, Seth supposed, was a bad sign about her personality. If there really was a corpse inside, that is.

  “I don’t know.” Mark shrugged, sitting on a bench next to Seth and playing with the weeds that had grown over t
he clearing by the shack. “I don’t think I’ve seen a cross in there, but there might have been a Bible in one of the drawers.”

  “What does it matter?” Seth rolled his eyes, itching for a drink.

  Domenico stared at him with that flat, condescending stare Seth hated so much, even more so in the choking heat of the summer. “If you died, would you rather have a proper Christian burial or be dropped into the swamp?”

  “I don’t want to think about dying.” Seth frowned, unhappier by the second.

  Mark was quick to dish out his opinion though. “I would like to be cremated. It freaks me out that someone might bury me alive.”

  Domenico sighed. “We’re supposed to be turned into ashes, I suppose.” He rustled the curly mane on Mark’s head, and Seth felt a sudden pang of jealousy. Why was Mark forgiven when he was not?

  “Sometimes, living feels like being dead,” Seth offered and got up, too annoyed to even look at them now. He fished out a bottle of wine from the bag with groceries and started making his way down a path. “Let me know when the body’s gone.”

  “You’re not drinking,” said Dom quietly. “Put it back.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do.” Seth didn’t even look back.

  A gunshot resonated through the woods, rousing dozens of birds off their cozy places in the treetops. The bottle shattered in Seth’s hand, and his leg was suddenly wet.

  His lips parted, and at first, he was too shocked to say anything, as his hands trembled. Seth looked over at Dom, who had just shot the bottle in his hand, leaving him alcohol-free. He couldn’t choke out a word.

  “Fuck you!” Seth finally yelled and spread his arms. “You could have killed me!”

  Domenico snorted and waved the gun dismissively, completely oblivious to the wide-eyed look Mark was giving him from a few steps away. The boy was frozen in fear, like a lamb that had just seen its mother slaughtered, and even Dana looked out of the wooden hut to see what was going on.