by Scott, Ada
I stood up and walked over to him. He spat at my feet and looked up defiantly. I could only see the fear in his eyes because I knew him so well.
“You deserve to be with the Picollis, so I’m going to send you to where most of them are. You fuckin’ stuck-in-the-past assholes and your fuckin’ symbolism and etiquette. If you had any brains, this is what you should have done.”
I aimed my gun at his head and fired. The first shot killed him instantly, the second added insult, the third proved he did have some brains in that head. At least he used to, now it was sprayed all over my couch. I kept on going.
Chapter 25
Kendall
The feeling that something wasn’t right crept into my dreams and turned them into nightmares long before I was awake. Endless gunfire, explosions, running away from men in pinstripe suits with tommy-guns. I was thankful when everything faded away and I felt myself back in Jace’s bedroom.
I reached out for Jace under the warm covers, but his side of the bed was empty. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes and looked around. It was still early morning, if the light was anything to go by.
The silence was better than normal, it was positively soothing to my ears. The way yesterday ended was so loud. Bullets, explosions, hard fucking and screaming orgasms. So damn loud.
This was the first time the whirlwind of events had stopped spinning me around long enough for me to look at my surroundings. The feeling of wrongness followed me from my dreams.
I bunched up my eyebrows as I thought about it. It wasn’t the obvious, getting shot at by a bunch of mobsters wasn’t right, but there was more nagging at me, screaming at me to think.
Mobsters, the Picollis of course. They were the crime family that had been responsible for all the stuff happening lately, but it was hard to imagine what they were coming after Jace for.
The kinds of businesses that Jace was directly responsible for weren’t the kinds of stores that required Mafia protection from common street crime. Had they got pissed off about all the businesses that were refusing to deal with them that were ultimately owned by Jace?
Had Jace turned them down too? He was the kind of man that wouldn’t give in without a fight, so were the Picollis trying to teach him a lesson?
I sat up and winced. My muscles were aching as if I’d spent all day and night in the gym. Shuffling backwards, I arranged the pillows behind me and leaned against the headboard. There was no need to rush this awakening, I supposed.
On Jace’s pillow was a piece of paper with a hastily scribbled note. It said “Wait here. Back Soon. Love, Jace.” A man of few words, but he said the ones that mattered at least.
That sense that something was wrong kept worrying at me. I would ask him about whether he was in trouble with the mob when I saw him. Surely he’d be able to explain it away and I’d feel silly for bringing it up. It sure felt silly when I heard myself asking the question in my head.
Then I remembered how troubled he’d been ever since the Mafia revealed to the world that they were alive and well, despite what the police were telling Lucile and all the other journalists who crowded around at every statement they made to the media. My brow furrowed again.
The police. Why hadn’t we spent all night at a police station giving statements? It wasn’t like they could have failed to notice all the machine gun fire. Something exploded in that street too.
My heart sank. All at once my silly question seemed deadly serious. My Jace was in trouble with the Mafia, he’d refused to make a deal, or he had made a deal and it went bad. That was how these things went, right? Bad?
I gulped. Note or not, I had to ask him, and I had to do it sooner rather than later. Since I’d started staying at Jace’s penthouse more often than my own crappy apartment, I had a small selection of clothes here in a set of drawers against one wall, so I went for that.
As I dressed, I tried to brace myself for the worst. If he had made a mistake and got involved with these people before things went “bad,” that would explain why we hadn’t gone to the police.
What would I do if he’d done that? He could go to jail, couldn’t he? The thought of only being able to see him through a bulletproof glass window, as we spoke to each other over a prison phone, broke my heart.
After pulling on a t-shirt, I took a deep breath and stood as tall as I could. I would stand by him. I’d hold his hand as he went to court. When he faced the media afterwards. Forever. He was the best person I knew, and even if he made that mistake I would stand by him.
With that promise to tell him, in addition to the questions, I stepped out of the bedroom with a renewed sense of purpose. Jace wasn’t in the main open-plan area of his penthouse, it was almost eerie how silent and still everything was.
I peeked around a few corners to the various nooks and blind spots he might have been doing something in, but there was no sign of him. The guns weren’t on top of the bar anymore.
Remembering his face when he was retrieving them made me shiver. Had he ever even shot a gun before? He looked like he knew how to use one, but I hoped he wasn’t planning on doing anything crazy like taking on the mob.
The spare bedroom, also known as the room where we went when the sex was going to get messy like with chocolate body paint, was as empty and quiet as the rest of the penthouse. The only room left was his office, and he’d told me never to go in there because of confidential documents and things that he worked on in there.
The last thing I wanted to do was to cause him to be in breach of some non-disclosure agreement or anything like that, but stakes had been raised to the level of life-or-death yesterday. Every passing second I wasn’t with him made me more nervous. Suddenly, from behind the office door, I heard a strange sound.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
A deep, airy, percussion, over and over again. It sounded like a helicopter’s rotors in super-slow-motion. I gripped the handle and turned it, opening the door on silent hinges.
The scene inside wouldn’t have been out of place in a horror movie. A corpse that looked like it might have been Jace’s colleague, Lorenzo, was slumped on a couch with blood and gore sprayed out behind him on one side, bright red on the white fabric.
Five or more bullet holes peppered his chest and standing over him was Jace, my Jace, reloading a gun before pointing it at Lorenzo and pulling the trigger again and again.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
Lorenzo didn’t even twitch when the bullets hit him, he was dead, but Jace emptied his gun anyway, like a madman. A psycho with no regard for human life. My Jace… oh God. I let out a horrified strangled sound as my trembling hands covered my mouth. He looked at me, gun still pointing at the corpse, and I froze.
“Kendall, I-”
Hearing my name shocked me out of whatever daze I was in and I screamed, spinning on my heel and scrambling for grip with socks on the smooth floor. For the second time in as many days, I was running for my life.
My heart almost overheated and ground to a halt while I was fumbling at the front door and I could hear him getting closer and closer. I opened it and fled into the hallway, seeing Jace’s security team reach for their weapons and then think better of it, merely moving to block my path to the elevator.
The closest one stopped me in my tracks, holding me by both arms as I struggled to fight him off. The others crowded around, trying to control my flailing arms.
“Let me go!” I screamed. “I’ll call the cops! He’s killed him!”
“Sir?” one of them asked.
“Let her go, right now,” came Jace’s voice.
“Are you s-”
“Right fucking now. Kendall, please, let me explain…”
The men let me go and I pushed between them in a mad dash for the doors ahead of me. I pressed the button and, mercifully, the elevator made its little beep sound straight away and the doors opened.
“Wait-”
Somebody’s phone rang as I entered the elevator and one of the security guys answ
ered it. He listened for a moment, cursed, and then paused again.
“Sir, you need to listen to this,” said the guard.
With eyes blurred from tears, I turned to press the button for the ground floor and took my first and only look back. Jace was standing between the elevator and his security guards, looking at me with a phone pressed to his ear. My vision was too fuzzy to catch his expression, but I could see he was still holding that gun.
I slept with a murderer…
Chapter 26
Kendall
Unlike the hallway outside Jace’s door, nobody downstairs tried to stop me, despite my obvious panic. I rushed out the front doors and straight into one of the waiting taxis.
“Where to, miss?” the driver asked.
“Just go!” I did my best not to scream.
He shrugged and set off at a frustratingly calm pace.
“Hurry!” I said.
The driver looked in the mirror. “If you want me to hurry, you’re gonna have to tell me where to go.”
I was about to tell him to take me to the nearest police station, but the words caught in my throat. Could I really go there? What if Jace owned the police? What if he didn’t but they asked me why I fled the scene of a crime to go have sex with a murderer?
Worst of all, would they even believe me? Did I even believe myself? This was Jace, the man who took my virginity, who stood up for me and showed me love like I’d never dreamed of. How could the best person I knew be the worst? I needed time to get through this.
“Woodville,” I said.
“Where?”
“It’s a couple hours south-west of the city.”
“You got enough cash to pay for that kind of ride?”
“We can stop in Foxdell and I can get cash out, please just go.”
“OK, you’re the boss.”
I sat back in the seat as the driver picked up the pace a little. The faster he went, and the further we got from where I’d witnessed Jace kill Lorenzo, from where the Mafia had unleashed automatic weapons at us, the further my heart rate edged away from the red zone.
Pretty much every emotion that existed washed over me as the taxi driver listened to music in some foreign language and we passed city limits. I looked out my window at the city that had chewed me up and spat me out in ways even the people back in Woodville couldn’t have imagined.
Out to my left in the distance, I saw a huge plume of smoke as something burned. It kind of reflected what was going on inside me and was typical of the kinds of carnage I’d seen in the last day.
Every time I saw an image in my mind of Jace, even the image of him with that gun, I was surprised at how much my heart still went out to him. This was another thing on the list about love that nothing had prepared me for. I still saw everything that was good about him. But… he killed somebody, and he was so calm about it.
That’s cause it wasn’t his first…
A shiver ran down my spine.
But what happened to standing by him no matter what?
In a way, my life flashed before my eyes. All the people who had put me down over the years, all the people who didn’t think I was worth loving. And then Jace. He was like an explosion of color in the timeline of my life.
He held me up so high that I almost forgot how sharp and hard the ground was. It was the first time I dared to harbor the hope that I might be special to somebody.
I remembered in the car yesterday, when it seemed like every gun in the world must surely be firing on us, and Jace was lying on top of me. He had been ready to die defending me.
A lump formed in my throat and my eyes watered anew. I held my fist to my mouth to stifle a sob and no matter what I did, I couldn’t hold a train of thought together. It was like my brain looked over everything and pressed a ‘nope’ button, shutting off.
This was too much for me to handle. How was I supposed to explain this to my mom and dad?
“Hi Mom, hi Dad, I’m home just like you said I’d be, but guess what? There’s a murderer who’ll probably be looking for me and we can’t go to the police yet until I can explain why I left a crime scene to go fuck him. Is my room still the way I left it? What’s that you say? Nope, bareback.”
I hid my face in my hands at the sheer depressing absurdity of the situation and cried quietly until I felt like I had a headache from dehydration. When I next looked up, we were just heading into the town of Foxdell and I realized I couldn’t face my family yet either.
“Hey, can I change my destination, please?”
“Where would you like to go?”
“I’ll still need to get cash out here, but then there’s a cabin about fifteen minutes north-west of town. I’ll go there instead.”
My family had stayed at the cabin, owned by a family friend, for vacations a few times. My sisters had sweet summer romances with boys camping in the area, boys who had probably never ended up killing anybody.
At this time of year the cabin and surrounding area would be pretty secluded. The very core of my being reached out for that vague concept of peace and quiet to try to wrap my head around this chaos.
“Sure thing. Having a pretty rough day, huh?” asked the driver.
“Yup.”
“Don’t do anything crazy, OK? I don’t wanna see your picture on the news.”
I nodded but, no matter what I chose to do, I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my word on that one.
Chapter 27
Jace
The elevator doors closed between Kendall and me, sending her towards the ground floor. All I wanted to do was chase after her and try to explain everything, tell her who I really was. And why.
Would any of it make any difference? Probably not but, especially now, it was the only hope I had to hold on to the first really good thing to come into my life since I was six years old.
The only thing that held me back was the sound of gunfire and explosions coming from the phone that Jonny was holding towards me. With one last glance at the numbers going down on the readout above the elevator, I cursed and snatched it from him.
“It’s Lou at the Sicaria plant,” said Jonny.
“What’s happening, Lou?” I yelled over the cacophony.
“The fuckin’ Picollis, sir! They firebombed us and started pickin’ everybody off like flies when we came out! A few of the guys got some cover and we’re returning fire, but it’s bad, real bad. I don’t know how…”
“Lou? Lou?”
“The fuck? They’re pulling out… I don’t… ah shit, I can hear the cops. Sir… there’s bodies everywhere, a pallet of money and some drugs inside too, if it doesn’t burn first. They came before the truck arrived for today. What the fuck do I do?”
“Did the Picollis leave anybody behind?”
“Uh… yeah, looks like we got a few of ‘em.”
“Get somebody you trust and see if any of them are still alive, if they are, then drag their asses out of there, I’ll want to talk to them. Tell everybody else to get the hell out of dodge, I’ll sort this out.”
“Yes sir. Sorry, sir, they came outta-”
“No time for that, Lou, go do it,” I said.
“Yes sir.”
Fuck. Fuck. FUCK. I handed the phone back to Jonny. The Sicaria plant was more than a mild-mannered commercial dry cleaning plant and illegal drug distribution depot on the south side. If the Picollis knew how much cash and drugs were in a vault under that building, they would have come with everything they had. Lucky that Lorenzo hadn’t known either, I guessed.
This was going to take some serious bribery to sweep under the carpet. I had to make sure that when the fire department sent in their specialists to determine if the site was safe after the fire was put out, they were all paid well enough to not see a damn thing. Same went for the police department when they went in to do their thing.
I owned the police already, but the fire department wasn’t something I’d invested heavily in. If this stunt was big enough for the Feds to start taki
ng a renewed interest in what was going on, that would be a whole other level of shit to deal with.
“Call Stefano,” I said to Jonny. “Tell him Kendall’s on her way down, everybody get the fuck out of her way. Make sure one of our taxis is ready for her in front of the building. Tell the driver to do what she says and not fucking complain.”
Jonny started dialing straight away, and I turned to Marzio as I pulled out my own phone. Damage control had to start straight away.
“Get a clean-up crew into my penthouse. Lorenzo was working for the Picollis, so he’s dead. Anybody got a fuckin’ problem with that?”
The four of them hurriedly shook their heads and murmured their “no, sir’s.” I held my phone to my ear and listened to it ring. The Police Commissioner had to know some of what his men were walking into today, and I needed to get some contacts in the Fire Department pretty fucking fast.
*****
By the time I was beginning to get a handle on the metaphorical fires, the real ones at the Sicaria plant were still burning hot, and Kendall had a couple hours head-start on me. According to the taxi dispatch, they’d been heading to Woodville, but the driver had ended up dropping her off in a cabin slightly north of Foxdell.
This was a day that just wouldn’t fucking quit. I sat in the back of my car as the driver took us out of the city on the 28, past the Ex Machina headquarters. It was the first chance I’d had to take stock of the situation.
From killing Lorenzo, to making sure no more of my men were killed while unprepared, to calling in all the favors I needed to smooth the Sicaria shitstorm out, it was all like a battle through hell. It was just one more skirmish in the war I’d been fighting for over two decades.
If I didn’t win this fight for Kendall’s heart, though, it would feel like the war was lost. Her phone was turned off, and I had barely any idea what to say even if she did answer.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and rubbed them.
After that day in the car with my parents, my whole life was a blur of violence and meaningless sex with meaningless women. I’d always done everything I could to distract myself from the rage of losing so much to the Picollis, but it was always there, bubbling under the surface.
