by B. B. Hamel
“Or maybe he isn’t as loyal as you think.”
Dante nodded but said nothing. I could tell that was eating at him, and I didn’t need to dig my fingers into that wound.
As we went north, the city that I knew and loved began to slowly fall away until we were definitely out in the suburbs. We took I-95 up to Knight’s Road, and from there we headed out to Roosevelt Boulevard.
Dante slowly pulled off the Boulevard and into the parking lot of a shadylooking motel called the Neshaminy Inn.
I’d never stayed at a place like the Neshaminy Inn before, but I knew what kind of place it was. I could tell just looking at it that mostly prostitutes and their clients stayed there, plus the occasional criminal in need of a cheap room. As we walked into our bottom floor room, I realized that was exactly what we had become: criminals.
Maybe Dante was used to that, but it was new to me. I was trying to figure out just exactly who I was, and maybe a healthy respect for the law wasn’t a part of my personality like I thought it was. Maybe I did inherit some of my father’s traits after all.
The room itself was rundown but it was safe and there was a bed. I collapsed onto it, staring at Dante as he meticulously checked the room over, clearly a bit paranoid.
“What’s the plan now?” I asked him.
“Now,” he said, getting into bed next to me, “we wait.”
“I hate waiting.”
“I know. I’m impatient too.”
“I’ve just been waiting for days now.”
“Don’t worry. I have a plan.”
“What’s that?”
He kissed my neck. “First, I’m going to undress you. Then I’m going to tongue that gorgeous pussy of yours until you forget all your troubles.”
I smiled. “Sex won’t solve all our problems, you know.”
“Sure it will.”
“You can do whatever you want to me, but your mafia is going to still be after us.”
He smirked at me. “All I heard was ‘you can do whatever you want to me.’”
“Of course.”
I giggled as he kissed me, his hands roaming my body.
“Wait,” I said, “wait, wait, wait.”
He groaned. “I was just getting started.”
“Hold on. You said before that we can’t just run away. What are we going to do?”
“I have a plan,” he admitted.
“What’s your plan?”
He grinned at me wickedly.
“I’m going to kill them all.”
Chapter 24
Dante
I hated that I brought Jodie to the damn Neshaminy Inn, but I didn’t know where else to go. We needed to get out of town immediately, and there were so few places that we could pay entirely in cash with no questions asked.
It was a risk, but a calculated one. I knew that they might find us, but I figured we had at least a day before they realized that I was running. That would hopefully be enough time for me to set my plan up and get it into motion.
Jodie wasn’t going to like what I was about to do, but that was okay. I had to do hard things if I was going to save her from hard men. Besides, she deserved every fucking hard thing imaginable because of everything that I had put her through and more.
Sometimes I couldn’t sleep, and tonight was no different. I stared up at the Neshaminy Inn’s cheap roof, listening to Jodie breathing softly beside me. Ever since she came into my life and I realized how strongly I felt for her, I found it harder and harder to sleep at night. I put her through so much pain and misery, and although I did it all because I was ordered to, I still made those choices. I chose whether to obey the commands or not, and ultimately I was the one responsible for those fucking sins.
I could pass it off however I wanted, but I knew where the blame was. It stuck with me, and I hated myself for having locked her up the way that I did. I knew it was fucked up and wrong from the beginning but I did it anyway because I was a good soldier. I followed orders and did what the family told me to do. Of course, the family was all that I knew, and I never considered that they could be truly wrong about something.
But in this, they were truly wrong, and fuck them for trying to fight back against me.
I held her as my prisoner. I kept her locked up in a room and was going to break her for some very bad men. Of course, I stopped that as soon as I could, but it still happened. I wasn’t sure how I was going to live with myself or how we were going to move on from here. I wanted her to become something much more than just my prisoner, but I had no clue how we were going to do that together.
As I lay there, lost in my thoughts, I heard something. The noise yanked me back into reality, completely drowning out my inner voice as I went into high alert.
I heard the noise again, and I was sure that it was coming from the bathroom. I quickly got up and grabbed my gun from the nightstand. Jodie stirred, but she didn’t wake up as I moved silently across the room.
The noise came again. It was a scratching sound, like someone was running a tool against glass. I stepped into the bathroom, keeping low, and peered up at the window above the toilet.
I heard the noise and saw him then. The window latch slipped open and the window was shoved upwards as his body slipped into the bathroom.
He moved clumsily. Drago never was the sneakiest man in the world.
I flipped the light switch on, pointing my gun at his body as he froze, still in the middle of picking himself up from the floor.
“Drago,” I said.
He stared at me. “Dante.”
“You weren’t very smooth.”
“Guess you always were the stealthy one.”
I stared at him for a second. He wasn’t moving, but I could sense the tension in him. “What are you doing here?” I asked finally.
“Gennaro had me follow you.”
Fuck. I should have known he’d do that. Of course he was going to suspect me after that conversation, I just didn’t think he’d send Drago after me so soon. That was a stupid mistake, of course. Gennaro wasn’t the trusting type, and as soon as he sensed any sort of weakness he was likely to pounce. Even in a man like me that never once showed a single moment of doubt or disloyalty, Gennaro wouldn’t take the risk.
Drago stared back at me, eyes hard, but I could see the subtle signs of fear in him.
“Dante?”
I didn’t turn around. “Stay in bed, Jodie,” I said.
“That the girl?” Drago asked. “Now I know why you wouldn’t let me have a taste. You want her all for yourself.”
“Shut your mouth now, Drago,” I said.
“What’s happening?” Jodie said.
“It’s okay,” I answered. “We just have a visitor.”
“Give her back to Gennaro,” Drago said. “This won’t end well for you.”
I stepped closer to Drago. “You have a gun pointed at your head. You think this is going to end well for you?”
He was silent for a second then shook his head. “You always were a stubborn fuck.”
“And you always were stupid. Did Gennaro send you here to kill me?”
“No,” he said, but I could tell that he was lying.
“Then why come in through the window?”
“Thought it was safer. I figured you might be a little on edge.”
“Bullshit.” I shook my head. “You’re a bad liar, Drago.”
“Gennaro just wants the girl. He understands that mistakes can be made.”
I shook my head. “You don’t get it. She’s not going to become a sex slave, no matter what Gennaro thinks. The girl is mine and she’s going to stay mine. I tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take it, and so here we are.”
“Here we are,” Drago echoed.”
“Dante, tell me what’s happening,” Jodie called from the other room.
I glanced back toward the door, and that was when Drago made his move.
He was fast. There was a reason for his success in the mob. He was deadly and he
was efficient when he needed to be, even if he was something of an idiot.
I couldn’t hesitate. I’d worked with Drago for years, hell, we were even friends. We weren’t best friends, but there were times that I genuinely liked the guy and even a few times where he saved my ass. Still, I knew I couldn’t hesitate, because I knew he wouldn’t.
His shot only managed to graze my leg as I put two bullets into his chest. He fell backwards, a wet gurgle at his lips, and fired another shot wildly into the air.
“Dante!” Jodie screamed from the other room. She appeared behind me but I held a hand out.
“Stop,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“Oh my god.” She stared in at Drago as he collapsed into a heap in the corner between the toilet and the wall, blood pooling around his body. He died moments later, the gun in his hand falling slack.
“That was your partner,” she said.
“Not exactly my partner.” I walked over to him and kicked the gun away, just to be safe. “We need to go,” I said to her. “Go pack our things.”
She nodded and left after one last look at his body.
I grunted as I nudged him with my foot. He didn’t move, and I knew his eyes weren’t seeing anything.
“Fuck,” I said softly.
This was what the mob drove us to.
They took everything from us. They expected everything, and what did they give in return? They gave us death disguised by money.
There weren’t a lot of old mobsters, and the ones that did grow old were the bosses, the guys at the top. Guys like Drago were just fodder to them, bodies that carried out orders but didn’t matter in the long run. Drago was disposable, and by extension, so was I.
To them, humans were just trash which had to be discarded once in a while to serve the greater purposes of the family.
Anger rolled through me. I hated that I had to kill Drago, hated that he didn’t give me any other choice. The stupid idiot could have backed down and I would have let him live, but he chose to follow orders blindly to the very end. Maybe there was another way I hadn’t thought of, but I doubted it. Drago would have made that move sooner or later no matter what I said to him.
He couldn’t help it. He was a good soldier.
Well, I was done being a good soldier. I was done being in their family if this was what they wanted us to do.
“Dante?”
Jodie’s voice snapped me out of it. I turned away from Drago’s body and looked at her. She motioned for me and I walked to her, letting her wrap her arms around me and pull me close against her. I hugged her tightly like that while Drago slowly went cold on the tile floor five feet away from us.
“Come on,” she said. “We should go. People heard those shots.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Angry, but fine.”
“Come on.”
We went back into the main room, grabbed our bags, and left out the front door. We headed to my truck, got in, and left just as the sound of sirens began to come toward the motel.
I was pretty confident that nobody was going to give the cops any useful information, but even so we kept driving for most of the night. I took a pretty circular path around the city before finally ending up across the Delaware River in Camden, New Jersey. I found an empty parking lot where I pulled the truck over in the shadow of a crumbling brick building.
“You sleep,” I said. “I’ll keep watch.”
She shook her head. “I can watch.”
“Think you can shoot someone if they try and steal our truck?”
She paused then smiled. “I guess not.”
“You sleep. I’ll watch.”
She nodded once, giving me a look. Finally, she curled over onto her seat, putting her feet in my lap.
I sat there in the darkness, thinking about all the times Drago and I went out on jobs together. Gennaro sent Drago after me on purpose, probably because he thought I might be too soft to pull the trigger when it really mattered.
He underestimated me, and that was good. I was going to take advantage of that and tear him to fucking pieces.
I was going to tear them all to pieces.
Chapter 25
Jodie
I had a fitful, restless night in the truck, but at least I slept. When I rolled over and looked at Dante, I could tell from his face that he hadn’t slept a single second. He looked exhausted and stressed, although I knew he was trying to hide those facts from me.
I could also tell that he blamed himself for everything. It was all over his face when he looked at me, and it almost made me feel guilty. I knew that none of this was Dante’s fault, that if he didn’t exist my family would still have gotten killed. Without him, I would have been put in a much worse situation and wouldn’t have met someone that truly cared about me.
I’d be dead without him. A large part of me understood that. I’d never let them take me into sex slavery, and so I’d die one way or the other.
Dante clearly didn’t see it that way. He only saw that he was a part of what happened to me, that he killed my family and took me captive. He didn’t see the fact that he went against orders, treated me well, kept me safe. Kept me sane. He didn’t understand that he gave me something so much more important than whatever he thought he personally took away.
He gave me purpose. He gave me a life with my eyes wide open to the world, not blinded by my luck.
Because that was what it was. I was lucky to be born where I was with the family that I had. I was lucky to get everything I needed just handed to me, provided for me by my father and my mother. Maybe it was rotten luck that everything came from the mafia, but at least I had it. Some people never even got that much.
“I wish you’d sleep,” I said to him.
He looked at me and smiled slightly. “Good morning to you too.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
He shook his head. “I had to keep watch.”
“They’re not following.”
“You’re probably right. But we couldn’t have known that last night.”
I chewed my lip and realized that there was something else going on with him, something I hadn’t thought of right away. Last night, Dante had killed that asshole Drago, and while that didn’t matter one bit to me, I could see why it would matter to him. He probably worked a lot with Drago and knew him very well. Hell, they might have been friends at some point.
Last night he was forced to kill a man he knew.
“None of this is your fault,” I said softly to him. “You don’t have to punish yourself.”
“I’m not,” he grunted, looking away. “I just had to keep watch.”
“I don’t blame you for what happened to my family and what happened to me. I don’t blame you for any of it.”
“Maybe. But I was a part of all that.” He looked at me seriously. “I still kept you locked up.”
“I know.”
“I gagged you. I tied you up.”
“I know. You had to.”
“Maybe, maybe not. I could have let you go sooner.”
“You did eventually.”
“Eventually isn’t fast enough sometimes.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one that’s angry at you?” I asked, moving toward him. “Shouldn’t I be the one who blames you?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
“Well, I’m not and I don’t. Wake up.” I punched his shoulder. “You’re the only one blaming anyone here.”
He grinned. “You punch like a girl.”
I leaned back in my seat and sighed, shaking my head. “You don’t take anything seriously.”
He leaned over the center console and took my chin. “I take you very seriously,” he said.
“Prove it.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Get some sleep.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Really?”
“Not right now, but soon.”
/> “Why not now?”
“We’re going somewhere first.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Where?”
“Somewhere very dangerous.” He kissed me gently on the lips. “And then after this, we’ll be done. We’ll run away to Alaska and start over.”
I made a face. “I don’t want to go to Alaska.”
He released my chin and moved back toward the steering wheel. He started the engine and pulled out, heading into traffic.
“Where do you want to go then?”
“I don’t know. Japan, maybe. Or Italy might be nice.”
“Italy is full of gangsters, you know.”
“Sure, but they’re different.”
“We’re Italian.”
“Are you though? You’re Americans.”
He laughed. “Okay then. Japan or Italy.”
“I don’t have a passport.”
“That’s okay.”
“Is it?”
“We’ll get you one.”
I smiled. I believed that if anyone could get me a fake passport that would allow me to get out of the country, it was him.
“So where is this dangerous place we’re going right now?”
“Just sit back and think about where you want to go after this,” he said then grinned at me. “Let me worry about all the killing.”
I opened my mouth to argue but decided against it. He was probably right, in the end it didn’t matter where we were going. So long as I was going with him, I knew it would be okay.
After about an hour of driving, we ended up back in the city outside of a normal-looking brick row home. The stoop was clean, just like all the houses in the neighborhood, and you could tell that it was a decent block.
“Stand back here,” Dante said as he walked up the steps. I nodded and stayed put. I watched as he went up to the door then knocked loudly a few times, waiting for whoever was inside to come open up.
When the door finally did open, I was shocked at who I saw standing there.
Pagano looked equally surprised to see us. Before he could speak, Dante pushed Pagano inside, following him in. I rushed up the stairs and watched as Dante muscled Pagano into his living room, pushing him down onto the sofa. I shut the door behind us and locked it.
