Annihilate Them

by Christina Ross

  And when he did—when he looked over his shoulder toward the entrance and his bald head revealed itself to Gia—she almost froze.

  It was Stephen Rowe. She zoomed in, saw his face, and in anger, let out the breath she’d been holding within her.

  He’d fooled them.

  Betrayed them.

  He’d been planning on taking out the Wenns on his own.

  But why?

  “We need to get out of here!” she said as she stumbled away from her rifle.

  “What are you talking about?” Carlo said to her. “Jesus, Gia, the Wenns just left the building! Get the fuck back on your rifle! We take them now!”

  “Look to your left!” she shouted at him. “Look for Rowe! He’s there! In a tux! You can see his fucking bald head! Do you see him?”

  “I’m looking...”

  “He’s near Park. No one is going to recognize him looking like that. He’s fucked us—he’s taken this payday from us—and he’s about to kill them on his own. Why else would he be here now? He told us that he was leaving on a damned plane today! He said that he was leaving so we could finish it—and now this! He’s had this planned all along. He baited us. Despite everything we went through to prepare for tonight, he never once planned on allowing us to be any part of it.”

  “I see him,” Carlo said. “He’s moving toward the Wenns. No one is even looking twice at him.”

  “Why would they?” she asked. “He’s changed his fucking appearance.”

  “But none of this makes sense,” Carlo said. “He has to know that he’ll be killed if he tries to take either of their lives. Think about it, Gia. He hired us to do the work for him so that he wouldn’t get caught.”

  “Then why is he here?”

  “The only thing that makes sense to me is that he might be here to witness their deaths in person. When it’s over—when gunshots are fired and heads explode—he can just rush away with the rest of the crowd. Scatter amongst them. Vanish into the night after seeing what he’s waited to see for so along.”

  On one level, that made sense to Gia—it could be true. Maybe Rowe, as sick as he was, did want to see them die for himself. But Uncle Niccolo had always taught her that if someone ever misled or lied to you, that was the moment to break ties and flee, because only more lies would come.

  “The three of us had a deal, and Rowe’s presence just violated it,” she said. “We’ve got to get out of here now—so move it.”

  “Are you sure?” he said. “He’s no longer moving toward them. He’s just hanging off to the side now, almost as if he’s waiting for something to happen.”

  She peered into her sites, and saw that what he said was true.

  “What if he just wants to watch?” Carlo said. “What if he’s waiting for us to act now?”

  Fuck! she thought.

  She looked down the sites and scanned the area in front of the foundation until all of them came into view.

  And it was true—while Alex and Jennifer Wenn were waiting their turn for their limousine to arrive along Fifty-Fourth Street, which was gridlocked with limousines, Rowe hadn’t moved forward. It also appeared that he had no weapon. Instead, he looked nervous, twitchy. He likely was riding high on cocaine again. His gaze was squarely on the Wenns—and anticipation was clear on his face.

  For us to shoot?

  “What should we do?” Carlo said.

  Her gut was filled with tension and uncertainty when she said, “I don’t know.”

  “We should kill them,” Carlo said. “Take the money. I’ve got a clear shot of Alex’s forehead. Do you have Jennifer?”

  “I do.”

  “Then we must shoot.”

  Angry, unsure, and confused, Gia locked her sites on Jennifer Wenn’s right eye as she gave into her brother—and readied to press the trigger.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “IT’S COOL OUTSIDE,” Alex said to me when we left the foundation. “Are you cold? Would you like my jacket?”

  “I’m good,” I said as I reached for his hand. “I’m a Maine girl, remember? I may have been here three years at this point, but this weather is still like the Bahamas to me.” I placed my free hand on his cheek as we moved forward with the rest of the crowd. “But thank you, Alex.”

  “Anything for you.”

  Likewise, I thought.

  “Did you have a good time tonight?” I asked as we moved forward and looked through the long line of limousines for our car, which was nowhere in sight. Already, I could tell that we’d be waiting for a while for Cutter to show, but that was fine by me. I was happy to be out and with my husband. He was the only thing I needed.

  “I did. How about you?”

  “I had a blast. I still can’t believe the surprise you and Rudman sprang on me. That was epic.”

  “You should have seen the look on your face.”

  “Speaking of faces, did you see Epifania and Rudman’s when we walked past them a moment ago? Sparks were flying!”

  “To say the least.”

  “I hope that it works out. Epifania can be a handful, but I have a feeling that he likes that about her.”

  “Cross definitely likes a challenge.”

  “Then he’s going to get one.”

  “Jennifer,” a man’s deep voice said behind us. “Alex. It’s good to see you tonight. And here I wasn’t sure if I’d ever see you again...”

  As Alex and I started to turn, I thought that the voice sounded oddly familiar to me. But before I could process it, an arm suddenly wrapped around my throat, a gun was shoved against my right temple, and I screamed as I was led away from the rest of the crowd.

  “Jennifer!” Alex shouted.

  “One move, and she’s dead, Alex,” I heard the voice say too close to my ear. With my back pressed against his muscled torso, I could feel that whoever had me was in shape. “One move from you or from anyone else, and your Jennifer is dead sooner rather than later.”

  As the crowd pressed away from us and looked at me in horror, Alex took a step forward.

  “Who are you?” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Are you really so self-involved that you don’t recognize me?” the man asked. “All I’ve done is shave my head and bleach my goatee. And you have no idea who I am?” His voice lowered a notch. “Why should I expect more from you, Wenn? In fact, I shouldn’t.”

  “Rowe,” Alex said with a chill in his voice.

  A chill ran through me.

  “That’s right, Alex. What a smart dog.”

  “Get your hands off my wife.”

  “And what if I don’t?”

  “I’ll fucking kill you.”

  “Really,” Rowe said. “And how will you do that, Alex? After all, I’m the one holding the gun, not you...”

  I locked eyes with Alex and saw the terror in them. Be calm! I thought as I stared at him, hoping he could read my thoughts. Don’t do anything stupid!

  “Jennifer and I are going to die here tonight,” Stephen Rowe said. “You should know that. In just a few moments, there will be a big show of blood. And by the way,” he said to the crowd. “All of you will be able to watch it go down. Just think of how many cocktail parties that will get you invited to in the coming weeks.”

  He kissed me on the cheek, which made me recoil away from him, though I somehow forced myself to keep calm.

  How do I get out of this? I thought. He’s got a gun smashed against my head. His arm is practically squeezing my throat shut. How can I get free from him without him shooting me? And where is security? Ben must have placed security guards outside—are they in tuxedoes in an effort to blend in? Are they waiting for the right moment to strike? Because if they make one false move and Rowe senses it, we’re both dead. They must know that...

  “Before I commit my little murder-suicide, Alex—which I believe we all know is how your own parents died, so at the very least, we must consider the irony of that—I have a few things I want to get off my chest,” Rowe said. “And t
his time, you’re going to hear me out. You’re not going to get rid of me like you did the last time—as if I was some meaningless piece of shit. Instead, you’re going to listen to me. You’re going to realize through your own wife’s death exactly why you shouldn’t have fucked with me on that day at Wenn—when I was dragged out of your building by the police and humiliated in front of the world when the press swarmed me. That day destroyed my life. Today, I’m destroying yours.”

  At that moment, his body tensed against mine.

  “You made me kill the love of my life!” he said.

  “Meredith?” Alex said.

  “Not Meredith,” Rowe said. “That bitch never was the love of my life, though I did have her killed. Everyone thought her death was just some sort of random event. But what nobody knows is that on the night of her murder, she was on her way to see her lover when I had her neck broken. Apparently, the coward chose not to tell anyone that she was on her way to see him that night. Social fears,” he said. “They can be tragic, can’t they?”

  “You’re the one who killed Meredith?” Alex said.

  “Are you deaf? Yes, I had her killed, and the cunt had it coming.”

  Confusion claimed Alex’s face. “Then whom are you talking about?” he said. “Who was the ‘love of your life’?”

  “Who do you think?” Rowe said. “Janice was. Despite how she turned against me in the end, I still loved her. But she had to pay for what she did, didn’t she? Just like Diana Crane and Mike Fine, she had to pay.”

  When he said Diana and Mike’s names—and the implications that were tied to them—I felt my knees go weak.

  It’s been him, I thought. All along—it’s been him! How many people have died this week because of him? And by extension, through his connection to Alex and me...?

  “Today, in a warehouse that’s, oh, somewhere in this city, I cut Janice up. Sliced her face. Stabbed and deflated the tits I paid for. And now, the woman who would have been mine for the rest of my life if you and Jennifer hadn’t interfered, is dead.”

  He paused for a moment, and when he spoke again, his voiced trembled.

  “But she betrayed me, didn’t she? She had to die for that, didn’t she? Just like Meredith. And just like Diana Crane and Mike Fine, who withdrew their support of me at the very moment that I needed it most.”

  The cold metal of the gun hurt as he jammed it firmly against my skull. I looked over at Alex, mouthed the words “I love you” to him, and then closed my eyes and tried to focus on what I possibly could do to get out of this situation.

  And then Rowe spoke, interrupting my thoughts.

  “Just so all of you know, this is how I handle betrayal,” Rowe said. “I had Meredith killed. I massacred those people outside the Witherhouses’, and in the process, I took out Diana Crane and Mike Fine. Today, I killed Janice Jones. And now it ends with this one,” he said, pulling me even tighter against him. “Are you hearing me, Alex? All of this ends with the death of your wife.”

  The crowd roared as he suddenly lifted me off my feet and dragged me farther away from them. I struggled against him. I slammed my heel onto his shoe, heard him laugh when he tugged his foot away, and then my gut went stone cold when he whispered in my hear, “See you in hell, bitch.”

  At that moment, even though a part of me knew that I was as good as dead, my eyes became two balled fists—and I knew in my gut that there was no way in hell that I was going down without a fight.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  IN THE THREE MINUTES that had passed since Rowe snatched Jennifer Wenn into a vice grip and pulled her away from her husband and a crowd that was active and alarmed, Gia and Carlo had been transfixed. Unable to look away.

  “Look at his eyes,” Gia said as she leaned into her scope and scanned Rowe’s face. “He’s coked out of his mind, and it’s worse than it was earlier today. He’s completely lost it.”

  “Never mind his eyes,” Carlo said. “Look to the far right of the building. Security.”

  “What security?” she said in surprise as she tamped down hard on the impulse to run. “We looked for security earlier—just before the party ended. I scanned that goddamned area myself. There were no signs of security there before.”

  “There is now. They likely timed it so they’d leave along with the rest of the guests because they’re there now, Gia. Two men. Both with dark hair. Each as big as me. Each in a tux. Neither with a wife or a girlfriend. Each watching all of this go down and edging closer to the scene. Look at their faces—we both know that look. We’ve worn it ourselves—cold and calculating. Not a trace of fear in either of them, just a determination to shut this down. To figure out how to get this done without allowing Rowe to kill Jennifer Wenn in the process. And good luck to them when it comes to that, because—to be fair to them—Rowe isn’t giving them an inch to act.”

  “I see them,” she said. “If one of them shoots him, he could reflexively shoot her.”

  “Exactly.”

  “The point you tried to make earlier is dead,” she said to him. “He didn’t come back to watch—he came back to end this. Why? Why end his life now? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Who has ever been able to make sense of the deranged and the drugged,” he said. “But let’s go back in time. He said that he had a plane waiting for him—likely a private plane. What if whoever has been assisting him all this time decided to get the hell out now before Rowe could take them down with him? What if they saw what we saw today—a man becoming unhinged? What if they left him here, and he just decided to end it on his own, and go out with a bang?”

  “It’s possible,” she said. “We’ll never know.”

  “Does it matter? The fact of the matter is that I agree with you now. We do need to get the hell out of here, because shit is going down sooner rather than later. Soon, the police will be here. Too many people who aren’t in that crowd are aware of what’s going down. It’s already been called in—and Rowe knows it. He’s going to finish this within minutes. Trust me on this—he will kill Jennifer Wenn just as surely as someone will kill him. They’re both going down, but we’re not going down with them. So, get up.”

  “By taking the Wenns on his own—or, at the very least, Jennifer Wenn—he’s cheated us of millions,” she said.

  “So what?”

  “We’ve risked our lives for tonight! And he’s robbed us of what he promised us.”

  “We need to leave!”

  But Gia didn’t move. The muscles in her jaw tightened in anger and she looked harder into her sites as she quickly weighed her options for how to handle this betrayal.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  “ARE YOU WATCHING ME New York?!” Rowe shouted out. “Do you see me now?! Are you finally paying attention to me? Are you regretting that you judged me? That you treated me as if I was some kind of monster? Because this is what happens when you come to those conclusions!” he said as he shook me against him. “You lose one of your precious fucking princesses!”

  “Put down the gun or we’ll shoot!”

  Startled, I watched two men in tuxedoes cut through the crowd and aim their guns straight at Rowe’s head, which was just behind mine.

  No! I wanted to shout out to them in fear. Stand back! Now! If you try to shoot him, you might miss and he’ll kill me!

  It was at that moment that red laser beams flashed from their guns and cut the distance between us. Were those beams wavering across Rowe’s face? His head? I had no idea...

  I also didn’t know whether Rowe even cared at that point.

  From the start, this had been a suicide run. He’d already said that both of us would die tonight. And so I swallowed that, sucked the darkness down deep into my soul, and tried hard not to feel the despair that was swirling in my gut, even though I nevertheless felt it because I didn’t know what the next few moments would bring.

  Or what I might be able to do to end this.

  I looked over at Alex—my sweet, sweet Alex—whose eyes
were bright with tears of rage but who was holding himself back for a reason. He knew that if he intervened, that he might make matters worse. The dilemma he was facing was all over his face—the frustration, the indecision, the not knowing at what point he should jump in and help me.

  Before telling him that I loved him, I thought about the short time we’d had to love each other and the children I hadn’t been able to give him. I said those words—I said out loud that I loved him—and then an idea occurred to me and I immediately acted.

  With a sharp, backward snap of my head, I slammed my skull as hard as I could against Rowe’s face. Just as he bellowed out in pain and stumbled back, I immediately reached up for the gun that he’d been holding to my temple and wrestled it away from him.

  At that moment, I watched the crowd react with screams of fear and I knew why—with the gun flailing between Rowe and me, it could go off at any moment and a stray bullet might hit any one of them.

  “Give me the gun, you fucking bitch!” Rowe growled into my ear.

  With everything I had in me, I swung around and faced him without losing my grip on the gun. I tried to knee him in the balls but I missed, striking him instead in his thigh. As we continued to struggle for control of the gun, I saw the blood pouring from his broken nose, and I saw the sheer hatred mixed with utter surprise in his bloodshot, wilder-than-wild eyes.

  Surprise...

  A surge of adrenaline overcame me.

  Use his surprise, I thought. Use it in your favor. Bring him down!

  While I kept one hand on the gun and tried like hell to keep the barrel from pointing at me, I punched Rowe squarely in his right eye with my left hand—on which were the enormous engagement and wedding rings Alex had given me. And when I did that—when those diamonds dug deep into his eye and I twisted my fist in an effort to destroy his eye—Rowe stepped on my dress’ ridiculously large skirt and grabbed my arm as he fell back, sending both of us crashing to the cement with me landing on top of him with a thud just as the gun went off.