RIP ME: A Dark Romance

by Naomi West

  Many hours later I’m sitting up bolt upright in my bed and scrabbling on the bedside table for the phone that is chirping away. Dare. Dare is calling me. He said he would call me as soon as all of this was over. Is it possible that it’s over already? That he’s found and destroyed Greco already? With a racing heart and a shaking hand, I flip open the phone and hold it to my ear.

  “Dare?” I ask, my voice trembling.

  But it isn’t Dare who answers.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Dare

  “Holy shit!” Artuz hollers behind me in the split second after I kick the door down.

  The two people writhing around on the bed in front of me absolutely freeze as the door falls to the ground with a monumental crack.

  “What the fuck?” Fabi yells as he drags a sheet over the naked woman underneath him. He covers her up but not before I get an eyeful of her long body and red hair.

  “Rett?” I ask in disbelief as I flip the light on.

  “Hey, Dare,” she says in her southern drawl, a light color coming into her cheeks but she seems pretty casual considering the position I just caught her in.

  “Who’s your girl, Fabi?” Artuz asks, leaning against the doorjamb behind me.

  Fabi reaches down and slides some underwear on. He comes around the bed and stands before us, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “What the fuck are you doing in my house?” he asks, his voice low.

  I raise my eyebrows. I’ve never seen this side of Fabi before. I always thought Dante was the commanding one and Fabi was the goofy, fun loving one but here he stands, looking strong and confident like a mob boss.

  “I could ask you the same question, seeing as how the two of you are officially missing.” I put the safety back on my gun and put it in its holster. Fabi stares me down but eventually realizes that I’m not going to be leaving without some answers and he sighs and sits back on the bed.

  “It’s a long story, Dare.” He runs one hand through his hair and looks supremely exhausted.

  “You know what, I don’t even care,” I say and reach in my pocket to pull out my phone. “I’m not the one you owe an explanation.”

  Fabi looks at me in confusion as I walk past him and shove the phone into Rett’s hand.

  “Call her,” I say to Rett, “call her and tell her that you’re alright.”

  “Who?” Fabi asks, looking back and forth between the two of us.

  “She knows I was missing?” Rett asks, anxiety creeping into her voice, “I didn’t think she would have figured it out yet. It had only been a few days.”

  “Who?” Fabi asks again, obviously getting frustrated.

  “She’s been going out of her mind with worry for you. You probably took a year off her life.”

  Rett drops her head and instantly scrolls through to find Alessia’s number in my phone. She looks up at Fabi. “We’re talking about Alessia. Neither of us have reached out to her to explain.”

  Comprehension dawns on Fabi’s face and he has the grace to look a little chagrined. “I called her to let her know I was safe. But I didn’t think she needed to know more.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s pretty much been non-stop panicking for the last four days,” I snap, unable to control my frustration at him. They should have called. She deserved to know that her brother and her best friend were safe.

  “Oh, so you speak for her now?” Fabi asks, a combative look in his eye.

  “Well, they are fucking,” Rett says as she finds Alessia’s number and clicks on it, “so I think in some situations he can speak for her.”

  Fabi turns back to me and for a second I see something like rage come over his face but it flickers and dies out in place of humor. “You’re kidding. You and Alessia?”

  I nod, unsure what to make of his reaction.

  “You’re the dude she was dating who wouldn’t give it up?”

  I hear Artuz give a surprised grunt of laughter behind me and I suddenly wish for Fabi to die a thousand deaths. I’m hoping he’ll be my brother in law soon, so instead of slapping him into next Tuesday, I just cross my arms over my chest.

  “Just trying to do right by her,” I say through gritted teeth.

  Fabi leans back on his hands and surveys me for a second. “Yeah, I can respect that,” he says, before falling back with a little laugh. “Dante’s gonna lose his shit. Can I be there when you tell him?”

  I open my mouth to retort, but we all fall silent as Rett sits up, gripping the sheet around her.

  “Lessi? Lessi are you there?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Alessia

  “Lessi? Lessi are you there?” I hear Rett’s voice in my ear and I swear my heart stops.

  “Rett?” I ask, my voice trembling.

  “Yeah, sweetie, it’s me. I’m alright. I’m okay.”

  “Where are you?” The connection is fuzzy so I can only imagine she’s somewhere far away from me.

  “I’m in your dad’s house, actually. Pretty impressive digs you grew up in. A little ominous for my taste. You know, with all the red velvet tapestries and the classic paintings and shit. But still, you know. Impressive.”

  “Yeah. Impressive,” I echo her vaguely. I feel utterly dazed. “Rett, what the hell is going on?”

  I hear her take a deep sigh. “I’m here with Fabi, and Dare, and some guy with a kind of a crazy look in his eye? Dark hair and bowling balls for shoulders?”

  “Artuz,” I say, guessing. I feel a deep calm wash over me for just a second as I realize that Dare is there and safe, at least for a little while longer.

  “Are you Artuz?” I hear her call out. “Yeah, apparently he’s Artuz.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Well, actually, up until about ten minutes ago, I was fucking your brother.”

  “Jesus Christ, Rett.” I can hear Fabi say in the distance. Even across the ocean I can hear the humor in his voice.

  “Um,” I murmur.

  “Yeah, totally unexpected, huh?”

  “Okay,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose, “why don’t you start from the beginning?”

  Lessi, I’m gonna put you on speaker and let Fabi help me tell the story, ok?”

  “Okay,” I say weakly, still trying to wrap my head around this.

  “Hey, Alessia,” Fabi says. “Sorry for leaving you in the dark about everything, it’s all just happened so fast and we’re still trying to get our footing.”

  “Uh huh,” I say, reserving my judgement until after I hear the story.

  “So, where to begin?” Rett says. “Well, I guess it was right around the same time that you and Dare started hooking up.”

  Fabi didn’t say anything though, so I assumed he’d already been told. Whether by Rett or Dare, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t comment.

  “You guys were spending so much time together and I suddenly had all this free time.”

  “Yeah, Rett, I’m sorry about that. I shouldn’t have left you out in the cold like that. I should have made more time for you.”

  “Honey, please. I was thrilled for you that y’all had finally gotten together. I missed you, sure, but I didn’t begrudge you the time you were spending with your man. I just had more time to go out and about on my own. And pretty much right away, I met Anthony. I told you a little about him.”

  “Sure.”

  “He was super into me. And I was flattered. But he was way too intense. Always trying to get me to go to all these really secluded places. And he wanted to know all about you. Way too much personal information. I started to get this weird feeling about him.”

  “And that’s when you posted that picture of the two of you on Instagram?” I ask.

  “You saw that?” she asks. “It was only up for like five minutes.”

  “I must have looked at exactly the right time, I guess.”

  “Yeah. But I really posted it so that Fabi would see it.”

  “Why Fabi?” I ask, totally surprised. I hadn’t even kno
wn they knew each other.

  “When Rett came back to school and you started talking about her I got curious,” Fabi says, “so I looked her up. I just wanted to know who your friends were, I guess.”

  “Doesn’t hurt when my friends look the way Rett does, huh?” I ask dryly.

  “Doesn’t hurt at all,” Fabi says and I can hear the grin in his voice, “I commented on a few of her photos here and there, but not much.”

  “So how do you fit in to the whole Anthony thing?” I ask.

  “Well, turns out Anthony is actually Antonio,” says Rett.

  The name turns a screw in my head and suddenly I remember where I knew his face from. He’d been sitting with Greco in my living room that day so many years ago. He hadn’t been much older than I was, but he was there in a room with two mob bosses. Antonio. Antonio Greco. Greco’s son.

  “Antonio Greco,” I whisper.

  “Yup,” says Rett, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s not enough fear in her voice. “Apparently, he’d been sent on a little mission to prove himself to his father and do away with you. He figured the best way to you would be through me.”

  “So how did you figure it out?”

  “The idiot carried his identification on him,” says Rett. “I started to get suspicious of him, and I went through his wallet and remembered all the things you’d told me about the Greco’s. But he came back and found me going through his wallet. I had no idea what was going to happen, so I did the only thing I could think to do.”

  “You took a picture of the two of you and posted it to Instagram?” I ask skeptically.

  “Yeah, and I showed it to Fabi. I figured that if anyone was going to be able to identify a Greco, it would be Fabi.”

  “So,” Fabi cuts in, “I figured out pretty quickly that Rett was tangled up with Antonio Greco when she didn’t want to be. And, you know, at this point I had a little bit of a shine for her.”

  “Rather, you had a shine for my Instagram page.”

  “Tomato, tomahto.”

  “So Fabi got my email off of my page and emailed me with instructions to do the whole Find My Friends thing so that he’d know where I was.”

  “Wow, Fabi,” I say, pretty impressed.

  “I know. One of my finer moments for sure,” he pauses and I can tell we’re getting to a part of the story he doesn’t like so much. “I was able to tell that she was on the highway coming toward Chicago. I didn’t know if she was okay or not, but I had to get to her.”

  “You should have seen him, Lessi. I’ve never seen anybody drive like that before, he ran Antonio off the road, had me out of the car and into his SUV in like thirty seconds flat. And then BAM, we were outta there.”

  “I believe it,” I say. I’ve seen Fabi drive a million times in my life. I just don’t like thinking about Rett or Fabi tied up with Antonio Greco. He may be the younger son, but I’ve heard some pretty ruthless things about him.

  “Anyways,” says Fabi, “that was the night that dad got arrested and everything went down in flames. I didn’t know what to do with Rett, didn’t know how to keep her safe. So I figured, you know, this house is kind of like a fortress. And there’s basically an armory in the basement. So we came here. And have been hiding out while Dante and I figure out a way to get Greco off your back, Alessia.”

  “And then you slept together?” I ask, not sure I need to be filled in on that detail, but not able to resist asking anyways.

  “Well, we didn’t really have anything else to do,” says Fabi.

  “Your brother is a real charmer,” Rett says although I can hear in her voice that she’s taken with him.

  Rett and Fabi. Who would have thought? In a weird way, though, they kind of make sense together. They’re both so fun and they both know how to have a good time with the opposite sex.

  “I’m just so glad you’re both alright,” I say.

  “Oh Lessi, I’m so sorry you were worried this whole time. We didn’t know how to reach you, and even though we figured you were with Dare, we figured it wouldn’t be safe to call him in case they were tracking Dare’s phone. We didn’t want them to be able to find us.”

  “I understand,” I say. And I do. The last few days have been so intense and so confusing for everybody, I can’t expect them to have done any better than they did. “Can I talk to Dare for a minute?”

  I hear some scuffling on the line and then Dare’s voice is in my ear and I’m a hundred times calmer. “Hey gorgeous.”

  “Hey baby. How are you doing? How are things going?”

  He heaved a heavy sigh. “Things are about as we expected. Greco made bail. He’s holed up in his house. I’ve got Artuz with me.”

  “And what’s next?”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to give you the details, gorgeous. Just remember that it’s all gonna be over in a few days. And then I’ll be back by your side, looking at the ocean from our bedroom window.”

  “Okay,” I whisper, tears filling my eyes. “I miss you.”

  “Me too,” he says, “but it’s good news about Rett and Fabi. They’re safe. So take them off your list of things to worry about. Everything is gonna be alright.”

  I looked out my window as the first licks of dawn came up over the ocean, light purple and stretching out toward me. “I should go before I wake up your parents. It’s still early here.”

  “Try to get some sleep, Alessia.”

  “I will.”

  “And gorgeous?”

  “Hm?”

  “I love you.”

  And he hangs up before I can say anything else.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Dare

  Alessia’s hair. Her dark, bottomless eyes. Her blush. Her giggle. I roll through these things in my mind on a loop as I sharpen a knife and tuck it into my belt loop.

  Patrizzio’s armory in the basement is impressive. Actually, it’s bone chilling. The number of weapons he has down here could fund a small a guerrilla uprising.

  I carefully select a few different firearms and place them on my person. I strap on a bullet proof vest and tuck some mace into my belt. I bypass the throwing stars, because who the fuck takes throwing stars to a gun battle?

  “You’re going after him, huh?”

  I whip around to see Fabi leaning up against the door of the armory, crunching an apple and looking at me thoughtfully.

  “Yeah,” I say, turning back and straightening the vest.

  “I think I’m gonna come too,” Fabi says, and it’s almost like he’s deciding to come along for a movie, or a trip to the mall.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea, Fabi.”

  He shrugs. “Maybe not. But I’m still coming. Look. I left to go rescue Rett. That fucked up the whole plan Dante and I had. It meant that I wasn’t there to do my job and Greco got arrested. That’s the whole reason he wants Alessia now. Retribution. He wants to hurt us the way we hurt him.”

  “Well, that’s something you’re gonna have to square with your conscience on your own time, Fabi. I can’t have you coming along and fucking this up.”

  I turn back to him and there he is, standing directly in my face. His eyes burn with the same intensity that I’d seen back in the bedroom. He’s been protecting Rett, and he’s got every intention of protecting Alessia now. He looks more like his father than I’ve ever seen before.

  “She’s my sister. There’s a threat on her life. I’m going,” his voice is low and deadly.

  I cock my head to one side, considering him. “How do I know you won’t get in the way?”

  “You don’t,” he says, “but I’m the only one who’s been in Greco’s house before. I know it really well, actually.”

  I raise my eyebrows in surprise. “How the hell do you know the house of a rival mob boss?”

  “I used to date around with Cara, Greco’s daughter.” His grin is a lascivious flash and I remember why I’ve always liked Fabi.

  I don’t think he really will get in the way.
Hell, he might even be useful.

  “Fine,” I say. “Pick your weapons, then.”

  He slaps his hands together and starts to walk the aisles of guns and knives like he’s shopping for button up shirts. I hear footsteps coming down the stairs and immediately reach for my weapon.