Hunter: Perfect Revenge (Perfectly Book 3)

by Alice May Ball

  Minchia.

  Y FUTURE HAD no vacancy for a man like him, and it was definitely not going to adapt to make space for a man with obvious criminal connections. By his own admission he worked for criminals and with them. Who knew what actual crimes there were in his past. And he was a brute. An animal.

  I repeated the ideas over and over in my head. All the reasons I should have nothing to do with him. It had been a bad idea to see him in the first place. Going to a bar with a man like that, how would that ever have turned out well? What the hell was I thinking? And then taking him back to my apartment. Opening the door to him. Letting him into my home. Into my bedroom.

  The depth of his eyes, the hardness of his big, jutting jaw, the heat of his whispers, none of it meant anything. Not the way he made my skin jump as he peeled off my shirt. Not the way he was so rough and careless, running his hands over me. Pulling me up against his hard torso. Breathing my name into my hair, giving me goosebumps as his breath fanned my throat. And my cleavage. My treacherous breasts that leaped and loved him.

  My poor, lost pussy, which wept and sobbed for him. Pouted and pined as his lips teased and tormented my poor, helpless clit. My trickling walls that opened, only out of a lonely kindness. They should have known better than to seize on the hard strength of his tongue. Foolish thing, being won over by the length of him, rolling, spreading and flattening, finding all my secret spaces and greeting them like naughty playmates, long missed but still mischievous. Still up to their old dirty tricks.

  My thighs, silly, girlish things, flattered by his caresses and nips. His licks and the hardness of his cheeks. Still, they shouldn’t have hugged and squeezed him. Shouldn’t have made his mouth quite so welcome up between my dripping petals. My irresponsible, clenching, twitching ass was bound to egg him on, goad him and make him think he should do more.

  And when he did, when he spread me wide, when he pinned me flat and helpless with the nails of his eyes, then I should have known. Then I should have said, “Oh, no, mountain man. Don’t bring that thing near me. Don’t think you can plunge your fucking oversized jackhammer cock into me. Don’t you dare stretch me wide, split me sore and breathless on that damned telegraph pole. Don’t think you can shove yourself all the way up through me.”

  If I had the sense to stop it there and then, he wouldn’t have driven that thing up so far he made me think things I’d long forgotten. He wouldn’t have rocked me like a roiling ocean current and made me toss and clench and flap and claw and scream until I shouted out his damned name.

  Then I wouldn’t have to spend all day trying to pretend that it didn’t matter. And thinking up good reasons to not sit down or walk too fast.

  Bastard.

  The way Horse was, the picture of him in my head, all of the images from that evening, and from the night, kept me buzzing clear through the next day. Right up until I went out after that call.

  The velvety touch of his skin, hard sinew rolling beneath, his dark scents. The heat of his chest, the strength of his thighs, the rolling force of his powerfully sculpted ass, all that was the mood music to my day.

  The whole of that next day, his breath was still on the insides of my thighs. My fingers still felt the twist and grip I’d had on his hair. All of it with the memory of his voice, low and warm in my ear.

  His mobile lips. His absurdly long tongue. I would remember every taste and every flick, every unexpected extra thrust, for a long time to come. Coupled with the abrasive soreness and the ache that wouldn’t go away. As it turned out, I would have to remember it all, and for some time to come.

  The call shouldn’t have come to me. But it had, easy and light, the way that only really bad luck can be. The Bureau had sent an FBI ‘persons of interest’ notification to the local precinct, I might have sent it myself, and I never thought to even check. It was something we would only ever have done as a courtesy. It was a formality, just for the local enforcement to be aware, simply so that they would keep away from the individuals concerned, or keep us informed if, for any reason, they had some urgent need to approach them.

  Our investigation was looking into the connections and movements, some of their associations and business activities. We were, I was, in fact, due to be interviewing them pretty soon. Sometime in the following days, for sure. Even that was only procedure. It wasn’t like they’d never been questioned before.

  We knew who they were, they knew that we knew. It was all just routine. Or it should have been.

  The watch commander had no real need even to let the bureau know what was happening, it was just him going out of his way to be friendly. He sounded like one of those cops who wanted to transfer across, and maybe he thought that being nice to the Bureau would help his chances along.

  If I hadn’t left a memory stick in my desk drawer and had to go back for it, I wouldn’t have heard about any of it until afterwards. As it all shook out, I happened to be passing the office front desk, which was unmanned again, and I saw the phone light flash.

  When I picked up, the watch commander introduced himself. He was chatty and I wasn’t in too much of a rush. My step still sprung and not all of the glow from the last night was pure pain. Even I was able to hear the playful lilt in my voice.

  When he said the address, I just started writing it on the pad at the desk. Almost the whole address was on the page in front of me before I even thought about it. Then I realized that was where the suspects lived. Still, even when he said there were reports of shots fired, there was no need for me to attend. But it was nearby, and I was curious. How would things have turned out if I had just let it go?

  If I had done the normal thing, thanked the watch commander for his help and waited for a report to come in next day, my whole life would have been completely different.

  Nothing in the report or the circumstances even made me think of Horse. It could have been the only time that whole day that I wasn’t thinking about him.

  Y HEAD HURT. I came to, freezing and cramped, lying in darkness. There were muffled sounds, but all I could remember at all clearly was the weight of the gun being dropped in my lap and the freezing ice beneath me. The muzzle of the gun was hot. That was what woke me. Shoving upwards, I got the freezer lid open with difficulty, just in time to hear scuffling, hurried steps and to see a fleeing figure.

  I had reached up in my stupor and been able to grab the punk’s wrist before he was gone. By sheer reflex I held on pretty hard and gave the wrist a good twisting wrench. It sounded, and felt, like it broke. If I didn’t break it in two, he was for sure going to be out of the Fuzboll games for a few days.

  Clambering up in the freezer I was slow and clumsy. I looked at the gun. As I expected, it was my gun. A drill-bit bore of pain stabbed through my shoulders and all of my limbs and joints. They cracked with the cold. The lid of the freezer was stiff and heavy. I was even more stiff.

  The clump of the punk’s feet wasn’t too hard to follow, but I struggled down the stairs in fitful, rolling staggers. Every step, I expected to pitch forward to roll and bounce headlong the rest of the way down the stone steps.

  The punk ran downstairs and I heard him crash through a back door. Still groggy, I stumbled after him with the gun in my hand. How long I’d been lying unconscious in the freezer, I had no way to tell. Can’t have been too long, though. More than half an hour or so, I would have been too frozen and stiff. It would have taken me a long time to get up, get my limbs working. I wouldn’t have been able to get up and get out in time.

  I stumbled onto the dark of the first floor and heard booted feet making a run for it out the back. Through the rear door I saw him disappear out into the yard.

  Not a great start to my first evening as an unwanted bodyguard for a couple of mafia brats. And I had no clue what the punk had done after he knocked me out and slung me into the freezer. All I knew was, as I started to come to, the hazy recollection of the lid of the freezer lifting and a figure dropping the gun in on top of me.

  Groggy
as I was, I figured that the gun was more likely a plant than a gift from a mystery benefactor. His plan must have been to leave it with me in the freezer, and I guessed it was most likely to put me in the frame for whatever it was he’d just done with it.

  My legs felt like they were broken and I was running through setting concrete. It seemed like a long time before I made it through the door after him. Right outside the door was where I stumbled into the long barrel of her gun.

  Pointed right in my face. The woman I’d flung around a bed the night before. In the bed, up against the wall, in the shower. Oh, yeah, in the shower, too. She held the weapon in both hands with her head cocked to one side along the sight and her lovely eye boring hard into mine. She still looked fucking great.

  I said, “I was going to call. You could have waited.”

  “Drop the weapon. I thought you were more of a one-night-stand kind of a guy.”

  “I was going to make an exception.”

  She said, “While I think of it,”

  “Yes?”

  “Drop the weapon.”

  “Can I just put it down?”

  She cocked the hammer and I thought I’d take that as a ‘no.’ The gun I’d been holding fell on the stone floor with a clatter.

  “I love the way you hold a gun. Great stance.”

  She sighted along the barrel at me. “You want to watch how I handle the recoil when I discharge it?”

  I’d been right. It must have been a custom long barrel. “This might not be the best time.”

  “Hands behind your head.”

  “No need to be so formal.”

  With Special Agent Vesper Cross’ eyes on me, it felt like she looked all the way inside me, like she could see into my inner thoughts and secrets. Into that dark place I almost never went. I have secrets, of course I do. Too many. Most of them are things I want to keep locked away, things that I’ve seen that I don’t want to have to look at or think about ever again.

  What showed in her eyes was that she didn’t judge. Not the person. She would judge a person’s actions and her judgement would be swift and decisive. Her judgement of what a person chose to do would shake a prophet of the Old Testament, but only their actions and choices. Never the person. Only the deed, never the man.

  With a gun she was like a Zen archer. She would feel the target with her heart, reach along the line of sight. Wait for the heartbeat on the arc of the breath. My weapons training was deep enough that I could see she was beyond a natural. She was a gifted weapons handler.

  If she fired on me from fourteen inches away there wasn’t too much chance she would miss, but still she sighted right along the barrel. Flexing her fingers on the grip and taking no chances with her aim. There would be no warning shot, and when she pulls back on that trigger, the lights are going out.

  How did I know all that? At the time I didn’t. But I had a very long time to think over those few moments, and you can get a lot from time spent looking at details.

  Her voice was soft. Silky and sexy, exactly as I remembered it.

  “Put your hands on the back of your head please, Horse.”

  There was a question in her eyes, I saw it. I was wondering something, too, and it was probably the same thing. Could it really be a coincidence, her being here? Had chance brought us together that one night, or was that only the way that it seemed as we rumbled around and over the mess that we made of her bed. I thought about how she’d felt. How she’d made me feel.

  Red and blue lights flashed on the wall behind me. The sirens of the black and whites pulled up outside. Doors slammed and footsteps clomped through the house as I stood with my back to her.

  “Out here!” she shouted. I chewed my lip.

  Adrianu and Custanzu Bonaventura were both in the house with bullets in their skulls. Two each.

  It came to a plea and I took the DA’s bargain. There was no way for me to get away from it. My arrest was made at the scene of a double homicide and I was found with the murder weapon in my possession. Paulo, Georgio and Armando had melted away like a mist. Nobody with any connection to the family would admit to ever knowing anything about them. Or me.

  Not so surprising, I guess, but it left me out on the ledge, and left the D.A. with a slam dunk.

  There had been a theft as well as the killings, and that supplied a motive so, boom, the prosecutor had a full house. Nobody attempted to show that I actually had any of what was said to have been missing, but the case looked so good to everyone that even my attorney looked at me pityingly when I raised it with him.

  Somehow the gun barrel got lost between the ballistics test and the evidence locker, and that was my break. If it hadn’t been for the fucked up forensics, I would have been looking at murder in the first, times two.

  So, a holiday in the big house and I was next in line for a whole world of new culinary experiences. Omelettes boiled in a bag. Dope fiend sandwich, made out of two Grandma’s brand peanut butter cookies with a Snickers smashed in between. So called because all the dope heads needed fast fixes of sugar and protein when they were new arrivals. Pizza was made in the cell with a Top Ramen crust, tomato sauce and slices of pepperoni sausage or summer sausage. It’s not delivery, It’s de jailhouse.

  Connections are everything in the joint and I got along okay. The University of Crime offered many opportunities for profit, inside and in preparation for release. The gangs, like most things in prison, split down racial and tribal lines. The stereotypes were so loud and overblown it was like living in a cartoon. The blacks, Puerto Ricans, Columbians, Mexicans and Italians all had their big, swaggering, dead-eyed crews of muscle , clustered like a donut around their bossmen.

  The boss' cells were like tiny replicas of high-end hotel rooms, made from pieces, like a collage. As an outsider I was able to get along with all of the gangs. Just to look at me, I was obviously not one of them so I didn’t represent competition to any of the members. All except the Italians. There was no friction, but I couldn’t ever get closer than conversations with members on the fringes. The ‘made guys’ would hardly even talk to me.

  “Nothing personal,” they said. Enzo Cuzamano was the biggest mob guy in there. He wasn’t ever getting out. He made a point to come over to where I was sitting at dinnertime one evening in my first week. He put his tray down next to mine and leaned on the table. He looked around the room to make sure everybody there was carefully and respectfully not watching him before leaning close to my ear.

  He said, “Nothing personal.” And he looked in my eye. Then he picked up his tray and went to join his gang.

  It was like a stamp of respect, but at the same time the message was clear. As far as the Italians were concerned, I was an outcast. Nobody from that section would have anything to do with me.

  Time and time again throughout those five years Vesper requested visits, but I couldn’t say or do any of what I wanted, any of what I needed to do with her. Not in a supervised visitation. Cameras, guards watching. Bright lights.

  It seemed Vesper didn’t have or couldn’t make up a compelling enough legal reason to see me, or she would just have demanded an official visit from the prison governor. Wouldn’t have mattered then whether I wanted to see her or not. And I did, I really did. All the time I was inside, I wanted nothing more than to be alone in a room with Vesper Cross. But not the room that would be available in the prison.

  And I had no legitimate reason to see her. Not until I got out. Then I would definitely be looking to meet up. And there would be nothing legitimate about it.

  ID HE DO it? All I knew for certain was the dull weight that sat like a lump of lead in my heart. That and the twist in my stomach when I saw him stumble out of the back door of that house. Peering around, groggy. With the gun in his hand. Even then, when I had no idea what had happened inside, I knew right away there was something wrong with that picture.

  The precision sidearm that he carried in his neatly tailored holster was not a blundering about in the dark kind of a w
eapon no more than Horse was a blundering about in the dark kind of a man. Not a man like Horse. Not a trained and experienced serviceman, who had recently been on active duty in special ops. Something was wrong.