by Ada Scott
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 answered 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…
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.
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 taking 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.
It was still there now, but since Kendall came into my life and worked her way into my heart like some unstoppable petite assassin, I realized there was pain there too. It had been with me forever, like black poison.
I’d thought I’d felt good fighting, destroying everybody that stood in front of me. I thought I’d felt good fucking my way through a never-ending river of women. I thought that killing so many of the Picollis felt best of all.
None of it compared to the way Kendall made me feel though, because Kendall wasn’t just a distraction. She was my home, the place where I could finally relax and take off the body armor I needed to carry around everywhere else to keep myself alive.
It had never been OK to let any of that poison out before those quiet times with Kendall. If I didn’t fight for her, and win, then that poison would build up inside me again. Who knew what I’d do without her?
I’d fought on so many fronts over the years. Hand-to-hand, with guns, with knives, real poisons, explosives, face-to-face, backstabbing, one-on-one and a massacre. I’d always won.
The problem was, this was a completely different kind of fight and I had no idea what to do. For the first time since I’d bashed that kid’s face in at Wellfort, I was ill-equipped.
We were almost at the cabin when my phone rang. When I looked at the caller ID, I almost managed to choke on my own tongue when I saw it was Kendall.
Jace
My men spread out around the cabin as I walked up the steps to the front door. To my relief she said she wanted to talk, and asked me to send somebody to pick her up.
She didn’t seem surprised when I told her I was only a couple minutes away, because I owned the taxi company she’d caught a ride with, she only sighed with resignation. I took what comfort I could over the fact that she called me at all.
It must have been shocking for her, walking in on that scene with Lorenzo. I could barely remember the first person I killed, or even saw killed, but death was just the logical conclusion of all the violence I’d been surrounded with for years by then, so it wasn’t so bad for me.
Kendall was from a different world though, she didn’t know what it took to survive in mine. I hoped that, together, we could do more than survive. I wished for that harder than I’d ever wished for anything, even revenge.
A thousand hopes and fears raced through my mind as the door swung open. Would she run into my arms? Had she talked to some law enforcement agent outside of my control?
When I saw her, my heart reached out for her, and my hands mirrored the sentiment. It hurt more than I could have dreamed when she didn’t reach out for me too, instead keeping one arm wrapped protectively around her mid-section.
On the bright side, there weren’t any police officers apparent behind her either. I stepped inside, glancing at her sore-looking red eyes and then looking down.
I hated being the cause of the pain etched on her face, and I was still terrified that she would never be able to accept me for who I was. Unfortunately, the cat was out of the bag, so that choice was gone.
“I… I don’t know where to begin,” I said when she closed the door.
“Why!? Why did you kill him? Why is the Mafia really going after your businesses? What is going on?”
Now that she didn’t need her hand to close the door, Kendall had both arms wrapped around her stomach. By the sounds of it, they might have been the only things holding her together. She was at the breaking point.
“Lorenzo was working for the Picollis, he told them where our car was going to be, and when, yesterday. He led them right to us.”
“Why? Why do they care so much about you?”
“Because I nearly wiped them out. I didn’t do a good enough job, though.”
Kendall’s eyes glanced around the room in various directions, as if clarification might be found in the fireplace or the baseball bat mounted above it. She shook her head and returned her gaze to me.
“I don’t, understand, Jace. How could you do that? How did you get involved in this?”
; “I’ve been involved in this since forever. You remember that car crash with my parents?”
She nodded.
“It wasn’t just any crash, it was a mob hit organized by the Picolli Family,” I said.
“How could you know that?”
“Some wiseguy came to Wellfort one day and told me. He showed me a picture of the Picollis’ mark, and I remembered men with that tattooed on them showing up in my dad’s store sometimes. I didn’t remember much, I was too young, but I recognized it.”
“Who was that guy?”
“I have no idea, never got a name,” I said.
“How do you know he was telling the truth?”
I walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back to look out, checking that my men were alert and watching out for trouble. It was a stalling tactic. Inside my heart was racing, pumping hot blood to my head where I could feel it burning on my face.
“At first, I didn’t know. I just believed him. I was too young to know any better, but it sowed the seed. I vowed to myself that I’d pay them back for what they did. I’d pay them back a million times over for what they took. I had no plan, then. All I knew was that I had to turn myself into the kind of person that nobody could fuck with. That was the only kind of person who could do what I needed to be done. This was the one thing to hold on to, so I fought, and I fought, and I fought with everybody, with anybody I could find.”
“But how did you make sure?” Kendall asked.
“When I was old enough to figure it out, I went to the library and looked up old newspapers. I found a story about my family on one of those microfiche things. There it was, in black and white, a picture of our car, smashed up and with some bullet-holes in the door for good measure. I read as far as my mom and dad’s names, along with ‘Picolli’ and I couldn’t go any further. That was enough.”
