Damian. I love you. I’m sorry I never said it. Even if you wouldn’t have said it back. I wish I had told you how much I love you. How much you mean to me, and how you’re the only person who has ever made me feel like me. I wish I could have raised this baby with you.
Police sirens wail in the distance. Cristiano curses, ordering his men to spread out.
“Shouldn’t we just leave?” says one of his men.
“There’s only one fucking way on this dock. We’re trapped. Just wait up top for my signal and light them up when I say. I don’t give a shit how many pigs they bring, this bitch is dying and we’re walking away, even if we are up to our ankles in blood when we do.”
His men nod, climbing the stairs.
My hair is dangling in the water and the gentle waves made by the boats bobbing and sinking in the water lap at my eyebrows, but the man operating the crane has stepped away from the controls and the crane stops dipping me toward the water. Still, a few more inches…I fight against the panic threatening to consume me. I can’t even curl my body up and away from the water because of how tight the ropes are. My body is rigid and locked. I’ll be absolutely powerless to do anything.
Damian. Please help me.
21
Damian
I follow the cop cars as closely as I dare. Franklin was able to find out that Cristiano had his hands in a few shipping operations, so I knew to wait near the docks, but I didn’t know which one. Apparently Greg’s people did, because I saw three cop cars come screaming toward the C&G docks. I see Cristiano waiting at the end of the docks in a white suit with his hands behind his back. The three cop cars park in front of him and six officers get out, taking cover behind their car doors and pointing pistols at him.
I park my car and get out, sneaking toward them. I called for Benny to bring help, but he was out of state working on fencing the last of the goods we ripped off. I shouldn’t need any muscle, because I don’t think even the Riccis aren’t crazy enough to kill cops. Mafia connections can make a lot of crimes disappear, but killing cops isn’t one of them.
“Freeze!” shouts one of the cops.
Cristiano smiles calmly, hands still behind his back. “I’m frozen.”
“Show us your hands!”
“Which one is it, freeze, or show you my hands?” His eyes move to a nearby roof and he gives the slightest nod.” For three seconds, nothing happens.
Gunshots ring out, deafening in the clear night. The muzzle flashes light the darkened dock like lightning.
Cristiano rolls behind a crate. Four of the cops drop instantly, dust and blood bursting from their uniforms as bullets tear through them from both sides. One of the shooters is only a few feet from the boxes I was moving behind. I quickly rush behind him and take him by the neck, squeezing hard and then bashing his skull with the butt of my pistol. He immediately slumps against me.
Even in the middle of the chaos, all I can think of is Callie. I keep searching for her. Bullets spray sparks near my head, skidding off metal shipping containers. I notice a hook dangling over the water and see that it’s shaking. A stray bullet wouldn’t make it shake like that. Callie. I rush past an opening, risking bullets to get closer.
Gunshots crack and burn through the night, making my ears ring. Cristiano fires from behind the crate, peppering the cop cars with bullet holes. His men keep unloading, but the two surviving cops shoot back, dropping two of Cristiano’s men. I find the other shooter near me and pull a knife from my pocket, jabbing it in his heart in one swift motion. He drops, gun clattering to the ground. I’m getting an angle on Cristiano as I move closer, but I still hear at least two or three of Cristiano’s guys on the roof firing.
One of the cops takes a bullet in the neck. Falling and grabbing the wound, legs spasming. The last cop drops one more of Cristiano’s guys before a bullet catches him in the head. He falls and the silence that follows is deafening.
Cristiano stands casually, not realizing I’m still here. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he shouts to the men on the roof. The two men start coming down a flight of stairs. I jump out from cover and squeeze off the fastest three shots of my life. One takes Cristiano in the chest and the other two take his men in the faces. Both men die instantly, but Cristiano spins, clutching his wound and spraying bullets at the space I was just in.
“Damian!” He yells, sounding crazed in his excitement. “I underestimated you!”
I don’t have time for this shit. Callie is on that hook. I know it. I try not to let my mind run through possible scenarios. Just get there. Just save her. I ignore Cristiano, rushing past him and running into the open, firing blindly behind me to keep him at bay. Bullets zip through the air, passing near my head. I leap off the dock and toward the hook. The dark water envelops me, cold enough to suck the air from my lungs. I surface and see her.
“Damian!” she gasps. She’s hanging upside down, face red enough that I can even see it in the near darkness. The water is right at her eyebrows.
I tread water, reaching for my knife and kicking off my shoes. “Hold on baby, I’m going to get you out of this.” I start hacking at the ropes tying her to the hook, but it’s slow work.
Metal grinds overhead and Callie starts to dip below the water. I look up. Fuck. Cristiano must have got to the controls. He’s going to fucking drown her.
“Damia—” her words are cut off as her head plunges beneath the water.
No. I’m going to save her. I furiously hack at the ropes, grinding my teeth as I dig through the seemingly endless layers of rope. Something gives, and I free her upper body. Her legs go beneath the water. I suck in a deep breath, diving and finding her mouth. I press mine to hers, moving her hand to plug her nose. I breath a lungful of air into her mouth and go back to her legs, carefully cutting at the rope, making sure I don’t cut her. The hook keeps getting lower, and I feel pressure build in my ears. My body screams for air, but I only surface to get another lungful so I can swim back and breathe it into Callie’s mouth.
We’re a few feet below the surface and everything is black, silent and oddly calm. The water is remorseless, utterly unaware that two people are struggling for life within it. I finally make it through the ropes on her legs, just as I think I can’t make it any longer without air. I grab her to pull her free but something is still stuck. I feel around blindly until I realize the hook is through her jeans too. I yank it free and grab her by the waist, kicking to get us to the surface.
I feel my consciousness slipping and my legs weakening, but Callie kicks her legs too, giving us the last push we need to reach the surface. Water breaks over our heads and the cold night air greets us. We suck in deep, ragged breaths. My strength trickles back, and I start trying to get us under the dock incase Cristiano decides to find out if the hook took care of us or not.
We struggle to swim in our water-laden clothes, moving toward the safety beneath the dock painfully slow. I see Cristiano lean over the dock, clutching the wound in his chest. He holds a gun in the other hand.
“You’re harder to get rid of than a cockroach, Citrione!” He fires down at us, bullets splashing in the water dangerously close to us.
I dig my own gun out and aim up right at his face and squeeze the trigger. It clicks. Fuck. Water jammed it. His gun clicks when he fires the last bullet in his clip just as we’re passing beneath him. He swears, struggling to reload with shaking hands.
We find a staircase leading back to the surface of the dock when we swim out of his line of sight. I sit Callie on it, making sure she’s okay before signaling for her to wait. I drop my useless gun and pull out the knife. She shakes her head at me.
“I have to stop him now or he’s going to try this again.” I’m about to move up the stairs and then I pause. “I’ll help you raise Greg’s baby under one condition.”
She gives me an incredulous look. “You’re grinning at a time like this? Wait. What? What condition?”
“You have to agree to marry me.”
For a second, her face is unreadable. Then her lips quiver and her eyes fill with tears. She leans forward, hugging her wet body against mine and sobbing into my shoulder. “Yes. Yes. Yes! God, yes.”
She’s freezing, and I wish I had time to hold her tight and warm her. I hate knowing that my baby is so cold, but I can’t risk Cristiano finding us down here like sitting ducks.
I pull away, smiling. “Don’t worry. I’ll be careful up there. He’s not going to expect me to come at him.”
She takes a deep breath, the happiness in her face melting away. “If you let anything happen to you, I’ll never forgive you.”
“Deal,” I say, smirking. I move up the ladder quietly. The cold water drying on my skin is making my hands numb, but the burning hatred I have for this Ricci fucker who tried to hurt my Callie is enough to warm them. I hear more sirens in the distance. Damn. That was fast. I can’t think about that right now though. I need to end Cristiano. The cops might just arrest him, and that means he would have a chance to get loose again. I have to kill him.
I see him kneeling over the edge of the dock, one hand pointing a gun down toward the water and the other holding the bloody wound in his chest. I use the large shipping containers to sneak as close as I can without him seeing, all while the police sirens grow louder and louder in the distance.
I clutch my knife and press my back to a container that is only a few feet from him. I kneel, grabbing a loose chunk of concrete near my foot. I toss it over the container and into the water. The splash draws his attention, so when I emerge from behind the box, his back is to me. I walk toward him with deadly purpose, knife at the ready. I’m about to drive the point home when the sirens reach a crescendo and the sound of several car doors opening reaches my ears.
“Freeze!” yells one of the cops.
Cristiano turns toward the sound, noticing me and pointing his gun at my chest. We’re arm’s length apart, both poised to kill.
“Don’t fucking move a muscle!” shouts the cop.
I meet Cristiano’s eyes, fascinated by the way the red and blue light of the sirens catches his features, enhancing the crazed mania in his face. “I’m going to kill that bitch of yours when I get out. Maybe I’ll wait until the baby is born so I can—”
His eyes widen as the knife punches through his suit, undershirt, skin, and heart. At the same time, his finger twitches on the trigger. Blinding light flashes between us and it feels like a hammer hits me in the center of the chest. I fall backwards, head bouncing off the concrete. The last thing I see through dimming eyes is Cristiano collapsing to the ground with glazed eyes.
Sorry, Callie. I couldn’t risk letting him live.
22
Callie
I hear a gunshot and rush to the upper level of the dock. My legs move sluggishly from the cold, but my fear for Damian pushes me forward. I had heard sirens, but as far as the police are concerned, both Damian and Cristiano probably look like bad guys. They both are bad guys.
I see at least ten police cars and countless officers swarming the scene. Red and blue light washes over the entire port, but my eyes can’t seem to move from the two motionless bodies by the water’s edge. I realize there’s already an ambulance here. They must have had a call that officers were down. Three paramedics are kneeling by Damian and Cristiano’s bodies.
A paramedic wearing blue gloves check’s Cristiano’s pulse and shakes her head, moving to check Damian’s.
My heart pounds so hard that I can feel it throbbing in my throat. I realize I’ve fallen to my knees, hands covering my mouth. I’m too numb to even cry. I just feel a gaping emptiness, like a hole opened up in the very core of my being and everything good or happy I’ve ever felt is being sucked out of it, leaving an empty shell behind. Be okay. Please. I need you, Damian. I want to be your wife, to make you happy, to share my life with you and watch this baby grow with you. Please, I needed you to help fix me, and I wanted to try to help you find happiness, too.
The paramedic looks up sharply, shouting something I can’t hear over the sirens. The other two paramedics rush to the ambulance and pull a stretcher out. They slide a back board beneath Damian and lift him, putting him on the stretcher and folding the wheels to slam the ambulance doors behind him.
He’s alive. The thought swirls around my mind like blinding white light, making everything it touches feel good and right again. For now. I can’t think about “what if”, he’s alive. They are going to drive away with him. Without me. I stand, legs feeling uneasy and ready to give beneath me.
“Hey!” I shout. My voice is hoarse and weak. “Hey!” I’m hobbling toward the officers now. A few heads turn towards me. The officers are gesturing and rushing to grab blankets from trunks.
“Miss, are you okay?”
I try to push past the men and women covering me with blankets, pointing toward the ambulance. “Damian. Please. Let me go with him,” I beg.
“She’s hypothermic. Get her in an ambulance.”
“Get more blankets!”
“No, I need to go with him.”
Hands are half-pushing, half-carrying me toward another ambulance. I struggle weakly, mumbling about Damian even though it feels like my consciousness is slipping in and out of focus. He’s okay. He’s alive.
They won’t tell me where he is. Damian is a prime suspect in the murder of the officers who were killed in addition to the criminals, and I’m an eye witness. The only reason the case hasn’t gone national already is because of Greg’s influence. He doesn’t care about protecting Damian at all, but he knows I was at the scene and he’s using all of his weight to keep the case from reaching the media. It’s only a matter of time though.
To my annoyance, there’s nothing I can do to keep Greg from visiting me in the hospital. When I ask the nurses and doctors, they just dodge my question. Greg has no doubt gotten to them in some way already. He’s sitting beside my bed. I feel okay, though I don’t put up too much of a fight because I want to stay until they are absolutely sure the baby is okay.
Greg reaches for my hand, but I pull mine away.
“Is he okay?”
Greg frowns. “Stop asking about him. I don’t know or care how that animal is doing.”
“Then I have nothing to talk to you about.”
“How about your legal options?” he says. “Even a sniff of evidence in the wrong way and you might find yourself implicated in the murder of a very significant number of people, and some of those people are cops, Callie. The justice system is ruthless when it comes to protecting its own.”
I cross my arms. “You know I didn’t kill anyone. I was tied up during the shooting. All the officers there saw me come up dripping wet from being in the water.”
He gives me a condescending smile that makes me want to throw my metal tray of food at his face. “Come on, Cal. You know it’s not about what I know or what really happened. Haven’t you learned by now that I can buy whatever reality I please? Give me a reason, and I can ruin your life.”
“Don’t call me Cal,” I say.
He sighs, standing and brushing the wrinkles from his chinos and polo. “I’ll give you some time to think things over. Maybe you’ll come to your senses and realize I’m the only hope you have of not giving birth to that baby in a prison hospital.”
A few seconds after Greg leaves, a man in a fedora and an overcoat slips into the room. “Miss. Beccaccio,” he says. He has a gruff voice, but his tone is professional and cordial.
“Hello…” I say
“Franklin Guerre. Like the cheese. I work with Damian.”
“Is he okay?” I ask.
“He’s doing well. The bullet missed all his vital organs by a few centimeters. He’s very lucky. A few weeks in bed and he should be fine.”
I sink back in my bed, closing my eyes and saying a silent prayer of thanks. The relief that surges through me is visceral, relaxing muscles I didn’t know were tense and causing the exhaustion that I was holding back to return. I can�
��t remember the last time I prayed, but I feel like I owe the Big Guy one after this.
“That’s not the only reason I’m here,” he says, pulling up a chair and taking a seat. “Damian had me looking into Greg. He wanted to find some dirt, something that he could use as leverage to get Greg to back off once and for all. If he could, he, well…”
“You can tell me,” I say. “Damian already filled me in on most of the plan.”
Franklin raises his eyebrows. “Really? Are we talking about the same Damian Citrione? Tall, big muscles, bad temper?”
I smile. “Same one.”
“Since when does he talk business with women?” asks Franklin. Then he catches himself, holding out a hand in apology. “I’m sorry to sound so crass. It’s just an old business with old ways. I meant no offense.”
“None taken,” I say. “I didn’t give him much of a choice.”
Franklin flashes his teeth in a crooked grin. “I see why he likes you so much. You must be the girl he talked about who tipped him about the real estate. Good work on that. It got me going in the right direction.”
I smile, blushing a little from the praise. “So you found something else to use against Greg?”
“You could say I found someone to use against Greg, yeah.”
As if on cue, a man in a black suit that somehow screams FBI walks in. He has thinning hair and a lined, severe face.
“Miss Beccaccio. Agent James Conway,” says Franklin.
I narrow my eyes. “I’ve heard of you.”
“Good things, I’m sure,” says Conway sarcastically. “I was a pain in Damian’s ass, but Greg has practically held a gun to my career for years now, making sure I barked when he said to bark. Granted, your boyfriend has done bad things and probably deserves everything I was giving him.”
Mine (Citrione Crime Family #2) Page 14
