by Natalie Grey
But Thiago had always been better at posturing than acting. Tabitha’s fist connected squarely with his nose and his shot went wild, taking one of the guards in the shoulder.
The man’s scream and the roar of the pistol distracted the other guards, which only made Gabrielle’s job easier. She laughed, taking advantage of the changed timbre of her voice. A vampire’s voice in hunting form tended to terrify unwary humans.
“You lot are no fun.”
She knocked two of the guards’ heads together and dropped the bodies to the floor after quickly slashing their throats with her claws.
Tabitha looked down at Thiago, who was now lying on the floor with his hands over his face. His nose was fountaining blood all over his expensive suit, but all she could do was laugh. She had always known on some level that Thiago pretended to be more dangerous and important than he was, but it had never been quite so obvious to her before.
He was pathetic.
“You think you’re going to stand there and laugh at me, bitch?” He pushed himself up off the floor, and there was murder in his eyes. “I’ll end you right here, right now.”
He rushed her, and Tabitha did something she’d watched the Bitches do in training once or twice: she popped her leg up, planted her foot right in the center of his chest, and pushed.
She wasn’t quite expecting the impact so she gave a little cry, but it turned out there was a good reason for using that technique—it worked wonders. Thiago went flying back against the desk with a shout.
“FINISH IT!” Gabrielle yelled. “Don’t pause, just finish it!”
“I don’t know how!” Tabitha yelled back.
“Find a way!”
Tabitha muttered, “Oh, right, that helps.”
But as Thiago gathered his strength to rush her again, she felt herself react. She couldn’t turn and run, and she couldn’t duck and wait for him to focus on someone else. She had to act, here and now. She had to do something for herself.
She punched him again and this time she punched slightly lower, putting every ounce of her fury into her tiny fist.
Thiago’s scream was cut off abruptly and he sank to his knees with a wheeze, clutching his crushed throat. His face was incredulous as the light died in his eyes.
Tabitha stared at his body for a moment, then turned around and threw up on the floor.
Gabrielle decided there would be time to comfort the woman later. Right now there was the small issue of four more armed guards. One of them took aim at something near the wall and shot, and there was another scream as Emmi—running for her life to escape the carnage—slid to the floor, leaving a smear of blood on the wall.
“All right.” Gabrielle wrenched the gun out of his hand and dragged him close to her by the throat. “I’m not going to say I liked her very much, but that was pretty fucking low of you. And since you like this gun so much, why don’t you keep it?”
She embedded it in the front of his skull and let his body drop to the floor.
“So which one of you stupid bastards wants to be next?”
None of the men answered. Instead, all three turned and ran.
She loved it when they ran. Gabrielle took two steps and launched herself into the air, coming down on the middle one’s back while his comrades left him to die.
“How does that feel?” she asked him when he realized they weren’t coming to his aid. “Are you thinking maybe you should have made better friends? Because you should have.”
“Please don’t hurt me. I’m just—”
“Someone who hurts whoever he’s told to?” She snapped his neck without waiting for an answer. “God, I hate cowards. If you don’t have the strength to own your actions you shouldn’t carry weapons. You two, stop right there.”
The two last guards heard her, but neither one of them stopped.
They both died by their comrade’s gun, and Gabrielle grimaced as she dropped it to the floor. She was used to a higher quality of weapon these days.
The door burst open and Santino stood in the entry, gun drawn and face pale as he saw what remained of the room. He tried to leave again, but Gabrielle grabbed him and dragged him back into the room.
“Tell me all about the guys watching Tabitha’s family and I’ll let you go.”
“I’ll tell you everything!” He held his hands up pleadingly. “Everything!”
“Okay. You can start anytime.”
Tabitha snorted.
“There are five guys on the block and two guys on the opposite side of the street on the roof.” Santino was shaking. “I’ll call them off if you want! I’ll do anything! Just let me live!”
“He’s not a very brave man, is he?” Gabrielle tilted her head to the side.
“No,” Tabitha agreed, “but he didn’t have to do anything to get where he is. He just piggybacked on other people’s hard work.”
“A lot of crime bosses do,” Gabrielle informed her. She glared at Santino. “Anything else?”
“That’s all, I promise.” He held out his hands. “I could work for you.”
“No,” Gabrielle said simply. “You see, I don’t think I can trust you alive.”
“What? You said that you would let me live if I told you!”
“And you all told Tabitha that her family would be let go as soon as she was done with this job.” Gabrielle’s face was like stone. “A lie for a lie, Santino.”
There was a gunshot and Santino lay still.
Tabitha stared down at the body while trying to remember how to breathe.
“Are you okay?” Gabrielle asked her. “That was the first person you ever killed, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.” Tabitha hunched her shoulders. “And…I’m not sure if I’m okay. Can I just not be sure for a while?”
“Yeah.” Gabrielle looped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close. “Yeah, that’s okay. Should we go get those fuckers outside your family’s house.”
“Yes,” Tabitha said emphatically.
“Wait, don’t you need the notebooks?” Gabrielle looked over her shoulder.
“Nope.” Tabitha started laughing. “Those are fake. They look a lot like the ones I used to have, but they’re not. And anyone who tries to use them to track Michael down is going to find themselves following a lot of dead ends, and possibly ending up with a few felony convictions in Kansas.”
“Kansas?” Gabrielle gave her a look. “Okay, first things first… Let’s go kick some ass. But I’m going to need to hear more about these fake notebooks.”
“Sure!” Tabitha grinned. “I’ll tell you over a choripan.”
Chapter Five
Cipriano Alvarez was not having a good night.
First off, he’d pulled the late shift. He hated the late shift. In most jobs the late shift was dead and you could play cards, but not when you worked for Thiago. Night was when Thiago did everything, because he liked to be like Anton.
Cipriano had only met Anton once—which was to say, he’d been in the same room once—and he didn’t see what all the fuss was about. Anton was dead now anyway, so how scary could he have been?
That still left him with the late shift. Not only that, his girlfriend Serafina was off at a club with another man. Videl claimed not to be interested, but Cipriano was sure that the man was just waiting for him to turn his back before he made a move on Serafina.
And so far it had been a slow night. That hadn’t improved his mood at all.
They didn’t even need him here.
Sure, there had been some excitement when Orlan’s group had brought in some tiny tattooed chick and a tourist, but the police weren’t going to trace the tourist here until later this week—if they did at all.
So they were back to square one, bored and resentful.
Renaldo, his shift-mate, spoke from the darkness. “Cipriano?”
“Huh?” He didn’t feel like saying anything more.
“Did you hear that?”
“What?”
“Two gunshots
, almost at the same time. I thought I heard one or two earlier, but I wasn’t sure. I’m sure about these two.”
Cipriano looked at his colleague with a withering expression. There were always gunshots nearby. There was always some gang trying to prove itself by encroaching on Anton’s turf. Most people in the city didn’t know Anton was gone yet. Most of them, in fact, hadn’t known who Anton was, just not to mess with his deputies, but recent rumors were leading other gangs to think theirs was weak.
Thiago wasn’t helping. The man was weak.
And then Cipriano heard another gunshot, and he understood why Renaldo was worried.
The gunshots were coming from inside the building.
The two men looked at one another anxiously. There were two options. One was that someone had attacked Thiago and the other was that Thiago was in a bad enough mood that he’d just shot three, or possibly five, of his people.
If it was the second one, it might make sense to just leave. When Thiago got in one of these moods no one was safe.
And then they heard the yelling and the shooting in the hallway just inside.
The two men barely even had time to exchange a look before the door flew off its hinges and clattered into the street a few yards away.
A woman in a red tank top, faded jeans, and black boots emerged. Her hair was the same dark red as the tourist who had gone in, but her face...
“Madre de dios,” Renaldo moaned.
He died with claws through his neck, and the woman let him slide off those claws onto the ground.
“Not. Even. Close,” she informed him.
She looked at Cipriano and he fell to his knees. To his horror, when he opened his mouth to plead for forgiveness his mind flashed faces before his eyes. Some had died on Anton’s orders, some had died on Thiago’s—and some, Cipriano had just watched die, never intervening.
“You know you don’t deserve mercy,” the woman told him. “Just as there is no second chance for the lives you took, so there will be no second chance for you.”
Cipriano’s life ended before he’d even had time to accept that he would die.
“May I ask… What will you do if you see Joaquin again?” Gabrielle and Tabitha were making their way through the streets toward Tabitha’s house.
Tabitha looked at her in surprise, “I hadn’t thought of that. He didn’t come with us to Thiago’s hideout, did he?”
There was a long silence.
“If I let him go, would you be disappointed in me?” Tabitha asked finally. Her voice was very small.
“It’s your choice,” Gabrielle told her.
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
Gabrielle paused in the shadow of a building. Children were playing nearby, although they were keeping a wary eye on the two unfamiliar women.
“In a way that is your answer,” Gabrielle said finally. “Whether Joaquin lives or dies is your choice.” Of course if he actually tried to kill Tabitha, Gabrielle wasn’t going to pull her punches, but she wasn’t going to tell Tabitha that.
“What do you think Michael would say?” Tabitha asked. Her tone was wistful.
“That your sense of honor has to be yours and yours alone,” Gabrielle said firmly. “Do you want to be merciful to Joaquin?”
“No!” Tabitha said instantly. Her eyes widened at her own admission. “Wow, I’m a vengeful bitch, aren’t I?”
Gabrielle laughed. She started walking again and grinned down at Tabitha. “It’s one of the things I like about you.”
Tabitha relaxed slightly.
She remembered when she’d first awakened in captivity after the bank job. Her colorful language, tattoos, and piercings had seemed to make people think that her outward appearance was a direct indication of how courageous she was.
And when she was out of Anton’s sight, it almost had been. Tabitha liked joking with people, putting them off-balance and sharing a laugh with them. Without the constant fear of someone finding her attractive or wanting her to get ever-deeper into risky and immoral schemes, she had found herself enjoying the person she had pretended to be for so long. She loved the tattoos she’d gotten and she liked spiking her hair up sometimes—and frankly, Michael’s expression when she did that was really the icing on the cake.
Coming back here had brought her fear roaring back, though.
But she was changing. Standing up to Thiago had taught her that.
And she wasn’t about to let anyone hurt her family.
The snipers, secure in the incorrect assumption that they would hear anyone coming onto the roof, died within seconds of one another. Gabrielle rolled their bodies away as Tabitha peered through the rifle scope at the street below.
“I only see four of the guys,” she told Gabrielle.
“The fifth is in the shadows just around the corner on the left.” Gabrielle pointed at him.
“It must be nice to be able to see that well,” Tabitha said disgustedly.
“It is,” Gabrielle agreed sweetly. She gestured at the street. “What do you want me to do?”
Tabitha had already thought about this, “I want to make sure no one in the house hears. Can you do that?”
“Sure, but why?” Gabrielle sat back, crossing one ankle over the other as she frowned at Tabitha.
Tabitha twisted her hands. “I’m…not sure I want my family to know I’m here, and I’m definitely sure I don’t want them to know they had assassins waiting for them outside,” she added hastily.
“Wait, back up… I thought you came here to check on people?” Gabrielle’s frown deepened.
“Yeah, and the first person I saw sold me out!”
“Your parents aren’t going to do that, right?”
“No, they aren’t. They wouldn’t!” Tabitha shook her head. “But Joaquin was a wakeup call. I thought I’d come back and tell people I was all right and they’d be glad, you know? I thought it would ease their minds to know I wasn’t dead, but they have whole lives here, and maybe they’re angry at me, and maybe they don’t really want to see me.”
“But you wanted to know if they were all right,” Gabrielle protested.
“I can do that without seeing them,” Tabitha told her. “Santino and Thiago are dead. The human side of Anton’s gang is just going to fade away now; they only had it because he built it anyway. My family will be safe.” She looked down at her hands. “I think I’ll just leave them a message that I’m alive. That way they don’t have to see me if they don’t want to. After all, I did just disappear on them. I bet they’re angry, and they have every right to be.”
Gabrielle’s heart ached for the younger woman, and she tried desperately to act as carefree and nonchalant as she did most of the time.
“Okay,” she said. She stood up and helped Tabitha to her feet. “Your wish is my command. Five very quiet ass-kickings coming up.”
“Thanks.”
Tabitha followed her down the fire escape and dropped from the last level to the ground. She looked up to see Gabrielle’s expression of surprise.
“I lived on people’s couches,” she explained. “And sometimes… Let’s just say they didn’t know I was there. I’d sneak in during the day when people were at work. I got good at climbing up and down fire escapes.”
“While eating… What are those sandwiches?”
“Choripan. And that would have been difficult.” Tabitha grinned as Gabrielle dropped lightly down beside her. “Okay, let’s do this.”
The guard around the corner from the others was the first to meet his maker. He was just lighting a cigarette when Gabrielle sauntered up to him out of the dark.
“So.” She plucked the cigarette out of his fingers and took a drag. “Working tonight?”
“Yeah.” The man stared, transfixed, at the red lips around the cigarette.
Gabrielle took one last puff and dropped the cigarette on the ground, grinding it out with her boot. “I swear, no one makes good cigarettes these days.”
“Huh?” The guy j
ust looked at her.
“So what are you doing for work tonight, hmm?” She trailed her fingers down the side of his face. “Keeping a family hostage?”
“How did you—” He stammered the words out, suddenly worried. A woman this pretty—and unarmed—should be afraid of him if she knew what he was doing.
“I know a lot of things,” Gabrielle told him. “I know you work for two lowlifes named Thiago and Santino. And I know they’re dead now.”
“What? W-why?”
Gabrielle snapped his neck. “Because they do things like this,” she told his body. She stepped over him and peered around the corner.
Two of the guards had gone on their patrol around the block, which left only two across the street from Tabitha’s house. She’d take those two first so they didn’t notice that the patrol didn’t come back, and then take out the patrol when they came around the corner.
The next two to die lurked in the shadows, watching the door. They looked left to one corner, then right to the other, panning their eyes along the building’s front.
They were trying to be diligent, but really, they were so predictable that their diligence was next to useless.
Gabrielle slipped across the street while they were looking to the right, and was between them before they had much of a chance to react.
“Hello, boys.” Her voice was a low purr, a reminder of the days when she had indulged in every kind of pleasure she could find. “Who’s up for some fun?”
The men looked at one another and then stared at her. She could see the mental calculations going on. Did they want to risk Santino’s ire by leaving? Maybe, if their night was going to be good enough.
“Uh, what kind of fun were you thinking of?” one of them finally asked. He was trying to sound nonchalant, but she could see the pulse jumping in his throat.
“Well...” Gabrielle drew the word out, rolling it in her mouth. “I was thinking you two could start running in opposite directions, and I’ll see if I can kill you both before you make it to the ends of the block.”
