Bow Down(54)

“Goodbye, Louisa.”

She gave me one last, lingering look, and then left the room. The door clicked softly shut behind her.

I stood there in the dark, feeling like a wrecking ball destroyed me. I felt like my guts were ripped out and shoved back down my throat.

I didn’t think I’d be this hurt by her leaving, but it fucking destroyed me. I hadn’t realized how deep into that I had gotten.

But she thought I was a traitor, and that broke me the hardest. I’d done nothing but try and help her and her girls, and now she was casting me aside.

My plan was fucking good. We got fucked one time, and suddenly she decided that I was the problem.

I wasn’t the problem. Arturo Barone was.

But now I couldn’t do shit about that, or at least not yet. I had to get out of Chicago alive before I could worry about hitting Arturo in revenge.

Ethan stepped from his room. “We need to go,” he said.

“I’ll pack. We’ll leave in ten minutes.”

He nodded and disappeared back into his room.

I slowly walked toward mine. I put on some clothes and slipped the gun into the waistband of my pants. I threw my shirt into a suitcase, or at least everything that wasn’t already packed. I took one last look around and then left.

Ethan was waiting for me in the hall. We quickly got into the elevator and rode it downstairs.

Hotels are strange beasts late at night. They aren’t completely dead and asleep, because there are always at least a couple of people on-duty, especially at the expensive places. There are usually a few drunks sitting around the lobby, too, waiting to sober up, or maybe just unwilling to go face another night of sleep.

Once we got into the lobby, we went out the back way. Ethan scouted out ahead while I hung back in the shadows, my mind racing, worrying about Louisa, shocked and angry that she had betrayed me like this.

That’s what happens when you let yourself get close to someone. They break you and betray you.

I was angry, but I wasn’t angry at Louisa. I was angry at Arturo Barone for making me look like a fucking fool.

Nobody did that to me, not to Wyatt Carter. Nobody made me look foolish. I didn’t care that Arturo was the leader of a powerful mafia family, I was going to find a way to bring him down. Maybe not tonight, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon I’d plunge a knife into his chest and smile as he bled to death in front of me.

That fucking bastard deserved it.

Five minutes later, a car pulled up in front of me. Ethan rolled down the window. “Get in,” he said.

“Stealing cars now?”

“Best way to get past the mafia thugs stationed all over the fucking place.”

I quickly went down and got into the car.

“Understood.”

“Sit low.” He began to drive.

As we drove, I moved forward in my seat. I caught a glimpse of a car with two men sitting in it as we drove out of the exit and headed down the highway.

“Stay down,” Ethan said. “We have a long drive. Might as well get some sleep.”

“Where to?”

He shrugged. “We’ll figure that out in the morning.”

“Alright.”

“I’ll keep us alive for the next few days. You figure out how to keep us alive well into the future.”

“I will,” I grunted.

We drove in silence from there, back out into the night, and I began to plan my revenge.





28





Louisa





I couldn’t find his computer on the internet anywhere. When I finally managed to track his cellphone signal, all I saw was that he was headed west out of the city before it mysteriously vanished.

I had no clue where Wyatt was going, but there was some voice in side of me that kept saying that I had made a horrible mistake.

As a few days passed, that feeling grew stronger. Kasia was adamant that it was Wyatt who betrayed us, and wouldn’t hear a single word about maybe looking into it. As far as she was concerned, Wyatt was dead and that was the end of the story.

But I knew that it wasn’t. So much didn’t make any sense. For example, if he was playing us, why did he get me that money to buy those guns? Why did he introduce us to the Swede? He didn’t need to do that. My father would never ask him to do that because it was just completely unnecessary. He could have done something else that wasn’t arming his opponents. Instead, he gave us guns and ammunition that we were going to use to kill the people he worked for.

There were other things, little things, like the way he looked at me or the way he kissed me. Maybe he was faking all of that, but I couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t that kind of man. I believed him when he talked about his past, and told me that he never wanted to become like his parents. He wanted to help the city, to make it better.