His (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance)(41)

18





Aubriella





When I wake up, there’s an overpowering smell that is sweet in all the wrong ways. I dry heave, try to bend over, and realize I’m strapped to a chair. Still gagging, I struggle, awareness coming to me slowly. I’m in a large, dark factory. A few feet to my right is…

I throw up and barely manage to turn my head enough to avoid soaking myself in my own filth. It splatters to the ground and I can’t even wipe my mouth because my hands are tied. There’s a body in the chair beside me, but it’s so mangled that it looks like dogs have been at it. My eyes are drawn to the sports jacket lying on the ground, soaked in blood. There’s a SportsCast lapel pin on it. Oh my God. That’s Jerry Washington. It has to be. They got to him for the article.

I would hurl again, but there’s nothing left in my stomach.

“First time seeing a dead body, sweetheart?” asks a deep voice from a darkened corner of the room. The speaker steps forward, followed by a thin man who looks like he could be in his sixties. The man speaking is clearly a member of the mafia. He has the dark, olive skin of an Italian with thick eyebrows and a prominent nose. The other man looks completely out of place, like a confused grandfather who happened to wander into the wrong building. However, the black butcher’s apron hanging over his chest, covered in blood says he’s in the right place.

“You killed him!” I cry.

The Italian man shrugs. “Technically, yeah. But it was your boyfriend’s crew that brought him here and left him for dead. I just let my guy have some fun with him before he expired on his own. Hell, that article would’ve put away some of our biggest enemies. Why would we go after him?”

“So what do you want?” I ask, voice shaking.

“We want your little boyfriend to walk into this trap. I think we’re going to need to rough you up and send him some pictures though. Wouldn’t hurt to press his buttons some. We want him coming in mad and stupid.”

“Wait,” I say, but I already feel the inevitability of it, the cold and careless truth of what is about to happen to me. All the times I ever watched a movie and saw someone being tortured, it always seemed so distant, just something unpleasant to watch that I had to look away from. I can’t get out of this chair. I can’t even move. I have no way to distract myself from the pain that’s going to come.

My chest rises and falls so rapidly that my head gets light. I can’t stop breathing faster and faster. The big man kneels in front of me, smiling cruelly. “I know what will calm you down.”

Without warning, he backhands me hard across the face. I gasp, feeling the metallic tang of blood in my mouth immediately. I’ve never been hit so hard before. It makes my nose burn even though he hit me in the jaw, and my teeth feel like they’re going to be sore for weeks. The skin inside my mouth feels torn. I close my eyes, begging for Vince to hurry, wherever he is.





19





Vincent





I don’t wait for the rest of the crew to arrive when I reach the factory. I’ve got me, Frankie, and Jimmy. I dropped the two of them off a block away so they could get to the rooftops and make their way inside that way. I walk behind Lucky, arm around his neck so I can use him like a human shield. I jam my gun into the back of his head and kick the door open. When I step inside, I see the silhouettes of four gunmen standing on rafters and the scaffolding of the second floor. They all have pistols trained on me.

“My finger is on the fuckin’ trigger,” I shout once I’m inside. “Shoot me and he’ll die. Just give me the girl and I’ll give you your guy.”

The only gunman on the ground floor points to a staircase at the back of the large space, still aiming his pistol straight for me. I move slowly, painfully aware that if one of them was a good enough shot, they could clip me from behind without hitting Lucky, and even if I do grease him before I die, that’s not going to help Aubriella.

Then I hear a gunshot from upstairs. Bullets ping into the metal grating beside me, spraying me with sparks. I turn, whipping Lucky around as I do. Gunshots pepper him, making his body shake against me as a mist of blood flies up in front of him. I duck behind him and squeeze off two rounds, dropping the gunman on the floor. I drag Lucky’s now lifeless body around a corner.

“Aubriella!” I shout

“Vince!” I hear a faint cry from somewhere not too far above me. I drop Lucky’s corpse and run around the corner, firing blindly in hopes that the other gunmen will duck for cover instead of trying to drop me. It seems to work, because only one or two shots ricochet off the metal above my head before I clear the staircase and reach the second floor. I push into the closest room, diving and rolling to avoid the bullets splattering into the catwalk behind me. Any fear of being shot or dying is just background noise. I’m consumed by the desire to save her and protect her that is so overwhelming it might as well be molten metal in my gut.