His (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance)(42)

I get to my feet and don’t have time to take in my surroundings before a gunshot thunders out only a few feet in front of me. I reflexively duck, but feel like someone just stabbed me in the shoulder with a hot poker and didn’t rip it out. I fire back, dropping the gunman and then holding my gun on what looks like a grandpa who ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then I realize what I’m looking at.

The “grandpa” is wearing a bloody smock. Aubriella is gasping for breath and tied to a chair, so bloody that I can barely tell it’s her. There’s a mutilated body beside her. I don’t need to see more. The old man raises his hands, preparing to plead for his life but I put a smoking hole between his eyes and move to cut Aubriella free.

One of her eyes is swollen shut, but she looks sleepily up at me with the other bloodshot eye. I hear gunshots peppering the building below me now, but I don’t care. My soldiers have probably arrived and maybe some of them are taking fire, I can’t think about that. My fuckin’ Aubriella, my doll…I carefully take her by the waist and slump her over my shoulder, still holding my gun with the other hand. Feeling her frail body and the wetness of her blood makes me want to scream in rage. Instead, I put six more bullets in the dead old man and empty what’s left of my clip in the other guy.

I catch up with Jimmy outside the factory. There are about eight others with him, including my soldiers and Ramone, a capo from the East side. “Someone call the fuckin’ doc! Tell him he needs to come here. Now!”

“Doc doesn’t do field work,” Jimmy says. He’s clutching his thigh and dark red blood is oozing around his fingers, but he barely seems to notice.

“Tell him he’ll do it or he’ll be the one needing a doctor.”

Jimmy flicks his eyebrows up and shakes his head. “You got it boss.”

When it’s all over, we left four dead Anastasios, including the two I dropped upstairs. The new kid, Dino, took a bullet in the neck and didn’t make it. Jimmy took one in the leg but the doc says it missed all the major arteries and he’ll be fine. No one has heard from Frankie, and I can’t even find anyone who saw him in the gunfight. It leaves a strange feeling in my gut, but with everything else going on, I don’t pay it much attention. He’ll show up. He always does. I wave the doc off when he tries to examine my wound, making him check every last scratch and bruise on Aubriella’s body instead. Once she’s stabilized enough to move, I have her brought to my penthouse.



I sit beside my bed, clenching my fists in rage as I wait for the doctor to finish examining her again.

“This may scar,” he says, pointing to a cut by her ribs. “Other than that, the wounds will take a few weeks to heal completely. She has two cracked ribs and a badly bruised bone in her leg. I’m leaving her some Percocet for the pain. Just keep an eye on it. You don’t want her taking this longer than she needs to. You really need to let me take a look at that, by the way.”

I glance down at my shoulder where blood has soaked my shirt to the waist now. I wave him off, although I do feel nauseous and dizzy, it feels like a betrayal, like worrying about my own pain minimizes hers.

“I’m not kidding, Vince.” He moves to where I’m sitting by the bed and feels the back of my shoulder. “It felt like your skin was on fire from the inside out after you were shot, didn’t it?”

I nod.

“That’s because the bullet stopped in here. It hit your bone and got lodged inside you. If I don’t clean it up, you could get a serious infection. Hell, there are probably tiny shards of the bullet shredding your tissue every time you move. The bleeding alone could kill you.”

I raise a hand to wave him off again but my vision goes black.





20





Aubriella





Everything hurts. It feels like I went skydiving without a parachute, like I have bruises beneath bruises and cuts on top of those. I want to cry, but I know it would hurt too much. The only feeling besides the pain is a mind-numbing anger. I can’t believe I let myself get involved with a criminal like Vince. Something like this was always going to happen. This is exactly why girls aren’t lining up to be mafia girlfriends. The mafia. My memory flashes with images of the man who harassed me at the stadium and the men in that dark factory and...

Warm tears slide from the corners of my eyes and pool in my ears. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but I’m afraid to move to get the water out, so I just lay still.

“Aubriella,” says a quiet voice beside me.

I open my eyes and see his face. He’s like my dark angel, my salvation and my doom all wrapped into one. Not for the first time, I think how much easier it would have been to stay away from all this if he wasn’t so fucking beautiful. Even when his eyes are puffy from sleeplessness and his hair’s a mess, he’s stunning. My heart betrays me by increasing its pace when I guess at why he hasn’t been sleeping. Has he been so worried about me that he couldn’t sleep? Has he just been sitting here, for however long I was unconscious, waiting for me to wait up? It’s touching, but not enough.