His (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance)(46)

22





Aubriella





Vince left after the mysterious phone call at two in the afternoon. He still hasn’t given me a phone, so I’m practically stranded. I could probably take the elevator and just walk back to my place in an hour or so, but thinking about going out there right now makes my knees weak. Every time I picture myself on the streets again, I want to hug my arms around myself and find a corner to hide in. It was so easy for them to find me and take me. I look out from the large penthouse windows to the streets below and imagine how many of the miniscule dots are bad men who want to take me.

Shit.

I feel trapped. Trapped in this room. Trapped with him. Trapped in the shitstorm my life has become. I can’t even say it all went off the rails when I met Vince. I was on the wrong path long before that. Hell, maybe it was when Mom died. Sitting around whining isn’t going to do me any good though, so I decide to do some snooping. I mean, he has to know I’m going to snoop around a little if he just leaves me here all day. I check the clock. Eight in the evening? He’s been gone six hours. For all I know, he could be out all night.

Feeling completely justified, I start with his closet. The pine forest scent of his cologne washes over me as I step inside and I guiltily dig through his neatly folded clothes, carefully replacing them when I’ve finished to make sure I leave no trace. I don’t know what I’m looking for, but I feel like I’ll know when I see it. Some other girl’s number? A condom wrapper? More guns tucked away?

The truth is I am enjoying looking behind the scenes a little in his life. Other than his taste in movies, he has been a mystery to me. Maybe I’m hoping to find something that will make it easier to walk away from him. Maybe I’m trying to find something that will convince me to stay.

His socks are all folded into pairs, each pair clipped together with a golden tie clip. I raise my eyebrows. I don’t know how he has the energy. Maybe someone does it for him. I don’t think so though, somehow I suspect Vince wouldn’t be the type to pay for someone to do his dirty work, even if it was just around the house. His shirts are organized by color, but he apparently has an aversion to anything other than black, grey, white, red and deep blue. There are at least ten shirts of every color in slightly different shades or cut to different fits. He has a smaller room within his closet that’s entirely full of exercise clothes: shorts, t-shirts, and a rack of neatly kept tennis shoes. There’s even a small pile of expensive looking tennis equipment in the corner.

I smirk. Tennis? It’s not exactly the sport I would picture a mobster playing, and picturing him out on some grass courts with white short shorts makes me want to laugh. I lean down to pick up one of the racquets out of idle curiosity and accidentally knock it against a rack mounted to the wall. It flips out of my hands and lands hard on the ground. A small rubber piece pops out of the base of the racquet and a golden key bounces to the carpet.

I kneel, looking at the key. My heart flutters. A secret key?

I spend the next thirty minutes searching through his house, practically bursting with curiosity and wanting to know where the key fits. I finish my third round of the entire apartment and end up in his bedroom again. I dejectedly walk toward one of the few solid walls in the place that isn’t a window and plop down, banging my head slightly against the wall in frustration. The sound is hollow. I frown, turning to look at the wall.

I stand back up and start patting my palms along the wall, following the hollow sound until it becomes solid, right behind a bookshelf. I try pulling almost every book out and opening it, tilting it, or trying to trigger some James Bond style secret door, but nothing works. It’s only when I’m about to give up the idea that I realize there’s a nearly invisible seam in the wall right behind the bookshelf. I do one more check, this time looking at the shelf itself and I discover a small, unmarked keyhole near the center of the shelf. I try the key and it works. The bookshelf clicks on some hidden hinge, turning into a door that I pull open to reveal a well-lit room behind the wall.

The room isn’t huge, but bright white lights burn overhead, casting everything in a clinical shade of white. My stomach churns when I see five very large guns mounted on the wall and five sets of body armor. There’s also an assortment of grenades, knives, and other objects that look deadly. A single picture frame sits on a table on the other side of the small room. I move forward and lift it, looking at the young man smiling back. He’s handsome, but in an innocent sort of way. I recognize Vince’s dimples in his cheeks, the fullness of his lips, and the same thick eyelashes. But it’s definitely not Vince. I carefully pull the picture out and read the back.