That sense that something was wrong kept worrying at me. I would ask him about whether he was in trouble with the mob when I saw him. Surely he’d be able to explain it away and I’d feel silly for bringing it up. It sure felt silly when I heard myself asking the question in my head.
Then I remembered how troubled he’d been ever since the Mafia revealed to the world that they were alive and well, despite what the police were telling Lucile and all the other journalists who crowded around at every statement they made to the media. My brow furrowed again.
The police. Why hadn’t we spent all night at a police station giving statements? It wasn’t like they could have failed to notice all the machine gun fire. Something exploded in that street too.
My heart sank. All at once my silly question seemed deadly serious. My Jace was in trouble with the Mafia, he’d refused to make a deal, or he had made a deal and it went bad. That was how these things went, right? Bad?
I gulped. Note or not, I had to ask him, and I had to do it sooner rather than later. Since I’d started staying at Jace’s penthouse more often than my own crappy apartment, I had a small selection of clothes here in a set of drawers against one wall, so I went for that.
As I dressed, I tried to brace myself for the worst. If he had made a mistake and got involved with these people before things went “bad,” that would explain why we hadn’t gone to the police.
What would I do if he’d done that? He could go to jail, couldn’t he? The thought of only being able to see him through a bulletproof glass window, as we spoke to each other over a prison phone, broke my heart.
After pulling on a t-shirt, I took a deep breath and stood as tall as I could. I would stand by him. I’d hold his hand as he went to court. When he faced the media afterwards. Forever. He was the best person I knew, and even if he made that mistake I would stand by him.
With that promise to tell him, in addition to the questions, I stepped out of the bedroom with a renewed sense of purpose. Jace wasn’t in the main open-plan area of his penthouse, it was almost eerie how silent and still everything was.
I peeked around a few corners to the various nooks and blind spots he might have been doing something in, but there was no sign of him. The guns weren’t on top of the bar anymore.
Remembering his face when he was retrieving them made me shiver. Had he ever even shot a gun before? He looked like he knew how to use one, but I hoped he wasn’t planning on doing anything crazy like taking on the mob.
The spare bedroom, also known as the room where we went when the sex was going to get messy like with chocolate body paint, was as empty and quiet as the rest of the penthouse. The only room left was his office, and he’d told me never to go in there because of confidential documents and things that he worked on in there.
The last thing I wanted to do was to cause him to be in breach of some non-disclosure agreement or anything like that, but stakes had been raised to the level of life-or-death yesterday. Every passing second I wasn’t with him made me more nervous. Suddenly, from behind the office door, I heard a strange sound.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
A deep, airy, percussion, over and over again. It sounded like a helicopter’s rotors in super-slow-motion. I gripped the handle and turned it, opening the door on silent hinges.
The scene inside wouldn’t have been out of place in a horror movie. A corpse that looked like it might have been Jace’s colleague, Lorenzo, was slumped on a couch with blood and gore sprayed out behind him on one side, bright red on the white fabric.
Five or more bullet holes peppered his chest and standing over him was Jace, my Jace, reloading a gun before pointing it at Lorenzo and pulling the trigger again and again.
Whomp! Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
Lorenzo didn’t even twitch when the bullets hit him, he was dead, but Jace emptied his gun anyway, like a madman. A psycho with no regard for human life. My Jace… oh God. I let out a horrified strangled sound as my trembling hands covered my mouth. He looked at me, gun still pointing at the corpse, and I froze.
“Kendall, I-”
Hearing my name shocked me out of whatever daze I was in and I screamed, spinning on my heel and scrambling for grip with socks on the smooth floor. For the second time in as many days, I was running for my life.
My heart almost overheated and ground to a halt while I was fumbling at the front door and I could hear him getting closer and closer. I opened it and fled into the hallway, seeing Jace’s security team reach for their weapons and then think better of it, merely moving to block my path to the elevator.
The closest one stopped me in my tracks, holding me by both arms as I struggled to fight him off. The others crowded around, trying to control my flailing arms.