The sound of my cell phone vibrating on the night stand rouses me from sleep, and I groan inwardly as I untangle myself from Kat’s warmth to answer the damn thing. I swear if it’s not an emergency, then whoever is on the other end of that line is going to lose a hand.
Kat murmurs sleepily as I roll away from her and sit on the edge of the bed. When I see Maximo’s name flashing on the screen, my heart sinks, because he wouldn’t call and disturb my lie in for nothing.
“Hey,” I answer the call.
“I’ve found him.”
“Where?”
“LA.”
“LA? For real?”
“I’ve got eyes on him right now. You want me to bring him back to Chicago?”
I glance behind me at my sleeping wife. “No. I’ll come to you. Don’t let him out of your sight until I get there.”
“Sure. I’ll be his shadow.”
“Don’t let him see you. I don’t want him spooked before I get there.”
“Dante?” he snaps, and I squeeze my eyes closed. I’m tired and I’m not thinking straight, because if I was, I would never have said that to him. He’s my right hand, and I would be lost without him. I never need to tell him what to do, he does it without thinking. He’s my brother every bit as much as Lorenzo.
“I know. Look, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
I hang up and place my cell back on the nightstand before slipping under the covers. Kat smiles as I press my chest against her back and slide my hand over her swollen belly. I kiss her neck softly, and she purrs. I hate that I have to leave her.
“I have to go away on some business, kitten,” I whisper.
“Where?” she asks with a yawn.
“LA.”
“LA?” She rolls onto her back. “How long will you be gone for?”
“I’ll be back tomorrow. I promise.” I don’t intend on dragging out this whole thing for longer than is necessary.
“Can I come with you?”
I shake my head, and her brow creases with worry. “Lorenzo will be here though, and Toni is still around. They’ll look after you while I’m gone.”
“Who will take care of you, though?” she whispers.
“I can take care of myself,” I remind her.
“Dante?” she breathes. “Can’t you send someone else? Can’t Maximo or Lorenzo go? What if the baby comes early and you’re not here?”
“Kat, you know I have to take care of things sometimes. The baby won’t come early, but if it does, I’m only a plane ride away. Lorenzo needs to stay with Anya, and Maximo will be with me. Besides, this is something I need to do.”
“Is it dangerous?”
“Kat, don’t do this. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
She rolls her lips together as she stares into my eyes, and the worry in them makes me want to wrap her in my arms and take us both far away from here. But that’s not the reality of the life we lead. The life I’ve tied her to.
“Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she whispers.
I roll on top of her, holding myself up on my forearms so I don’t crush our baby, and that makes my girl smile. “Will you be good while I’m gone?”
“When am I ever naughty?” she purrs.
“All the damn time, kitten,” I remind her as I run my nose along her jawline. God, she always smells too fucking good. I could fucking eat her. I want to eat her. Bury my head and then my cock in her warm pussy and not leave this bed for the rest of the day. I hate this fucking life sometimes. “So eat properly and take your vitamins.”
“I always do.”
“Good girl,” I say before giving her a soft kiss on her forehead. “Now go back to sleep.” I push myself off her, and she rolls onto her side, pulling the duvet up to her chin. I walk to the ensuite to take a quick shower before I head to LA to kill her brother.
Once I landed in LA, we watched Leo Evanson for eight hours before we grabbed him. He spent most of the day and night in a casino, which was full of patrons and witnesses. In Chicago, I would take him off the street in broad daylight and not give a damn. But LA is not my territory, and I need this taken care of as cleanly as possible. The last thing I need is any interference from the cops. But now I have him exactly where I want. In an abandoned office block on the outskirts of the city with nobody around to hear him scream.
Everything about Leo says slimeball weasel. From the way his beady little eyes scan the room as Maximo and I advance on him, his back pressed against the wall as he looks for an escape, to the bacon grease stains on his faded old Navy t-shirt.
“How funny running into you here in LA, Leo,” I say with a grin as I get closer. He goes to run, but Maximo catches him, slamming the piece of shit against the wall.
“I-I’ll get your money. I just need a few more weeks,” he stammers.
“It’s been twelve fucking months, Leo. I don’t think a few more weeks is gonna cut it.”
“I’ve got something going on. It could be big,” he says, his eyes wide and pleading.
“You see I’ve kind of already collected on your debt, Leo. I took your sister as payment instead. She’s mine now, and I gotta say, she was worth every cent of that two hundred and fifty grand you stole.”
“What?” He scowls at me, and for some reason, that makes me a little less inclined to tear his head off. If he fights for her, then maybe I won’t torture him for too long before I kill him. However, he fucks it all up as soon as he opens his mouth again. “So you took her? My debt is paid, then?”
“Are you fucking serious?”
“You’re a piece of shit,” Maximo snorts.
I grip his throat, squeezing my fingers tightly and pressing my palm against his Adam’s apple until he’s struggling to breathe. “You think that me taking your sister lets you off the hook? Your debt is settled, but you still stole from me, coglione.”
He opens his mouth, but all that comes out is a strangled groan.
I lean in and whisper, “I took her and I made her mine. I fucked her every single day and night, Leo, until she screamed.”
He struggles, trying to escape my grip, but he’s not angry because of what I just told him. He’s struggling because he wants to survive.
I let him go, and he drops to his knees, clutching at his throat. “I can get you money too,” he wheezes. “Just tell me what you need.”
“What I need, you greasy fuck, is for you to pay for having me chase you around the fucking country.”
“Look, I can get you some cash, just let me tell you about this game I have lined up…” he pleads as he pushes himself to his feet.
“And your sister? What do I do with her? Because I’m not gonna lie, I’ve become kind of attached to my little pet.”
He rubs a hand over his jaw and stares at me. “Look, like I said, if you want her, then I ain’t got no problem with that.” He shrugs, as though her life means nothing to him.
I grab him by the shirt and throw him back against the wall. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first time you’ve used her to pay off a debt, would it, Leo?” I snap. “Few years ago, you owed some gambling debts and you told the two guys who came collecting exactly where they could find your sister, right?”
His complexion was already pale, but now he’s turned an unnatural shade of gray. “They were gonna kill me,” he says as though that is a perfectly valid explanation for handing my girl over to those two animals.
“They almost killed her,” I spit. “You know what else they did to her, you sick fuck?”
“They just had a little fun. She was okay,” he insists.
Fuck, he is a piece of shit.
I take a deep breath to calm my racing heart before I tear his out with my hands. He’s looking up at me like he actually believes in the bullshit that he’s spewing. My eyes narrow as I search his face for even the slightest bit of compassion for her. No wonder Kat is under the illusion that I might be a good guy when this is what she had to compare me to. “You really think she was okay after that? She left her job. She hardly ever left the house. But you think she was okay?”
He frowns. “She was, man. They didn’t really hurt her. How do you know all this anyway?”
“Oh, I tortured your little friends to death and they told me about your gambling debt, but the rest, I got from your sister. But how much did you owe?”
“What?” He blinks at me.
“How much did you owe them?”
“Five grand. Why?”
Fuck, I’m going to fucking implode in about ten seconds. “Five grand. You gave them your sister for five grand?”
“I didn’t —”
Before he can finish his sentence, I shove my fingers into his mouth, holding his tongue still as I press my thumb under his chin. “You want to know why I spend so much time fucking your sister, Leo?”
He makes a garbled sound as he stares at me with fearful eyes.
“Because she’s my wife now, you dumb fuck.”
“N-nuh.” He tries to shake his head, but I keep a firm grip on his jaw.
“Yes. My wife. Mother of my unborn child. She is my fucking everything. And she was your sister. You should have protected her. I gave you the chance to redeem yourself a little, but once again, you handed her over to a monster to save your own skin.”
Tears trail down his cheeks as he mumbles incoherently, but I get the gist — he’s begging for his life. I wonder how much she begged those animals he handed her over to.
“If I told you how she still screams in the middle of the night, haunted by what those sick fucks did to her, and how I have to hold her until she falls back to sleep because the sound of her crying splits my goddamn heart in two, would that give you any idea of the ways in which I’m about to make you suffer? Because I want you to know, Leo. I want you to be fully aware that I am about to inflict the kind of pain on you that will make even Maximo struggle to hold back his lunch.”
He’s gagging harder now, choking on his own spit and snot as he cries. “Seems like your sister got the looks and the balls, huh?” I snarl at him before I let him go, pushing him to the floor before I take off my jacket.
“But your pop…” He sniffs, wiping the saliva from his chin. “I offered him the money back, but he didn’t take it. He said she would be enough.”
I look at Maximo whose frown mirrors my own. What the fuck did he just say? I grab a handful of Leo’s hair and yank his head back so I can look him in the eye. “What did you just say about my father?”
“He caught me cheating, man. He gave me a kicking and I gave him his money back, but he wanted more than that, so I told him about Kat and what had happened before. I thought maybe he might be into the same kind of thing. Then he told me we were square. If I gave her to him, he would give me back the money and then we’d call it quits.”
My free hand is clenched into a fist, and I have to hold myself back from smashing it into his face. “Why are you telling me this now and not as soon as I walked in here?”
“I knew he’d come for me one day. I was supposed to meet him the next morning at Kat’s house because she worked nights at that government building. He said he’d hand over the money if I handed her over. But I’m not stupid, man. He could have just taken her anyway. He wanted me there so he could kill me. So I took off. I thought you knew this already?”
I glare at the piece of shit on the floor as I try to make sense of this information. “You didn’t even try to warn her?”
“I was terrified. I left her a note, but I had no time to get to her. She doesn’t even have a cell phone.”
“But why did my father want your sister? And if she was so important to him, why did he send me for her?”
Leo trembles. “If I tell you what I know, will you let me go?”
“Not a fucking chance in hell. But I could make your death less painful and right now I can assure you that you’re going to want me to do that. Now tell me why the fuck was my father so interested in Kat?”
“He wasn’t. Not at first anyway. Not until I told him about Elmo and Tony and how they’d taken her as payment for a debt before. Then he started asking me all kinds of questions like when it happened. I mean, he wanted specific dates and everything. It was like he remembered something, but all of a sudden, he was more interested in her than me.”
“So he just let you go? Just like that? Because you told him about Kat’s attack? You expect me to believe that?”
“He let me leave because the club next door was closing and it was getting kind of busy. But he had no intention of letting me go.”
“So you bailed on your sister and left her for Salvatore Moretti?”
He glares at me. “It’s not like I thought he was going to kill her. He seemed really eager to meet her. At worst, I thought it would be a similar deal to last time.”
“When she was raped and tortured for days?” My head feels like it’s about to explode with holding it together instead of kicking this sick fuck to death.
“Kat is strong. Way stronger than me. I knew she’d be okay.”
“Well, you got one thing right,” I say as I start rolling up my sleeves.
“Dante, please,” he snivels. “She’ll never forgive you if you kill me. I’m her brother, man. Kat’s not like us.”
“Oh, I know that, asshole. But I would rather that than allow you to live and risk the prospect of you ever being in her life again.”
“I won’t. I’ll stay away.” He wipes his nose, his hands clasped as he begs for mercy. If Kat were here, she would take pity on him. She’d ask me to let him go because he’s right — she is better than us and she would try to convince me to show a little mercy. But I am not that man. Not even close.
“No, you wouldn’t, Leo, because people like you are a disease — an insidious cancer that never stops destroying everything it touches. The moment you’re in trouble again, and let’s face it, that’s gonna happen as sure as the sun is gonna rise, you’d be back. Asking your baby sister to protect you now that she’s the most powerful woman in Chicago. If you think I would ever allow that to happen, then you’re the dumbest fuck I’ve ever met.”
“D-Dante, please?” He’s still wailing as my fist connects with his nose for the first time, bursting it open like a ripe peach.
I don’t stop punching him. Not until all that’s left of his face is a bloody mess of skin and brains and bone. Not until my hands and shirt and face are soaked in his blood and Maximo has to drag me off his lifeless corpse. Not until I have poured out most of the rage that is burning through my veins like it’s the only thing keeping me alive.
“Dante, you’re gonna hurt your hands if you keep doing that. There’s nothing left, buddy,” Maximo says in my ear, wrapping his biceps around me. “We got to get you cleaned up and out of here.”
I rock back on my heels, staring at the battered body of Leo Evanson. He was dead by the third or fourth blow. He was a lucky son of a bitch. If I wasn’t eager to get back to Chicago to confront my father and crawl into bed with my wife, if I didn’t have to look her in the eye every single day for the rest of my life, I would have tortured this sack of shit for days. At least I can tell her it was quick.
I shower and change in the small unused office block that Maximo and I brought Leo to earlier. The building belongs to the corporation of the man who owns LA — Alejandro Montoya. And while he and I aren’t exactly friends, we have a mutual respect for one another. I trust that his team will clean up any mess here without any issue. He owes me after the last time I did the same for him back in Chicago.
As soon as Maximo and I are done, we drive back to the airport and spend the entire time wracking our brains to think of any possible connection between Kat and my father.
Have I been played for a complete fool?
If so, by whom?
