Shaken, sad, broken woman that I am, I burrow my head against his warmth and forget why I’m supposed to be afraid of him.
Somewhere in the distance there’s a screech of tires. The opening of car doors.
Rem talking to someone, his voice low, urgent, the words foreign.
He moves and pain claws from my right side all the way around my waist and back again. I curse at him, he curses back. I think. Words don’t mean much anymore.
Then the cold air is replaced by heat. The smell of leather. I’m still tucked against Rem and am so ready for sleep.
But something’s niggling the back of my brain, insistently piercing the fog, refusing to let me go.
“Remmmmm…” My voice is faint, shapeless, even to me. I feel Rem’s head move, his cheek brushing mine as he leans down to hear me better.
His questioninghmmmmreverberates through my less painful side.
What was my question again…? Ah, right. “H-how do…y-you…know my…n-n-name?”
The man holding me sighs. His answer slips into my consciousness just as everything goes black. “Shhhh, Lena. Let’s just take this night one fuck-up at a time.”
3
REM
She’s a liar. A threat to the Family.
A dead weight in my lap, leaking blood all over my clothes and the back seat of my really fucking expensive car.
“How bad is it?”
I meet Johnny’s eyes in the rearview mirror, give him a blank stare. Theitin his question is hard to define. This fucked up situation? My target? The shit that’s gonna roll downhill when Ari finds out about this?
Vaffanculo.He’s going kill me when he finds out about this.
“The girl, boss,” Johnny prompts. “How bad is the girl?”
Lena. More woman than girl, I’d say. Unconscious, she’s sitting sideways across my lap, injured side out. I’m not dead or losing blood, so I’m also not oblivious to how the curves of her hip and breast are pressing against my body.
She groans as I twist slightly, awkwardly retrieving my phone from my pocket. I swipe on the flashlight to get a better look at her wound and try to tamper the sudden and surprising anger that hits when I see the shallow gash in her side.
“The bleeding has almost stopped,” I tell my number two. “Definitely a bullet graze though.” I let a string of expletives fly, the harshness of my language at odds with how gently I re-cover her wound. Even so, I hear her suck in a sharp breath.
At the same time, Johnny takes us fast around a curve and I have to grab Lena before she flies off my lap. The movement wakes her just long enough for her to groan in pain. She pushes weakly against my chest and demands I let her go. A few hours ago, I would’ve happily obliged. Quite frankly, I would’ve tossed her as far away from me as possible. Probably with the car still moving.
Now? Fat fucking chance.
“Easy on the turns,fratello. We don’t want to make the wound worse before we have a chance to patch her up.” I don’t want the woman bleeding any more. I need her conscious, not passed out from blood loss.
“Sorry, boss. Just thought you’d want to clear that part of town as fast as possible. With a shooter on the loose and everything.”
“Si, si.”Merda. The farther we get from her apartment, the more clearly I can think through what just happened. Problem is, I have no fucking clue where to start.
Neither does Johnny. “What the hell was that boss? Who the hell shot her?”
“Fuck if I know.” I’m always honest with Johnny. We live in a world of murder and mayhem, crime and chaos. You gotta trust someone to have your back and, for me, Johnny Giordano has always been that guy. So, I tell him the truth. If I don’t, he usually figures it out anyway.
“It was supposed to be a clean sweep through the apartment. No one inside, no contact, no body count. Straight up recon. And other than you, no one else knew I was going to be there.Shewasn’t even supposed to be there. Why the fuck did she come back like that?”
We pause at a red light, both of us scanning the near-emptycity streets for potential threats. It’s January in Chicago and colder than a dead guy’s balls at the bottom of Lake Michigan, the streets empty. Small mercies—it makes it easier to spot someone coming at her with a gun.
