“Is tying up women the only way you manage to keep them?” I bit out. So much for keeping my mouth shut. Guess some things never changed.
“Careful now.” His leer widened. “If you talk back, I might do more than use you as a tradeoff.”
“I’d like to see you try.” I kept my tone calm. “I’ll finish you o?—”
The door burst open and Achilles stood on the threshold, panting.
I had the good sense to recoil in shame. I should’ve never come here. He’d asked me to go to my brother’s house, and that’s what I should’ve done. Instead, I’d defied him for the millionth time.
Achilles’s dead eyes flickered with emotion at the sight of me, but he trained them back to their usual impassive pools of death.
Stefano had his gun aimed at him, and Achilles’s weapon was drawn too, pointing at Stefano’s head. A shotgun, of all things. A hunting one. A Mossberg or a Remington, I couldn’t tell.
“Oh, good. You’ve finally arrived,” Stefano greeted in English.
“Let her go,” Achilles said evenly, his gaze purposefully homed in on Coppola, not me. “She’s got nothing to do with it. It’s me you’re pissed at, so let’s settle the score.”
“I disagree. She has a lot to do with it.” Stefano trailed his free hand along my cheek in mock affection, and when I looked up, I saw his canine smile widening. “She was mine, and you took her away from me.”
“She was never yours,” Achilles snarled, “and you should be grateful I had the good sense not to give her to you in the first place, because it earned you a few blissful months of life. It was only a matter of time before I snuck into your place in the dead of night and slaughtered you in your sleep to have her.”
Achilles stepped into the apartment and kicked the door shut. The walls rattled around the room.
“If you fire that weapon, you’re taking her with me,” Coppola pointed out.
“It’s my hunting shotgun. It’s loaded with slugs,” Achilles retorted twice as calmly and thrice as deadly. “So I get to blow your head offandkeep the girl. Ain’t that my lucky day.”
“Don’t you want to know how I deceived you into this position?” Coppola asked.
“Not particularly.”
“I gave my Rolex to my consigliere. Dropped him off a few streets down and let him walk the rest of the way. Your soldiers picked up his track and followed him. You thought I wouldn’t find out, huh?” Sangue Blu stroked his chin. “You’ve been getting too sloppy, Achilles. And for what?” He shook his head, gesturing to me. “This? This is what you started a war for?”
Achilles’s jaw clenched, but he let his silence do the heavy lifting. He wore a mask of calm during psychological warfare. Meanwhile, I pretended to stretch my back, hiking my bound hands up and over my head. If I could bring them to my front, I’d be in a good position to wrap my arms around Coppola’s neck when he was distracted and try to strangle him. For that, however, I needed Achilles to keep him engaged. My eyes searched Achilles’s face, but he refused to look at me, his low-energy dominance electrifying the room.
“You know your little girlfriend here killed three of my soldiers?” Coppola huffed.
Achilles lifted his free shoulder in a shrug. He was buying time, and I wondered what his plan was. He always had one. A quick glance at Coppola clued me in. His arm began to shake. He’d been training his Glock on Achilles for too long. Achilles was counting on him getting tired.Hecould aim a much heavier firearm at someone for hours on end.
My gaze burned through Achilles’s cheek, and finally, he spared me a neutral glance. I motioned with my chin to my hands behind my back. His eyes slid back to the Italian mobster.
“She’s good with a pistol,” Achilles conceded. “With other things, too.”
“Is that why you decided to keep her?” Stefano tilted his head.
I raised my arms all the way over my head—slow, slow, painfully slow—bringing them to my front. Stefano still stood beside me, but he was fully immersed in the conversation.
“No,” Achilles drawled. “I kept her because I’m in love with her.”
Stefano snorted. “You cannot feel love, Achilles. You are a monster. Everyone knows that.”
“Monsters can love, too. Harder than humans, in fact,” Achilles assured him, not sparing me the smallest glance. “Did you not love your late wife, Stefano?”
“I did, yes.” Coppola’s throat worked. “She was the light of my life.”
“And you thought Tierney could replace her in less than two years?” Achilles snarled.
I calculated the angle from which I needed to jump Stefano to strangle him. Luckily, I was on a stool. It gave me the height advantage—I could pull it off.
