Gavin answers for him. “He’s been working for me since right around the time you fired him. Vin was staying with you, you fired Rocco, and I saw an opportunity.” He chuckles. “I was wrong about what that opportunity actually was, I’ll admit. I thought he’d make a good enforcer. His encounter with Vin proved me wrong on that one, though, right boy?”
Gavin’s words sound friendly but the tone and look he gives Rocco is menacing. Rocco grimaces and stares straight ahead. I split a glance between them trying to decipher the meaning of that one. Did Rocco attack Vin? As far as I know, the only time Vin and Rocco were even in the same room was at my restaurant—before I fired him.
Rocco is mumbling an apology that sounds like “sorry boss.” At first I think he’s talking to me, apologizing to me. But no, he’s clearly fully focused on Gavin.
What. The. Heck.
Gavin is still talking. “He didn’t do great at getting Demonio to fall in line, but once he got back into your kitchen—”
“He got back in my kitchen because I believed in him.” I look at Rocco, keeping my voice level because losing it won’t help me and I need to help myself right now. “I believed in you.”
Rocco scoffs, and I’m immediately taken back to the day I firedhim from the old Arsenal. That sneer. The disrespect. “Fuck you, you stuck-up cunt.”
Yep, there he is. Why am I such an idiot?
Gavin checks his phone. He almost looks bored, and I wonder who he’s talking to, who specifically is so invested in who Vin marries. His friend, Ronan? Or someone else?
Then the door explodes off its hinges.
48
VIN
The text comes in from Sophie and I immediately know that something is wrong. She barely let me drive her to the coffee shop. No way is she texting and asking for me to come get her eight minutes after I dropped her off.
I have a guy planted in the coffee shop already. He held the door open for Sophie, an anonymous patron like her, then took a seat at the front window where he has a good view of Sophie and I have a good view of him.
I text him to find out what’s happening and he replies that it looks tense and another man has joined them, someone they’re calling Rocco. And Sophie looks upset.
FUCK.
I text my driver to wait out front, text the men I have in place tofollow me, and then I text Ronan:
This war has gone
far enough. It’s
time for you and
I to meet.
Time to go get my girl.
49
SOPHIE
The door frame splinters, the bell above the door catching and jangling on its way down. Every person in the room flinches, some throwing themselves under their tables.
Vin definitely knows how to make an entrance.
He steps through the hole he put in the restaurant wall, his gaze locked on mine as the dust settles.
“Are you hurt?”
He shouts the question but before I can answer, he draws his gun and drops Rocco with two shots without looking. The gunshots are louder than the door explosion.
Screaming and burnt powder fill the air as Vin crosses to me pulling me out of the booth and into his arms. His hand wrapsaround the back of my head as he presses my face into his chest. “Don’t look. I’ve got you, princess.”
