Well, that was a no-brainer, Bella decided. She liked this woman. Liked her a lot. And, though Bella had been trained since childhood not to be taken in by first impressions, this woman smelled like a friend.
“No. You’re not going anywhere. You’re going to stay with me.”
Amy Jo cocked her head to the side. “Like a handmaid or something?”
Bella laughed. “Where are you getting this stuff? Yes, I’m descended from royalty, but honestly, this is twenty-first-century America. We don’t live by a feudal system.” Well, not feudal though the lucani did have a distinctive way of governing themselves. “How about as a traveling partner for now?”
Amy Jo didn’t answer right away and Bella couldn’t decipher her expression. “With both of those men?”
Ah. “I trust those men with my life. They’ll never hurt you. I’ve known Steven since I was fourteen. We met the day my parents and older brother were killed. Diego is a…protector.” Of what would be a conversation for another time. “He’ll give his life for yours if that’s what it takes to keep you safe.”
Amy Jo’s back straightened. “I don’t need anyone to save me.”
“That’s not what you were saying a little while ago.”
“I know it sounds stupid now but,” Amy Jo grimaced, “at the time, I thought it would work.”
Bella tightened her arm around her new friend’s shoulders. “It’s not stupid. All myths have basis in fact. But you’ve figured that one out already, haven’t you? Look, I know you don’t want to talk about what happened that night, but if you ever need someone to listen, I’m here. I can’t imagine—”
“No.” Amy Jo cut her off with a shake of her head. “You can’t. And I’d rather not talk about what they did to me. Not ever.”
“Okay, but if you change your mind, I’m here. I am going to have to ask you what you heard those men say. I need to know. It could be important to my family.” She drew in a deep breath and let it out, watched Amy Jo do the same.
“Okay. I think… I think it’s probably better if we do that now. Before I lose my nerve.”
Shaking her head, Bella laughed. “I don’t think that’s a problem you’ll ever have.”
* * *
“Do you believe her story?”
Steven broke the silence that had descended when Bella had kicked him and Diego out onto the concrete slab that passed for a porch at this third-rate motel off the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
Diego didn’t turn. The grigorio looked wound tight enough to snap. “Yes. She’s telling the truth.”
Steven shook his head, amazed. “Then she’s a damn strong woman, to live through that.”
Diego nodded. “Those men are animals. We are not animals, though some may think so.”
Son of a bitch. Steven’s hands clenched into fists at his sides as his eyes shut for a few brief seconds. That was the final fucking straw. He swore he heard it break somewhere in his brain.
He opened his eyes to see Diego watching him, calculation in his eyes.
“You know what, asshole?” Steven’s hands clenched at his sides. “I’ve had a fucking shitty day and I’m sick of your attitude. I’ve known Bella since she was fourteen years old. I was there the day her parents were killed. After my dad died, the only people left in the world that I care about are her and Cole. If anything happens to her…”
No. He couldn’t think about that. Not now. “Apparently you and I are going to have to work together. If we can’t do that, you’re going to have to leave, because I won’t. Not this time.”
Raising one eyebrow, Diego leaned against the rusted wrought-iron railing that delineated each room and crossed his arms over his chest. “You don’t own the woman, Castiglione. And from what I’ve heard, you cut yourself out of the loop. So what the hell are you doing here? She doesn’t need you to screw up her life again. You’re no good for her.”
Steven’s hands curled into fists, itching to slug the arrogant bastard. “You mean not good enough, don’t you? And you are? You just want her because she’s a purebred. Isn’t that right?”
If Diego’s expression was any indication, Steven decided he might’ve finally pushed the other guy far enough. Good. He needed to work off some of this excess energy and a fight would do it. Besides, if this prick dared to lay one hand on Bella, Steven would flay him alive and hang his pelt on his wall. If last night had proven anything, it was that she would always be his. No matter what.
Come on, bastard. Throw the first punch.
Diego’s eyes narrowed to slits. “You don’t want to go there. Not now.”
Steven bared his teeth. “Yeah, actually, I do.”
“No, you don’t.” Diego bared his teeth in an approximation of a smile and turned back to stare at the parking lot. “You just want to pound the shit out of someone and I’m handy. What we need to do is talk about what we’re going to do now. You know Bella’s in there making a new friend. We’re going to get stuck taking that crazy woman with us to New Orleans. And we need to figure out what the Mal wants with Bella.”
Steven knew what the Mal wanted with Bella—to use as leverage against him. And from the look Diego gave him, apparently he knew it, too.
Steven turned away. “I’ll take care of the Mal after we get Bella to Cole.”
“You and what army?”
Steven didn’t have an answer for that. And he was saved from thinking of one when the door opened.
Bella stood there, her gaze weighing the situation. “Amy Jo’s ready to answer some questions. Did you boys play n—”
Steven wrapped his hand around her neck and pulled her flush against his body before she could finish her sentence. He had an instant hard-on as he dropped his lips on hers and kissed her until he felt her yield against him. His tongue pushed past her lips, but she was already opening for him.
His hand moved from her neck to her hair, threading through the strands until she couldn’t move without his consent.
She tasted so hot and so damn familiar that the lust he’d tried to keep under wraps exploded, raising his body temperature and threatening the hold on his arus.
With a groan, she returned his passion, her lips moving against his in a way that nearly had him ripping off her clothes and pushing her back onto the bed in the room.
Only the knowledge that Amy Jo and Diego were watching forced him to rein in that hunger. When he broke away, he looked into her eyes, searching for something.
He didn’t find what he was looking for until she smiled and warmth flooded her gaze.
“It’ll be alright, Steven.” She lifted a hand to cup his cheek, her skin warm against his.
He wanted to turn his head and press another kiss into the center of her palm. But over Bella’s shoulder, he caught Amy Jo staring at them with wide eyes.
He nodded. “We need to find out what she knows about what the Mal is planning and how congress works into it. Then I need to get you to Cole.”
Bella smiled as she shook her head. “I’m not leaving your side, not until we find out what’s going on. You need me. I fight better than you do and I know what’s been going on the last three years.”
She didn’t say it, but he knew the rest of that sentence was “since you left me.” Since he’d turned his back on his heritage and his family.
But he refused to put her in any more danger.
“This is my problem—”
“No,” she cut him off, shaking her head. “It’s not. It’s our problem. I’m not a child anymore, Steven. I’m a grown woman who’s been taking care of herself for years. Years you wanted nothing to do with me.”
That hit him low in the gut with the force of an Ali punch. He could deny that he hadn’t wanted anything to do with her. He’d thought about her every day. Dreamed about her every night.
But he couldn’t deny that he wanted to keep her in a safe little box, away from the Mal, away from all of his shit.
And he wasn’t sure he could concentrate if she was around.
Be
fore he could open his mouth, she continued. “I’m not throwing that in your face to hurt you. Well,” she grimaced, “maybe just a little. But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not leaving your side. Get used to it.”
With a sigh, Diego said, “Then I suggest we take the rest of this inside. We need a plan.”
Chapter Seven
“We need you to tell us everything you can remember from that night,” Bella said. “Every word, no matter how trivial it might seem. I know this is going to suck big time but we need to hear it.”
Bella didn’t know the half of it, Amy Jo thought as they sat on the bed while the men stood against the wall. Not too close but in her line of sight. As if they knew she wouldn’t want them behind her.
Smart men.
She rolled her shoulders, trying to work out the tension, and attempted to control her breathing. She could very easily hyperventilate here and that would be completely embarrassing. Still, the Princess wanted her to talk about something she’d tried desperately to put out of her mind.
Amy Jo shrugged, her gaze downcast. “I don’t know that I’ll be able to tell you much.”
“Anything you can tell us will be more than we know now,” Bella urged.
Well, that sounded rational enough. But her heart continued to flutter like a trapped bird and her throat dried to the consistency of the Sahara.
“Alright, but I’m not completely sure what I heard.”
Which was somewhat of a lie. There were parts of that night she would never forget and parts she would never remember.
“I know I heard them say something about a meeting.” As she was lying on the ground, forgotten for the moment after a second rape. She had focused on their voices, imprinting them into her brain so she could identify the men later. “They laughed about it, about how they could wipe out all the ‘fucking royalty’ —their words, not mine—at one time.”
Bella’s gaze never wavered. “Did they say where this was going to happen?”
“One of them said they were leaving for New Orleans in the morning, to scout.”
“Did they talk about what they were planning?”
She shook her head. “No. At least, I don’t remember that they said anything about that.”
Bella slid her hand over Amy Jo’s, resting on her knee, then squeezed lightly. And didn’t let go. “Do you know how many men were there?”
Amy Jo’s heart tripped like someone had flicked a switch, making it hard for her to breath. “I know…there were four men but there might have been fifth who didn’t…”
Sweat broke out in a fine sheen over her entire body. Bella’s hand squeezed her knee and she focused on that.
“Do you know if the men mentioned the word ‘congress’?”
She shook her head, her hands already starting to tremble. “No. I only remember them saying your name, Princess, and, well, yours.” She pointed at Steven, whose expression hardened like quick-drying cement and she quickly looked away. “I don’t remember what they said about you, or even if they were talking about you. Just that they said the name Steven.”
Bella squeezed her knee again. “And you didn’t hear what they wanted Steven to do for them?”
She shook her head, more to dislodge memories than as an answer. “No, nothing like that. They didn’t speak English all the time. I think they must have been speaking Italian or Arabic. Some foreign language.”
Bella nodded. “It probably was. Can you remember any of those words?”
“Only a few. They used mal a lot. I know that means bad. And bene, and that means good. But some of the others, I didn’t memorize. I was listening more for what their voices sounded like.”
“So you could recognize them later.” Pretty Boy spoke, not bothering to make his words a question. She looked up to find an expression almost like approval on his face.
Her spine straightened just the tiniest bit. “Yeah, it was…difficult.” She shook her head again, blinking away the ugly memory that just popped into her head. “But I’m good at blocking out distractions.” That was a good word. Distraction.
“Can you tell me what the men looked like?”
No. Absolutely not. “I don’t know.”
That stopped Bella for a few seconds. “Were you blindfolded?”
Amy Jo shook her head. “I just don’t know what they look like. I…blocked it out.”
Bella’s eyes narrowed. “But I’m sure you remember something. Just generally. Dark hair, light hair, tall, short—”
“Arabella.” Diego cut her off. “Stop.”
The world had started to spin and darkness tinged Amy Jo’s vision on the edges. Snippets of sound were beginning to creep out of her subconscious, things she’d ruthlessly suppressed after that night.
Images, like subliminal photos in advertisements, were there one second and gone the next. Hands, hair, legs. None belonged to any man in particular, but they were all intertwined.
Her chest ached, like someone had grabbed her lungs in a vise and tightened. She started to hyperventilate. And then she felt it, that sense that her body was no longer her own. What she imagined it must feel like to know you have a cancer that was eating you alive from the inside.
It started like goose bumps under the skin, but it went deeper, into her very cells. She moaned, unable to speak, and her eyes closed, blocking out everything but the need to control her body.
Vaguely, she heard yelling. She felt Bella’s hand wrap even more tightly around her knee and she tried to hold on. She cried out with loss when she couldn’t.
Then she could only think about fighting off the alien that wanted to take over her body.
Even though she knew fighting didn’t help. It only made the process that much more difficult. She’d learned that over the past three months, but it was so hard to let go of herself. This wasn’t her, this animal. She couldn’t concede.
The others continued to yell at each other. Something about a bullet.
Jesus God, were they going to shoot her?
The little piece of her brain that was still thinking rationally said, “Maybe that would be better than this agony.”
Just before the fur could dissolve her skin into one ungodly itch, she felt a pinch on her arm then an almost unbearable coldness crept through her veins.
Now this, she decided, was agony. Then everything went black.
* * *
Amy Jo passed out like someone flipped a switch in her head. Diego caught her before she slid off the bed.
“Well, shit.” Bella released a shaky breath and tossed the used hypodermic needle into the trash. “This is gonna be a problem. We can’t give her a Bullet every time this happens. It could kill her.”
Diego lifted the woman against his chest, feeling the slow, steady cadence of her breathing. The Bullet—the drug the versipelli had developed to stop their change—had knocked her out. Unconscious, her features were almost plain—pug nose, full cheeks, rosebud lips. His gaze snagged on the freckles scattered across her nose. There weren’t many of them. He could probably count them if he tried. He wanted to lick them.
No way in hell.
“Diego, I think you can put her down now.”
He found Bella watching him with a carefully blank expression.
He laid Amy Jo on the bed and stepped away until he felt the wall against his spine, telling himself with every backward step that he did not want to stay by her side.
“What the hell just happened?” Steven asked.
Bella sighed and sank onto the other bed, her gaze still on Amy Jo. “Some biters have more of a problem controlling their change than others. Sometimes stress will trigger it, even if it’s not a full moon. They can be damn unpredictable.”
“And that’s going to be a problem.” Diego moved across the room, to let his feet move and get his brain in working order.
Bullshit. You just want to put more space between you and the girl.
He wanted to tell himself to shut up. Instead, he said,
“Whatever happened to her, whenever she thinks about it, it could trigger her change.
“Congress is in three days,” Steven said. “We need to find out what she knows fast. How do we do that?”
Diego looked at Bella and found her staring back.
“Andrea,” Bella said.
“One of the streghe.” Diego sighed and sat on the chair on the far side of the room, running his fingers through the hair Amy Jo seemed to think was girlish.
His gaze kept straying to the bed. His brain wouldn’t stop conjuring images of what those animals had done to her. He knew firsthand the depths to which some men fell.
“Yeah,” Bella said. “Andrea can read her mind without having to put her through more trauma.”
“Where is she now?” Steven asked.
“New Orleans, believe it or not,” Bella said. “Damn, we’re going to have to rent a charter. We can’t risk taking Amy Jo on a commercial flight. And it’s going to have to be someone we know, someone who’s not going to ask questions.”
Steven snorted. “Where the hell are we going to find someone like that one short notice?”
Diego reached for his cell phone. “I know a guy. Flies out of Allentown but I’ll have him pick us up at Reading. He owes me one.”
Hell, Marco owed him more than one and Diego was about to collect on all of them.
* * *
“Long time, no see, Brother. Finally found something the bastard’s good for, huh?”
Sitting with Amy Jo—still out cold and beginning to worry her—in the back seat of the windowless rented van, Bella heard the man speaking to Diego but couldn’t see him.
It’d been a short trip from the hotel to Reading Regional Airport. Whoever Diego had called had already been in Reading, so they didn’t have to wait for him to fly in from Allentown.
And whoever he was, he didn’t sound friendly.
“Vaffanculo,” Steven muttered under his breath. “Bella, come see this.”
Scooting forward into the next row of seats, she peered out the front window.
And gaped at a man who looked so much like Diego it was scary.
“Holy twin brother, Batman.”
Moon Bound Page 9