I sit back as he returns to his sniffing and growling. It’s probably a byproduct of where I found him, all that growling bubbling up inside of him, but I wouldn’t change him for the world.
I close my eyes and let the sun glow against my eyelids.
I’ve got everything a person could reasonably want at forty-two years old, at least where money is concerned.
What about a family? a small voice whispers inside of me.
I almost laugh the question away.
When I was a younger man, I knew that I wanted to meet a woman and start a family. I felt certain that one day, I’d meet somebody who made me feel something I couldn’t ignore, that’d make me sit up and act.
But, as the years wore on, it became clear to me that that was never going to happen. For whatever reason, every woman I ever met just left me feeling bland and bored and lonely.
It didn’t matter how attractive they supposedly were.
It didn’t matter how hard they laughed at my jokes… or laughed when I wasn’t even making a joke, but they thought it was the right place to laugh.
It didn’t matter how they stooped and bowed and made fools of themselves in their eagerness to please me.
I kept waiting, certain that it would change.
One day, I just stopped waiting for it to change. I accepted that I’d never feel what I wanted to feel—needed to feel.
I open my eyes and let out a dark shivering sigh.
It doesn’t matter.
I’ve got my dog and my estate and, unlike most people who work in this business, I’ve got my life.
CHAPTER THREE
Rosie
“What were you doing, sweetheart?” Vito says, as his men spread out around me.
I look into their faces one by one, trying to detect if there’s any softness there if any of them will come to my aid. But they all stare blankly, their eyes glazed over like they’re not even people.
It’s like they’re Vito’s robots.
“Nothing,” I whisper. “I thought I heard a noise. But I was wrong.”
“You didn’t hear nothing, huh?” Vito leers as he walks right up to me, bringing with him the stink of whisky and cigarettes and sweat. “So why were you poking around? It seems to me you want to be a hero, Miss…”
Don’t tell him your name, a voice screams inside of me.
He sighs, tilting his head at me like he can read my thoughts.
“I need to see your ID,” he says.
“I don’t have any,” I lie.
“ID,” he growls, “or I’ll have my boys work you over until you start to like it, you fucking whore.”
I swallow as acid fear boils through me, causing my hairs to prick on the back of my neck.
My hand feels clumsy as I reach into my purse, taking my ID out and handing it over. My driver’s license trembles as I offer it to him, as though in time with my frenetic heartbeat.
“Rosalind Smithson, Rosie huh,” Vito says, nodding as he says my name.
Bugs crawl over my skin, oozing and writhing and making me want to scream.
I see pedestrians walking by at the end of the alleyway now, but none of them are as stupid as me. They don’t even look down here, let alone think about getting involved.
“Do you have any idea what that bastard did?” Vito growls, glaring at me as he closes his fist around my driver’s license.
“Something bad,” I say. “He deserves to be in there, Mr. Franzese. I understand that.”
“Hmm, is that so, little lady?” he chuckles. “Because I seem to remember you talking about bolt cutters and the like.”
“No, I—”
“Think very fucking carefully before you tell me a lie,” he growls. “It could be the last thing you ever say.”
My heart pounds so heavily, the beating torture spreading throughout my body, causing my fingers to tighten and my toes to curl in my shoes. My freaking scalp tingles in anxiety, which I didn’t even know was possible before this moment.
I take a breath, trying to control my jackhammering heart.
“I was going to help him,” I murmur. “But he told me a lie.”
“What did he tell you?” Vito snarls, slipping my driver’s license into his pocket.
I glare at his hand, anger warring with fear. I want to leap forward and grab my license back. I need it to take Mom to the hospital for her appointments.
I don’t deserve to be intimidated by this lowlife, with his drugged-up eyes and his big shot grin. I hate that I have to stand here and take this, let him talk to me like this.
I wish I had a gun.
“A vicious lie,” I murmur.
“What. Did. He. Tell. You.”
Vito stares hard at me. The men behind him exchange looks, quickly, as though they’re scared of Vito catching them looking at each other. I guess that Vito has a habit of flying off the handle – hence the man in the trashcan – and they’re worried about him killing me so publicly.
“He said you raped a woman,” I murmur. “But I know it’s a lie. I can see that now.”
Vito throws his head back and laughs, and all his men laugh along with him. Even though I can tell they’re forcing it, Vito either can’t or doesn’t seem to mind.
The moment his laughter dies, they all stop.
“His girlfriend got frisky with me so I gave her what she wanted,” Vito says, inching closer and closer to me, his voice getting sleazy. “I can tell you want it too. You’re a little large for my tastes, but you’re nice’n young, so I’ll give you a go.”
My chest feels like it’s going to shatter in half. My heart slams, slams, slams against my ribs.
A little large for my tastes.
All my life, it comes back to that. Whenever I get into an argument, whenever somebody wants to wound me, they resort to my size.
I clench my fists at my sides, my hands shaking, praying to who-knows-what for this to end right now so I don’t do something I’ll regret.
Or maybe I won’t be able to regret it. Maybe it will end right here, in blood and pain, and I’ll only have minutes or seconds to realize I need to get control of my temper.
“Look at this, fellas,” Vito sneers, but he keeps his gaze firmly pinned on me. “It looks like she’s getting a little feisty. What is it, sweetheart? You want to—”
“Please,” the man in the trashcan murmurs. “I can’t breathe…”
Vito spins and kicks it, and then he starts leaping around, swearing at the sky, using every curse word he can seemingly think of.
I would laugh if I didn’t get the sense it would result in my death. I feel frozen in place, like I’m sinking into quicksand, unable to move. All I can do is seethe silently as he recovers his poise and runs a hand through his hair.
“Interrupt me again,” Vito growls at the trashcan, “and I will fucking let you out. But you won’t like it.”
Vito sighs and glances at one of his men.
“We have to deal with her. Make her disappear,” he mutters. “She’s seen too much.”
“Yes,” the man says, without any change in his tone of voice. He’s probably around forty years old, on the heavier side, with a weighty gold chain hanging around his neck. “But maybe we should get him to do it.”
“He doesn’t do women,” one of the others says, a younger man with a broken nose.
I feel like a rat trapped between a gang of wildcats, with no escape, with no possibility of escape.
They’re discussing my murder the same way they’d discuss ordering a cappuccino.
Vito snaps his gaze to the younger man.
“He’ll do whatever the fuck I tell him to do,” he growls.
He turns back to me with an unhinged grin.
“I’ll be seeing you very soon, Rosie Smithson, very soon indeed,” he says.
They turn and begin to stride down the alleyway. I see the black car parked across the street.
How did I miss that before?
They were watching me th
e whole time, probably laughing their asses off.
“Wait,” I say, my voice rising despite myself.
One of the men – the younger one with the bent nose – spins before the others and shakes his head frantically at me. There’s fear in his eyes, and a message, Shut up, you idiot, or he’ll shoot you right here.
Vito turns slowly.
“Did you say something, bitch?” he says.
“I need my driver’s license,” I murmur, even as a voice inside of me screams to shut up, just shut the hell up right now. “My Mom is sick and I need to take her to her hospital appointments.”
Vito narrows his eyes at me as though he thinks I’m joking.
His hand twitches toward his jacket, as though he’s going to grab his gun and shoot me any second.
The younger man glares at me, glares hard, screaming silently at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, somehow forcing the words past my closing throat and the panic rioting through me. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“That’s right,” Vito said. “You shouldn’t. Tell your cunt mother to get the bus.”
He turns and stalks back over to his car.
I stumble out of the alleyway, feeling as though my throat is closing up. All the air in my body feels as though it’s being sucked out of me, my belly suddenly empty, sickness churning acidly inside of me.
I move down the street, trying to make my breathing come slowly. Even as the street wavers and distorts with my tears – and seems about to fall sideways at any moment – I try to force down the rising terror inside of me.
When I finally reach my apartment building, I want to scream with all the pent-up fear bubbling up inside of me.
I stumble across the lobby and then pause, glancing at the door.
Fuck.
I’ve forgotten the lemonade.
But it’s not like I can go back now.
I keep walking.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ryland
I sit in the bar, moving my finger around the edge of the whisky glass. I haven’t taken a sip. I won’t take a sip.
I can never relax around mob guys. They’ll laugh with you one second and then go for their guns the next.
I didn’t even want to come here.
I want out of this goddamn life.
But when Vito Franzese called up with the second half of my password, I knew I had to come unless I wanted to cause problems.
I’m not scared of Vito or his family. If it came to it, I’d go to war with them and make them pay for crossing me, but that’d mean losing my home, possibly Chopper—losing everything I’ve worked so hard to build.
So I’ll keep the peace, for now.
I glance around the bar, empty in the late afternoon sun. It reeks of liquor and sweat and cigar smoke. Dust particles shift in the air.
Finally, the door to the kitchen bursts open, and Vito and his goons come stalking through. I know them all by name, but I never bother to say them or even think them. They all dress the same and act the same, completely subservient to their boss’s son, now that their boss is in the slammer.
Vito walks over, his face red, his eyes glassy. He’s almost as tall as I am and that’s saying something. My contacts on the street tell me he’s addicted to steroids, among other drugs, which accounts for his overstuffed look.
His men take up a table in the corner of the room and Vito drops into the seat next to me.
“Afternoon, Ryland,” he says.
“Vito,” I say, with a short nod.
“Lovely day, eh?”
“Sure,” I say.
“But I heard it’s supposed to rain later.”
He grins widely, flashing a gold tooth at the back of his mouth. His father would never indulge in something like that. But Vito is nothing like his old man. He’s brash and unpredictable and downright insane.
“I’ve got a package I need delivering,” he murmurs.
Package is code for a person, and deliver is code for killed.
I sigh. I don’t want to deal with this shit.
“Is that so?” I say, clenching my fist under the bar, tension moving its way up my arm and right into my damn skull, my temples pulsing.
“Yeah,” he grunts.
I really don’t like his tone. I imagine what it’d be like to smash his face against the bar, to make it explode like a watermelon.
“She’s seen too much,” he says. “Here.”
I flinch at the word she.
He knows I don’t take on contracts for women. His father understood that.
He reaches into his jacket and pulls out an envelope, laying it on the bar.
A thousand savage instincts rise in me, each of them aimed toward causing this bastard the maximum possible harm.
I open the envelope and glance inside, and then my life changes.
My world shatters.
I stare at the photos of the woman, my throat going tight as I move my callused fingers over the polaroid.
My fingers are too savage and hard-worked to touch a woman as beautiful as this, with her majestic curves and her cascading auburn hair, with her full red cheeks and her big brown eyes.
The photo was taken from across the street, as the woman was helping a sick-looking elderly lady toward a car.
My eyes burn into her as I cycle through the photos, my chest clamping tightly, my balls swelling with the need to put my seed inside of her.
She’s the one. All this time, all this searching, and I’ve finally found her.
I stopped believing it would happen.
But it has. It is. It’s happening right now.
Vito drops a driver’s license on the bar. I glance down at the photo, staring into her eyes, at the slight smile at the corner of her lip.
She’s twenty-one years old, which is exactly half my age.
I wonder if that’ll bother her.
But it can’t. Whatever happens, I need to possess this woman.
No, I already own this woman.
She just doesn’t know it yet.
I clench my jaw as I devour the sight of her, my body roaring at me to go and find her, to find her now, to claim her in every way a man can claim a woman.
She belongs to me…
And this motherfucker wants me to kill her.
“She’s gotta go,” Vito says matter of fact, as though that’ll be the end of it. “Make her disappear, Ryland. We don’t want a body on this one.”
“Is that her mother?” I ask, nodding at the photo.
Vito shrugs and takes my whisky, knocking it back.
I resist the urge to glare at him. Vito is notoriously sensitive. He’s a fucking idiot, truth be told, a man who doesn’t know how to control his emotions. There’s nothing more pathetic than a man like that.
“Yeah, she’s got cancer or some shit,” he grunts. “At least, that’s the sob story she tried to give me when she stuck her nose where it ain’t wanted. You got her address on the license. You got her name. We’ll pay you double your usual rate for this one.”
I run my finger over the photo again, my hand trembling.
No, motherfucker, I want to roar. If you think I’m going to hurt this woman, you’re living in a fantasy world. I’d die – I’d kill – before I let anything happen to her.
But if I said that, we’d fight to the death right here.
Vito and his goons would pull their guns and I’d be forced to let out the beast inside of me, to throw myself at them with bloody intent.
Maybe I’d win, maybe I’d slaughter Vito and his men.
But then what? The Franzese family would be forced, out of honor, to hunt me, and I’d be forced to run or fight to the death.
Who would take care of my sweet Rosie then?
I need to play this right.
Vito grunts as he knocks back the last of my whisky, slamming the glass down.
“So, we’re sorted?” he says.
I coll
ect the photos and drop them into the envelope, along with the driver’s license, slipping it into my inside jacket pocket.
Whatever happens now, I know this is the end of my hitman career. Lying to the mob carries a death sentence, and there’s no way I can get out of this without lying or killing them all, which also carries a death sentence.
“Yes,” I tell him.
Vito tilts his head at me, a vicious smirk smearing across his addict’s face. He’s looking at me like he owns me like he’s the big fucking dog.
He has no idea that I could end his life in the time it’d take him to blink.
I could grab that whisky glass and crush it against his face, and push, and keep pushing until shards of glass were embedded in his damn skull. He has no right to look at me like that. He has even less right to put a hit out on my goddamn woman.
I let this simmer beneath the surface, the beast in my chest beating a brutal drumbeat as I keep my face passive.
“You know, Ryland, some of the fellas thought there’d be a problem asking you to do a woman,” he says. “But I told them, nah, we just need the right price. How’ll you do it?”
I grit my teeth, my jaw pressing painfully against my cheeks.
“That’s none of your concern,” I tell him. “All you need to know is you’ll never see her again.”
He looks at me for a long moment. I can tell he thinks I’ve spoken to him disrespectfully, which is always the way with weak bastards like Vito. He’s so fragile, so terrified, that he has to act tough because he knows he really isn’t.
I stare at him, my face hard, and I see he’s debating whether or not to make something of my tone.
Then he chuckles and shakes his head.
“Just make sure to get it done quickly, alright? Can’t have some—”
He’s about to say bitch or slut or something else that’ll turn me feral.
“It’ll get it done,” I growl, interrupting him.
If I heard him speak about her like that, I know I’d lose control, and then I wouldn’t be able to protect her. I’d punch him so hard his jaw would dislocate by the time he’d hit the floor, and then I’d leap over the bar and go for my gun, stowed away in my padded secret jacket pocket where they never think to look when they’re searching me
Maid for the Hitman: A Steamy Standalone Instalove Romance Page 2