Whatever he had been about to say was drowned out by the dulcet tones of a doorbell echoing throughout the house. She felt him tense and when he looked back at her there was concern pinching his features.
“Stay here, I need to see who that is.” Mateo slid off the bed and started to rally his clothes. When he picked up his ruined button-down he growled and rushed off towards a door that must have led to a closet or bathroom. He returned a moment later, checking his gun like a pro. Dropping the clip, checking the barrel, slamming it home again and then pulling back the slide to load one bullet to-go.
She sat up and crossed her legs on the bed. “I’ll come with -”
“No. Stay here. I’m not fucking around, Camille.” His eyes were serious as he turned towards the door and she growled at the command. She eyed the door as he stepped out and smiled when she realized his room didn’t have a key code on both sides.
Of course, there’d be no reason to lock himself in his bedroom, which meant she wasn’t locked in either.
Chapter Six
Mateo tried to finger comb his hair and scrub his face so he’d look less well-fucked when he arrived at the door, but since he could still smell her on his lips that was probably a lost effort. His mouth watered as he entered the cool tile of the foyer and he realized he’d never put on shoes.
Fuck, wasn’t that professional?
Camille was making him a mess and a half, but he’d meant the promise he had made. There were options, there were always options – sometimes they were just hard ones.
When he looked through the peephole his heart stuttered as ice spilled down his back. Tony was standing on the other side of the door, and that was not a good sign. In fact, it was a fucking horrible one. Mateo reached into his pocket and fingered the switchblade that rested there, taking a little comfort at its presence and the weight of his gun against his back. With a deep breath he schooled his expression and put in the code to open the door.
“Mateo!” Tony gave him a smile and reached his hand out, forcing Mateo to leave the blade in his pocket to grasp his hand.
“Hey, man, what are you doing here? I thought -”
“Ah, yeah, Scarpa wanted me to come and assist. Try one last time to get the bitch to talk before we cut our losses.” He shrugged and stepped forward so that Mateo had no choice but to step aside and let him into the foyer. A large, old-fashioned black doctor’s bag hung from Tony’s hand and Mateo felt himself go cold.
No fucking way.
“I’m working through my process, and she’ll talk, so it’s not necessary for you to be here. After all, I don’t crash your parties, do I?”
“Scarpa is impatient. We don’t know who she is in Callahan’s organization, but if she’s some kind of call girl on his payroll then the old man might get a hard on for her and when she doesn’t answer – well, you know how it goes.” Tony shrugged and looked around the house. “Shit, I always forget how nice this place is.”
“Thanks,” Mateo mumbled. “Listen, it’s not even been two days, he’s not going to call some kind of alarm if she doesn’t answer.”
“Risks, man, risks. We’ve all got to be smart, and you know the boss. He’s still fuming over the last hit that took out Antonetti. No way that wasn’t Callahan, and so he’s not going to let this one go. If the girl has answers we need to get them out of her or bring her body to him.” He adjusted his grip on the bag and pointed towards the right hall. “Where’s she at? You got her locked up in the cell?”
“I’ve got it, Tony. Just let me do my thing.”
“No can do. I told Scarpa you wanted to meet with him and he said that you weren’t invited to a meeting unless you had an address or a corpse.” Tony laughed like he’d told a joke. “That’s why I’m here. We think maybe your methods won’t work as well with this one. My methods always work, one way or another.”
“My methods are working,” Mateo growled out through his teeth, showing way too much emotion, but there was no way in hell he was letting Tony within twenty feet of Camille.
Tony kicked one of the shards of glass on the floor with his shoe and looked back up at him. “You sure about that?”
“She had a tantrum. I’m handling it.”
“The number of hours you’ve had her say differently. It’s never taken you over a day to get anything. Time is up. Now, take me -” Tony froze, his mouth going slack as he looked past him towards the back of the house.
She wouldn’t.
Mateo turned around and saw Camille standing near the hallway to his room, wearing his shirt again, her white blonde hair a vicious post-fucked mess that spoke volumes. Tony’s eyes widened and he dropped the bag, immediately going for his gun – but that wasn’t going to happen. Mateo grabbed the blade from his pocket, flicked it open and thrust it deep into Tony’s stomach without hesitation. Then he pulled it back and drove it in higher, between the ribs, puncturing the man’s lung. Finally, when there was enough blood spilling he looked at his face to see the shock and the panic as his skin went pale.
He was fading fast but Tony still raised his gun, a useless last effort. Mateo knocked it away and then plunged the knife into his throat feeling the blade scrape against bone. With a gurgle, Tony collapsed and Mateo shoved him back so he wouldn’t have to touch him further, but his hand was already soaked in the man’s blood.
As was the tile, and the grout. Fuck, that was going to be a mess.
Tony struggled for a moment more but then the light went out in his eyes and Mateo sighed, turning to catch the confused look on Camille’s face.
“What. The. Fuck.” She approached him slowly as he flicked blood from the knife and then he leaned down to wipe his hand and then the blade on a clean section of Tony’s shirt.
“Why didn’t you stay in my bedroom?” He stood back up and looked down at her as she gave him one of her best fuck off looks.
“Because I don’t like it when you’re bossy.”
“You seem to like it plenty when it results in you coming. Repeatedly.”
She rolled her eyes and pointed at Tony’s body that was still leaking blood all over his pristine floor. Fucking dammit. This is why he had the cell. “What just happened, Mateo?”
“I killed him.”
“Yes, I saw that, but why?” She wasn’t upset in the least that she had just watched him kill a man, and in a disturbing commentary on his life his cock twitched in his pants. Instead of answering her, he kicked over the doctor’s bag that had come open when Tony dropped it. A pair of pliers skidded over the tile and the pointed end of a drill poked out.
“He came here to get Callahan’s address out of you, or kill you while he tried.” He watched her expression and caught the slow swallow before she raised those perfect blue eyes back to his.
“Well, that would have been… messy.”
“This is where you say thank you.” Mateo almost grabbed his hair with the hand covered in blood, but he caught himself in time and grumbled. “Fuck, this just complicates things.”
“Was he your friend?”
He laughed. “No.” None of those bastards counted as friends, they were coworkers. Low-lifes he had to spend time around for the consistent and very lucrative paycheck that came from Scarpa. Tony had been decent at pool, and not bad to have around during March Madness, but the fact that the man lay dead on his floor was only upsetting because his blood was staining his God damned fucking grout. Mateo took a slow breath. “I haven’t heard a thank you.”
“Callahan was going to kill my brother.” Her response had his head swiveling so fast he got a head rush, but her monotone voice was deceptively calm. “That’s why I agreed to work for him. It’s why I’m on his payroll, and it’s why I can’t afford to give you his address. The kid is fourteen, and whether or not he’s only my half-brother, he doesn’t deserve a bullet just because my dad got his mom pregnant.”
“Shit.”
She shrugged. “Yeah.”
“Are you two close?” He asked it qui
etly but her laughter was loud, and he arched an eyebrow at her.
“I’ve never even met the kid. He probably doesn’t know a thing about me, because from what I’ve found out in the last year my dad died when he was still young. Hazard for most drunken gamblers who borrow money from dickbags like Callahan.” She shook her head slowly and toed the pair of pliers near her bare feet. “I think that’s how he knew about Luke. Or he got pissed the last time I refused to go on his payroll and sent someone to find a weak spot.”
“If you’ve never met him -”
“I know.” She cut him off and growled, tearing a fist into her hair as she turned to walk away from him. “Trust me. I hate that I couldn’t just let it go, tell him to kill the kid and cut the noose before it was even around my neck, but he looks like me. I mean, a little like me. He has my hair, and before you ask I did my own research. I’m good at finding info when I need it, and he is actually related to me. It was a fucking unlucky star he was born under.”
“Not so bad having someone like you for an older sister.” Mateo tried to help, but she rolled her eyes.
“He wouldn’t even be in danger without having me for a sister.” She sighed. “This kid is so blissfully normal. He’s in high school, he plays basketball, he’s got a cute little girlfriend, and works at a pizza joint at night and on the weekends. And yeah, I’ve kind of stalked the shit out of him, but, hell, even his mom is the kind of mom I wish I’d had. She holds down a job, and -”
Camille cut herself off and Mateo couldn’t help but be shocked by the torrent of information that had flooded out of her. If he had known all it would take was stabbing one of the dicks he worked around, he would have invited one of them over sooner. “Okay… so?”
“So, that’s why I won’t give you Callahan’s address. If it was just me I’d take the risk. I’ve run from assholes like him before, but I can’t just throw this kid to the fucking wolves. I won’t.” She stared at the floor, and he stayed silent trying to think of the right words because this was not what he had expected.
Some sort of twisted loyalty? Maybe.
A rule not to kill the one who paid her? Logical.
But to let herself be blackmailed into working for Callahan over a kid she’d never even met? No. That wasn’t right, and he was the dick who had spent the last day torturing her for the information that would have guaranteed a bullet in the back of the kid’s head. If he was lucky enough for them to do it quick.
Mateo would kill pretty much anyone except for a kid, and although fourteen wasn’t young it was still too young to be caught in this shitstorm.
Fuck.
Camille stared at Mateo’s profile as he watched the slowly growing pool of blood leaking from under the man. He had killed for her, one of his own men, and he’d done it with a kind of cold, vicious efficiency that had left her more than a little impressed.
Worse? He had clearly taken it easy on her. The bastard.
Crossing her arms she chewed on her bottom lip, trying to figure out what their next step was. When Mr. Dead Guy didn’t report back there’d be all kinds of problems. The ones that usually involved shooting a lot of people, which just sounded exhausting.
If she lived through this, she was taking a vacation. She fucking needed one.
“So, you said you were going to fix this. How do you plan to do that now?” Lifting her eyes back to him he glanced over at her with a tired expression. “What? You offered.”
“That was before I knew there was a kid hanging in the balance and before I gutted one of Scarpa’s favorite sociopaths.”
“You’re not his favorite?” Camille grinned.
“I’m one of them.” He gave her a chilling smile that made her pussy clench and her blood run hot.
Fuck, why did that turn her on?
“You sure we can’t just let him take the kid out? It would solve a lot of problems at once.” Mateo paused with his clean hand fisting his hair, offering her the solution as if it were that simple.
She stared him down, refusing to even play around with the option in her head. After all she was still a little ashamed at how long it had taken her that day to accept the deal that kept the kid alive. Once she had even gone to the pizza shop Luke worked in, tired of Callahan’s bullshit and determined to kill the kid herself so that at least she’d know he hadn’t suffered – but he had been smiling and laughing with his coworkers.
So blissfully fucking normal and untarnished.
It had been like gazing through a looking glass at an alternate reality of what her own life could have been if her mother hadn’t been an addict, and her father hadn’t been an absent drunk who usually just showed up to randomly crash on their floor. So, instead of following Luke and killing him, she’d sat in silence and eaten a slice of pepperoni, and felt a strange satisfaction that at least one of them had a real life.
“No, Mateo.” Camille shook her head.
“Fine.” He pointed back towards his room. “Go shower. The code is 4116. I’m going to try and clean up this mess.”
Camille smiled. “Giving me your code?”
“I’ll change it later. Trust me.” Mateo snapped his fingers and pointed again. “Go.”
“Bossy motherfucker.” She rolled her eyes and he muttered under his breath as she walked away. It felt weird for him to know the secret she’d held so tightly for a year, and she still wasn’t sure why she’d actually said it aloud.
As she stripped and stepped under the hot water her mind spun. Why had she done it?
It had probably been because she’d just seen him kill a man to keep her safe. That didn’t happen in their world.
If he were sane he would have handed her over, protected himself, and moved on to some other piece of ass. Instead, he had chosen to fuck up his whole universe for her.
Idiot.
Camille scrubbed at her hair and couldn’t deny that she was an idiot too. Playing guardian angel to some kid because of a few strands of DNA felt worse than stupid, and there was nothing in her life rules that made her decision okay. She’d learned young that the safest kind of life was one where you had no attachments to anyone. No expectations of those around you – because when you never expected someone to be there for you, you were never surprised when they weren’t. With a curse she flipped off the water and stepped out onto the rug, soaking it as she wandered across the bathroom to snag a dry towel from a shelf. As she was drying off she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Bruises everywhere, the cut at her neck had reopened when she had rubbed at it in the shower so it was actively bleeding again, and she looked fucking exhausted.
“You’re a real winner right now, C.” She sighed at her train wreck of a reflection.
But Mateo had called her beautiful.
She shook her head as if she could shake loose some kind of reasoning. What the fuck was his angle?
Mateo had fed her, fucked her into a soaking mess, called her beautiful, and killed for her.
Of course, he had also kicked her ass, tortured her, played a twisted game of freeze out, and practically sent her to a loony bin with his little box of horror – so why was she already wondering if they had time to fuck once more before the whole world fell apart around them?
“I ordered you some clothes. I guessed at your size, so don’t throw a fit if they’re too big, I wanted you to be able to wear them.” Mateo was leaning against the door to his bathroom, his dark eyes roaming over her naked body.
“So you’re not planning on keeping me chained up in your basement like some kind of sex slave?”
“Of course not. I keep all of my sex slaves upstairs. Do you know how expensive it is to heat a basement?” He grinned at her and she tossed the towel at his chest, flipping him off before turning away to finger comb her hair to the best of her ability.
“Did you come up with a plan? Or did you spend all of that time chopping the dead guy into tiny pieces?”
Mateo let out a huff of breath. “I just wrapped him in a sheet and
threw him in the cell, but the only solution I can come up with is that we go get the kid ourselves.”
“We’re not killing him.”
“You’ve made that abundantly clear, but if we have him in hand then Callahan can’t kill him. You can give me the address, Scarpa can go put him six feet under, and then you’re out.” He shrugged. “It’s the only solution.”
“I never wanted the kid involved in this.”
“That kid is already involved, doll face, and if we don’t get him then someone else will and they’ll probably have a similar bag of tricks to Tony.” Mateo’s dull voice made her cringe inwardly because although she’d maintained a calm expression standing by the corpse, the sight of those tools tumbling from the bag had made her want to throw up. She had made it twenty-seven years without having someone drill a hole into her thigh, and she planned on never experiencing it. Ever.
“Shit. How in the hell am I going to get him to come with us? He doesn’t even know me.”
“It’s not a negotiation, Camille. We’ll grab him and throw him in my trunk.”
She turned to glare at him. “Seriously?”
“What? He’ll be alive won’t he?” Mateo shrugged. “He won’t get hurt as long as he doesn’t struggle.”
“Why are you even trying to help me?”
He took a slow breath in and let it out even slower, his dark eyes were focused on her but his expression gave nothing away. She could imagine the gears in his head turning the same way hers were, second-guessing every stupid decision they’d both made based on emotions that neither of them could afford to feel. Finally he shifted to lean on the other side of the doorframe and spoke, “Will you give me Callahan’s address once you know the kid is safe?”
“Sure. Although once the kid is safe you may have to fight me for who gets to pull the trigger that puts Callahan in the dirt.” Camille tilted her head at him and he laughed a little.
“Deal. I’ll kick your ass again whenever you like.”
Lethal Sin (Dangerous Games Book 1) Page 9