Broken (Dying For Diamonds Book 1)

by Kiley Beckett

  “Where are we going, Rocco?” Daniella hissed at him, and now she wrenched her arm away from his grip, anger pinching her brow.

  They didn’t have time for arguments, speculation over what was the best way out of the building, so he said, “It’s not too late for me to knock you over the head and put you over my shoulder. You want that?”

  She huffed and shook her head, watching some of the office workers weave around the two of them posed face to face in the middle of a busy hall. She looked at their faces for support, like, You believe this guy? She folded her arms in an act of defiance and her chin jutted towards him like she was challenging him.

  “They’re coming to get you, Daniella. I was the one they sent. You know I won’t kill you. But look at me...they’ll send others.”

  Her poise was weakened, her shoulders slumping by a fraction. “Did you shoot Jimmy?”

  “I would have. It wasn’t him. Another one. He came for you from the offices. He drew a gun.” Her stoic expression wavered. “Yes, Daniella, this is real. Someone really wants you dead. Welcome to the big world of organized crime. If you can’t be your father they’ll kill you and bury you and you’ll be a pleasant memory for the people who knew you. Your father was nice, sure, but he was also one of the meanest sons of bitches around. I should know. I did the things that he needed to have done. This building could be crawling with men like me, all of them wanting to put a bullet in that pretty face of yours.”

  “No...”

  “Look in my eyes, Daniella.” He got himself lower, her stiff pose softened as his words eroded her resolve. He looked deep in her eyes and he held them. They stared into one another and her mouth worked weakly like she might say something but no words came out. He held her gaze firmly, but his eyes began to lose themselves in hers. Something different in there, something changed from when he knew her. The confidence gone, his feisty Daniella shaken, and something in there, something in those black eyes with flecks of copper that would only wink in the brightest of lights, something in the tremulous hold she struggled to keep on his eyes told him that he was the one who took that confidence away from her. “Believe me. I know you don’t want to…but you have to…trust me,” he said, his voice, low and gravel but softening, becoming soothing as he ached for her, ached for her to know his own hurt.

  What he’d done wasn’t easy and it wasn’t careless.

  When her lower lip trembled, when he saw a quiver pass through that pouted plump vermilion, he kissed her. Maybe she saw it in him. He hoped she did. What he did four years ago was beyond comprehension and how he loved her was beyond that still. But maybe if she could see it in him—read it in his eyes, his actions, his heart—maybe she could begin to understand. His lips came to hers slowly. Her eyes lowered and they kissed, plump wet flesh rolling against each other in gentle, heavenly osculation. He breathed her in. Stood there, his arms snaking around her and holding her while lawyers and accountants and assholes in suits and ties, tsked and grunted with exasperation, parting around their imprudent obstruction.

  “Rocco,” she whispered, and her eyes darted to find his but he kept his gaze from her. What he’d seen in there—what she’d revealed—wounded him, took something from him and the last thing he needed when he had to keep them both alive was to have his heart squeezed, or broken, or even soaring.

  “We have to go,” he said, eyes along the hall to where he knew they’d find stairs that would take them down to the street level, hopefully the killers looking for them at the main exits and the elevator banks.

  He pulled her again, taking up that graceful arm and she was compliant. Maybe a little dumbfounded right now, but what did he expect? If he’d thought she might be dead and she showed up on his doorstep he might have a little trouble keeping his head in the game.

  daniella

  There was passion in his kiss. She could feel something there, something in the way his lips had pressed hers. There was honesty in that kiss.

  However honest that kiss was, however his emotions may be real, she could never forgive him for what he’d done. He'd like that. She sensed it now. He wanted her gift of forgiveness. That was too much to ask. Too much.

  She stumbled behind him, her stride trying to match his as they bounced between oncoming foot traffic. His hand gripped her wrist too hard. His hands were like steel and he was hurting her.

  They came to the end of an office hall, gathering stares from the workers. He paused at a four-way intersection, two office paths coming together in a cross. Eyes were on them. Over cubicle walls and through glass office doors. Those eyes would have seen a man, a huge and menacing man, his head whipping around angrily, trying to get his bearings. His thick hair, once combed back, hung in a heavy comber down one side of his handsome face. He was all in black. Black leather coat, black leather engineer boots, rough and ragged midnight blue denim. His hand gripped and tugged a young woman, leading her roughly by her wrist. How did she look to them? Pretty, mid-twenties, wow, very finely dressed in Prada wool, but what’s with those cheap shoes? Was she scared? Did her face look scared?

  She was. Scared of Rocco. Scared of his words. If they were true she should be scared. They were coming to kill her. Kill her. Could the man she once loved protect her? She supposed if anyone could it would be Rocco. He was frightening.

  Then, in the same moment, as Rocco decided his direction and that decision traveled through his arm, tightened his already fierce grip on her, tugging her to the right, their ears and nerves were assaulted by a deafening klaxon burr. An alarm. Not piercing, but deep and bass and buzz. As loud as a jackhammer, each pulse brought her shoulders higher up around her ears. Each buzz rattling her senses so she couldn’t think. People jumped, stopped in their tracks, eyes turned up to where the sounds emerged, hidden over their heads behind ceiling tiles. The building’s Emergency Broadcast System. The sound signifying danger, but not fire.

  “Shit! Let’s go,” Rocco growled and yanked her to follow in his steps, weaving now through stationary workers, renewed urgency in his gait. She followed him, wincing at his tugging, but trusting now at least that he wasn’t kidnapping her and he wished her no harm.

  He stopped suddenly and her momentum crashed her against his side. He was solid mass and she ran her face—mushed it—into the leather of his arm.

  “Whatthef—”

  She bounced back, saw his angry expression looking down at a blank faceless door with a curved aluminum handle and a circular lock set above it.

  “What is it?” she said. “Where are we?”

  She looked around the room they were in. She’d stumbled blindly behind him, mostly watching the heels of his boots and trying not to get tripped up. They were alone. They’d passed no doors, light from the offices they’d traveled through spilled behind them around the straight slash of a concrete partition. They had turned a corner and found themselves in a dim unfinished space with cement floors and plain steel doors.

  “Get back,” he said. “Behind me, Daniella. Close your eyes, cover your ears.”

  “Why?” she cried, but she complied, cowering behind him and cupping her hands around her ears but staring down into the floor.

  There were two bright flashes reflected off the polished surface, two loud bangs echoing all round the hard stone walls followed by metallic clinking of bullet casings. She saw them bounce and sparkle on the floor.

  Now there was screaming. Total frightened chaos just around that concrete corner as normal people who worked 9 to 5 and worried about 401ks ran for their lives. Footsteps beat on that carpeted office space and she saw passing frantic shadows dart on the concrete floor.

  Rocco had let her go and she soothed her wrist and watched as he wriggled a big leather finger in the space where that circular lock had been, clearing the mechanism she supposed. Then he stepped back and one powerful leg reared up and he heaved the heel of his huge boot into the center of the door and it shot off, clanging against the stone on the other side.

  Without
hesitation he was through that door, gun up but kept close, arm tight to his body, angling himself into a fluorescent lit concrete space that she could see now was a stairwell. He looked up, he looked down. He waved her toward him.

  “Okay, Daniella, come with me,” he said, and he headed to the flight of stairs leading down. He trotted ahead, gun held up, eyes focused on every gap provided as they descended, every triangular space that opened up and gave a vantage point to the spaces they were headed. They did this for thirty flights, him ahead, grimly focused, waiting for trouble, her shuffling behind, staying close but keeping her distance. When she got too close he held a hand up, signaled for her to hang back. Thirty flights of stairs. Thirty flights as their own sounds were drowned out by a repetitive aggressive buzz that assaulted their ears and nerves in relentless intervals.

  On the fifth floor, five floors away from safety, they finally met trouble. A dozen feet from them a door was kicked inward. This one opened with a key card not shot through with a pistol.

  At the first sound of metal being heaved Rocco had stopped. His arm came up and shoved her back. He retreated up one step and she did the same. They both saw clear ahead of them, and five steps below, three men barge through the door. They weren’t office workers and they weren’t Nero Syndicate men. She could see it right away. They were faces that were foreign to her. Not dressed in suits like the Nero family wore out of respect during these enclaves; they wore tight jeans and dress shoes, T-shirts with calligraphy and tattoo art. But they held weapons. And they didn’t hesitate. She didn’t even have time to scream. The three men floundered through that door and their eyes came up and they saw Rocco and Daniella frozen on the steps and all of them raised pistols with long suppressors. But they weren’t pistols, they were small and compact and only from being raised by Don Nero did she know they were machine guns. She scrambled, Rocco shoving her from behind. The concrete exploded all around her. Bullets blasting chips of stone and throwing up smoke. She stumbled and fell on her face onto the small square landing between two flights of stairs. Rocco fell over her and she knew he was dead. They were too close for him not to have been hit.

  Gunfire pulsed again and she screamed, Rocco’s dead weight crushed her. The guns sounded like tearing canvas magnified by ten, echoing all around her and up and up through a hundred flights of stairs above them. Stone cracked and chipped, pulverized concrete wafted around her in clouds, and bullets ricocheted and pinged off metal railings. She screamed louder. There was a tug at her sleeve followed by a searing burning. Like she’d been pressed with a curling iron. She cried and screamed louder. Rocco moved. He struggled, and she feared someone was pulling him off her so they could put a point blank bullet between her eyes.

  She rolled underneath him as his weight was lifted, threw her hands up to protect herself but saw only Rocco. He wasn’t dead. His hand had pulled something from his pocket and he worked it at his waist, two hands coming together near his belt buckle. It was drab green, said US ARMY, and it clinked, something thin and metal flew off it and it landed lightly in her clothing.

  As gunfire ripped up the stairwell again, Rocco tossed the green cylinder over his shoulder and as he fell back over her she heard it clatter down the stairs falling towards those men with their guns. Then Rocco grasped her hard, his hands clapping on either side of her head, closing her ears off and he fell again, his whole body weight pressing her into the concrete floor. She felt safe under him.

  There was a pop then. Like the world’s biggest paper bag had been inflated a few feet away and then viciously burst. With Rocco’s hands over her ears she felt it more than heard it. It kicked the soles of her shoes and she felt a wave of force travel through her. Then Rocco was gone and she sat, eyes blinking wide and bewildered, and she took the scene in below them. Rocco was hurtling down the steps, his pistol out and aiming. The three men who had just tried to kill them were splayed out in various groaning forms of injury. Their clothes had been shredded. One of them was now shirtless, another one had somehow lost his shoes. A new alarm began, working consistently under the deafening buzz. Like a smoke alarm. The lights in the stairwell had been blown out and it was dim. The men moaned and sat up, concussed and out of it, and she watched as the landing below was lit up with six bright flashes as Rocco walked through their interspersed bodies and shot each of them twice in the head.

  5

  Underground

  rocco

  “Who were they, Rocco? Who were those men?” she cried as he helped her over their bodies. One hand out, taking hers, her sexy leg stepping over a dead body. He pulled her to him and held her.

  “You hit?”

  “I think so,” she said.

  “What!? No, Daniella...where?”

  “My arm is burning,” she said.

  He turned her around and looked her over, his eyes exploring the beautiful curves of this sexy young woman. Now wasn't the time—now was not the time to get distracted... She was clear of any wounds which was incredible. Three men with Mac-10s, must have been ninety bullets sprayed in their direction. There was a tear in the sleeve of her jacket and he wrenched it wider with his hooked fingers. She yelped. He exposed her skin. She wasn’t bleeding, but a hot bullet fragment had scored right through her jacket and seared her, leaving a reddening welt on her arm. He kissed her near her wound, kissed her better. Their eyes met awkwardly and he felt foolish.

  “Are...are you...okay?” she whispered.

  He was hit. He knew he was hit but he would worry about it later.

  “You’re okay,” he said with great relief. “That’s what matters. You’re tough Daniella...”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You don't even know. I survived you. I can survive this.”

  He took her by the arm again and led her farther down the stairs. Back into the cold fluorescent light and away from the bloody mayhem they blundered themselves into. They were facing dire consequences. Any one of these doors they passed could explode inward again and they might not be so lucky. More men, more guns...every heartbeat could be bringing them closer to their last. He would die before he let her suffer. Die before she ended up on a cold concrete floor, executed by some thug.

  By the time they hit the daylight of a glass door that would lead them out a sequestered service entrance they were both running. He hit the aluminum switch bar that ran the middle of the door, opening the lock and bashing it wide at the same time. Under his foot the words had read, fire exit alarm will sound. And it did, but it was just one more note in the cacophony, and now they were outside.

  They were in the cold crisp winter air and they found themselves amongst a stampede of office workers fleeing from the main doors farther along the building to their right. He ran blindly with her behind him. He knew where they were going. Once outside there was eight feet of pavement, then a steep gravel slope ending at the towering plywood walls around a construction site. A new building being built in the shadow of the Empire Crest.

  daniella

  Panic had spread through the building like a hungry virus. While many had cleared out already, the pathway in the snowy shadow of the building was teeming with fleeing workers. Perhaps they'd hidden under their desks and were just now getting the courage to run out to daylight, maybe some were management who thought they should go down with the ship, then in a few cold and dreadful moments had realized $40,000 a year for some dog shit corporation didn't warrant that duty. For whatever the reason, they now found themselves weaving through a strangely comforting throng of sobbing and worried workers.

  “Do you know where you're going?” she panted as they came to the top of the dangerous looking slope that fell steeply toward a chain-link fence and plywood boards that had been erected around the excavated core of what would be the base of whatever new tooth was to be added to Chicago's skyline smile.

  Rocco bear-hugged her unexpectedly and the suddenness and his strength made her gasp and cough. She heard her name then. Yelled by men, two different voices. Frantic or
angry, she couldn't tell, but she could see at least two men running their way. Faces she recognized, soldiers of Tony T. They wove through the oncoming frantic foot traffic, banging against office workers desperate to make it out to the street. The men shoved some of them aside while trying to cover the ground between them, maybe fifty yards or more.

  In the moment before Rocco jumped down the slope she watched the two of them run closer, covering ground quickly and getting past the obstruction of the fleeing workers. She saw them clearly now, anger seemed to cross their faces, their black ties flapping over their shoulders. One called her name again, said, “Daniella, stop!” Another one, just to his side, drew a pistol.

  Then she was in the air, coming down hard on top of Rocco, held firmly in his massive arms. She rode him down, Rocco's leather and jeans shredding on the gravel. His boots hit and shook the chain link and she felt like the wind was knocked from her. When she sat she saw Rocco on his feet and he'd pulled a flap of chain-link up, holding a gap open for her, his leather fingers woven through the diamonds of the fence.

  “Quickly, Daniella,” he said, holding a hand out to her. She took it and he wrenched her up and then forced her through the gap and she stumbled and fell on the other side, skinning her knees on the macadam.

  “Ah!” she hissed, but there was no time to suffer because she was hoisted up, thrown over Rocco’s shoulder like she was weightless and then he was running. Her name was shouted again behind them and panic and bile rose in her throat. She wanted to scream but she knew she’d throw up that fish stew all down Rocco's back, so instead she bit her lips and shut her eyes.

  Her stomach bounced on his hard shoulder as he ran with her and she thought her bladder would burst. The sound of men sliding on gravel after them and then clanking into the chain-link chased them but it was fairly distant, Rocco covering a lot of ground even with her on his shoulder.