RIP ME: A Dark Romance

by Naomi West

  There's just one more man back there. Greco only sent three men to try and disable me? I’m almost offended. The guy in the back seat is big, but obviously scared. His gun shakes as he points it at me. He’s gasping and holding one hand over his leg. Blood is leaking out over his fingers. I remember the gunshot from before. His scream. Either this idiot was dumb enough to shoot himself in the leg, or Alessia knocked the gun away from shooting at me. His eyes are crazy, in pain and squinting. He holds Alessia by the hair.

  I'm at once wildly relieved to see her sitting there and horrified. There's my girl, fear in her eyes.

  But she's still, too calm. There's duct tape over her mouth and wrapped around her wrists. A black eye is starting to form on her left eye and a line of blood is trickling down from her nose. I feel a rage rise in me that I didn't know I was capable of.

  I've never felt this way before. Not when I was in combat as a soldier. Not when I was being shot at trying to protect Patrizzio. But it's there now like another living breathing animal in the car with us.

  "I'm going to kill you," I say to the man.

  The guy suddenly looks years younger as fear washes through him and I realize he can't be more than eighteen. My hatred turns to Greco for employing children as his paid muscle.

  "Or you can get the fuck out of this car right now," I grunt. I don't know why I give him an option, but I do and he takes it. He's out the back door like a flash, dragging his injured leg with him.

  The second it slams closed, I'm turning back around in the driver’s seat, jamming the keys into the ignition and peeling out of the parking lot in the Hummer.

  I merge onto the highway going in the opposite direction as before. I'm sure they have GPS to track this monstrosity of a car, but I don't have any other choice. All I need is thirty minutes of leeway. Thirty minutes and we can be at the airport. Twenty if I gun it.

  I pray that Greco didn't send more than one battalion to collect my girl. Cocky bastard probably thought three guys would be enough to take her from me. He doesn't know that the devil himself couldn't take her from me at this point.

  I look in the rear-view mirror and curse.

  She's sagging to one side in the back seat. Unbuckled and swaying, the duct tape is still over her mouth and wrists. Her eyes have gone glassy and distant. She looks without seeing. I know she’s in shock right now and that panic and hysteria can’t be far behind. I don’t want her to be visibly freaking out at the airport and drawing attention to us, so I figure I’ve got to move the process along a little.

  I swerve around a semi-truck and put the Hummer in cruise control as I reach my hand to the back seat. It lands on her shoulder. Soft and warm and reassuring. She’s alive. I grip her shoulder and try to drag her forward. She seems to get what I’m trying to do because she starts to scrabble up to the front seat, over the center console.

  She moves clumsily because her hands are still taped together and her eyes remain glassy but then she’s there, sitting next to me.

  I know it’ll hurt, but I need to do something to shock her back to reality. I lean over and rip the duct tape off her mouth. She lets out a little yelp and her bound hands instantly go up to her mouth.

  “Alessia, are you okay? Are you hurt? Alessia!”

  She jumps at my sharp tone and turns to look at me, her eyes still a little unfocused. She shakes her head a little. “Yeah. I’m not hurt. Except my head hurts. My eye and nose. He hit me.”

  Her voice is so small and it makes me want to turn around and rip the skin off of all those dickheads. I’m distracted by her suddenly clawing at her own hands, trying to rip the duct tape off.

  I reach in my pocket and pull out the little Swiss army knife. “Alessia, baby, it’s okay. Let me help you.”

  She puts her hands out and I carefully cut the duct tape. She rips it off and balls it up, throwing it on the ground.

  “Now buckle up,” I say, “I have to drive really fast and I want to make sure you’re safe.”

  The second she does as I say, I put the pedal to the floor and scream down the highway, honking and swerving as I go. Everyone clears the way. We’ll be to the airport in twenty minutes.

  “Where are we going?” she asks.

  “I’m not going to talk about it in the car. It might be bugged.”

  She nods and goes still, her head tracking backward to read a sign that we’re passing. A sign for the airport. I know she’s putting it together. And suddenly she’s lifting up her butt and reaching around to her pants pocket, scrabbling for something. She pulls out her wallet and her passport.

  “Just in case,” she mouths to me, looking so proud of herself for thinking of it back when she was packing at home. I look at her for a second, the bruise turning a deep purple around her eye, the bridge of her nose starting to swell. Her hair is a tangled mess and the collar of her sweater is stretched and torn like somebody was dragging her by it.

  And it hits me like a ton of bricks. I’m in love with this woman. Completely and entirely. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her. I’d die for her. It isn’t the first time I’ve had that thought but this time I fully understand what I’m thinking. There is no living without her. I realize that I don’t care about whatever dumb ass plan she concocted with her brothers. I don’t care that she started this relationship with me on false pretenses. All I care about is her safety.

  The thought makes me drive even faster. We’re squealing into the airport in ten minutes flat and I’m instantly jumping out of the car and running around to her side. I leave the car running and race into the terminal. I hope their car gets jacked.

  I run up to the Delta terminal, Alessia puffing behind me. “I need two tickets to your next flight out of Detroit,” I tell the woman behind the counter.

  She’s about sixty five with bright red hair and big glasses, her uniform is immaculate. Her eyes bounce back and forth between the two of us and I know she’s taking in Alessia’s black eye and the blood below her nose. I really should have helped clean her up a little bit, but every second counts.

  “Where to?” she asks. I notice her name tag says Bonnie.

  “Doesn’t matter, Bonnie. Whatever flight you have that’s leaving next. Preferably a short flight. Under an hour and a half.” If Greco’s people track us to the airport and figure out where we’ve flown to, I don’t want them to have time to organize their people in the destination city and send somebody to that airport for us.

  “Alright,” says Bonnie, her eyebrows raised. She clicks and clacks on her keyboard for a second before she looks back up. “How about Ontario? Flight leaves in 45 minutes and the flight length is an hour and ten.”

  Perfect. And it’s across a border, so it would be even harder for Greco to get someone from his team to follow us there.

  “Yes, we’ll take two.”

  “We only have first class left.”

  “Fine.”

  Bonnie looks me up and down like she doesn’t believe there’s an ice cube’s chance in hell that I can afford first class but she shrugs and holds her hand out for my credit card and our identification.

  It takes her another excruciating ten minutes to get everything in order. She prints out the tickets but doesn’t hand them over.

  “Go stand over there a minute,” she says to me.

  I blink at her. Unable to even comprehend the fact that this little old lady is holding so much power over me right now.

  “I said, go stand over there for a minute and give me a second with this child.” She nods her head to Alessia.

  I calculate my options and realize that this whole thing is going to go faster if I just do what she asks. I pace about twenty feet away and turn and watch her lean in and talk to Alessia. I see Alessia nodding, then shaking her head. Bonnie barks out a laugh and lifts her hands in surrender. She hands the tickets to Alessia.

  Alessia immediately walks right over to me and I’m tugging her toward security. I won’t be comfortable until there’s an ocean between her
and Greco. Apparently, Bonnie gave us priority boarding so we get right through to the gate.

  We have just enough time for me to duck into an airport shop and pick up a few items. I don’t let Alessia sit down. As soon as we board the plane I push her into the first class bathroom.

  Immediately I strip off her torn, bloody sweater and throw it in the trash. She peeps and tries to cover herself from me. I attempt to ignore that but her action slices right through me. God, I’ve been so cold to her over the last day that she doesn’t even want to be seen by me.

  I quickly rip the tags off a simple blue sweatshirt I’d just bought and tug it over her head. I thought she might want the hood to help cover her face both for the privacy and for the black eye. Next I pull out makeup removing wipes I just bought as well and gently swipe the blood and sweat off of her face. She holds her face up to me like a child. Her eyes closed. She must be exhausted. Lastly, I plunk a baseball cap over her head and pull the brim down low, over her face, and complete the look with a pair of mirrored sunglasses. She pulls the hood up and looks at herself in the mirror. She gives a mirthless little chuckle at her covert appearance but she doesn’t look recognizable and she doesn’t look like she’s just been beat up. So, mission accomplished.

  Now that she’s reasonably presentable, I tug her back out to our seats, ignoring the lascivious grins of the other passengers at the fact that we’ve just come out of an airplane bathroom together.

  I give her the window seat and buckle her in.

  “How much crap did you just buy?” she asks in amazement as I pull out a bottle of water, a bottle of Gatorade, an apple, a cheese stick, and some Ibuprofen.

  “It’s kind of an emergency kit for shock. We’ll get a meal on our next flight, so this should be enough for you until then.”

  “Next flight?” she asks as she absently takes the bottle of water I’ve put in her hand.

  I tip it up to her mouth and she takes a sip. I don’t speak until she’s taken a good long drink. Then I hand her the Ibuprofen. She takes two and I hand her the apple. She sighs and rolls her eyes, capping the water but she takes a healthy bite of the apple and I relax a little.

  “Yes, we’re going overseas. Somewhere they won’t be able to find us. We’ll lay low for a while until I can figure out what to do next.”

  She nods and doesn’t ask where we’re going. I’m grateful. I don’t want to talk about it out loud with prying ears all over the place and I don’t want to have to lie to her only to re-explain again later.

  Absently she reaches into her pocket for her phone but comes up with nothing. “Oh my God, I left my phone in the Tahoe.”

  “That’s okay,” I shrug. “We would have had to leave it behind anyways. It might be traceable.”

  “You kept yours.”

  “Mine is untraceable,” I say. I take pains to switch my sim cards and providers as often as I can. The only thing that remains the same is my phone number.

  She shrugs and it’s as if she’s barely even heard me.

  “Alessia,” I say and she turns to me, but her eyes stay cast down. “What did Bonnie say to you when we were buying our tickets?”

  A little smile flickers across her face and I could have kissed Bonnie for giving us that right now. A moment of levity.

  “She asked if I really wanted to go with you. She said she could have a security team escort you away at the gate for ‘NSA’ reasons if I needed time to make a getaway. She said she’d wait and drive me away.”

  My eyes grow wide as I sit back in my seat. “Damn, Bonnie.”

  “I know!” Alessia smiles again and my heart leaps.

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That you were protecting me from the people who gave me a black eye. And that I was safe with you. But she was right when she sensed that you were a total dickhead who gets off on bossing me around.”

  I bark out a laugh, pretty shocked that I even have it in me at a moment like this. “I guess I can’t argue with that,” I say. I want her to turn and smile at me like she did before, but she doesn’t. I can tell her mind is already miles away.

  She’s quiet. So quiet. She just turns to look out the window of the plane and watches as we pull away and says nothing as I take her hand in mine. She’s limp. Halfway removed. If her eyes weren’t open I would think she was asleep.

  Thankfully the flight is short. In little more than an hour I’m tugging her to another ticket counter. She stands next to me, completely out of it, as I buy four sets of first class tickets. Each to different parts of the world. I check in to all of the flights via each airline kiosk just in case Greco is tracking us.

  Finally, we’re boarded again. I gently tuck the blanket provided by the airline around her legs. As soon as we’re airborne, I recline her seat and try to make her comfortable.

  “We’re gonna be in the air for about seven hours, baby,” I whisper to her. “You should try and sleep.”

  She says nothing and her eyes don’t close. So I dig through the bag of things I’ve bought and hand her a bottle of Nyquil.

  “Trust me,” I say.

  She looks up at me, in the eye, for the first time since she was attacked. Does she trust me? Does she trust anyone or anything right now? I can see her eyes dilating in and out and I know she’s about three seconds from completely freaking out. She needs to rest or she’s going to crash, hard.

  Finally, she looks away, shrugging. She unscrews the cap and pours out a portion into the little cup, shuddering as she swallows the bitter liquid.

  I activate the screen on the seat in front of her and turn on some chick flick for her to zone out to while she waits for the medicine to kick in. After about twenty minutes I look down and notice that her eyes have fallen closed and her breathing is even. Her head is tucked onto the pillow and, selfishly, I move the pillow and arrange her on my shoulder instead.

  I just want to be close to her. I want to have some part in her comfort. I need to. She’s been through so much in the last day and half of it was because I wasn’t gentle enough. I wasn’t understanding enough. As soon as we get to our destination, I’m going to make it right. Explain to her that I don’t care about anything but her.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Alessia

  I blink my eyes against the bright morning sun and I realize that I’ve slept through the entire plane ride. The flight attendant comes over the intercom to say that we’ll be landing in a few minutes. I look out at the rolling green landscape underneath us and I realize that I have no idea where we are or where we’re going.

  And weirdly, I don’t even care. I feel as numb this morning as I did when I fell asleep at the beginning of the flight. It almost feels like I’m watching myself in a movie. Like this isn’t even happening to me in my real life.

  I look over and see that Dare is awake. He’s typing something into his phone and doesn’t notice that I’m awake. His tray table is down and there’s two glasses of orange juice, two paper cups of coffee, two mushed little croissants in plastic bags and two apples.

  My stomach rumbles for the food, but I don’t move. I don’t want him to realize I’m awake yet. I take the opportunity to study him. He’s as handsome as ever. Painfully so. I realize that I didn’t always think he was handsome. Captivating? Yes. Powerful? Yes. Deeply attractive? Yes. But handsome? That’s a recent development. It probably happened about the time I fell in love with him.

  I close my eyes at that thought. Love. With Dare. What awful timing to admit something like that. In love with a man who thinks so little of me.

  But how could I not love him? I think about the way he holds me, looks at me, gives me pleasure, carries my bag, listens to me. Sees me. And then I think about the sight of him sprinting across that parking lot. How half of me was weak with relief that he was there to protect me, and the other half was terrified that he was about to get himself killed.

  I push that thought away. I’m not ready to think about yesterday. Any of it. Not the phone cal
l with Dante, or Fabi’s disappearance, or Rett’s disappearance, or the fight with Dare or the men in the car.

  I purposefully make my mind go blank. Needing a distraction from my thoughts I start to stretch and yawn. Dare immediately puts his phone down and turns to me.

  “Hi,” he says, so simply it breaks my heart for some reason.

  I don’t have it in me to greet him back. I can barely look at him. “Any of that for me?” I ask, nodding at the food on his tray.

  “Half of it,” he says and gives me a little smile.

  I reach for the coffee and the orange juice, nursing both of them. The hot and the cold feels so good on my throat. I realize that I’m parched.

  “How’d you sleep?” he asks.