Sinful: A Bad Boy Hitman Romance (Guns and Glory Book 1)

by Nina Park

  Alina walked up to the reception desk, trying her best to project the easy confidence her father had taught her just by being himself. "Hi, there," she said.

  The secretary was a pretty, dark-skinned woman with tightly curled, natural hair that was held back from her face with a bright strip of cloth. She wore scrubs, and she had an easy smile when she looked up at Alina.

  "Good morning," the woman said. "How can I help?" Her tone was warm but in an official sort of way.

  "I'm here to see my father. Mr. Degas?" Alina carefully did not pronounce it like the painter.

  Daddy never had because, in Europe, they often recognized the name that way and would ask all sorts of questions. The whole point of the name was to avoid questions. She'd asked him once why he wouldn't use something plain and American, like Andrew Smith, but he'd shrugged that away.

  The woman's smile tightened just a little bit. "You must be the daughter," she said, just a hint of rudeness in her voice. "We've all been wondering how long it would be before you showed up."

  "I'm so sorry," Alina said, choking back the annoyance that she should be expected to apologize to this woman, and the real guilt that she hadn't been there at every single moment her father had been sick. "I would have been here if I could be, but I was kept away by his own business affairs. And I'm here now. Please, can you tell me what room he's in?" It was a pretty bad lie, even by her own standards, and she really ought to have anticipated this and planned for something better.

  "Visiting hours are over," the woman replied, and there wasn't any softness in her voice. She didn't quite cross her arms and threaten to call security, but the threat was there all the same.

  Alina reached for another, better lie. One great thing about being pregnant, she'd found, was that it made crying really damn easy. Well, it was inconvenient as hell most of the time, but when someone really needed to turn on the waterworks, it was easy enough to make it happen.

  "God, please. I've been driving for hours. I won't stay long, I won't disturb him, just please? I need to see him and know that he's okay. That he'll be here in the morning when I come back."

  That made the woman's face soften. "Of course, honey. At least you're here now. Though I will tell you, your stepmother has been doing a good job taking care of him. I just know what it's like, not having your blood nearby when you want them."

  The word 'stepmother' made Alina's stomach clench. It reminded her all over again that her father had apparently been with this woman, Dez, for years, and never said so much as a word to her. It just didn't make sense. No, they hadn't been the closest family ever, but surely, he would have said something—

  But that wasn't what she wanted to think about. She followed the directions the woman gave her down a long hall and into a private room. It was long past visiting hours, and she was sure she shouldn't have even been there, but she also knew that anyone who found her would have to pry her out with a crowbar. She was so close now.

  She took a single, long moment to steel herself – just in case she was wrong about the whole damn thing – and then pushed the door open.

  Her father. Daddy. The man she'd wondered and worried about every day for months was lying in the hospital bed, sound asleep. He was curled up on his side, as he so often was. He was too thin by far, the skin that had always been rounded – by good living, he'd always said – hanging loose at his cheeks and under his jaw. His eyes, even in sleep, looked a little sunken, and his face just seemed... older.

  He wasn't in hospital clothes, that was nice; a pair of plaid pajamas were visible above the thin hospital blankets. More than anything else in the world, Alina wanted to fling herself into bed with him the way she had when she was a child, and she'd had a nightmare, but she had no idea how badly he was still hurt. The last thing she wanted to do was to make him feel even a single bit worse.

  She pulled up a chair next to the side of the bed as close as she could get it, then rested her head on the mattress and her own hands. For the first time, she let herself cry at the idea of what she'd almost lost. Her father had chosen this violent, bloody life, but she never had. It had almost taken her father from her. Thinking about what the rest of her life would have been like without her father, bringing a child into the world who would never meet their grandfather… Just the idea made her ache.

  Alina found herself making all the grief-stricken promises that a person made when they were afraid. That she would be good, she would be careful, she would do everything right forever, if her dad could just be okay.

  She cried herself out, and then she felt herself starting to drift. I’ll just rest my eyes for a minute, she thought to herself, and then she would get up and see about finding somewhere to stay for the night. She would come back in the morning, and they wouldn't get rid of her. Alina would be her father's full-time nurse for as long as he needed her. And she would meet this Dez person and find out what the hell was going on there.

  But first, she was just going to close her eyes for a couple of minutes.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Vincent enjoyed the warmth of the shower until he felt clean, and then until some of the tension had eased out of his muscles, and then until his cock had gone soft, and then until the water started to run cold. It had been obvious that Alina wasn't coming upstairs long before that, but he couldn't quite bring himself to give up hope.

  She'd been so slinky, so sexy as she suggested the playful shower. He had suspected even then that she was aiming to get him out of the way so she could take off on her hair-brained scheme all by herself. He'd hoped that he was imagining things.

  Apparently, he had not been imagining things.

  He got out of the shower, toweled off, and got dressed. For good measure, he hollered her name a couple of times, but the house held that odd kind of echo that only happened when there was absolutely no one home.

  "Shit," he said out loud, just to say it, then followed it up with a solid, "Fuck."

  The car was gone because, of course, it was. What kind of escape plan didn't involve her racing off in the only mode of transportation they had? And her phone was gone. He had let her keep it because she was smart enough to leave the GPS and cell signal off, but if she were driving in an unfamiliar part of the city, of course she would turn on her GPS. He was sure she would know the risk of it, but her father was important to her. She was going to do whatever she needed to do, take any risks, in order to find him.

  On one side of Vincent’s brain, he could admire her dedication and courage. On the other, he could easily throttle her for taking such idiotic risks.

  Okay. Before he could figure out how to follow her, he had to figure out where she'd gone. He hadn't been careful enough when paying attention to what names she'd talked about Frank using, or what hospital or ICU or rehab he'd been in. He went through the notes on the table where she'd been working, but didn't turn up anything there. He opened her laptop, but she'd either been using an incognito window or wiped her search history. Damn millennials and their technical know-how.

  He could just drive into the city and go from hospital to hospital, but without a name, that wasn't going to get him far. "White male, came in with a GSW maybe a couple months ago? Got thirty of them? Great..." His age would narrow it down some, but that would count on finding someone willing to share information for a price, and while you could bribe some orderlies and transport people who were basically getting minimum wage, plenty of them were working where they worked because of the integrity of their calling or something. He couldn't lie; he'd never understood any of that crap. It sounded stupid, but he just didn't it. Integrity didn't get your next meal in your mouth.

  So he couldn't count on bribing the information out of anyone either.

  There was really only one thing left that he could think to do.

  He picked up the burner phone, then put it down and picked up his real phone, the one that had been powered off for weeks. He'd kept it charged, just in case, but off. It took a minute for it
to go on, it had to spew through so many notifications and updates from a dozen things he didn't give a shit about. And then he was finally able to access his contacts and dial a number. It was a risk; he didn't know who was telling him the truth and who wasn't. But he had to do something and just sitting on his ass waiting for the woman he loved to die, carrying his child, wasn't good enough.

  The call went to voicemail three times in a row before it was picked up. "What in the hell do you think you're doing?" Was the first thing Vincent heard.

  "Hi, Nick," he said. "Nice to talk to you, too."

  ***

  One very fucking tense conversation later, followed by an agonizing wait in the house, Nick was pounding on the front door. Vincent opened it without saying a word. The conversation on the phone had been hard enough; when Vincent had made it clear that he was calling because Alina had done a runner on him, he'd thought Nick might literally shit a brick. Nick had snapped that he would be at the address Vincent gave him in twenty minutes; he'd made it in fifteen. Fancy. Vincent would have been impressed if he wasn't entirely sure that he was about to die.

  It wasn't that he couldn't take Nick. Man to man, he was entirely sure that he would come out on top. But a capo for the Costas... Man, his life wouldn't be worth a thing. There would be so many bounties out there on his head... It wasn't a good idea. It just wasn't. So getting out of this without either dying or needing to kill Nick, that was going to be Vincent’s best shot at protecting Alina like he needed to. And that was his top concern.

  "Where is she?" Nick demanded as soon as he came inside.

  Vincent fought the urge to roll his eyes. "If I knew that, I wouldn't be talking to you; I'd be wherever she is, getting her the hell back into somewhere safe." He sighed. "I think she figured out where Frank is."

  Nick gave Vincent a long, measuring look. "What do you mean, where Frank is?"

  That wasn't how the question would be answered by someone who really didn't know what was going on. Vincent gave in on the eye roll front. "Nick, come on. You have to know. Where is the man?"

  Nick shook his head, and his shoulders dropped. Clearly, he'd made his own decision about who to trust. "You're absolutely not going to believe a goddamn word of this, and I don't blame you."

  Vincent took a long moment to consider, then grabbed two beers out of the fridge, popped them open, and passed one to his capo. "I'm listening."

  "The night Frank was shot, I called you. Plans were put in motion. You know how it is. Family head turns up in the hospital with a gunshot wound. That shit gets messy too fast for anyone to deal with. There are people who deal with that sort of thing. They were called. A car was sent. He was stable enough for that, anyway. That woman went with him."

  "Dez?"

  "Yeah."

  "And then?"

  Nick took a long pull from his beer, then tipped the open top in Vincent's direction. "And that, my friend, is the ten-million-dollar question. And then... no one knows."

  Vincent stared for longer than he would have liked to admit. "So... you're saying that no one knows where Frank Costa is."

  "Except, apparently, his daughter, if you're right."

  "And Dez?"

  Nick shook his head. "I assume you've done some digging on her, or you wouldn't have called me instead. Woman's a snake. Appeared out of nowhere a few years ago, and she's been digging her way into Frank's pocket ever since."

  "Alina hadn't ever heard of her."

  "That's not entirely surprising, given what we found out after Frank disappeared." Vincent raised his eyebrows and Nick continued. "She's worked him so hard that he's changed his will."

  "What?"

  "Yeah. Family assets are family, that's always how that is, everyone understands that. His personal wealth passed to Alina. She's his kid, makes sense, right?"

  "Right."

  "Yeah, not anymore. It all goes to this woman."

  Vincent leaned back, running his hand over his chin. He'd gotten stubble again. He should have shaved while he was waiting for Alina in the shower, but he'd been too distracted by his damn cock to do the things he needed to do. Which was really a great sum-up of this whole cock-up of a job. Goddamn it.

  "You think Frank did it for real?"

  "Can't tell. Lawyers can't tell, aren't even supposed to admit they've seen it or said anything about it. But they say fighting it in court would be a bitch, and if we can't produce Alina to fight it, there's no hope anyway." Nick shook his head. "I've known that girl since she was in diapers. I want to see her get what's hers. But I have to admit – if Dez's close enough to make that change, whether she did it on her own or got him to agree to it – how much does she know about the family? How many secrets could she spill to someone else?"

  Vincent nodded. "So what are you thinking?"

  "I did some more digging. And I think she did exist before she turned into Desdemona Dreiling."

  "Of course. But who?"

  Nick reached into a pocket and pulled out his own phone. He tapped a few things and then showed Vincent a picture; after a moment, Vincent recognized it as Dez – dark hair in long, loose waves around her face, a serious expression but a somewhat meek sort of posture.

  "Don't look at the hair," Nick said, after giving Vincent a moment to look. "Look at the face."

  Vincent did what he was asked, and waited as Nick swiped to the next picture.

  At first, the woman looked completely different, and then things started to click. The shape of the nose, and the wide set eyes. The full lower lip paired with an upper lip that was just a tiny bit thin. Small things he wouldn't have noticed if not for Nick's reminder.

  "Another identity?" Vincent asked. With plastic surgery, maybe...

  "I don't think so," Nick replied. "This is Bethany Delacoy. She was killed in a shoot-out downtown about five years ago. She was a cop, running vice."

  Vincent winced. "Was it Costas?"

  "Pretty sure no. But it definitely wasn't your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man."

  "So what's the connection?"

  Nick shook his head. "Her records are scrubbed as clean as Dez's. I only found this at all because the autopsy guy owes me a favor, and that place is so old they still duplicate everything with paper records."

  "Again, so what's the connection?" And then it all came together. "The sister wants revenge?"

  Nick nodded. "I dug hard, and back in college, Bethany pledged a sorority with a twin sister, Diana. Diana disappeared not long after Dez showed up. It's an amateur job, as these things go, but it's enough it would fool someone who didn't know how to look."

  Vincent considered this for a long minute. "Okay. So, she changes her identity, gets Frank to change his will – for what purpose? Stealing his kid's money? What kind of revenge is that for her sister's death?"

  "It's got to be more than that, somehow. I'm sure what or how. But this woman – she's after something. Hell, maybe she's planning to auction Frank off to the highest bidder, make some other family the head of the Costas through a puppet scheme. Maybe the shot was worse than she expected, hell, maybe he's dead, and it's all a lie. I don't know."

  "And that's why you didn't call us back. Because you didn't know."

  Nick nodded. "Got it in one, my friend." He sighed, some of the tension leaking out of him and being replaced with total exhaustion. "How's the girl, anyway? Alina was quite the party girl last I knew, and I can't imagine it was easy keeping her under wraps."

  Vincent felt himself go totally still and tried hard to keep his face neutral.

  Nick laughed again. "Did you have to fuck her in place, like I suggested?" He glanced at Vincent, then did a hard double take. "You didn't. Vincent."

  "Boss—"

  "Don't you tell me. Don't you tell me you nailed the boss' daughter while he was maybe dying." Nick's face was bright red. His hands were clenched into fists.

  Vincent had expected to face this kind of anger from Frank, if Frank ever found out, but from Nick – this caught him of
f guard. He felt himself shift into a fighting stance as Nick came to his feet.

  "Nick, it didn't happen like that."

  "You took advantage of an innocent girl, Vincent, a grieving kid—"

  Vincent scoffed. "Have you seen that girl lately, Nick? She's no kid. She's a grown woman, and she's damned well capable of deciding what she wanted. And if she wanted to work out her grief on my cock, who the hell was I to stop her?"

  That had not come out anything like what he'd meant to say. So he wasn't entirely shocked when Nick took a swing at him. Vincent ducked, but just barely; even with the warning of Nick's weight shifting, Nick was a hell of a lot faster than Vincent had ever been. He let Nick go past him, hands up to guard, but not trying to take a swing back. How much of this anger was just Nick making sure Vincent understood where he was in the hierarchy of things, and how much was him actually being ready to knock Vincent's head off? No way to tell yet.