PREGNANT FOR A PRICE

by Kathryn Thomas

  “So, what do you want to do with it?” I asked, and she threw her hands in the air.

  “We’ve got an entire country to explore,” she reminded me. “I say we do something with that.”

  “Can’t say I disagree.” I grinned, and for the first time in a long time, I felt a glimmer of excitement. At last, the future held something I could actually look forward to.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  On the plane back over, I knew exactly what I was going to do. It wasn’t something I wanted, necessarily, but it was something I needed.

  Before, when I had killed people, it had been for money. Maybe a little bit because it raised my reputation too, but mainly it had been for the cash. And I knew that wasn’t a noble cause. Hell, I wasn’t sure if there was a noble cause when it came to killing people, but if there was one, I had it.

  I was doing it to protect the woman I loved.

  Yes, I knew going back to American was risky. I couldn’t be certain that in the time we were away everyone had done what they were meant to. Maybe Leo hadn’t heard that I was “dead” yet. Maybe he didn’t believe it. Maybe Saffron remembered more than I had hoped she would. I couldn’t be sure about any of it, but I was willing to take the chance. Because I knew at the end of the day that this was my job - not murder, but keeping Sabrina alive and safe.

  I couldn’t leave them over there forever. I didn’t have long before their restaurant would go into liquidation or some shit due to lack of custom. I had to be as fast as I could - not that I intended to stay a second longer than I had to. Even as the plane pulled down onto the tarmac, I wrinkled up my nose. This place held bad memories for me now, the kind you never wanted to relieve. I knew I couldn’t be happy here until all the people who had threatened me and the people around me were long dead.

  I got back to my apartment late the day after I dropped Lily and Sabrina off in Italy. The scent of Sabrina was still fresh on my clothes thanks to the hook-up we’d had just before we went away. God, I was going to miss that woman. When I looked around the apartment, I wondered what she’d think of the place, whether she’d love it or dismiss it as the bachelor pad it was. No matter - we’d just find somewhere else to live. I didn’t care, as long as I was with her. I hadn’t felt this way about anyone before her, and I had to do everything within my power to make sure she could live the life she wanted to live. Hopefully, one that had me in it.

  It was dark outside when I started planning, and rain began to thrash up against the window. It felt appropriate for my mood, considering what I was coming up with.

  I wrote out a list of everyone I would need to take down. It ended with Leo, of course, but there were plenty of people I had to take out along the way. Bodyguards. Other hitmen. Associates who would try and continue on his legacy. I needed to clear this city of anyone who would do harm to the woman I loved, and it was going to take a while.

  Most of my weapons had been lost when I crashed the car in the incident I had with Taylor a few days before, which left me with a bit of a problem. How was I meant to go about taking any of these people out? I would have to start small; work with what I did have left. After all, the last thing I needed was the cops on my tail. I scoured my apartment for anything I might have that I could transform into hitman equipment. I found a couple of decent-size knives and a pullover to obscure my face. I disposed of the latter - if I was doing my job properly, there was no way I needed it. Yeah, I was being pointlessly macho, but I didn’t want to give myself the chance to back out of any of this. It was do or die. Well, do and die, for the people I was after.

  It was surprisingly easy to find the people I needed to find. I mean, I couldn’t be that surprised - these were people who, after all, had the run of the city as far as they were concerned. Leo and the rest of the Marinos had no reason to think anyone would be taking a stand against them. Why would anyone be that stupid? It would be a death sentence, taking a public stand against that family and their associates. Whoever did it would have to be absolutely batshit insane. Or have a damn good reason for doing what he was doing. Luckily, I did.

  The first person I picked off was Dean, the bodyguard who’d been promoted high up Leo’s ladder. It was a way for me to make my mark, a way to let Leo know that he wasn’t as safe as he thought he was. What better way to do that than get rid of the person who was meant to protect him?

  I tracked Leo from a hired car, watched him coming out of Leo’s building late at night after a couple of drinks too many. He would wobble slightly on his feet, and I knew he was too far-gone to take any notice of what was going on around him. I shook my head - it was that kind of arrogance that got people killed. Even when I had been at my most successful in the business, I never let my guard down. In that kind of trade, there was always somebody to whom your death would be in their best interests. But Dean was an idiot, always had been, and walked all the way back to his apartment from his workplace along well-lit roads that made it far too easy for me to track him.

  I caught the door as he made his way up into his apartment building, wrapped an arm around his neck, and drove the knife under his ribcage. He never got a look at me, and I preferred it that way. As the life went out of him, I wanted him to think back to all the people he’d hurt and killed over the years, and desperately try to figure out which one of them had finally come for him. There was no way he would know it was me. I was probably far down the list of people he’d hurt over his years working for the Marinos.

  I picked off the rest of Leo’s bodyguards, one by one, until I was satisfied that I had gotten my touch back. I knew that the bodyguards were nothing more than glorified thugs, which would be easy to take down because they were stupid and didn’t have that constant awareness the better-trained members of the Marino crew did. It was the hitmen who would pose a real challenge.

  As I took out the last bodyguard, Ira, he managed to crane his neck around and get a look at me as I drove the knife into him in a clean motion. I tried to look away, but he caught my head with his hands and tilted it down so he could get a proper look at me.

  “Anthony Dorello?” he murmured. “They told me you were… dead…”

  He slumped to the floor with a loud thump, and I cleaned off the knife and pocketed it. So, they thought I was dead? That was useful information to get my hands on. Even more useful? After I had done a scour of Ira’s apartment, I found a slim folder with a run down of the personnel under Leo’s command. Basically, it was a kill list of everyone I needed to take out over the next few weeks.

  I managed to rent out an apartment opposite Leo’s hideout. I gave the landlord a fake name and a handful of cash, and she didn’t ask any questions. It gave me a good vantage point to take in the kind of impact I was having on them - I couldn’t help but smile when I saw Leo glancing over his shoulder nervously as he scuttled into the building, obviously worried that he would be next on the agenda. But I had plenty of people to work through yet.

  The personnel dossier ran down a list of hitmen- but Saffron wasn’t on the list. Well, she was, but she had been crossed off, with a “DECOMISSIONED” scrawled in messy, loopy writing across a picture of her face. What had gone on? I guessed I would never know, but at least I wasn’t obliged to take her out on top of everyone else. Much as I hated her for what she’d done to Sabrina and Lily, I knew this was just a way of life for her, a method through which she could keep herself afloat and alive. Soon enough, she wouldn’t have anyone to work for in the Marino family anyway - so I was glad she got out when she did. I thought of our shared history fondly, but that wouldn’t stop me taking her out if the need arose.

  There were nine hitmen in total, each of them substantially younger than me. I wondered why that was - first Taylor, and now these nine dudes who barely looked like they were out of diapers. Maybe it was a way for him to guarantee that the people around him would be loyal? I remember my dad telling me that, when I first got into the business - that the younger you got guys like that, the easier it was to convin
ce them that this was the only way of like they should be concerned with. The easier it was to guarantee that they wouldn’t go straying anywhere else, or to anyone else. The thought of that sent a shiver of anger down my back. How could he do this to these guys? Especially when he knew the risks that came with it, when he’d seen how many people had been killed or arrested because they didn’t know how to cover their tracks. I wondered how long these kids would have lasted if I wasn’t coming after them - weeks, months, maybe a year? Maybe I was doing them a favor. At least the way I did it, it would be quick.

  I couldn’t be sure who the two guys were who had come after Sabrina all that time ago were, but they had been relatively easy to take down. I recognized the fighting style (or at least, the one they were going for). I just had to hope that these guys would be the same way. In my ransacking of Ira’s apartment, I had found a couple of guns stashed away in his kitchen cupboards. What they were doing there was beyond me, but I managed to stow them away in my bag and smuggle them back up to my apartment. One was a pistol, the other a sniper rifle, and a plan was already forming in my head as to how I could use them.

  The apartment I was in had a window that looked straight out on to Leo’s place, and I knew the cops didn’t come by this way very often, if at all. I basically had the perfect set-up to take down anyone who came out of that building. I was able to acquire some ammo for the sniper rifle, and set myself up in the window, the muzzle pointing straight on to the door where I knew everyone came in and out. They really had made this too easy - I knew that Leo’s father, who had passed the empire down to him, was a lot more careful, and wondered if this slapdashery was part of Leo’s rebellion against him. I wondered how his father had passed away, and I could guarantee that it wasn’t due to some crazy lone wolf like me, or else Leo would be making much more of an effort to protect himself.

  I pinned the picture of the hitmen to the wall and learned their faces off by heart. I even bumped into one of them as I was going down to the corner store for some food, and my heart flipped in my chest as I made eye contact with him, as if he could somehow know what he was planning. The man- Red- simply looked at me for a moment, as though he was trying to place where he’d seen me before, then paid for his cigarettes and left. I let out a long breath and pressed my hand up against the drinks cooler, thanking the Lord that Leo hadn’t put the pieces together and figured out that it was me who was coming after him.

  It took me less than a week to pick them all off. They weren’t subtle about hiding out. I assumed that Leo would have ramped up the security measures at least a little bit, but it turned out that I was wrong. They were walking in and out of there like nothing was different, and I wondered if they even knew what had been going on with the bodyguards. Hell, maybe Leo was keeping it all to himself so no one would get panicked, trying to figure out who was responsible before he went bleating about it to anyone else. I killed them all on the street, my sniper rifle quick and quiet, and Leo’s men cleaned them up before the cops could come out and find a reason to arrest a few people.

  I knew, by that point, that Leo must have been hardcore flipping his shit about everything that was happening. I knew he had never been great at hiding his emotions, and I wondered who he was taking them out on - not, to be fair, that he had much of a choice of the people who were left. I wondered if the rest of his staff were finding themselves constantly glancing over their shoulders, wondering if they were next, beginning to suspect Leo and grow distrustful of him. The smart ones would get out while they still could, and give me one last target to take out. The stupid ones would be loyal and stick around till Leo gave them the signal to go. Not that he ever would. No, if I knew Leo, he would lock down everything around him and make sure that no one could leave the sinking ship while he was still in danger. He’d insulate himself with people - as if that would stop me.

  With all the hitmen gone, I knew that my task was far from over yet. I still had to take out anyone else still left in that building and find out if there were any stragglers that needed my attention. I imagined that once I was done with Leo, the rest of them would scatter, but I needed to be sure. And either way, that required me to get to the boss man himself, and that certainly wasn’t an easy task.

  I had been away for two weeks when I started planning my final attack on the place, and I was beginning to miss Sabrina terribly. I would wake up in the middle of the night and reach over for her, only to find the bed empty where she should have been. I found myself staring at the ceiling, wondering what our life would be look once all of this was dealt with. It was hellish being without her, but it was the driving force behind me getting all of this done. Whenever I had those flashes of panic, those moments where I was convinced that I was going to get found out and dealt with for my trouble, I thought back to her - and promised myself that I was going to get this under control. I wanted her to be able to move through her life without fear, and nothing would get in the way of that. Nothing.

  I sketched out a blueprint of the building as best I could from my memory to figure out where would be best for me to make my way inside. I couldn’t just walk in the front door - as big an impact as that might have made, I’d be taken out in seconds. No, I needed to approach this sideways, find a way in that they weren’t expecting. I paced up and down the tiny apartment, running my hands through my hair as I tried to figure out how to go about it. And then it hit me. Where would they least be expecting me to turn up? Leo’s office.

  The window for his place was on the first floor, and looked out onto the street - it would be a pain to get there, but I could do it. Subdue Leo, and then take out anyone else who was in my way. Then come back and deal with the man himself. Yes, it was perfect - even if it was going to take a bunch of preparation.

  The streets felt quieter when I went out to collect all the equipment I would need to break into Leo’s headquarters. Maybe it was just my imagination, sprung from the fact that I knew there were fewer assholes on the streets thanks to my actions. Or maybe it really was a little safer. The air was calmer and cooler than before, not heated and tense as it had been so many times when I’d come out here when I’d still been working for Leo. How had I survived those times? As I gathered everything, it was hard to remember a time when I would have killed without forethought, without guilt. Now, it felt as though every person I’d taken out over the years was hanging over my head, weighing down on my shoulders, and that the only way I could make things up to them would be to take out Leo for good, to shut down the family that was involved in their death. I knew Leo was the last in his line and had yet to father a kid of his own, so if I took him out then that would be it - it would finally be over.

  I knew when it was time to act. I guess I had been putting it off since I thought of the idea, determined to leave it as late as I could so that I could savor what could well be my last few days actually on this Earth. I ate at my favorite restaurant and had a couple of scotches at the bar I’d frequented since I was way too young to actually drink. I wrote a letter to Sabrina, unsure of how it would get to her if I did end up on the wrong end of Leo’s wrath, but knowing that it had to be written so that everything I felt for her didn’t end up dying with me. I prepared and practiced and ran through every eventuality in my head until I knew there was nothing I could do except, well, do it.

  It had just gotten dark when I left my apartment, stealthy and quiet and under the light of the bone-white full moon. The night felt eerie and a little too quiet, as it had when I had first met Sabrina-I knew that wasn’t a coincidence. I wonder if Leo felt it too, or if he was going about his business as normal, blind to the fact that tonight would be the last one he spent alive. After everything that had happened, everything that I’d done, I couldn’t imagine that he would ever feel safe again. Not that I minded- the more uncomfortable he was, the better. That meant I might be able to get the drop on him while he was distracted by trying to replace all the people he’d lost in the last few weeks.

  I scal
ed the building with relative ease, the homemade grappling hook I’d constructed out of tough wire and rope clinging to the windowsill as I yanked myself up. I paused outside, scrabbling to get a hold of myself before I went through. I felt around for everything - my guns, my knives, my strength, and my courage. As soon as I knew it was all in place, I looked through the window.

  Leo was sitting there, his back to me, his fingertips pressed into his temples, as though he was trying to calm some errant thoughts that were running through his brain. I knew the feeling - that had been me almost the whole time I had been back, worrying that what I was doing was wrong; worrying that it would send me back to being the person I had been before I got out of all of this all those years ago. I stared down at him, the man who had been so instrumental in making me the person that I was today. I couldn’t muster up even a drop of sympathy - not even a glimmer that told me what I was doing was wrong, or that it would change me in ways that I wasn’t prepared for. I needed him gone. I didn’t care how big a part of my life he’d once been, how much he’d influenced me over the years - the sooner he was out of my life, the better. The sooner he was out of Sabrina’s, well, even more so.

  I kicked the window in in one swift motion. It came off its hinge, hanging in the air for a moment before it crashed down behind Leo with a loud crack. He spun around in his chair and saw me scrambling through the hole.