Stockholm Syndromance: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 4)

by Ada Scott

  “I know who the fuck you are.”

  “Please, Dad, I’m sorry! You need... I’m begging you… if you ever loved me, please stop this.”

  “Do you think I’m fucking stupid?” Vito asked.

  “What?”

  The sound of a fist hitting Eliana’s stomach made my blood boil. “Don’t you ever fucking touch her again, you cocksucker!”

  I strained uselessly at everything holding me back and only took a right-hook to the face for my troubles.

  “Shut the fuck up. You two. You fucking two.”

  “Dad…” Eliana croaked.

  “You...” The disgust was thick in his voice as he tried to find the words. “Love? You? Listen closely, you stupid bitch.” I heard him leaning over Eliana. “All you ever were was a life-support system for a cunt that I could sell. Well, you went and ruined the merchandise for the buyer, didn’t you? Now, you are truly worthless. What would the Capons want with you now? Any real Italian man? Fuckin’ nothing. I’m going to leave you here with these animals as partial payment for their help in tracking you down. You’re more use to my campaign dead. My approval ratings have gone through the roof since they found out you’d been kidnapped. When they hear your corpse has been found with the semen of fifty unknown men in you, they’ll know I’ll never back down on my campaign promises. To me, you’re dead, and soon you’ll wish you were. Hell, if you survive whatever they do to you, maybe I’ll buy you back so you can work in one of my low-end clubs where all the drug-addicts who can’t afford the good stuff go to get laid. You’ll be the slut in the iron mask and I’ll come visit every couple years just to listen to you beg.”

  Vito rose to full height, getting out of Eliana’s face, and took a step back. Eliana was so deathly silent that I could even hear Vito adjusting his clothes as he took stock of the situation.

  “I just wanted to come see with my own eyes and make sure they got the right bitch. And you?” He directed his voice at me. “I’m gonna enjoy watching the video. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m speaking to a crowd in Greenport this afternoon and I’m going to be interrupted by such terrible news, I need to prepare myself.” He chuckled at his own words.

  After a few seconds of silence, those cold footsteps went out the door, closed it behind him and receded back the way they came. Eliana couldn’t have been quieter if she wasn’t even in the room with me anymore, but I could hear her heart breaking as clear as day.

  “Eliana-”

  “Don’t say anything. Don’t speak.” Her voice was choked almost to the point of being closed off completely.

  Eliana

  It wasn’t until several of the Smoke Devil bikers untied us from the chairs, shoving me and carrying the still well-restrained Eric into the harsh sunlight, that I even began to pull myself together. Bikers were crowded around the courtyard at ground level and some were sitting on scaffolding that was probably normally used for patrolling, but was now nothing more than a grandstand for whatever grisly end they had in store for us.

  The two bloodstained posts driven into the ground about six feet apart from each other looked like something people in front of a firing squad would be attached to. My legs stopped working, and when the nearest biker shoved me, I fell to the ground.

  Without missing a beat, they lifted me by my armpits and my feet dragged along the ground as I stared ahead at our impending doom. Apparently they weren’t too fussed that they wouldn’t have a standing target when they set me down on the ground with my back to the post and secured my arms around it.

  Two big guys had a hold of Eric’s arms on each side as they secured him to the other post, still with that blood-soaked hood over his head. Instead of simply leaving him like that, they attached metal cables to each of his arms and legs, as well as one looped over his neck like a noose.

  To my horror, they unraveled these cables in five different directions, towards five different bikers who were walking their bikes back into position, and attached them. They were going to tear him apart.

  “Eric, they’re-”

  “I can guess.”

  Keith addressed the crowd on all sides, launching into a history of the club and what they’d always done to rivals and anybody who crossed them. He worked them into a frenzy while the finishing touches were put on to the upcoming spectacle.

  “I’m sorry,” said Eric. “I’m sorry for bringing you into this. You shouldn’t die here.”

  My chest felt like it was being crushed by grief. My teeth clenched up as I tried to get my words out, because he couldn’t see that I was shaking my head.

  “No. If it wasn’t for you, I never would have lived at all. Thank you, Eric. Thank you for this week. Thank you for letting me feel what hope was like.”

  The bikers eased their motorcycles forward, pulling at the cables until there was little slack left. I could see Eric’s chest rising and falling as he hyperventilated.

  “I wish I could see you,” he said.

  I stretched out with my foot and touched his. “I’m here.”

  My vision blurred and I blinked away tears, hugging his one foot with two of mine as best as I could. This couldn’t be the end. After everything we’d done, this couldn’t be it, but Keith seemed to be winding down to an inevitable conclusion.

  “Eric, we’re running out of time.”

  “I know.”

  “Could you… say… you d-don’t have to mean it, but if you don’t say it now then I won’t ever hear it. C-could you p-please say you love me?”

  “Engines ready!” yelled Keith, and five bikes roared. “Everybody, this is for you. Count this cocksucker’s life down. Ten!”

  “I love you, Eliana. You’re easy to love. I mean it.”

  All around us the bikers joined in the countdown. “Nine! Eight! Seven!”

  “I love you too,” I said.

  “Six! Five!”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Four!”

  “That’s my man.”

  “Three! T-”

  KA-BOOM!

  An explosion akin to the one that had erupted from Eric’s car on the first day I met him incinerated a good number of bikers at the rear of the compound while opening up a similar hole in the wall. Some of them up on the walls near the gates opened fire into the crowd below. I could feel the heat on my face from here.

  Masked men with assault rifles poured in through the gates as well as the HQ’s newly-torn asshole. It was chaos, with bullets flying in all directions and so many weapons firing at once that my ears were almost bleeding. The bikers on the other end of the cables were either killed or running for cover and I suddenly realized Eric was screaming something at me.

  “Get down! Get down! Play dead!”

  He was already getting as low as he could, and I did the same, shuffling on to my stomach with my arms bent uncomfortably to the side behind me. I tried to keep as still as possible while gallons of blood were spilled all around me, watching it in shock through almost-closed eyes.

  Just when the firefight seemed to be petering out, another explosion came from somewhere behind me and warm air blasted over us, kicking up dust and sending bikers running in the opposite direction, some of them on fire. One of them ran for the bike attached to the loop around Eric’s neck and heaved it up off the ground.

  I took a deep breath, forgetting about playing dead and preparing myself for an involuntary scream when half of the biker’s brains sprayed out the side of his head. My relief didn’t even last a second.

  As the biker fell sideways, the bike lurched forwards, pulling the cable tight before tipping over. Eric was yanked away from me, coming to an abrupt stop as his arms were stretched out behind him, still attached to the post.

  I could see his veins standing out on his neck as the cable bit into him and he struggled for his fucking life to somehow make the cable go slack. He made awful strangled gurgling sounds that wrenched the most painful scream of my life out of me.

  Shrieking so loudly I thought
the bloody lining of my throat was going to start flying out, I tried to pull the post out of the ground, break it, anything, so I could get over to him. I’d pull that bike back with my teeth if I had to.

  But I couldn’t. The post wasn’t breaking, and neither were my restraints. Instead of watching him get torn apart, I had to watch him get hanged sideways.

  Suddenly, I realized the loudest sounds in the courtyard were my screams and Eric’s tortured breaths. One of the masked men strolled casually, and infuriatingly slowly, over to the cable and dragged the bike a couple of feet in our direction, and Eric slumped to the ground, blood seeping out from under the loop on his neck.

  With his assault rifle slung back nonchalantly over his shoulder, he walked up to Eric, eased the cable off, and removed the hood. The color of his face was already returning to normal, if slightly beaten up, but even from here I could see a bluish tinge to his lips.

  “And who the fuck might you be?” said the man from behind his mask, which I could now see was a bandana.

  Eric

  When Jace said he was going to fund the Ex-Machina retaliation on The Smoke Devils he meant it. It was always a strange sight to see a motorcycle club with matching Kevlar and assault rifles rather than whatever they managed to steal along the way, but Jace had changed a lot of things since coming into power.

  Eliana had insisted on patching me up herself when one of the Ex Machina guys found a first aid kit that hadn’t been blown to hell in the hostile takeover. That was putting it mildly, the more realistic description was that she was ready to rip the hand off anybody who tried to fix me up, including myself.

  It was probably for the best. She had an attention to detail that went a long way beyond her experience, which was all second-hand via videos before she met me.

  She didn’t say anything about what we’d thought were our last words tied to those posts out there. She was so absorbed in the task at hand that I couldn’t even be completely sure if she remembered them.

  I sure did. The whole time I was out there with that hood on, especially when I was almost getting torn apart at the end, all I wanted to do was see her face one last time. I wanted it to be the last thing I ever saw.

  By the time she was done, I felt halfway human again. Except for my neck. That was still fucking killing me.

  Eliana was packing everything back into the kit when I stood up and buried my hands in the hair on either side of her head, pulling her close and leaning down so our foreheads touched. At this distance I was swimming in those beautiful blue oceans she called eyes.

  “I love you,” I said.

  Her nose wrinkled happily. “Love you too.”

  I kissed her and stood a little taller while she rose up on the tips of her toes to stay with me. When our lips parted, her heels came down again and she rested her forehead against my chest for a second before Charlie, the Ex Machina man in charge of the raid, popped his head in.

  “Hey, y’all wanna shoot a fish in a barrel?”

  I raised my eyebrow for a second, but the two of us followed him back into the building where we’d been waiting for Eliana’s father to show up. In the very room where we’d awaited our fate, Keith himself was sitting. He looked a little worse for wear.

  “You motherfuckin’ cunt, you’re gonna get what’s coming to you, when the rest of the brothers hear what the fuck went down today, you won’t catch us off guard again.”

  Charlie held up a couple of guns, giving me a choice between an M4 carbine and an AR-15. I opted for fully-automatic.

  “Just think, if your speech had been as short as this you might not be in this mess.”

  I opened fire on the son of a bitch at nearly point-blank range, making sure his corpse had its balls shot off before the magazine ran out of bullets. Charlie accepted the weapon back.

  “You’re a man of few words,” he said.

  “Yeah. I’ve got places to be. Did you see a car leave here within 30 minutes before you guys arrived? A convoy maybe?”

  “Nah. Some suit arrived and fucked off in a helicopter though.”

  “Was he carrying anything when he left?”

  “No, I watched him through the binoculars myself. Wasn’t carrying anything but a resting-bitch-face on the way in or out,” Charlie said.

  “OK. I need a bike, a gun, a prepay phone and a couple helmets. Some jackets too, nothing patched, I want to stay neutral. Maybe a few hundred bucks of spending money.”

  “There should be some spares around here. I’ll see what I can rustle up for you, get you sent on your way.”

  Charlie left us there with Keith’s well-aerated body. I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, then ran my fingers through my hair, feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders.

  “What now?” Eliana asked.

  “The job just got tough,” I said.

  “What? Just now?”

  “Yeah. I gotta figure out what happened to that briefcase and get it back if it didn’t get disintegrated in the raid.”

  Ex Machina were already looking under every rock within the walls of the former Smoke Devils HQ, looking for stashes of drugs, weapons, cash and scared-shitless Smoke Devils in bolt-holes. Unfortunately, they didn’t turn up anything that looked like the briefcase, and there wasn’t any mangled metal in the wreckage of the explosions that looked a likely candidate either.

  So, within the hour, Eliana and I were on our new bike and heading forward again. This time around she wasn’t grabbing for my cock and if she was enjoying herself as much as the first ride, I couldn’t hear her through our helmets.

  All she did was hold on tight, and that was fine by me because I had a logistical nightmare on my hands. Where the fuck was the case now?

  As far as I could see, there were a three likely options. When we were caught in the middle of the night there were police, and some suits. Maybe they were Folliero soldiers or maybe they worked for somebody more local, like Costanzo Capon on behalf of Vito.

  If the Mafia soldiers had it, they’d probably take it to Costanzo or one of his generals. If the police had taken it, it was going to be locked up in their evidence storage in Anchorville.

  My heart sank at either prospect. My face was all over the media and all my recent injuries not only slowed me down but drew unwanted attention too.

  With public pressure no doubt mounting, I must have been one of the most wanted men in the country at the moment. Especially if Vito had somehow gone ahead with his planned announcement about Eliana.

  It would take careful planning, a shitload of luck, and testicles made of solid stainless steel to walk into a busy hub of law enforcement activity or a pissed-off Mafia boss’ headquarters and demand Jace’s ill-gotten property back.

  The third option was by far the one I disliked the least. It was possible that the entire car had simply been towed and impounded. The police in attendance weren’t acting in an official capacity, so they weren’t necessarily going to do things by the book.

  For them, to keep things smoothed over for Vito, this might have turned into a simple stolen vehicle recovery situation. It might be sitting in a private impound while the incorrect license plates caused a bit of confusion as they tried to find the real owner.

  In the past, when my car broke down and the fault could be any one of fifty different things, my rule of thumb was to go through the possibilities from easiest-to-hardest to fix. That was my plan now.

  I turned our bike off the main road, heading back to where we’d been captured. When we arrived there, I was going to call the city to complain about a derelict car on the side of the road and see who arrived to tow it.

  Ahead, in the darkness, I saw the light from the motorcycle reflected from the back of a car. Inside my helmet, my jaw slowly opened as we rolled up to it.

  Right where we left it, sitting in the middle of what glass hadn’t fallen inside when the windows were smashed, was our car. I rolled to a stop and kicked the stand down, pausing for a second the way I would if s
omebody was playing a trick on me before stepping off the bike.

  Hoping for the impossible, I opened the trunk, then lied down on the ground and flipped the visor up so I could laugh in half-crazed disbelief up at the stars. Eliana stepped into view, her own visor raised as well.

  “Just notice your fly is undone or something?” she asked.

  “The case is still there. I can’t fucking believe it. I mean, they didn’t know we had it, but each of them must have assumed that searching and taking care of the car was somebody else’s responsibility and they all fucked off and left it here. Holy shit!”

  Aside from Eliana herself, nothing had gone quite right on this job, so this piece of good luck was really tickling me. The most beautiful woman I’d ever had my hands on crossed her arms and waited for me to get it out of my system with a bemused expression peeking out from her helmet.

  Finally, I sighed. “Alright, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  Eliana

  Rockwell was a city in quiet turmoil. Riding in, we passed a few sites of recently burned-out buildings and the city-center was nowhere near as busy as you would expect for a Friday.

  Something had happened here within the last week, and if Jace Barlow was involved, then maybe the Pirozzi Crime Family didn’t exist anymore. That’s what he did. Everybody who stood in his way, and some who stood by his side, died painfully.

  Mafia refugees of his underworld war had been migrating away from the east coast for a couple of years now as people sought out a new place for themselves after their own organizations were ripped to shreds. Initial arrogance had quickly given way to surprise, anger and, finally, horror at what seemed unstoppable.

  I didn’t hear much of my father’s business, but I heard about Jace Barlow. I heard about him, for sure.

  Eric rode the bike into an underground parking lot under some skyscraper and parked in an empty space that was marked as reserved for the CFO of Bridgerscorp Finance. When he turned off the engine, it was deathly silent if you didn’t count the booming of my heart in my ears.