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

by Ada Scott

  The other police officer landed, and between the two of them they managed to flip me back over, get control of my arms and cuff them behind my back, before hauling me to my feet.

  “Fuckin’ hell! We came here because we had some bad news,” one of them said, pushing me along the alley towards the front of the building. “Your mother-”

  “I saw the fuckin’ news.”

  “Yeah, well… once you identify the body, we’re gonna have a big talk. You got something to hide, Mr. Crewe?”

  I hung my head and watched the blood dripping from my nose, landing on my shirt. My extremities still felt numb except for a flare of pain in my back that flashed out to my fingertips every few steps.

  This was completely fucked. The Acardis would be waiting once the police released me. I’d be in the chains Giovanni had threatened me with. I’d never see Sarina again. My mom was dead and I’d never see Sarina again.

  This was all happening so fast that my head was spinning. One cop pressed down on my head as he bundled me into the back of the cruiser.

  I looked dazedly out the windows as my stomach cramped again.

  The cops got in the car, and the passenger cop turned to glance at me as the two of them pulled at their seatbelts. Before either of them could secure themselves, the sound of an engine from our left came loud and clear, and I stared into its headlights with less than a second to prepare for impact.

  The noise of breaking glass and crunching metal was all-consuming. The cop car flipped over on its side at impact, and the three of us bounced around in there like the balls in a lottery.

  With my hands cuffed behind my back, I had no chance to brace myself, and it was all happening so fast that I might not have had any chance anyway. The car teetered on its side for a second, then finally lurched over on to its roof.

  It was all I could do to groan when I heard doors opening and footsteps approaching rapidly. A man wearing a balaclava opened the front passenger door, looked in, pointed a gun at the cop’s head and shot him five times at point blank range with no hesitation.

  Some fucking huge guy, also in a balaclava, reached in the driver’s side door and dragged the other cop out, and I lost sight of him for a second. The next thing I knew, the cop came down on the sidewalk head-first so hard that I could hear the crunch, and he went completely limp.

  The back door opened and the huge guy dragged me out of the car, around the back of their van. They threw me in and I landed on top of two men in suits, beaten to a bloody pulp and restrained, though they were as still as the dead.

  The doors closed and, seconds later, the van left at high speed.

  Sarina

  “Don’t worry so much,” said Millie. “You’ve been killing it in the assignments, you can afford to have a shitty test.”

  “Yeah.”

  I put my bottle of water into the mini-fridge in our dorm floor kitchenette. Tests were never going to be my forte, when I was only getting such good grades on the assignments because the police department outsourced them for me.

  This was especially true given how little time I’d spent keeping up with that aspect of my persona, in comparison with the time I’d spent with Ryan. Not to mention how little I cared about my commerce degree. The charade would be over soon.

  Last night, I was within a hair’s breadth of telling Ryan, but every time the words were on the tip of my tongue, an image flashed through my mind. That hurt and betrayed look that would be on his face fueled what I could only describe as terror in my heart.

  He might do the worst thing possible. He might not love me anymore.

  So I chickened out, again, and now deflecting Millie with test worries was the only way to explain my mood. I couldn’t answer a single thing she quizzed me about at the library, no matter how much extra time we spent there.

  “I’m gonna head down to the cafeteria to catch the ass-end of dinner, you coming?”

  “No, I’m staying with Ryan tonight.”

  “Oh, OK. See you in class tomorrow?”

  “Yep.”

  Millie reached up and patted me on the shoulder. “See ya.”

  “Bye.”

  Without a care in the world, Mille headed back to the elevator so she could extract whatever nutrients as was possible from the cardboard they called food here. I’d only taken a couple steps towards my room when my phone rang.

  I dug it out of my pocket. I didn’t recognize the number and almost declined the call. I wasn’t in the mood to participate in a survey, or hear about the benefits of another cellular network, but that would have been a first on this number, anyway.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Sarina!”

  The voice on the other end was absolutely frantic, laced with so much panic that if I knew the caller, I certainly didn’t recognize them now. Heavy breathing partially masked the sound of yelling and thuds in the background.

  “Yes… who is this?” I asked.

  “It’s Shelton! You need to get out now!”

  My eyes darted around. I saw nobody, but lowered my voice to a harsh whisper anyway, as my heart started to beat faster.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You are compromised, Sarina! A dirty fuckin’ cop ratted you out! They’re coming for you! You understand me? Get out! Run! Disappear until the dust-”

  The sound of splintering wood came down the line and cut off Sergeant Shelton’s words. Less than a second later, I heard the phone clatter to the ground as several gunshots went off. People screamed and then it all went silent for a second, before all I could hear was the sound of a single set of footsteps approaching.

  Two more shots were fired and then the footsteps receded into the distance, until I couldn’t hear them anymore. The blood drained from my face as I hung up.

  Josiah Shelton had just been murdered, and I was next. For several seconds, I stood there frozen and unable to even think, and then I thought about Ryan. If I’d been ratted out, then what did that mean for him?

  Last night, I’d been too afraid to tell him the truth. I’d told myself I was waiting for the perfect time, the perfect wording to come to me. That time and those words would never come now.

  I had to disappear, or I was dead. And I only had today, tonight, one conversation, to convince Ryan to come with me. If it wasn’t already too late.

  My survival instinct kicked in and I raced to my room to retrieve my gun, flicking through the contacts on my phone to Ryan’s number. I was ready to hit dial as I flung the door open.

  A hand reached out, grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into the room hard, sending me falling to the floor. My phone bumped out of my hand and skidded under my bed.

  I scrambled back to my feet, turning to meet my attacker as I arranged my keys in my fist to poke out between my fingers as quickly and as secretively as I could.

  I saw that there were two men in my room. The one who yanked me in had his head out the door, looking both ways as if he was going to cross the street, and the other was holding a gleaming machete.

  Satisfied that the hallway was clear, the first guy closed my door and stood behind the machete-wielder. I folded my arms over myself protectively, looking as meek as possible but hiding my keys.

  The one with the machete spoke first. “Y’know, for somebody with “Screamer” written on her door, I expected a lot more noise. Doesn’t bother me though, there’s still time.”

  Screaming would probably only put some innocent college student into harm’s way.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “The fuck does it matter, bitch? All you need to know is that the Acardi Family sends its regards.”

  The world slowed down to a pace where my entire life flashed before my eyes between each heartbeat, and I saw that machete rise as the guy lifted it for a swing. I leapt forward with every scrap of speed I could possibly muster, unfolding my arms to cock my own fist back as I went.

  He was still halfway through a swipe of the blade that would have cut
me off at the knees when I stepped inside the arc of the swing, too close for him to hit me, and trapped his arm under my own. With a swift uppercut, I impaled his stomach on the three short spikes of my makeshift knuckleduster, then landed another one on his neck, sinking them in and twisting as I pulled out.

  The machete dropped to the floor, sticking into the ground tip-first as the man fell backwards, with his eyes bulging in shock and clamping his hands to his throat to try to stem the flow of his lifeblood leaving his body. He crashed against the wall and sank to his ass on the floor, gurgling. He couldn’t have known that it used to say “Badass” on my door, before the current nickname.

  The man who’d thrown me into the room was wordlessly shocked by the turn of events. He was fumbling inside his jacket when he saw me reaching for the machete with my free hand. Judging that he wouldn’t be able to draw his gun before he lost his head, he found his voice and charged me.

  “Fuckin’ bitch!”

  I swung for the fences, but he managed to partially block my punch so the keys scraped along the side of his head instead of taking out his eyes. A second later, his forehead connected with my face, just below my eye, and I saw stars as his momentum propelled us both backwards.

  My heel caught on the machete protruding from the ground and I felt a searing pain along the back of my calf, before I fell against the edge of my bed with my assailant on top, knocking the wind out of me. We both fell to the floor.

  Gasping for air, I jack-hammered my fist into his torso, stabbing him as many times as I could while he frantically struggled to catch my wrist, punch me, smother me, anything to stop the wounds from adding up to something that would take his life.

  I swung again and felt his fingers wrap around my arm, holding it fast. He punched me in the face hard enough to bring the stars back. In a daze, I felt my fingers pried open and my keys ripped out of my grasp.

  My vision cleared again when I felt his hands wrapping around my throat. The first thing I saw when that haze lifted was all that hate in his eyes.

  I tried to think. I tried to remember my training, but this was real life. In training, I was never distracted by a brutal assault before a lesson about self-defense technique. I never fought somebody who had been sent with the sole purpose of killing me.

  You’ve got about five seconds to remember before you lose consciousness.

  Ryan

  The van skidded to a halt. The men up front jumped out, then the back door opened. The huge guy climbed in and put a hood over my head. He hauled me outside, marching me several steps and into the back seat of another car.

  Somebody opened the trunk, and I heard some groans and weak protests as, no doubt, the two people who’d accompanied me in the back of the van were packed in. One of our two masked abductors climbed into the front seat.

  “Don’t move, don’t try anything.”

  I shook my head, as much to pacify him as to clear it. Under my fingers, amongst the trash on the backseat of a generally untidy car, I felt something that might just have been a paperclip.

  Through the hood, I saw the unmistakable light of a fire flaring up in the direction of the van, and a few seconds later the driver got in. I heard the sound of wiring being ripped from under the dashboard, then the car started. Before the fire got bigger, we were off again, though at a comparatively leisurely pace.

  “Don’t move, don’t try anything,” said the driver.

  “I told him that already,” said the other one.

  “Oh.”

  One of them made a phone call. “Hey… yeah, we got him… He’s still in one piece… Yeah… We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  “Hell of a day,” said the driver.

  “Yup.”

  I unfolded the paperclip and tried to focus on bending it into the right shape. I’d managed to pick the lock on handcuffs a couple of times before. When I could see what I was doing. When I didn’t have a countdown to death clock ticking down from “a few” minutes, overwhelming everything else in my mind.

  I worked on my restraints, as the car made a few lefts and rights, staying below the speed limit. I had no idea how far the van might have gone at that breakneck pace, but there was no doubt we were still pretty central.

  Finally, it turned off the road, and I felt it go down a steep ramp into an underground parking lot. A second before the driver turned the engine off, I twisted the paperclip and felt the cuff loosen on my left wrist.

  Between the time they stepped out and opened the back door, I slipped my hand out and held the cuff behind my back so it wouldn’t be obvious I had freed myself.

  “Out.”

  I swung my feet out of the car and stood up. One of them put his hands on my shoulders and moved me to the side, then leaned me against the car by the rear wheel well so he could close the door.

  I took a deep breath, trying to figure out exactly where the two of them were standing, which way was light and which way was dark. I had one chance to run, and fucked if I wanted to run straight into a motherfucking concrete wall.

  “You comin’ up?” a voice came from such a height that it could only be the huge guy.

  “Nah, I’ll wait here until Mr. Barlow tells me what to do with these jerk-offs, make sure nothin’ happens to ‘em.”

  I fucking ran, swinging my hands up to rip the hood from my head. I got maybe ten feet before the big guy caught me, moving at a speed I would have thought almost impossible for somebody of his size.

  I whirled around with a haymaker punch and he blocked it easily, with an expression on his face as calm as he might have had watching the weather report. It was a face I vaguely recognized.

  The fight drained out of me at the ridiculous hopelessness of the situation. Not only was he huge, he was Austin Fucking Aquila, the MMA heavyweight champion. What in the fuck was going on?

  I waited for a knockout punch that never came. Instead, he spun me around and reattached the handcuff before pushing me back towards, and then past, the car. The other guy had taken off his balaclava too and was sitting on the trunk, lighting a cigarette.

  At least he wasn’t the middleweight champion. I didn’t recognize him at all.

  “No, no, don’t get up. I got this,” said Austin, sarcastically.

  The other guy gave him the thumbs up and the two of us headed for the elevator. Another car parked right next to the elevator, and the guy who got out nodded at Austin, before falling into step behind us. As soon as I stepped inside, I knew this wasn’t the Acardi building; it was a completely different style.

  “Who do you work for?” I asked.

  “You’ll have to talk to my brother about that,” said Austin.

  We stepped out of the elevator into a poorly-lit office space that looked to be undergoing renovations. Some guy sat at a desk with a headset on, staring at a six-screen display setup full of fuck-knew what.

  He paid no attention to me, but another guy wearing a suit who was almost as tall as Austin, if slightly less muscle-bound, was scrutinizing me carefully. Austin pushed me down into a seat.

  “Watch him,” said the guy who must have been Austin’s brother, then turned to the strong silent type who had ridden up the elevator with us. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be killing somebody in an hour?”

  “Romano said he was gonna watch a movie, and he didn’t want anybody to disturb him for the next few hours. He was pretty much begging to die early.”

  “OK. As long as nobody finds him ahead of schedule.”

  “They won’t.”

  My brow furrowed. “Romano… Acardi?”

  Austin’s brother told the killer to sit tight in case he needed him for anything else and then turned to me. “That’s right. Romano Acardi had an unfortunate run in with a bullet, it seems.”

  “Who the fuck do you people work for?” I asked.

  “Me. I’m Jace Barlow.” He pulled up a chair and sat opposite me, looking at my face carefully. “I know you’re having the worst day of you
r life, Ryan. Do you know why this is all happening yet? Did the Acardis tell you?”

  “No.”

  Jace looked up at his brother, then back to me and sighed. “Today… the Acardis found out that your girlfriend is… a cop.”

  My ears rang as if in the aftermath of some kind of silent explosion and it felt like somebody was shoving an icicle through my chest. I shook my head and curled up a little as my stomach cramped again.

  “No. No. No, no, no. That’s… that’s not possible.”

  “It’s possible, and it’s true. The Acardis tried to find out some background about her, starting from just after Christmas as far as we can tell. They got real suspicious when all their leads ran into dead ends, and they just heard today from one of their sources inside the police department that she’s an undercover cop. They decided to go scorched-earth on you. The cops that picked you up worked for the Acardi Family. They weren’t taking you to the police station, they were taking you to your lab, where I understand they’re installing some shackles.”

  I buried my face in my hands, then slid my palms to the side of my head as if trying to hold my skull together. The idea of Sarina as a cop after all this time threatened to blow it apart. The fucking love of my life? I groaned.

  “They sent some soldiers to kill your mom. I’m so sorry we didn’t get there in time to stop them. They’ve sent others to kill Sarina, and anybody who knew who she was.”

  I sat bolt upright as if struck by lightning. “You gotta stop them!”

  Jace raised an eyebrow. “Why? Let them do your dirty work for you.”

  “No! I... I’ve got to hear it from her with my own ears. Please…”

  Jace stared at me for a frustratingly long time while I tried not to scream my request again as if he hadn’t heard. Finally, he turned to the strong-silent-type.

  “Alright, Eric. Since you’ve got some free time, go get her, bring her back if it’s not too late. Cumberland Dorm, room… four-fifteen, right?” He looked to me.

  “Yes.”

  Jace turned back to Eric. “Go. Right now.”