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

by Ada Scott

  “Yes, sir.”

  Eric didn’t walk, he ran to the elevator and disappeared a moment later. I hung my head for a moment, then lifted it again, only to let it flop backwards. I stared at the ceiling. Fuck this day.

  “It never rains but it pours, huh Ryan?” Jace said.

  I managed to bring my focus back to him. “What does that mean?”

  “It means everything always fuckin’ happens at once. We’ve been infiltrating this city for months now and all this shit happens today, when we were going to take the Acardis down anyway. That’s why we were stretched so thin. I didn’t have anybody close enough to the hospital to stop it.”

  “What are you, like, a shitty fairy godmother failing to look out for me or something?”

  “I think you’re already dealing with enough that I’m not going to get all puffed up with my own self-importance at the way you’re talking to me.,” Jace said. “No, I’m not your fairy godmother. I was thinking about being your employer, though.”

  “Not interested,” I said.

  “Hear me out. You’re the whole reason I’m here. I was looking for you. I found out you were the F King a few weeks ago. Even the cops don’t know that. Your girlfriend hasn’t reported it if she knew it.”

  “She didn’t.”

  I felt like my body suddenly weighed a thousand times more at the mention of her name. I struggled to readjust myself in my seat.

  “Austin, you got the keys for these cuffs?” Jace asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Get them off him.”

  Austin reached behind my back and I heard a click. He took the cuffs away and took a seat near the elevators and the exit to the stairwell.

  “I’ve been thinking about you a lot,” Jace continued. “I was wondering if you’re loyal to them, or if you might be convinced to work for me. After what happened today, I know you ain’t loyal to them, but you say you don’t want to work for me either.”

  I watched him with dead eyes.

  “So, let me lay out my benefits package for you to consider. Believe it or not, I know what you’re going through. I saw my own mother get killed by… well, not these fucks, but fucks a lot like them. I made it my mission in life to take them down. First, I took Port Magnus from the Picollis, then we took New Ashby from the Bertolinis. After that, it became apparent that all these old mafia families are one and the same, interconnected. The only way to make sure they don’t grow back is to fucking kill them all. I had to make sure my next move hit them in the biggest single money-making operation any of them had, and that’s you and your F. They buried you deep. They’re not exactly like the other mafia families where you can sneak into their house and steal their fucking Rolodex. My guy Dan here,” he gestured at the man at the computer, who waved without looking, “can hack anything from anywhere, but in the end it was easier to buy this building right across the road from Trafford Tower, so we could get mainline access to the data cabling under the street.”

  I looked at the windows, which were covered by vertical Venetian blinds. “We’re…?”

  Jace nodded. “Right across the street. Anyway, the benefits package. The first thing I’ll promise you is that, if you work for me, I’ll make sure you get all the revenge you can handle. You will make them hurt on a daily basis, and I’m not just talking about in the wallet. I’m talking about every kind of pain that you’ve felt today, and more. Nothing will bring her back, and I can’t promise any amount of revenge will even the score in your mind.”

  I dropped my eyes from Jace and leaned forward so that my elbows were resting on my knees. “I’m listening.”

  “Second. Consider it a signing bonus. You might have noticed two guys in the back of the van with you? These are the guys who killed your mother. We didn’t get there in time to stop them… but we got there in time to pick them up. They are my unconditional gift. To you. They are your property. I have some places, and some tools, you might like to use if you want to… talk to them.”

  Every beat of my heart was like the worst cramp I’d ever felt. I felt hot flushes and my hands bunched up into tight fists, shaking with anger. To know that the two men that killed my mother had been so close, they had been my makeshift mattress, really, was overwhelming.

  The dreams I’d been having about that peaceful future on some nameless tropical island with Sarina, my mother living out her golden years in a nearby mansion… that was falling to the ground around me like a shattered window. There could never be peace, but there could be vengeance.

  “What do you need from me?”

  “You’re gonna have to relocate someplace where nobody knows you if you want to live a life any better than the chains the Acardis thought they were going to put you in tonight. I’ll set you up with a new lab, new staff, new accommodation. I’ll match what the Acardis were paying you and, if you don’t fuck around with me, I’ll give you the respect a man of your expertise deserves. That’s true, isn’t it, Dan?”

  “All good, boss,” said Dan, not taking his eyes from the screens.

  “So, do we have a deal?” Jace asked.

  I swallowed down the lump in my throat, the grief for the life that could never happen, and cleared my throat. My mother was dead. Sarina… maybe dead too. “Yeah. Yeah, I think we do. You said the Acardis were going down tonight. How?”

  I walked to the window, peeking between the blinds at the Acardi building across the street. Jace stood next to me.

  “We’ve got the locations of about half the Acardis’ upper hierarchy in the city and nearby suburbs surrounded by my men, ready for a coordinated strike that’s going to tear the city out of their grasp in one fell swoop. Dan’s got control of all the money that can be reached electronically, and we have locations of billions more that they’ve got stockpiled.”

  “You know… if you wait a couple weeks, the Acardi bosses all have a meeting right there in their building. You could have them all in one place instead of half of them all over the city,” I said.

  “Alberico is scheduled to be out of town in a couple of weeks and, besides, Romano is already dead. They’re gonna know something is up when they find him, when they find the dirty cops that were going to bring you in. Things are in motion already, and that building is a fortress.”

  “Hmmm. If we could get the bosses there tonight, I could give them to you.”

  “Right, but we can’t. And when I said that building is a fortress, I didn’t mean it looked like a fortress or they just call it a fortress. It’s a fucking fortress. They can lock that shit down so tight you couldn’t get in with a tank before help or the authorities arrived. They have anti-aircraft guns on the roof.”

  “We actually can get them there,” said Dan.

  Jace and I looked over at the guy who had turned away from his computer screens for the first time.

  “They know how safe that building is. They’ve outlined siege scenarios, remember? If they were threatened enough, the bosses would make a run for the tower. They’ll toss out everybody who doesn’t work for them and then lock it down.”

  “OK,” Jace said. “That’s great and all, but it doesn’t change the fact that they’re not wrong. Even I can’t sneak in the kind of firepower through the streets of Highston that we’d need once they close the doors.”

  “I have a plan. The question is, can we threaten them enough? You said you’ve got teams around locations covering about half the underbosses?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Pull them out, all except one, and send them to the money and weapon stashes instead.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve got a plan.”

  Sarina

  The elevator dinged and the man, who had identified himself as a federal agent to people as he marched me out of Cumberland in a black hood, pushed me forward into the unknown. I very much doubted that he worked for the FBI.

  In the darkness I heard a choked gasp, followed by the sound of someone collapsing into an office chair. The man kep
t urging me forward.

  “She put up a fight?” somebody asked.

  “Fuck yes she did. She’s not above aiming for the nuts when she’s backed in a corner. Found her in her room driving a fuckin’ machete into some Acardi goon’s belly,” the man said. He hadn’t spoken a word since securing my feet and wrists and hurling me into the back of his car.

  He whipped off my hood. I was in some half-renovated, but, if the computer workstation was any evidence, functional office. How many floors up, I had no idea.

  I saw the person who’d asked if I put up a fight. He was a dark-haired man in a suit with tattoos that snaked and swirled out from under the collar and cuffs. I saw a man at the workstation… and then I saw Ryan.

  Ryan was sitting in a chair near the window, looking at me like he’d seen a ghost. Pale and showing signs of having been in his own battles tonight, he sat silently.

  He looked like he’d been to hell and back, and I probably didn’t look any better with my bleeding nose, bruised neck, black eye and the slow-seeping wound on my calf. I would have thought we were going to be executed together, if the guy hadn’t just mentioned “some Acardi goon.” If these weren’t the Acardis, then who were they?

  “What’s happening? Who are you?” I asked.

  “Could you guys give us a few minutes?” Ryan asked.

  The tattooed man in the suit looked at Ryan and thought for a second. “OK. Not too long, the cars are already arriving thick and fast. Eric, cut her loose and take a break in the stairwell. Austin, take the elevator down and make sure Stefano isn’t lonely, nobody uses it until I call you back up. Dan, let’s get some coffee.”

  Eric cut the cable ties around my wrists, as he had done with the ties that had bound my ankles when we arrived in the parking lot. Everybody murmured their compliance and gave me a wide-berth as they left the room, including a big guy by the door I hadn’t seen.

  It was deathly quiet when the door clicked shut behind them. I rubbed my wrists and tentatively walked towards Ryan.

  Instead of rising to meet me, when I got too near he pushed the chair back and took a step away from me as if repulsed by my closeness. My heart shriveled up like dead fruit on a vine and stopped me cold in my tracks. I dropped my eyes.

  “You’re a cop,” he said, simply.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know what happened today?”

  “No.”

  “The Acardis killed my mom.”

  My eyes shot back up to him and tears started pouring from swollen and halfway-normal eye alike. My legs threatened to collapse under me for a second, as I brought my hands to my mouth and sobbed, but then I steadied myself and reached out for him.

  He stepped back again. “Don’t touch me, Sarina.”

  I halted. My arms dropped to my sides uselessly and I hung my head. My hair fell in front of my eyes, and for a moment I felt the ghost memory of those tugs as Diana had braided it.

  “What is your real name anyway?” he asked.

  “Sarina Beckett. Ryan, I-”

  “You…” He held up his finger like somebody making a point, and shook it in the air a few times as he winced, trying to hold back his own tears. “You… they killed her because they found out I let a cop too close to their cash cow. To the F King. Me.”

  “You’re…”

  “Yes.”

  “Ryan, please… I’m so sorry! I didn’t want this to happen!”

  He sighed. “How much of it was a lie?”

  “A lot less than you think.”

  All I wanted to do was to go to him and feel his arms around me, to pour my love and support into him and feel it flow back into my own body, bouncing between us and getting stronger every time. But Diana was dead because of me.

  “Just last night I told you I’d love you forever. It was a lifetime ago… do you remember?”

  I nodded, feeling the tears running freely down my cheeks.

  “I wondered how I could have been so lucky to have you drop into my life. I guess now I know.” He paused. “But, what I felt for you was real. It was real and good. Something perfect in a piece of shit world. You made me dream about taking that perfection and taking it somewhere else where all this bullshit could never touch us.”

  “I wanted that too,” I said quietly.

  “That can’t happen now.”

  My head hung again and I felt as if I was melting like the Wicked Witch of the West.

  “But Sarina… I still love you. You’re the only thing left in the world that I love. Do you still love me? Was it real to you? Tell me. Tell me and I’ll believe you.”

  I looked up at him, my eyes as wide as the swelling would allow, feeling the spark of hope in the middle of the grief and despair.

  “Yes, I do.”

  Ryan’s face lost any hint of calm and he quickly closed the physically short but emotionally huge distance between us. His arms were around me and I never wanted him to let go. I held him back as tightly as I could and buried my face against his chest, shutting out the rest of the world for what might have been a second or an hour until he put his hands on my shoulders and held me at arm’s length.

  “I’m Ryan. You’re Sarina. I know you. You know me. But life is going to be... very different. You have to know what you’re getting into. I’m not some cosmetics entrepreneur, you’re not a college student or a cop. I’m gonna go through hell and do some hellish things. I asked you, once before, to fight with me. If you’re gonna be with me now… you gotta be with me in this. Will you stay with me, Sarina? Will you remind me that we’ll have a life after this shit is done?”

  I gulped. The last scrap of my mind that aspired to a law enforcement career tipped its hat and walked out the door.

  “I love you, Ryan. I trust you. I won’t ever let you down again. You and me, OK?”

  “Yes.”

  Ryan kissed me and pulled me into another hug that might have lasted forever, if somebody hadn’t cleared their throat. The tattooed-suit-wearer was standing there with the computer-worker he’d called Dan.

  The door to the stairwell opened, and Eric walked through as the lights on the elevator started counting up. It felt like the eye of the storm was moving on and things were about to get bad.

  “We good?” the tattooed-suit-wearer asked.

  “Yeah. Sarina, this is Jace Barlow. Jace, this is Sarina B… Beckett.”

  Jace nodded at me but I didn’t even know how to respond, recognizing the face now that I had a name to go with it. The millionaire from Port Magnus?

  “It’s time,” Jace said. “They’re locked down. Dan, get the blinds.”

  The elevator dinged and the big guy named Austin stepped back through as Dan pulled on a cord that twisted the vertical Venetians so that we could see through it. I immediately recognized the Trafford Tower.

  Ryan guided me towards the closest desk to the window and pulled out his phone. Everybody lined up next to us. He tapped a few buttons and set the phone down.

  I looked at it and saw a picture of a big red button there, like the kind you imagine the President might have installed somewhere in the Oval Office.

  “This is it, Sarina,” said Ryan. “You press this button and there’s no going back. The old life ends, you’re not a cop anymore. It’s not a symbolic button. You press it and people die. The people who did this to my mom, to you… to me. Are you with me?”

  My heart leapt into my throat, and I stared at the button with new fear and respect as the weight of expectation poured on top of me from all sides. It was like something out of a science-fiction movie… press a button and change reality as you know it.

  I looked up at Ryan, straight into his eyes… and found myself there. His fight was my fight, because I loved him. Everything else came second.

  I pressed the button.

  The display on the phone was replaced by a countdown.

  10

  9

  8

  7

  6

  5

 
4

  3

  2

  1

  0

  For a moment nothing happened. Then, through my feet, I felt the shudders like a train going past nearby.

  Out the window, I saw flashes of light bursting out through the windows of the Trafford Tower. Floor by floor, in sequence, they went, and I heard the explosions like gunfire, one after the other. The lights ran from bottom to top along each side of the building, and then a fireball burst out from the ground floor… then the first floor… then the second floor.

  The rumble of that train grew more powerful with each explosion, but it was nothing compared with the otherworldly roar when the tower started sinking right in front of us, as if the dust cloud that swirled out at street level hid a portal to another dimension that was swallowing the building whole.

  I couldn’t have blinked if I had tried. My eyes were wide open, bulging in shock as if they were going to take a vacation from my head. Row after row of blown-out windows flashed by in their race to the dust below. I looked to my right and saw my expression mirrored on four faces, then to my left and saw Ryan looking almost impassive.

  “How… how is this possible?” I asked.

  “My friend, Billy D. owned W. Darrin & Co Construction. After the earthquake, I gave him enough money to subsidize his bid when the tender went out on the Trafford Tower. That helped his chances of winning the contract to check the building and make any repairs required. He did, and so for the past year and a half he’s been secretly prepping the building for demolition with explosives I provided. I paid him a shitload of money, he got paid a shitload of money for the contract, and he sold his business for a shitload of money because of all the work he had lined up in other contracts around the city. He’s disappeared with all that money now.”

  “Remind me never to piss you off,” said Jace.

  Ryan put his arm around me as the dust cloud rose high enough to obscure everything out of the window.

  “Welcome to our new life,” he said.

  I held on to him like a buoy in the middle of the ocean.

  Bonus Story