by S. Ann Cole
He shook his head no. “That was my first instinct, yeah. I was hurt and broken, fucked up for a while. But at that time, I hated what my father had turned me into so I was rebelliously trying to suppress all they taught me in training. The whole ‘kill first, face the consequences later’ MO. So I sucked it up and let her go.”
What? “I don’t understand. How did—”
“A year later, I got a visit from Grandad’s lawyer,” he carried on, letting me know it wasn’t over. “Apparently, Grandad had predicted my father’s actions. Had known family meant nothing to him and that he would do anything, no matter the cost, to manipulate me into signing over the legacy to him. Grandad had known that leaving the legacy to me would plant enmity between me and my father, possibly all his sons, which would lead to me becoming the outcast of the family. And all his predictions came to pass.
“According to his lawyer, Grandad knew I wouldn’t end up with the legacy in the end, so he’d opened a secret account for me and instructed his lawyer not to apprise me of it until I was at least two years out of my father’s grasp. It was exactly two years after leaving Russia that the lawyer showed up.”
His head turned to me now, shades still over his eyes. “4.9 billion, Jhay.”
“Whoa.”
“A small grain comparing to the 57 billion family legacy, but still, at that point in time, that lawyer was like Jesus turning water into wine for me, stone to bread.”
I said nothing, waiting for him to tell me how all this led to him murdering Liz.
“After finding out about my new wealth, I set out on sowing seeds all over SF and LA. Inventing. Partnering. Buying. Building. The apartment building I live in now, it was being constructed buy Liz’s real estate mogul. I saw it, I wanted it, so I made an overly generous offer and bought it.
“I was in his office signing the final papers one evening when Liz walked in. I looked at her and realized I still loved her. But I was still blinded to the fact that all she was seeing was my money. She inquired what we were doing and I proudly told her I just bought the entire Russian Hill apartment complex from her fiancé. Because I wanted her back. I wanted her to know I could take care of her now. She came back—or so I’d thought.
“I thought we were good. But one night Ronnie caught her digging around in my office. That’s when I found out she never really came back to me; she was still with the real estate mogul, and I was the side fuck. She confessed she was searching for documents that would tell her what my offer price on a company—that both her fiancé and I were bidding on—was, so he could outbid me and get the company. I realized then that between me and him, he was her priority.”
His jaw muscles worked.
“I let her believe I forgave her for it. Let a few weeks blow off. Then one night when she came over, I told her I wanted to tie her to the bed and try something new. She was all for it. So I tied her up, spanked her, and fucked her. When she came, I sat on her chest, stuffed a couple of hundred-dollar bills in her mouth and duct tape it shut, then plugged two fingers inside her nostrils and kept them there until she suffocated.”
Silence. Dead silence.
Goose bumps rose all over me. My blood running cold. And this had nothing to do with the blasting air-conditioner.
There was a time when I never feared Chad. I only loved him because I never knew he was supposed to be feared. Then there was a time when I feared him greatly. Because he’d ruthlessly eradicated the Byrds, and I’d heard many tongues refer to him as the “undefeated”. Then, recently, I feared him no more, falling in love with him all over again.
And now, now I was back to fearing the man I love. My supposed savior. Sure, I’d killed my fair share of people, but they were orders I couldn’t get out of. It was either get the job done or be killed. And, yeah, okay, there was this one time when I contemplated killing my ex-girlfriend, Sydney, when I found out she was cheating on me with a man, but…would I have really gone through with it? When she didn’t even mean all that much to me?
I cleared my throat. “Her fiancé, the real estate mogul, didn’t he get suspicious of her disappearance? Come knocking and asking questions?”
“Nope,” he said so fucking easily. “Guess he thought she ran off or something. He moved on pretty quickly, as a matter of fact.”
Turning back around, I brought my knees up to my chest, staring out the windshield, unseeing. I could ask a lot more questions like: what did you do with her body? Do you ever regret it? Was that what triggered you back into killing?
But I didn’t think I wanted to hear anymore. I felt cold, ill, alone and afraid. Maybe I should just complete the job given to me and try finding my way back into Rafail’s good graces. At least with him, I knew where I stood: Do as I say and you live. Don’t do as I command and you die.
With Chad, he was so fucking capricious I had no idea what the hell would happen to me the next hour from now.
“I loved her. I never had an ounce of hate in me for her,” Chad’s voice broke through the brick-thick silence.
When I shot a glance over at him with incredulity no doubt slathered all over my face, he removed his aviators and locked our gazes. “It wasn’t hate that killed her, Jhay. It was love.”
Yeah, unrequited love. Sick fuck.
“You love me?” My voice was as frail as a broken butterfly wing.
“I always have,” he admitted.
“But…” I hesitated. “I don’t want you to love me.”
“Why?”
“Because you kill the people you love.”
Tic.
TicTicTicTic.
“I’ll never hurt yo—”
“Yeah, you said that.”
Tic.
Tic.
TicTic—
The car suddenly swerved out of traffic and onto the roadside. He jammed the gear in park then turned to face me. “Are you thinking of leaving me?”
My head shook from left to right. “I’m not thinking about it. I want you to let me g—”
“No.”
“I don’t trust you, Chad. And I don’t feel safe with you anymore. Let me go.”
“No.”
“Why the fuck not?!” The determined look in his eyes had me panicking inside. “If you really love me, let me go.”
“I can’t.” He tried to take my hand but I jerked it away. “I just got you back. I’m not letting you go, Jhay.”
“Oh yeah? Well I’m going.” I spun and tried to open the door, but he lunged across the console and held onto me.
“You’re not leaving me.” He was so cool and sure about this, which scared me even more.
I struggled, trying to elbow him. “Get the fuck off me!”
Face all up in mine, he kept me locked tight, trying to make our lips meet. As much as I wanted to give in and kiss him, I kept evading, shifting my head from side to side. “No!…No!”
But he was stronger, and in the same time his lips finally crashed with mine, there was a loud explosion, and the rear-view mirror on my side of the car busted into splinters. From a bullet.
Someone was trying to kill me.
“Fuck!”
SIXTEEN
I shall possess within the veil…
Taking quick action, Chad shoved my head down, forcing me off the seat and to the floor.
“Stay down, baby.” He flipped open the glove compartment, took out a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle and thrust it into my hand.
Shifting over back to his side of the car, he reached under his car seat and came out with another handgun. Setting the gun on his tensed thigh, he jerked the gear into drive just as another bullet slapped into the back window, only to find itself stuck in the impenetrable glass, causing a spider’s web of cracks.
“You bulletproofed your car?” I asked over the rush and race.
“I bulletproof everything.”
Another explosion. But there was no impact on the car. A miss.
“How about your brain and heart? Bulletproof those, too?�
�
I got a fusillade of shots for an answer.
The car suddenly jerked to a sharp halt as Chad stomped his foot to the break, then made a swift, tire-screaming U-turn.
“Wha-what the hell are you doing?!” I shouted from down below. “This is a one-way street!”
“Yeah,” Chad muttered, foot hard on the pedal. “Makes it easier for me to kill the stupid motherfucker who’s shooting at us in broad fucking daylight.”
I straightened up from the ground and plopped my ass back onto the car seat, readying the Desert Eagle Chad handed me, finger on the trigger.
“What the fuck, Jhay?” he barked at me, his tone a mixture of fury and frustration. “I said stay down.”
I scoffed, cocking my hand with the gun on the dashboard. Oh, so he could U-turn on a one-way street like a freaking madman, yet I was supposed to stay down? “I’m trained to kill. I’m not gonna crouch down and hide in a car like some screamy, witless blonde.”
He speared me an exasperated glare but didn’t ease up on the gas as he sped straight ahead in the opposite direction of the one-way street. Car horns honked loudly, idiotic drivers yelled with angry red faces, and sensible drivers swerved their cars aside to get the hell out of the way.
A tinted, pitch-black Escalade slammed to a screeching halt as Chad raced toward it. And there were our shooters.
The Escalade tried to make a quick U-turn, but with all the other cars trying to escape getting hit by the stark raving R8 tearing up the one-way, the Escalade didn’t have enough space or grace to successfully make the turn.
Moving fast, I powered down my window, aimed at their windshield and fired, then another immediately, then another, never missing.
Unlike Chad’s car, their Escalade wasn’t bulletproofed, so the three successive rounds of shots shattered the windshield to bits and pieces, leaving their heads wide open.
Both the driver and passenger doors on the Escalade flew open, and two men in black jumped out and started running away from us instead of firing at us.
“Fucking amateurs,” Chad muttered.
Hitting the brakes, he maneuvered the gear in park. “You take the driver, I take the passenger,” he ordered, wrenching his door open to get out.
“Why do I get the driver?” I argued. “Because the passenger is bigger?”
Chad frowned at me like I was a galling mental case. “Okay, Tweety Byrd. Take the fucking passenger.”
I grinned. “Spasibo.”
We hopped out and charged forward, but had to do a criss-cross when we got to the front of the car because the driver was on my side, and the passenger was on Chad’s side, so it would have been easier if we’d done what Chad suggested…but, of course, I had to be a stubborn nut.
The driver was a big sonuvabitch, a white-skinned Barnie, which meant he was intimidating, but slow and unwieldy. The fucker had a rifle in his hand, yet he was running like an overused pussy. Who were these clowns, though?
Instead of chasing the dummy, I steadily lowered down to one knee, aimed, then blasted him through the back of his tree trunk thigh. Like a heavy load of lumber, he tumbled to the ground with a great shout. Monumentally pissed at being shot, he turned and aimed his rifle at me, but I was quicker on the trigger as I fired again and blew a bullet through the bicep of his arm holding the rifle. Like a pregnant woman grinding her teeth through contractions, he squeezed his big bug eyes shut and dropped his weapon.
Tucking my gun into the tight waistband of my jeans, I jogged up to him and snatched up his rifle, pulled the clip and stuffed it in my back pocket, then frisked him for additional weapons. I found a .25 Browning strapped to his ankle and stole that, too. I drove the butt of the empty rifle down to his head, knocking him unconscious, then dropped it onto his stomach. Removing the Desert Eagle from my waist, I put the stolen Browning in its place, then ran around to the passenger side to check if Chad needed assistance.
Nope, he didn’t.
His gun was tucked away and he was bent over the shooter, punching the stupid out of him while barking a whole bunch of shit in his face, the man was so pissed off. “…is not motherfucking Brooklyn! This is San Franfuckingcisco! “ Punch! Crack! “You don’t just go around firing wild shots in broad daylight!” Punch! Crack! “You wanna kill someone here”—Punch! Crack!—”you do it fucking quietly and discreetly!”
By the time Chad was through with the sorry excuse of an assassin, the bastard was unconscious, his face an unidentifiable mess of blood, purple swells, and open gashes.
As Chad rose to his feet, a red sports car sped towards us, tire-burning to a halt next to us in a flurry of unnecessary excitement.
Retrieving his gun, Chad’s eyes met mine. I nodded. Then we both raised our weapons and aimed at the sports car.
Two steroid-gobblers rushed out of the sports car with their hands up to let us know they came in peace.
“Org’s men,” Chad muttered, lowering his weapon.
One of the men, built like a tank with a military haircut, giant-stomped up to us with his hands on his hips. “Fuckin’ A. This ain’t good for tourism.”
Chad got up in Military Haircut’s face. “You were supposed to be protecting her.” His face was a mask of unrestrained rage—which was the opposite of his true character.
Chadrick Niiveux wasn’t the man who got out-of-control angry. He was the man famous for being cool and deadly. Ever calm, ever unreadable, ever unpredictable. This raging, red-faced side of him was new, and I had a strong feeling it had something to do with me…threatening to leave him.
“We were,” Military Haircut defended, “but we got blocked off by another vehicle like this one a couple blocks down. Fools chose to engage a shootout in the middle of traffic on a goddamn one-way street.”
“Rafail’s thinking ahead and doubling his efforts,” said Chad. “You need to triple yours.”
Military Haircut tipped his head from side to side, non-committal to that suggestion. “Maybe not. These are definitely not assassins from The Organization. More like fucking trigger-happy, money-hungry freelancers that Rafail’s tryna save a dime on.”
“Lucky it’s daylight,” Chad ground out. “Or they’d be maggot food.”
“They’ll be,” Military Haircut promised. His beady eyes then shifted over to me, his gaze roving over my body, so slow and deliberate, I couldn’t tell if he was checking me for injuries or checking me out.
He started toward me, a thick, over-muscled arm outstretched. “You okay, Byrd? You hurt?”
Before his hand could touch a hair on my skin, Chad intercepted, his glare like poisonous laser beams. “Put your fucking hands on her and I’ll break your fingers one by one. She’s not yours to touch. What you should do is call your boss and get him to clean this shit up.”
Military Haircut scowled at Chad and puffed up his chest, so obviously to impress me. “Man, fuck you! My boss don’t take orders from you.”
In a flash, Chad whipped his gun up and pressed it against the man’s forehead. The second man hanging behind started to reach for his gun from its holster, but in an agile flow I cocked my gun at him and I drew closer to Chad, choosing sides. “Don’t even fucking think about it,” I warned. “I’m his, and I’ll put a bullet between your eyes faster than you can piss yourself.”
The decision was easy. If I really wanted to get away from Chad, this was the perfect opportunity. Leave with Sambo. But it didn’t matter how I felt back in the car. Now, in this moment, I knew for a fact that I didn’t want to be riding anywhere, with anyone, but right next to my man Chad.
He was it. Girlfriend murderer, betrayer, family slayer, or not. For me, he was it.
Smirking at my proclamation, Chad dipped inside his back pocket and withdrew his cellphone, punched a single digit, then put the phone on speaker. After two rings, a man with a smooth Russian accent answered, butchering Chad’s name, “Shadreek? I do not do well with bad news. Tell me it is not.”
“We’re good. A set of clowns opened
fire on us. And now there are two prone bodies on 4th and I’d really fucking appreciate it if you could work your god-like powers and get some bad cops to clean this shit up before news stations and good cops hit the scene.”
The man on the line, or Org as it turned out to be, sighed over the phone. “Okay. I shall get someone on it immediately.” A grave pause. “Where were my men when this happened?”
Eyes still on a scowling Military Haircut, Chad said, “Sucking each other off in the bushes, apparently.”
Military Haircut was fuming now. But what could he do with a gun pressed to his forehead and his partner unable to save him?
Org grunted disapprovingly.
“Listen,” Chad began, “Jhay owns me. She’s the bullet to my gun, the finger to my trigger. And I don’t like it one bit that she’s getting shot at. It pisses me off. Really pisses me off. Because if she dies, how’s that gonna work out for me, hmm?” He flexed his finger ever so slightly on the trigger of his gun, and Military Haircut’s eyes bugged out. “What I also don’t like, is when all-muscle and no-dick cocksuckers try to touch what’s mine. Your boy Sambo here says you don’t take orders from me. But I take orders from you. So, Org, go ahead and order me to kill him. Order me to blow his useless brains out.”
Silence on the other end.
Chad’s smirk deepened, nearing a smile.
Sambo panicked. “Boss?”
Silence.
“Boss,” Sambo pleaded in a rush, “we got cut off! We couldn’t get to her in time! Boss, don’t let him do this!”
More silence for a few still seconds, then, “How scared is he looking right now, Shadreek?”
“Pissing,” Chad replied.
“Good. That will wake him the hell up,” Org said grimly. “Now, you all need to get away from that scene. Bad cops are on their way.”
The line went dead and Chad lowered his gun.
Sambo narrowed wary eyes at Chad, and then he broke into a nervous grin. “Chadrick motherfucking Niiveux.” He shook his head, as if meeting some infamous being and couldn’t believe it. “I’ve heard about you…”