by Shandi Boyes
“You can’t have Rimi yet, so why not go after the next best thing?” My brows inch together when Rocco takes a step to the right, unblocking the visual of the almost unconscious blonde. Even with the roar of a private jet’s engines barreling over her head and the discharge of a semi-automatic weapon, she’s still out cold. “She didn’t get banged up like that for no reason. Whoever did that to her is the person you should be taking your anger out on. She wouldn’t have needed rescuing if someone hadn’t fucked her over.”
As my lips itch into a callous smirk, I snag my cell phone out of the Range Rover. “Smith…” Adrenaline thickens my veins when he hums a second later. “Do you have a spare laptop at the ready?”
The crack of a laptop screen being pried open sounds down the line before Smith asks, “What do you need?”
Rocco’s grin matches mine when I say, “It’s time to go on a scavenger hunt,” but it sags when I add, “After we’ve dumped her far from here.”
What I said earlier is true. Women are worthless in this industry, so I wouldn’t do myself any favors adding another one into the mix. If the reports blowing up my phone are a true indication of how Justine encountered the Gauntlet, the nicest thing I could ever do for this unknown blonde is wipe the slate clean for her so she can start afresh.
If that means I have to remove everyone from her life, so be it. I’ll do that. I’ll do anything to ease the guilt tearing me up from the inside out.
Chapter Eight
Roxanne
My stomach swirls as violently as my temples thump my skull when I attempt to open my eyes. I don’t know how long I’ve been out for, but if the dryness of my throat is anything to go by, I haven’t had a drink in a thousand years. My mouth is bone-dry. I can’t even conjure up the slightest bit of spit to moisten the burn of my swallows.
“Eddie…” That’s the last thing I remember—paying for tickets to a stupid action flick Eddie wanted to see. If the price tag on the flowers wasn’t a jarring enough reminder that we have hardly anything in common, his choice in movies should have been the icing on the cake.
Alas, I’m a sucker for his sweetly intense brown eyes.
Did I fall asleep during the movie? That could explain why my body is aching so much. The new theater complexes aren’t as spacious as the out-of-date one in our hometown, and I couldn’t afford premium tickets, so perhaps I’m kinked up because of the rigidness of the chairs in the theaters?
“Or not,” I mutter to myself when I attempt to ease the throbbing of my temples with a quick swirl of my fingertips. My wrist is cuffed to a steel railing. I’m shackled to a bed like a convict at the start of the movie we watched.
“They said you murdered someone,” whispers a shy, frail voice next to me. “That you cut him up into little pieces because he hurt you.” After switching on the light hanging over her bed, a petite brunette with sunken, blood-stained cheeks and black eyes rolls over to face me. “Is it true? Did you kill him because he did that?”
“Did what?” I ask, truly confused.
My heart pains for her when she leans over to open a drawer next to her hospital bed. Her face isn’t the only thing beaten up, so are her arms and torso.
“Who hurt you?” I ask when she hands me a compact mirror.
She tugs her nightwear in close to her body to hide her many bruises before lowering her eyes to her shoeless feet. “No one. I’m very clumsy. I often fall.”
I want to reply, headfirst into a fist by the looks of it, but I keep my mouth shut. I’m not one to judge. I look just as bad as her, except my cuts and bruises can’t be hidden with makeup. I’d need to grind out the stitches and staples running down my forehead first, and even then, I doubt the world’s highest-rated concealer would help.
The only good to come from my battered and bloody appearance is the knowledge I can stop bleaching my hair. Its natural red coloring doesn’t seem as bad as it did when I was a child. It gives me a unique edge not many women have.
It also may be the only way I can take the focus off the scar running down my forehead.
While licking my lips to soothe their deep cracks, I toss the compact back to the brunette’s side of our room. I’d walk it over to her like she did me, but since I’m cuffed to my bed, I can’t.
With that in mind, I ask, “If I’m so dangerous, why do I have a roommate?”
Her blue eyes widen to the size of saucers. “Umm…”
When she forcefully swallows, the truth smacks into me hard and fast. “We’re not in a standard hospital room, are we?”
She only shakes her head for a second, but it’s long enough for me to deserve the title of a mental patient. I scream like I’m in the process of being murdered while thrashing against the cuffs like I’ll have the strength to break out of them. I don’t. I’m too weak and pathetic for that, but my many pledges that I’m not insane does allow some clarity to form.
“We’re not in a mental hospital,” the brunette assures, pacing back to my side of the room. “We’re in a special wing of a hospital. A guarded wing.” Her next set of words take her nearly ten seconds to articulate. “It’s where they put criminals awaiting trial.”
“I’m not a criminal…” I stop talking when the first part of our conversation replays in my ears.
‘They said you murdered someone.’
‘That you cut him up into little pieces because he hurt you.’
“Who died?” I’m shocked I can talk with how hard fear is clutching my throat. Surely, I’m dreaming. This can’t be real.
The brunette rushes a spew bag to my side of our room when her reply makes me heave. She didn’t say any random old name. She said my boyfriend’s name—his full name. Eduardo Emanuel Cordova.
“I didn’t kill Eddie. I’d never hurt him,” I blubber out through violent sobs. “I loved him…” My words fall short when the deceit in my tone reaches my ears. I cared for Eddie, but it was nothing close to love.
I raise my watering eyes to the mystery brunette. “What happened?” When she drags over a chair, preparing to settle in for the long haul, I ask a second almost just as important question, “And why am I the only one cuffed?”
Chapter Nine
Roxanne
Who knew straight-up murder rates higher than a measly manslaughter charge? My ex-roommate drove her car headfirst into a cypress tree with her abusive boyfriend in the passenger seat, however she only faced a manslaughter charge. I was ‘allegedly’ rundown by my boyfriend before being run over by him. Then, miraculously, I somehow got myself to his apartment two towns over from where I was left to die to, I quote, “Torture the complainant over a six-hour period.” End quote.
Six. Hours.
That was the hole in my defense that had me transferred from the criminal wing of Erkinsvale Private Hospital to a standard ward. I was found in an ambulance bay by a medic going out to have a cigarette a little after one in the morning. Surveillance footage from my assault proves it occurred just after dusk. Despite wishing I was able to torture Eddie for six hours, it wasn’t possible for me to be in two places at once, hence the reason my charges were dropped.
Do I feel bad about what happened to Eddie? Yeah, in a way. I’m more remorseful for his family than him. They have nothing going for them and will most likely never get off welfare, but they didn’t deserve to lose their son the way they did.
I reached out to them a couple of weeks ago to offer my sympathies. When I got an automated message saying their number is no longer in service, I sent them a letter instead. Having their services cut is nothing out of the ordinary for the Cordovas.
“Are you ready?”
Ignoring the apprehension swishing in my stomach, I raise my eyes to my rock the past three months. My best friend, Estelle, grew up in the housing estate next to my nanna’s ranch. With my grandparents refusing to sell no matter how elaborate the offer, housing developments popped up all around them. Now they have the only ten-acre block left in this area of Erkinsvale.
<
br /> The executor in charge of my grandparents’ will said I could make an impressive profit if I were willing to sell their decades of hard work. Sadly for him and his commission-seeking cousin, I missed my nanna’s funeral because I was in a coma, so the last thing I’ll ever do is see her legacy bulldozed.
She loved and took care of me when no one else would. Then she died alone.
I can’t forgive myself for that.
The injuries that placed me in a coma for a month weren’t my fault, but I do blame them for my nanna’s death. She had told me time and time again that Eddie was no good. If I had listened, she wouldn’t have been out searching for me when I failed to make curfew, and then she wouldn’t have been knocked down a ravine by a drunk driver.
Mistaking my remorseful face as sympathy for Eddie, Estelle says, “Don’t look so glum, Roxie. You survived for a reason.” I roll my eyes when she chuckles out, “We just need to find out why that is.” That’s just like her. Even when we should be blowing snot bubbles out of our nose while in the throes of despair, she finds humor in every situation.
When I take a right out of the hospital room I’ve called my home the past three months, Estelle wraps her arm around my shoulders. “Nu-uh. Claudia isn’t there anymore, remember?”
My sigh is soundless, but Estelle still hears it. My ex-roommate wasn’t as lucky as me. Even with numerous witnesses saying they saw Claudia’s boyfriend’s hand on the steering wheel in the lead up to their crash, prosecutors pushed forward with their case. Claudia will give birth to her son in prison since she was served three years for involuntary manslaughter last week.
“We could visit her next weekend?”
I raise my eyes to my best friend, loving that she can read me like no one else. “Yeah?”
She bumps me with her hip, causing me to smile. “Yeah. You know me, always open for a three-hour drive to a maximum-security women’s prison.”
“How could you not when you say it like that?”
Laughing, she breaks away from my side to open the passenger side door of her beat-up Honda for me. Her car is a total write-off, but she loves it as much as she loves me. Nothing screams freedom like your own set of wheels. I’m hoping to scrounge up enough money for my own sometime this year.
“Your chariot awaits, m’lady,” she says, all pompous like.
Giggling about my immature tongue poke, Estelle races around to the driver’s side door. Because I forever admire her animalist grace, my eyes follow her trek partway around. My stare is incomplete because I’m looking at a pimped-out Range Rover parked across from the passenger loading bay. It’s not often you see flashy cars like that in Erkinsvale, and very rarely is there a pair of piercing blue eyes glancing out of the crack in the driver’s side window.
“Roxie…” Estelle stammers out in confusion when I hotfoot it across the street without checking for traffic.
I almost get wiped out by a car traveling in the opposite direction. The whoosh of its outdated metal whizzing past my face is strong enough to add an extra hobble to my shaking strides, but it isn’t to slow me down.
“Hey.” I race faster when the engine of the Range Rover fires up. “Wait!”
It darts out of its parking space so quickly, the smell of burning rubber lingers in my nostrils long after it rockets out of the hospital’s parking lot.
“Who the hell was that?” Estelle asks, out of breath. She isn’t gasping because she followed my sprint. She runs miles every single day. She’s as breathless about the eerie unease ridding the air of oxygen as me.
There’s only one time I’ve felt this restless. It was when I was in the alleyway with Eddie. Not the time he ran me over, but three months earlier, when he brought me to ecstasy under the watchful stare of a pair of vividly beautiful blue eyes.
The pair that just rocketed away were nowhere near as engrossing as the ones that stared at me almost seven months ago today, but they were most certainly just as dangerous.
The knowledge shouldn’t excite me, but for some reason, it does.
Chapter Ten
Dimitri
When Rocco places down his phone to make a quick getaway, I drag the timer on his live feed back a couple of seconds. I don’t want the image of Roxanne Juniper Grace when she spotted Rocco’s gawk half a block down from her apartment building, I want her reflection in the side mirror of the Range Rover Rocco’s manning at my command when she chases him down like she did outside the hospital three months ago. The second in time when her big green eyes are wide and unconcealed.
Restless edginess thickens my cock when I find the footage I’m seeking, which is utterly ridiculous considering I’m in a boardroom with thirty of my father’s closest confidants. He believes I’m in Sicily strengthening foreign ties. I’m here because it’s the last confirmed place the tracker on Rimi’s private jet was pinged. The Castros are either here, holed up at an unknown location, waiting for the heat to die down after their operation killed thirteen FBI agents and two CIA officers, or they took a secondary jet to another location.
Rimi’s crew has been silent for over six months now—double the length of time Roxanne was an inpatient at Erkinsvale Private Hospital. I don’t fucking like it. A ransom payment for Fien hasn’t been requested in months. That makes me edgy because if I’m not paying to keep her safe, how can I be assured she is?
Although I understand the reasoning for the silence—Rimi now has both sides of the law chasing him—usually nothing stops business from progressing in this industry. Not even having my wife kidnapped and my daughter forcefully removed from her stomach saw me awarded any leeway. I work or die. I don’t have any other option, so why isn’t it the same for Rimi?
After grinding my jaw side to side, frustrated by the world I was born in, I restart the live feed just as Rocco’s face fills the screen of my phone. “Satisfied?” he asks, sounding anything but.
Even with the eyes of thirty men on me, impatiently awaiting my verdict, I jerk up my chin. I don’t know why I needed to see Roxanne move into a tiny one-bedroom apartment in the middle of Erkinsvale anymore than I needed to watch her walk out of the hospital three months ago, but for some reason, the urge wouldn’t pass no matter how hard I fought it, so I gave in and let fate play its hand for once.
Will my indecisiveness see me scolded for the third time in my life?
Only time will tell.
“What now?” Rocco mutters, aware one task never ends without another one taking its place.
Hummed whispers bounce around the room when I reply, “Organize the jet to collect me. It’s time for me to return home.”
The sternness of my jaw doubles when Rocco mutters, “For your girl?”
His smile tells me his comment had nothing to do with my daughter, but I act stupid. “If you’re referencing Fien, yes.”
“What?” He pushes out a few seconds later, incapable of ignoring the wrath of my glare for a second longer. I’ve always been a temperamental prick with a short fuse, but it’s grown substantially worse over the past six months. “You’ve had me stalking that girl for months. Justine’s recovery didn’t even get this much heat, and you take the blame for what happened to her.”
I didn’t think my mood could get any worse, however it just did. My father’s verdict for Justine’s ‘supposed’ disrespect was an hour in a room with a dog trained to kill. Maddox moved fast after I called him, but he was still minutes too late. Justine was torn to shreds.
I asked Rocco to keep me updated on the progress of her recovery. That surveillance wasn’t as easy for him to conduct as it was Roxanne’s because Justine has an army of people propping her up. Roxanne has no one. From what Smith tells me, her parents are alive, but she hasn’t seen them in years. Her grandfather passed away a year before her grandmother, and she has no known siblings.
Do I feel sorry for her? Not. At. All. There are far worst things she could have faced than being forced to live with her grandparents. Her daddy could have sold her to his fr
iends for the night like he has her mother multiple times when his drug supplies get low.
If a man pays to fuck you, he’ll take it with or without your permission. Nearly every man around this table has done so in the past. The sex slave industry is rife at the moment. It’s right up there with baby-making factories.
That’s what my meeting today is about. A new baby-making facility is hoping to place footholds in the Sicily region. They want to take sex slaves, impregnate them, then sell their babies to the highest bidder.
Although this scheme isn’t close to my predicament, I can’t help but source similarities from it. Fien wasn’t sold to the highest bidder, but is that because I can afford to keep her safe? What would happen if that changed? Would she be passed on to the next candidate? Or killed like her mother?
Just the thought has my mood souring to the lowest it’s been. “Organize a meeting with my father within hours of my return,” I say down the line after standing to my feet, hopeful the table’s height will hide the raging pulse of my cock not even a bad mood could slacken. “I have some questions I’d like to ask him.”
Rocco scrubs at the stubble on his chin. “I don’t think it’s wise to mingle with him right now, Dimi. He’s knee-deep in some murky shit.”
“Murkier than this?” His silence speaks volumes. The only time Rocco is ever quiet is when I’m right. If I’m wrong, he shouts it from the rooftops. “Although the journey to my takeover is miles away, at one stage, I must take the first step. That time is now, Rocco.”
Since all is said and done, I disconnect our video chat, shut down my phone, then slide it into the pocket of my trousers. Despite the brief intermission, today is all about business, so I’m dressed to the nines—expensive suit, designer tie, diamond-encrusted cufflinks. If you didn’t know any better, you could confuse me with a legitimate businessman. It’s just the crooked people I’m forced to deal with day in and day out that would have you thinking differently.