by Paula Cox
I clear my throat, getting ready for my acting role, and approach the door.
“Carlos!” I squeal, my voice high-pitched, as though fear courses through me. No, not as though. Fear does course through me.
“Carlos!”
“Wait a second, friends,” Carlos says, and the bullets which thud into the refrigerator and the crate stop. I look down and see that the door of the fridge is pockmarked in dents where the bullets have pierced through the back and thudded into the front. A few minutes more, and the bullets would penetrate the lid and come ricocheting into the room. I swallow; so much is at stake here. “What is it? That is Livia, yes, little Ms. Russo?”
“Please, Carlos, get me out of here!” I wail like a stranded princess at the top of a tower, looking for my Prince Charming. “Please, help me!”
“Help... you? What do you mean?”
I imagine him tilting his head in interest, smiling at his friends, bemused but intrigued. Keep going.
“These Irish beasts, one of them has stabbed me! I’m... oh... ah... please, let me come out!”
“Boss,” one of the Mexicans says, “I don’t think—”
“I do not care what you think!” Carlos roars, his booming voice trembling the walls. Several empty glass salt-and-pepper containers lurch from the shelves and smash on the floor. If I’m a princess, this man is an ogre. “Why should I care if they stabbed you?”
“Boss, if they stabbed her, how is she—”
“Interrupt me again, bufón, and I will eat your guts and use your bones as toothpicks!”
“Are you bleeding?” Carlos asks, and I can hear the interest in his voice. I turn to Aedan, who swallows nervously, Adam’s apple shifting. He waves a hand at me, encouraging, but I can see in his dark hooded eyes that he’s desperate for this to be over and done with. He looks at the men, nodding, steeling them, getting them ready for the quick violence which is surely about to occur.
“Yes!” I squeal, turning my voice into a veritable damsel, hating the way it sounds. If there’s one thing I’ve never been, it’s the proverbial Damsel in Distress. “I’m... oh... I can’t... help... me...”
“We need her alive,” Carlos says, as though to himself. “At least, it would be good to have her alive. A real Italian trophy, something to be bartered with. And... oh, she is a very handsome lady. A real flor. Okay, I shall come to you, Italian lady. I shall come and I shall save you!”
“Boss—”
A gunshot goes off, and through the door I hear the sound of a man gurgling, walking in circles around the room, and then finally stumbling to the floor.
“I told you to be quiet,” Carlos says, and then I imagine him staring down the others in the room. “Does anybody else have any lovely suggestions?”
As Carlos approaches the door, the Irishmen creep as quietly as they can to either side of the door, pressed right up against the walls out of view. Carlos shoves the door, and the refrigerator shifts a little. Aedan stretches his leg across and pushes it with his boot; the crate tumbles down, breaks open, leaving the door free. Then Carlos pushes the door open, gun in one hand, the other stained with blood and holding something... the man’s tongue, his own man’s tongue. I fight back bile.
“Italian lady,” Carlos says, eyes glazed over in the visage of a true madman, a man who has really lost all his marbles and then some. “Oh, look, they have—”
Aedan and another Irishman jump at him and drag him from the doorway. The Irishmen fall on him like wolves, punching and kicking and spitting, stripping him of his weapons. I launch myself to the side, hands over my ears, as the Mexicans outside fire recklessly into the backroom, bullets smashing into the walls and sending plaster flying into the air like razor-sharp flakes of snow, one bullet cutting through the support of a shelf, a crate collapsing and tumbling; a thousand ketchup packets explode in a shower of red and at once it looks like the room is covered in blood.
But then the Irishmen have stripped Carlos of his weapons. Luckily, he’s one of those men who carry about a dozen: three hip holsters, two underarm holsters, two ankle holsters, and one back holster. I peep through my fingers as Aedan places his gun against Carlos’ head, holding him in place, and the Irishmen begin to peek around the doorway and return fire. Bullets ricochet all around me and a few of the Irishmen fall, but more fire back, and soon I hear the Mexicans screaming something in Spanish. The Irishmen spill from the room, firing over and over, until it’s just me, Carlos, and Aedan.
Aedan tilts his head at me. “Damn, Livia,” he says. “Can’t believe that worked.”
“You lying puta.” Carlos spits on the floor, a thick phlegmy globule. He doesn’t seem scared, only slightly sad that he’s been caught. He glances around with those skittish, glassy eyes, and I wonder if he’s on something, coke or speed.
“Come on,” Aedan says, pressing the barrel of the pistol firmly into Carlos’ ear. “Let’s rejoin the party.”
Wiping ketchup from my neck, I rise to my feet and follow Aedan into the bar.
Chapter Twenty
Aedan
Pressing the gun into Carlos’ head, I lead him into the main bar, walking over the corpses of several Mexicans. I glance at Livia, who walks beside me, and offer her a sideways smile. She gives me a sort of half-smile in response, as though she can’t quite decide whether she wants to hate me or forgive me. I sigh, head reeling at the speed with which my entire world has been transformed. Dad dead... I hardly believe it, but then I’m standing in the main bar, the Irish hitmen standing all around me brandishing their guns and not a single (alive) Mexican in sight. And there’s Dad, Patty, the man I spent so long trying to gain the approval of. Now he’s cold and blood-soaked and hardly looks like a man at all. Instead, he looks like a deformed creature, mouth twisted in a caricature of a grin, top half of his head missing.
I look at him for a long time, almost forgetting my surroundings until Carlos starts to laugh. “So you really are the bastard son I have heard so little about, eh?”
Livia steps over the corpses and sits in one of the booths, her neck still splotched with red, looking exhausted and worn out. Faraway, sirens fill the air, growing closer every second. Soon, they’ll be on us... The Clover is a dead spot now. It’ll have to be abandoned. My mind spins. So Mona, the woman Dad betrayed when he seduced my mother, is now the leader of the Irish mafia. Or, will it be her son, if it turns out to be a son? There’s so much to consider.
“I thought you’d be a scary-looking man, a man to be feared. I’ve heard stories about you, Aedan, but now I look at you, I see nothing but a bastard, a filthy, rotten bastard...”
I chose Livia. I said to myself, I will save Livia, and I saved her. But when I look at Dad, the life stolen from him, I can’t help but feel guilty. People don’t change in a matter of minutes, no matter how much I’d like it to be otherwise, and I can’t help but feel a pang of knife-like guilt right in my gut as I look at Dad’s corpse. Mom screams at me in my mind: This is your fault. You let him die. You betrayed your family. You are a failure. You have lost us everything. Just take that gun and place it against your own head—
“Aedan,” Livia says, cutting right through the thoughts. Her voice is soft and there’s an undertone of affection to it, despite the tinge of anger and resentment in her eyes. Looking at her is like looking at a swirling mass of colors, impossible for one dominant color to emerge: emotions surging around and around her face. “Those sirens aren’t getting any quieter. Whatever you’re going to do, do it now. We need to leave.”
We, she said we. Does that mean anything?
Her eyes are wide, her face glossy with sweat, and even now amidst this carnage she looks so damn hot some dirty thoughts start whirring around my head, like how goddamn beautiful she looked when she was under me, orgasm making her legs shake, her breasts jiggle.
“You are the big bad bastard—”
Carlos’ brains—brains that have orchestrated countless harassments over these past months—fly ou
t of the front of his face. He collapses, proving that big men do fall just as easy as little ones.
I drop the gun and turn to Livia, offering her my hand.
She looks at it for a few moments, as though debating whether or not she can really take it, and then lets out a long breath through clenched teeth.
“Just get me home,” she says. “This doesn’t mean anything. Just get me home.”
She takes my hand, and I nod.
“Yes, ma’am.”
I turn to the other hitters, the sirens ringing loudly in the air now.
“It’s time to go dark for a while, fellas. I’ll be in contact when I know what’s going on.”
All of us flee from the bar, leaving the stench of death behind us.
Despite everything, Patty dead and The Clover abandoned, I’m glad to have Livia’s hand in mine.
Chapter Twenty-One
Livia
As the sirens chase us to Aedan’s car and we drive as inconspicuously as we can through New York to my apartment building, I find it absurd that the sky is still bright with daylight. It feels like we’ve been in the bar for days, not mere hours—less than an hour, I realize, when I check the dashboard clock. I glance across at Aedan every few seconds, at the flecks of blood on his face, in his beard, making it even redder.
There’s so much between us to navigate, I think, watching him.
We drive in silence and I try and get it all straight in my head.
He was going to kill Dad, and yet I know for a fact Dad has taken a shine to him and him to Dad; I know they’ve grown close. I can’t count the number of times Dad’s mentioned Aedan to me, smiling, hands tucked into his waistband and eyes glittering as though he’s talking about a genuine son. But perhaps it was all an act, me included. But if that’s the case, then why did Aedan jump at me, protect me, even at the expense of Patty taking a bullet. I tell myself that there was something real between us, there must’ve been, but I can’t get the way Aedan sounded when Patty gave him his salesman’s pitch. But he’s his dad... but he betrayed me...
When Aedan stops the car outside my apartment building, I let out a groan and bury my face in my hands, massaging my eyelids with my thumbs, trying to work out the tension. My eyes ache—I cried more than I realized, back there in the bar—and there’s a band of tension around my forehead. All I want is to collapse in a heap and let the madness of today wash away, but as we sit here, I find myself not wanting to leave. If I go up to the apartment, I’ll be alone, alone with the memories of today. I’ll have to face that eventually, but right now, so soon after it all happened, the idea repulses me.
So instead of getting up, throwing the door open, and leaving like I probably should, I sit back in the chair and close my eyes. I hear Aedan recline, too, and let out a long, slow breath. The pain in his voice is palpable, and though I know it was his dad who ordered him to betray me, I can’t help but feel sorry for him—even if this sorrow does lurk within a hotbed of resentment and confusion.
“I don’t understand,” I say after a while, not planning on talking, the words tumbling out of their own accord. “If you were ordered to kill my dad...” I swallow, acid burning down my throat at the thought. “If you were ordered to kill my dad, why did you get so close to him? Why go golfing with him? Hang on—why save his life that day on the golf course? Was it just not the right time? Is that it? You wanted to wait for the right moment before you took him out. And why get close to me, Aedan? Was that part of your plan?”
“No.” Aedan sighs, turns to me, and when I face him I feel my body gripped with warm hands, tingles moving up and down my arms, a buzzing forefinger trailing down my spine. There are energies within us, I think, energies and impulses that don’t care one tiny bit about how we feel; whatever happens, they’ll always want each other. Chemistry, attraction, whatever we want to call it—it’s there, within me, within Aedan, calling out to each other. Just looking at his face, dried blood clinging to him, I can’t help but want him, to hold him, kiss him, be close to him, heal him.
“No,” he repeats. “I... I never would have killed Bruno, Livia. I want you to believe that. I never would have had it in me. These past few months, I’ve been thinkin’. Bruno, you know, well, Bruno’s been a damn sight nearer to a father figure than Patty ever was. Maybe that’s a fucked thing for me to say now that the old man’s dead, or maybe it’s only because he’s dead that I can say it, but it’s the truth.” He clenches his jaw, looking vulnerable in a way he never has before. He looks wounded, but not beaten, never beaten; Aedan is made of material too tough for that. “When I was a boy, my parents pushed me into the life, both of them, not just Patty. Mom was never happy. Patty, he... he hit her. I knew it. I knew it and I did fuck all about it. And then when she died, I...goddamn it, Livia, I wanted his approval then. Saying that aloud after I just admitted he beat my mother makes it sound damn strange, but that’s the way it was with Patty, always damn strange, always confusing. Nothing ever made any damn sense.
“I was always waiting for a nod, a smile, a pat on the shoulder. I went through the life slaughtering every damn bastard in my way, not for the cash—though that came, of course—but for the chance that that old, wiry bastard’d give me something, anything, that’d let me know he knew I existed, that I wasn’t a fuckin’ ghost in his eyes. But, he was a bad man, Livia. That’s the truth. A sadistic man. And over these past months, I’ve come to see Bruno as more of a father figure...”
He sighs. “I never would’ve killed him; that I can promise you.”
“I wish I could believe you,” I say, voice wracked with uncertainty.
“Then believe me,” Aedan says. He reaches across and takes my hands. I know I should pull away, but as soon as he touches me, the lust that grew between us at my apartment explodes all over again. This is a man I’ll always find it hard to pull away from, I know, even if everything is messed up beyond recognition. “I... I want you, Livia. I saved you. I could’ve run for Patty, protected him. That would’ve been the right thing for me to do, the thing that would’ve made me a good son. But I didn’t, did I? I came for you.”
“That doesn’t change what you were going to do,” I mutter, as he massages my hands in his. These strong hands, these strong killer’s hands...to feel them on me after the madness in the bar is like a gift. They soothe me, calm me down. I find myself squeezing him in return.
“Going to—I was never going to,” he says. “Never.”
“At first, you were. Before you got to know Dad, before you got to know me.”
He winces, and I know I’ve got a point. Before he knew me, before this energy began to buzz between us, he was going to kill Dad. He wouldn’t have thought twice. Whatever else Aedan is, he’s a stone-cold killer. His performance in the bar showed that much. He killed, what...over ten men, at least, and now he’s sitting here like his biggest concern is me.
“That didn’t last long,” he says, moving his hands up my arms to my shoulders.
Get your hands off me! I want to scream. How dare you touch me! Irish dog! Beast! Animal! Peasant!
Mom was right, Mom was right, Mom was right.
Remember Luca.
Remember Aedan’s betrayal.
But the truth is, when Aedan touches me, I’m weak. In all my life, I’ve never met a man who could penetrate my defenses so skillfully. The smell of our lust fills the air, overpowering the blood and the sweat, a potent odor of longing. An animal scent. It’s like we’re in heat, I think, as my body begins to thrum with it.
Aedan massages my shoulders, pressing his fingers into my skin, compressing it, and at once I relax. The murder and the mayhem fall away. I’m not so naïve to think that it will fall away forever. But now, it drifts into the abyss.
“Aedan,” I say. Hear myself say. Am I speaking these words? Am I really about to say this?
“Yes?”
“Drive us around there.” I gesture at an alleyway which sits between a gym and a closed-down restaurant. I
know for a fact nobody ever goes down there. At least, I’ve never seen anybody go down there.
Aedan doesn’t ask what I mean. His dark eyes, moving down to my breasts, tell me he knows exactly what I mean. I close my legs around my pussy, loving the way that even now my clit aches with longing.
What are you doing? All along, you’ve had your doubts, and now they’ve been confirmed. Don’t do anything stupid. But since when did my lust for Aedan listen to reason? As he drives us into the alleyway, far back into a shadowed recess which the sunlight doesn’t touch, I allow my eyes to rove over him. I start at his face, flecked with blood making him look dangerous and manly, capable. Say what you want about Aedan, but he’s capable and efficient, a real man, a real killer, the most dangerous man I’ve ever been in the presence of. His beard—so rugged, so manly. His chest, rippled muscles, muscles honed through countless hours of fighting, Down, down, to his crotch. Oh, fuck, I think, as I see how the fabric of his pants pitches up around his cock. His ten-inch cock. His cock which gets so damn hard for me.