Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75737 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75737 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
"You alright? You look a little pale."
"I'm getting a migraine," I told him, wincing for effect. I'd never suffered from a migraine in my life. I really never even got headaches. But I needed some time. Alone. I needed to think.
I needed to plan.
And once that plan was in place, I needed to act on it.
And I had to get the hell away from this Grassi family.
Chapter Nine
Luca
Something was off.
I knew it almost immediately.
The air in the rental house felt strange, thick, full of something that made me immediately tense when I moved inside.
"Where is she?" I asked of Dario and Lucky who were in the living room, Dario cleaning his gun, Lucky's fingers moving across the screen of his phone. Between his mother, his sisters, and the revolving door of women in his life, Lucky was always attached to that damn thing.
"Migraine. Been lying down for hours," Lucky told me, shrugging.
"I knocked asking if she wanted me to pick her up something for the pain," Dario told me. "She growled at me."
"Growled?" I asked, dubious.
"I heard it all the way out here. She growled. Guess it must be a banger. Mom says she just needs dark and quiet until hers pass. Figure maybe Romy is the same way. So we've just been keeping it down."
Maybe she'd triggered it with the whiskey the night before.
I'll admit, after my shower, I hit that bottle pretty hard too. But she was smaller, likely had a lower tolerance. And, judging by the gagging noise I'd heard from her room, she probably wasn't a whiskey drinker to begin with.
I felt a stab of sympathy, knowing I was the reason she was drinking.
Because I hadn't been able to control my anger.
Because I hadn't been able to keep my hands to myself.
She'd told me as much in that text, likely half asleep and a little drunk. There'd been an accusatory tone to it.
I'd decided not to engage, to let it go. Because I figured she would regret it enough that she sent it once she was rested and sober again. There was no need to pile on.
"Oh, and she said Matteo was being a dick," Lucky supplied.
"Wait...what? Matteo was?" That made no sense. They'd seemed to be getting along well.
"I was there. He was," Dario confirmed. "They went a couple rounds before she asked me if I had a Snickers to feed him so he stopped being a dick."
She had a bit of a temper on her. I found I appreciated that about her. That she had the confidence and the guts to snap back at people like us, when she knew what we did. It was impressive, given that I knew hardened killers who wouldn't dare.
"What was he being a dick about?"
"About the possibility that she's lying to us. And the suggestion of what might happen if she was," Dario told me.
"He did what?" I asked, tone getting lower, rougher.
Aside from the events of the night before in the basement, my anger typically ran to the cold side. My men knew this. Which was what had their eyes moving over toward me.
"He was just giving her a warning," Dario defended him.
"No one told him to give anyone a warning," I told him. "And in case this hasn't been made clear already, the decisions about Romy come down from my father and through me. No one has the right to go rogue and say shit they weren't told to. I shouldn't have to fucking say this, but here I am doing it. Consider yourselves warned," I snapped, anger snaking up my spine, curling around my throat.
My instinct was to go in her room, tell her that as far as my father and I were concerned, we believed her, that she wasn't in any danger.
But if she was down with a migraine, I had to leave her be to recover.
Antsy, unable to assuage my guilt over my family jumping the gun and saying shit they shouldn't have, I went into my room, got changed, and took off for another run, leaving a chastened Lucky in charge.
I thought it was a safe enough decision.
With Michael and Dario on the perimeter and Lucky in the house, it seemed like she was as safe as possible .
Then again, my concern had been about someone else getting in, trying to hurt her, take her.
I had never entertained for a moment that the biggest threat to her safety was Romy herself.
"What's going on?" I asked, stiffening when I got back to the house, finding Matteo's car there, spotting my father around the side of the house.
Something was wrong.
Something big.
My father, brother, and I were all rarely in the same place, for obvious reasons. Unless the shit had hit the fan.
"You forgot your phone," Lucky told me, voice tight. "She's gone."
"What the fuck do you mean she's gone? If she's gone, I want a reason why there aren't bullet holes riddling all of you, since you were supposed to be the ones standing between her and danger."