“Let me refresh your memory,” I seethed. “My best friend dies a day after he meets you and now you’re letting your stepbrother run off with the guy who killed him? Who just so happens to be holding Trace’s grandfather captive like a damn prisoner.”
I pressed the gun further into her neck, causing her throat to convulse against the metal. “Nixon said to protect me at all costs,” she said.
“And that”—I released her with a jerk and tucked my gun in the back of my jeans—“is the only reason you’re still breathing. If I suspect anything, if you sneak out to meet someone, if you suddenly disappear,” I swore, “Mil, I will hunt you down, I will torture you until you beg me to kill you and you know what I’ll say?”
“What?” She rubbed her throat, tears pooled in her eyes.
“No.” I smirked. “I’ll say hell no and I’ll just keep torturing. I’m protecting you as a promise to my very dead best friend—don’t make me regret it.”
“Anything else?” she croaked, a smug smile tugging the corners of her mouth. Damn, I wanted to strangle her.
“No.”
“Then let’s go home.” She pushed past me, shoving my body to the side as if she had enough strength to take me down. I watched her the entire walk to the car, I watched and waited for a misstep. Nothing added up—she had to be the answer.
Chapter Thirty-four
Chase
When we got home, I was torn between searching for Trace and just letting her be alone for a while. I mean, I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. Guilty, guilty, guilty, my conscience screamed at me.
I should have done something.
But no, I was too stuck in my own drama and jealousy.
And now my best friend was dead.
And the love of my life’s heart was broken. Damn, I wasn’t even sure if she knew where the pieces had fallen, and the worst part was, I still wanted to find every damn one and fix it—fix everything. But you can’t fix what refuses your help, and right now it seemed all Trace wanted to do was suffer.
“Chase?” Trace was walking toward me in the hallway. She looked how I felt—like shit.
“Yeah?” I put my gun on the table and met her halfway. “Have you eaten anything?”
She shrugged. Her eyes were sunken and her hair looked somewhat matted to her head. It looked like she hadn’t showered or done anything outside of staring at the wall since I’d been gone.
“Trace, you need to eat.”
She was like a ghost. If she shrugged one more time I was going to lose my shit. Instead, she did nothing. There was no expression on her face, just emptiness.
Did I get it? Hell yeah, I got it. I was hurting, too, but she was precious; she’d been everything to Nixon. What kind of person would that make me if I let her go down that road? If I let her sulk? This was about tough love—shit, she was going to hate me—but she needed to snap out of it and take care of herself. There was mourning and there was burying your soul with the one you’d lost.
She was doing the latter.
And damn if I was going to let her do it.
I grabbed her hand and dragged her down the hall.
“Chase.” She pulled against me. “What are you doing? Chase!”
Good, let her be pissed.
I dragged her into the bathroom and slammed the door. In one swift movement I had the water on in the shower. The bathroom was massive; the rain shower was one you could walk into without having to step over anything. It was the best therapy I could think of, other than getting her drunk, and I was pretty sure that would just make her suicidal.
“Get in.” I pointed to the shower. “Or so help me God I will strip you nak*d and toss you in there myself.”
She met my eyes. A slow-burning fire radiated from them, and then extinguished as she shrugged one last time.
“That’s it.” I grabbed her by the elbow and dragged her, literally, into the shower, both of us with our clothes on.
Once we were under the water, I held her there. Hot water ran down our faces. She tried to jerk free from my grip but I held her there. Pissed at her for not fighting—for not being strong like I needed her to be.
“Snap the hell out of it, Trace.”
Her nostrils flared, but at least she didn’t shrug.
She tried to jerk away from me again but I held her firm. She started kicking at my shins. I ignored the slices of pain radiating through my bones and yelled, “Who are you?”
“What?” She squirmed under my touch.
“Who. Are. You?”
“An Alfero,” she whispered.
“What do Alferos do?”
She said nothing.
I shook her a bit. “Damn it, Trace! What do Alferos do?”
“We fight!” she yelled and tried to push at my chest. “But I can’t. My heart, it’s broken. It’s so damn broken, I feel like I can’t breathe.” She hiccupped and struggled against me.
“Then breathe in me.” I released her and took off my soaked black t-shirt. “Breathe in my atmosphere because then at least I know you’re breathing. At least then I can hear you inhale and exhale. Trace, I can’t fix what’s been broken, and I’m not trying to take his place. God knows I can’t, no matter how badly I wish I could.”
She slumped against me and wrapped her arms around my neck, clinging onto me so tightly that I could feel her heat through her clothing.
“I’m sorry.” She sighed. “I’ll eat.”
“And what else?” I pried her away from me. “What else are you going to do?”
“Fight.”
“And why are you going to fight, Trace?” I whispered.
She took a deep breath. Water fell across her full lips. “Because that’s what he would have wanted.”
“Damn right.” I grabbed her hand and kissed it.
She gasped and then, somehow, I don’t even know how it happened, we were kissing. No—we weren’t kissing—I was devouring her.
Was it wrong to be thankful? To be so damn lost in another person that even though what they were offering were their broken and used pieces—you still grasped at them for dear life and wished that somehow if you loved them enough, those pieces would magically fuse back together?
“I’m not him, Trace,” I said against her lips.
“I know.” She sighed into my mouth. “I know.”
Our lips broke apart. Both of us stepped away from one another. Damn if it didn’t feel like a part of me was dying right along with Nixon.
She looked down.
Our relationship was going to be complicated; that much was sure. But I wasn’t letting her go—it would take an act of God for me to let her go.
“Take off your clothes.” I sighed.
“What? No! Then I’d be nak*d!”
I tried to hold in the laughter, tried and failed.
She swatted me with her hand and then joined in. Tears streamed down her face; I wasn’t sure if they were from amusement or just exhaustion.
“Kinda the point, Trace. I promise I can control my urges. Now take off your clothes, we’ll shower on different sides, I’ll be turned around the entire time. Even though, I have always imagined what you’d look like nak*d…”
“Ass.” She lifted her shirt over her head.
“Always.” I winked. “I’ll always be an ass for you.”
“How sweet.” She stepped out of the workout shorts she was wearing and stripped herself of the rest of her clothes. And as much as I was wanting to slam her against the wall, I couldn’t. Because I was pretty damn sure the last person who had seen her that way had been Nixon.
I wouldn’t take that memory away from her. I wouldn’t replace it with pieces of me—that, in my heart, would be the final betrayal, so I turned around, took off my own clothes and showered with her.
We didn’t touch again.
We didn’t mention the kiss.
And in the end. I made her laugh twice.
Which basically meant I was badass. I needed her laugh more than she realized.
Her laugh told me that even though it hurt like hell… we were going to be okay… One day, maybe not today, we would recover.
Chapter Thirty-five
Phoenix
“So this is fun,” I grumbled, wondering why I was literally sitting a foot away from the scariest mafia boss known to Sicily. He smirked and said nothing, while Frank, my father’s murderer, kept a gun pointed at my head.
Low point. Definite low point.
“I never said thank you.” I cleared my throat and tried not to sound as freaked as I felt.
“For?” Frank answered.
“Killing my father, of course.”
Frank snorted. “I cannot tell if you are upset I beat you to the punch or if you truly mean what you say.”
“Had he not done it, I would have,” Luca piped up from the front seat. The driver was taking us through a series of subdivisions, almost making me dizzy as trees and perfect houses flew by the windows.
“Come again?” I asked.
“Your father, I hope he’s burning in Hell,” Luca said crisply. “And I hope when I meet him there, I’m able to experience his death by my hands for an eternity.”
Shit. I really hoped Luca wasn’t going to be the one to kill me. I knew I’d already pissed him off enough for a lifetime of torture—which begged the question why was I still sucking in air when he’d made it perfectly clear a few weeks ago that if I double-crossed him, or as much as talked—he’d end me.
“Why am I here—”
“Not now,” Luca snapped. “It isn’t safe.”
“Right. Never is,” I mumbled.
“You’re lucky I need you. If I were you, I’d pray for my soul—because if this ends badly—yours will be damned right along with your father’s.”
“Can’t pray for something you never had.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Chase
I always hated “family” meetings. For normal people, a family meeting meant a talk over curfew or maybe even game night.
Right. Our games included blood and guns. Pretty sure a family meeting at my house was like inviting the devil to dinner.
The only thing I couldn’t really figure out was why we were meeting at my house of all places. I mean, I understood that Nixon was gone, but Mo wasn’t, and since that family was the family, it just seemed strange.
At any rate, it was totally possible that my dad had thought it would be too hard to stay at Nixon’s. I put on nice black slacks and a white button-up with a green tie. The other thing about family meetings?
You had to be respectful. My dad hated that I had tattoos, said they made me look like a punk, which only encouraged me to get more. He wanted me to cover them during meetings.
It had always been tougher for Nixon, considering he even had tattoos behind his ear, not to mention the lip piercing that pissed almost everyone off who met him.
He’d rebelled because it was the only control over his life that he’d had—what he did to his body, it was his and only his. Other than that, his life, the journey he’d been on, had been solidly planned out for him.