But death somehow made our relationship far more intimate than I could ever have imagined.
It didn’t matter now. Sex was for people who weren’t standing in a dead man’s office with his blood drying on their skin.
Move.
Move, now!
I wiped my hands on my fitted dress. It just smeared the blood, thin rusty lines across the dark grey. I’d need to burn this. Everything. The thought was so absurd I almost laughed, a choked sound that died in my throat.
The surveillance system.
That was the first problem. Cole’s office building wasn’t top-security, but there were cameras in the hallways, the elevator, and the lobby. I’d been careful coming in. The collar of my trench coach flipped high, my face cast down under the wide brimmed hat, and body slouched. But careful might not be enough, not with what was lying on the floor behind me.
I moved to his computer, waking the screen with a tap. Password protected. Of course. I pulled the USB drive from my pocket—the mob boss friend of Dominico had given me, loaded with a custom bypass—and plugged it in. The screen flickered, code scrolling too fast to read, and then the desktop appeared.
I found the security feed directory. Recent footage, hallway cameras, timestamp search. My fingers left faint pink smudges on the keyboard. I located the files from the last hour, selected all, deleted. Emptied the recycle bin. Then I navigated to the building’s cloud backup and purged those too. The files would still exist in the system’s temporary memory, but without the originals, recovering them would take time. Time I needed. I unplugged the drive, shut down the computer, and grabbed tissues from my purse. With some hand sanitizer, I wiped my fingerprints from the keys and the smudge from the desk’s edge.
Cole hadn’t moved. His mouth was slightly open. He’d been about to say something when the bullet—because it had to be a bullet, the entry wound was small and neat—had taken the words away forever. I hadn’t heard a shot. I’d been in the building when it happened. I’d heard nothing. I’d seen no one.
If I had been here a few minutes sooner….
I would be dead too.
I grabbed my bag from where I’d dropped it by the door, slung it over my shoulder, and took one last look at the room. Nothing of mine was here. There was no trail to have this lead back to me.
Probably.
That was the best case scenario.
I left opting for the stairs. Twelve flights in the near-dark was not an easy feat. My footsteps echoing between concrete walls. On each floor I expected to hear voices. The silence mocked me. My too loud breathing and the occasional hum of the HVAC system were ghoulish in the thundering stillness.
The service exit dumped me into an alley behind the building. The cold air hit me like a slap. It was late October in New York. The chill invaded my bones and refused to leave. I turned my collar up and started walking. I had to force myself not to run. Running attracted attention.
Home was twenty blocks north. I couldn’t take a cab. Not covered in the representative’s blood. And part of me…part of me didn’t want to go there. Whoever attacked the representative had done their work. Which meant they knew.
Knew about us.
That wasn’t as shocking as finding the dead body. I’d had a few days to process the reality that we were under surveillance. Cole had assured me it was a political tactic. That the photos were meant to create a stir. He said he would handle it, and that I didn’t need to worry.
Boy, oh boy, had he been wrong.
I needed to call someone.
Dominico. The name surfaced through the fog. Dominico would know what to do. He always did. The don of the Grimaldi Famiglia was like an adoptive brother. After I’d escaped his grandparent’s clutches, we’d grown close. His wife helped me get away from Boston. They’d supported me at school. They’d come to visit, celebrating every win from graduation, to my first apartment, and my new job as a pharmaceutical developer. They were closest thing to family I had left.
A mafia don would know exactly what to do in this situation.
I fished my phone from my jacket pocket. My hands shook so badly I dropped it. A curse escaped my lips as the screen cracked on the sidewalk. I scooped it up, wipedthe representative’s blood off the shattered display, and unlocked it. The contact list blurred. I stabbed at Dominico’s name, missed, hit it again.
The call connected on the second ring. “Bella.”
Something inside me broke hearing that one word.
“Bella! What is it?” the voice of death rumbled.
I swallowed hard, unable to catch enough breath to form the words. “Luigi—”
“Where are you?” His voice was rough with sleep, or maybe something else. I’d never called him this late. I’d never called him, period. We moved in overlapping circles because of Dominico, but Luigi existed in an orbit of his own. He was forbidden, and I’d resisted the darker pull of his presence. Always watching, never taking.
