Page 199 of Vicious Temptation

“Fuck you, cunt. I’m not saying shit.”

My parents did their best to desensitize us to death without turning us into complete sociopaths, and I think they succeeded. I don’t enjoy hurting people for the sake of it because that’s never been who I am. But if you threaten me or anyone I love, you’ve already made the worst decision of your life

I look him over, then smile. “I was hoping you’d say that.”

Okay, maybe I do enjoy the look on his face when I pull out my old jumper cables and let them clank.

“W-What are you doing?” Panic creeps into his voice.

“Do you have any idea how well those pretty little barbells conduct electricity?”

He shakes his head frantically, not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because he knows exactly what’s coming. “No. Don’t. Please.”

Of course he begs when his manhood is threatened.

“Me neither,” I say. “I guess we’re about to run a test.”

I clamp one of the cables to the first piercing, and he jerks and cries out, “Help! Somebody help me! This bitch is crazy!”

“Who are you, and who sent you?”

“Shit. Shit,” he stammers as my finger hovers over the ignition switch. “Okay, okay. It was Rafe. He said you owed him and that you disrespected him on the track in front of everybody. He paid me. I was just doing my job. It’s nothing personal. I swear.”

“Pointing a gun at my head and pulling the trigger feels pretty personal, Jakey.”

I tap my nail against the panel.

“No, please. I told you. I gave you what you wanted.”

“You did, and I’m very grateful.”

He takes several shaky breaths as some of the panic leaves his face. “So you’ll let me go?”

I turn away from him and head toward my workbench. “No.”

“But you said⁠—”

I glance back at him. “I said I was grateful.”

Then I fire.

The bullet strikes him in the forehead, and he slumps as his blood spills across my garage floor.

He came here prepared to kill me for a paycheck. If he’d arrived a few minutes earlier, my father could have been standing beside me when he pulled that trigger. There was never a version of this in which he walked out of here alive.

Pulling out my phone, I call Matteo.

“I need a favor,” I say before he can get a word in. “I need your full discretion and Santino’s cleanup crew at my garage.”

Matteo goes quiet before asking, “Are you good, Remi?”

“I am.”

“Okay.”

His willingness to leave it there is exactly why I called him.

“Oh, I need you to meet me at Furia tonight.”