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“The undershirt will help for now.” I glanced over my shoulder. “I have to go in the store to get alcohol and bandages. You’ll be safe in the car, I promise.”
“No.” She thrust forward and pulled her gun from my waistband and pointed it at me again.
That got me shot in the first place. “What do you want, Becca?”
“I want to get word to Vale. Gian took his phone, but I can leave a cryptic message and he can get it later.” She choked. “Vale has protected me since we were in school. He’s got to be frantic.”
“And what will you tell him?”
“That I’m okay.”
“If he’s working with Giancarlo, they’ll know if something happened to you. The hitman will post it. No news is good news. Becca, I have to bandage my arm. Me bleeding out won’t help you.”
She shook her gun. “My gun will help me.”
“Go ahead and either shoot me again or blast your handcuffs open.” I chuckled darkly at this conversation.
She lowered her head and whimpered. “I’m dizzy. You drugged me.”
“You’re a fighter.” I stepped closer to snag the gun then tossed it in the front seat next to my Glock. If someone drove by and saw her pointing it, we’d get in trouble. “You forced yourself awake. Probably all the adrenaline in your system from what’s been going on. The amount I gave you should have kept you asleep for several more hours. I’ll let you sleep more in the car once we get back on the road.”
“Why did you stop?”
With the gun no longer in my face, I brushed her forehead. “To check on you. I’ve been stopping every half hour. There’s no point to any of this if you die on me.”
“I’m coming inside with you. I have to move around, I feel sick.”
Losing blood, the pain fucked with my judgement. If she ran from me, and got hurt, it would be my fault. Still... “Promise me, you won’t take off. I won’t be able to drive for much longer thanks to this.” I lifted my arm. “We’ll find a place in this town to sleep. Are you hungry?”
She shrugged. “A little. Mostly thirsty.”
Nodding, I went back to the trunk where I secured her gun in a lockbox and set the code. After putting my jacket back on and slipping my gun into the inner pocket, I took out a knapsack with supplies each unmarked car came stocked with. “Here. There should be water in there.” I crouched down and with the strap in my teeth, I used my free hand to unzip it.
Her hand closed over my mine and it felt so warm.
“I got it. Thank you, Jules,” she whispered and pulled out a bottle of water. “God, I’m dying of thirst.”
“That’s the drugs. Drink the whole thing. We’ll get more.”
She kept the bottle between her legs and used her free hand to twist the cap off. Lifting it to her mouth, she stunned me with her beauty. Those pink lips around the mouth of the bottle...
I was a dead man.
*
WALKING TO THE STORE’Sentrance, I held Becca by the waist. Partly to steady her. Partly to keep her from running. Mostly, I couldn’t help touching her.
That kiss in her limo had me doing all kinds of crazy shit. Risking my career by watching out for her. She was a brand-new leader in a vicious world of seasoned killers.
“Keep your hood on, please, Becca.”
“It makes me look shady.”
“Better shady than recognized.”
She glanced around. “That’s our problem, you know.”
“Being recognized?”
“We think Manhattan is the end-all, be-all of society. Sure, we’re the capital of everything. Finance. Fashion. Entertainment.”
“Crime. Organized, anyway.” I didn’t know why I helped her argument. “Your point?” I couldn’t resist hearing her voice. How innocent she sounded at times. When she wasn’t telling me to fuck off.
“I don’t want to sound pretentious, but I’m guessing shoppers here don’t know who I am. Or give a shit about me and my problems.”
“You’re right. That does sound very pretentious.”
She stopped abruptly. “Did you know Sebastien’s family was dirt poor when he went to school with us, Julian Russo? Son of Phillip Russo, New York City construction king.”
Hearing my father’s name sent chills through me. “I remember hearing rumors about Sebastien. But people were afraid of him because he was so tall and large, the type of guy that you expected to pummel you if you looked at him wrong.”
“I didn’t care if he was poor. I saw a boy with a beautiful smile who made me laugh. Who had nothing in our world, but would risk what he had to protect me.”
I admitted to myself, of the three men she’d given herself to, I doubted Sebastien would have anything to do with a hit on her. Three men. She had three boyfriends. Holy shit. How’d she get them to agree to share her? These were the princes in the mafia world, not the type of men to share anything.
“Your point is taken, as far as the customers here in the sticks not recognizing you.” With my free hand, I grabbed her arm and pulled her behind an SUV. “You see the entrance? Those cameras?”
She exhaled. “I got an AV lesson from Giancarlo.”
“There’s something you don’t know.” And maybe Giancarlo didn’t either, but I highly doubted it. “All big retailers like this were approached by the FBI counterintelligence to link their camera feeds to a third party for facial recognition.”
Becca stared up at me. “One third party only?”
“Yes, one.” A purchasing policy violation if I ever saw one. Protocol stated we needed to bid it out and divide the contract over three companies. To avoid what I knew was happening right now. “All of our contracts are published by law. Most people have better things to do like scroll on Instagram than look up thousands of government-awarded contracts. Hackers aren’t most people. One company means one central database. I have no doubt, whoever put that hit on you has hacked into that database and is looking for you.”
“Great.” She shook her head. “How do people get away with anything these days?”
“They don’t.” I held her against me again. “Your father made his deals with local law enforcement. And when dead bodies stopped turning up in the streets, and all the international terrorist activities started, the FBI focused our resources elsewhere. You’re right about who I am. Where I come from. What my father did for a living before he moved to Miami.”
“I do my homework.” She gave a cute curtsey.
“Just keep your head down and don’t talk to anyone, got it?”
“Got it.”
The glow of the monolith store sign blinded me. All I could think was...
This was a bad fucking idea...
