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“Avery, for fuck’s sake,” he said when I just… couldn’t stop. Just couldn’t pull it together. How could I? I felt pulled completely apart. I didn’t have the tools to reassemble. And even if I tried, I knew nothing would ever fit quite right again. “Alright,” he said, and then his hand was moving away, then he was moving away.
Out into the hall, where I could hear his voice, low and calm, talking on the phone.
I was vaguely aware of someone else in my apartment at some point, and maybe I should have been freaking out, wondering what they might do to me. Do with me.
I couldn’t seem to bring myself to give a single fuck about that, though.
“Alright, kid,” Renzo said with a long-suffering sort of sigh as he reached for me, grabbing me, and pulling me up slightly on the pillows. “Open your mouth,” he said, and I heard a pill bottle shake.
I didn’t.
But that didn’t matter.
His thumb pressed down on my lip until they parted, and a pill slipped between my lips. Then a bottle of water was pressed there.
“There,” he said when I had no choice but to swallow.
I didn’t ask what he’d given me.
If I would even survive it.
I didn’t care.
“You didn’t get the paper, did you?” he asked.
My head shook as I pressed my palms into my eyes, wondering when the hell they would dry up, when this would stop.
“Does he know who you are?”
Another head shake.
“Okay. Alright,” he said, reaching for me, and pulling me flat on the bed again. But this time, he pulled the covers up over me. “Just drift off,” he said. “It’s for the best.”
With that, he was gone.
Not long after, I felt the pull of sleep.
I didn’t fight it.
Not even if it was the end.
At least it was… nothing.
And I wanted nothing right then.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Emilio
What the ever-loving fuck had just happened?
I’d stopped home to, well, fuck Avery senseless before I had to get back to work.
And there she’d been.
In my office.
In my briefcase of files.
My locked briefcase of files.
With paperwork in her hands.
I would have even figured that maybe she was cleaning up, getting things organized for the design plan she had for the room.
But the fucking guilt on her face, and the fact that she fled, yeah, that kind of shot that idea all to hell, didn’t it?
I’d followed her.
Out into the hall, watching as she grabbed her purse, but didn’t even find shoes, just tore out onto the street, barefoot, to get away from me.
“The fuck?” I hissed to myself as she disappeared from view.
I’d called her a few times, but, well, it didn’t look good. A woman clearly running away from me, barefoot, and me calling after her.
I couldn’t be bringing anymore unwanted attention to the Family right now, so I moved inside. Where I tried to get my fucking head together.
Because, well, what the fuck?
I moved into the dining room, pouring a drink to ease the raw feeling of my nerves, this soul-sinking sensation that something really fucking bad had happened. Something life changing. Something goddamned devastating.
I threw that back then brought another glass with me as I made my way back into my office.
My gut twisted hard at the unmistakable evidence on my desk.
Not just the briefcase and shuffled paperwork, but the can of compressed air and the statue from the mantle in the living room that she’d used to hit the lock after she’d frozen it.
She’s broken into my shit.
She’d been looking through it.
Why?
For fuck’s sake, why?
It wasn’t money.
Surely by now, if she wanted to steal from me, she’d come across numerous hidden stacks of cash around. And she kept such fucking fastidious records of the money she spent that I’d given her.
She wouldn’t do that if she was looking to grift me.
This was about the paperwork.
Pulling in a breath, I moved in front of the desk with its missing chair that we’d broken just the day before.
It felt like a lifetime away now. The sex, the laughter, the trip out, the most fun I’d had in years, the certainty that I’d just fallen for the woman as I held her in my bed and we drifted off to sleep.
I felt suddenly older as I reached for the paperwork that she’d been holding. Something that had been way fucking down at the bottom of the pile, all but forgotten because it had just been a random deal done over a year ago with some fuck who owed the Family a lot of money, and didn’t have it liquid. So he’d signed over some real estate to us instead.
We’d gotten busy with other shit and hadn’t gotten around to doing anything with it. Always figuring that someone would want the space at some point, and would pay us for it, take it off my hands.
