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“Watch it!” Julian snaps.
I roll over onto my back, scrabbling for the gun, but someone—not Julian—has kicked it away. As for Julian, he runs to me, kneels, takes my face in his hands. “Just stay down,” he murmurs, then looks away to hiss with a poisonous tone, “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Saving your life. You can thank me later.” Johnny Jacopo looks down at me, gun trained between my eyes.
“He wasn’t going tokillme,” Julian says, and the hand stroking my throbbing forehead feels so soothing, I close my eyes. “You hit him too hard, Jack.”
“It’s not an exact science,” comes the rueful reply, and when I crack my eyes open again, Jacopo is crouched by my side, a worried light in his eyes.
I try to shove them off, but I’m slipping under, my consciousness fading along with thought. There’s something warm and wet under my head.
“He’sreally hurt,” Julian says, hands fluttering over me, coming away red.
I’ve never heard Julian Castellani sound afraid before.
Strange to hear it now…
CHAPTER32
LEO
Next timemy eyes peel open, they’re looking at something pink and yellow and green. My eyes focus, making out a vase of flowers. Behind bars.
A vase of flowers behind bars?
I sit up fast, and only succeed in making my head spin as a stabbing pain shoots through it.
“Over there,” says a voice beyond the jailed flowers. “There’s a toilet if you need to—well, do that.”
I make it to the toilet in time and hurl my guts up, my head throbbing and complaining, my eyeballs on fire as my body heaves up all that coffee I drank in the car while I was waiting for...
Julian.
I wipe my mouth and glance over my shoulder.
Turns out it’s not the flowers that are behind bars. It’s me. And Julian is out there too, that bastard, sitting on a folding chair outside my cell, wearing what’s supposed to pass for a smile. He’s changed into a white button-down and jeans—the expensive kind—and he looks like an Abercrombie and Fitch model with his hair combed like it is. If it weren’t for the stink of death in this place, he might even pull it off.
I stagger back to the bed, touching the back of my head cautiously. There’s a bandage all around, and as I pull at it, Julian says sharply, “Don’t. We had a hell of a time stemming the blood.”
“Where am I?”
“You’re at Redwood Manor.”
I look around the cell. I’ve been lying on a thin mattress on a metal bunk, my head on a pillow, and several comforters piled up on top. The rest of the room is bare except for the metal toilet and sink.
“You really let the place go since last time I was here,” I grunt.
“You’re joking. That’s a good sign. How are you feeling?”
“How the fuck do you—“ I begin in a shout, and the nauseous feeling swims back. “—think,” I finish weakly.
“We need to talk.” Julian stands and comes close to the bars.
“I got one thing to say to you, Julian.” I stand as well. “And that’s ‘fuck off.’”
He puts his hands on his hips and gives a little sigh, like I’m some petulant kid who won’t listen about his bedtime. “Roxy is fine,” he offers after a moment. “I didn’t kill her.”
That gets my attention. I hadn’t even wanted to ask, because I already knew the outcome. Johnny Jacopo and Julian Castellani show up somewhere together?Someone’sgonna die.
