AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I need to show him I’m perfectly fine without one.
“Stop roaring up and causing trouble,” I finish. “I’m speaking to Drago.”
Rather than listening to me, the voice of reason in this overheated and shrinking room, Ricardo makes a grab for me. And Drago shifts to block him. The two men collide, and Ricardo, taking the hit, snarls in Drago’s face.
“What do you think you’re going to do?” he asks the other man. “You don’t know her. You don’t know who this is.”
“On the contrary—” Drago begins, puffing out his chest.
“Isabella, we’re getting out of here. Take my goddamn hand and stop fucking around.” There’s no arguing with Ricardo.
Not even when one of Dragos’s men reaches for the gun at his side and rests his palm on the handle.
My mouth goes dry, the rest of me tensing up.
“Son, I suggest you back up and take a beat. Go outside and clear your head. You don’t want to start something you have no hope of finishing.” Drago keeps his voice conversational, but a sliver of ice works its way down my spine and lodges in the small of my back. His eyes lost any hint of civility, and I had to blink at the image in front of me.
No more Santa Claus. No, this was the Grim Reaper.
“Ricardo—” I start.
“Flashing your weapon isn’t a good sign.” Ricardo doesn’t have anything on him. At least, nothing that I felt when our bodies pressed together. If he does, he’s hiding it—it doesn’t matter. “No one is going to shoot anyone tonight.”
I maneuver my body in between the two of them with my back to Ricardo, my attention focused entirely on the man with the gun.
“And if you call me son one more time,” Ricardo adds, his arm banding around my waist, “then you’re going to have a lot more trouble than violating the terms of this place. Which, as an outsider, I’m sure you’re not aware of yet. I’d be happy to enlighten you.”
He hauls me against his front in a deliberate move.
Drago doesn’t move. A slight twitch of his eye and his man takes the gun out without cocking off the safety. “If you take her now, you’ll invite more trouble into your life than you’re aware of. Son.” He says the word out of spite.
Ricardo reaches behind him in a slow, deliberate gesture.
The other two guards take it as an invitation, both of them cocking their weapons and training them on us.
I barely have time to scream before someone else from the bar notices the draw and starts to yell for help. The crowd does what crowds do best. Panic. Bleating like sheep, they surge in a wave and come perilously close to knocking me forward into the draw.
The crush of bodies is the perfect escape, but I can’t think. I can’t do anything except screech along with the rest of them and prove Ricardo right that I am utterly useless. There are guns ready to shoot, primed, and pumped. There are people ready to die. And there is Ricardo, hauling me against his hip as he makes a break for it. He cuts a path through the rest of them toward the back door instead of the front, where they all head.
“Isabella.”
My scream cuts off, dying in the back of my throat as he finally sets me on my feet. He grabs my hand, digging the metal of the silver into my skin, and drags me the rest of the way toward the black sedan. Two of his men wait outside and open the doors for us.
Ricardo shoves me through the open door and follows with his body.
“You know where to go,” he barks out.
They carry out his order without thought and without hesitation. Exactly the way they’ve been trained.
Because these men have been in this job for a long time. Probably not as long as I have, and even so, they know more than I do. They know where to step and how lightly or how firmly. They know when to draw their guns and when to stay silent.
The car sails along the open road smoothly, hardly another vehicle in sight this late into the evening on a Wednesday. Not like it makes a difference what day of the week it is.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Somewhere we can lay low for a while. We got out just as the guns started going off.”
I hadn’t heard them.
