AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Red. Splattered everywhere. Blood. The coppery tang fills my nostrils all at once.
The man holding a blood-coated hammer, letting it hang at his side.
Tap, tap, tap. The blood drips from the end onto the plastic.
In a chair sits what might have been a man but is now a broken, blood-soaked lump of flesh.
I joined the force straight out of high school. I always knew exactly what I wanted to do. It only took six years to become a detective. I’ve seen a lot of things—too many things. But that was always after the fact.
It was never during.
And the victim was never gurgling, choking weakly on their own blood when I found them. He’s still alive. I can’t recognize anything close to a human face under all that blood, but somehow, he’s still breathing.
The man with the hammer spins with a surprised grunt, and I knew, didn’t I? I knew who he was before I stepped foot in this club. I knew what he was capable of and what he had probably done.
The sight of Luca Santoro’s blood-spattered face steals my breath and makes the world spin. Before I can allow my extensive training to kick in, my legs go out, and pain explodes in my head before everything goes black.
4
LUCA
Are you fucking kidding me?
“What the fuck, Vin?” I hiss as my braindead bodyguard pulls Em the rest of the way into the room and slams the door. This time, he locks it. “What were you thinking?”
“Sorry, boss.”
“You think I fucking care if you’re sorry? Anybody could’ve walked in here!” My heart’s racing, and my adrenaline is still pumping. I’m in a dangerous place—clearheaded enough to see what’s happening to my body and my brain but not enough to give a shit. Blood roars in my ears, and my chest heaves like I’ve come back from battle, blood-soaked and victorious.
This is not the time to fuck with me.
“I should use this fucking hammer on you,” I growl out. “How did you forget something so simple as locking the damn door? I cannot believe you did that.”
He absorbs my rage without looking at me. Instead, he picks her up with no effort and drapes her across the plastic-covered leather couch. “I think her head’s bleeding,” Vinny offers as if the sight of blood isn’t enough to confirm that.
Another wonderful development. “Just leave her there. I’ll figure something out as soon as I’m finished dealing with this problem.”
A problem that has gone silent. Fuck. He died when I wasn’t looking. I was hoping to witness those final breaths so I could burn the image in my memory and recall it every time I’m on the verge of trusting an outsider from now until the day I die.
“Get rid of him.” I drop the hammer on the floor, knowing it will be taken away with the body and the plastic, disposed of in the same barrel of acid as Frankie’s body. Normally, I would have him dismembered, maybe leave a few pieces around where part of my victim’s crew could find them.
A message, in other words.
“Careful with the corpse. We don’t want Vitali getting the heads-up yet that we know he was behind the port fiasco.” My father’s words echo in my mind. As if he needed to remind me, like this is my first fucking day on the job.
Now, there’s the matter of cleaning myself up before she regains consciousness. There might still be a chance to convince her she saw nothing, but there’s no hope if she sees me the way I am now.
The attached full bath and dressing room come in handy at a time like this. Stripping down to my underwear, I bundle the suit in another wad of plastic before handing it off to Mike, one of the men in the room.
“What are you doing?” I ask Vinny, who hovers at Em’s side. “Get back out there. We don’t want anybody else trying to sneak their way in,” I snap, knowing he would rather be anywhere but here. When I am as pissed as I am now, I don’t need a hammer to do damage, and he knows it.
Once I’ve scrubbed my hands clean with a nail brush and soap, I pull the plastic from beneath Em’s limp body, then open her purse. Her driver’s license sits outside her wallet, and I see she wasn’t necessarily lying about her name. Em, short for Emilia Washington, twenty-four years old. She lives in what I immediately recognize as a shitty part of Brooklyn. She can’t feel safe in that environment, someone as tiny and defenseless as she is.
What the fuck was she doing coming in here? She said she knows who I am, knows my family. Yet she would stroll in here the way she did? Something doesn’t add up. Maybe she downed a few shots after I left her.
Trying to process her intentions, I’m almost oblivious to Mike and Bobby carrying the corpse through the back door and into a waiting van in the alley. As soon as the door clicks shut, I open her wallet, glad they’re out of the room. For some reason, I just know I can’t let them witness my reaction to what I find.
“A detective?” NYPD-issued ID, Detective Emilia Washington. My hands shake, and everything goes red.
