Total pages in book: 52
Estimated words: 48018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48018 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Angelo looks back at me as Bobby gets out and into the driver’s seat. “Can you hold this?”
Of course I can. I’m a federal agent. I can take care of a bleeding nose. I take over the task of holding my nose while Bobby does as he is told and gets into the front seat.
“You should come up here,” Bobby says to Angelo, lowering the partition with a smooth hum.
“I’ll stay here with the prisoner,” Angelo reminds him. “Lest we have a bleeding, oddly-dressed woman running through city streets being the very opposite of disguised.”
I look at Bobby. Now that the partition is down between us, I can see his dark gaze in the rear-view mirror. He is jealous as all hell. He needn’t be. He made me bleed. I plan on returning the favor.
I’m very grateful to Bobby, actually, because my blood, my fucking DNA is now all over the back seat of that car. All they need to do is swab it. Assuming they ever show the hell up.
“Put the kiddy locks on,” Bobby suggests. She won’t be able to escape. Then we can talk business without her hearing everything.”
“She can hear, as far as I am concerned.”
“Right, because we’re going to kill her anyway,” Bobby says with a vicious glare at me.
“Because I will never let her go.”
Those words sink into the fiery hot core of my body, giving me an immediate and intense gut reaction. He speaks as though I have always belonged to him, as if there’s no option in the world but for me to belong to him.
Angelo is being overly possessive, but that is how he is. Dismissive of most people, but instantly and endlessly attached to a select few. I have no idea what has made him interested in me, but as I look up over my bloody handkerchief and meet Angelo’s eyes, I feel dark tendrils of obsessive attachment wrap around me. It occurs to me suddenly, all at once and entirely too deeply, that I will not be able to escape Angelo Vitali. Even if I get away, he will come for me, again and again. I feel waves of comfort and fear washing over one another, mingling and becoming some new feeling that has no name and yet settles in my body like an old friend.
Fuck. Me. I am in trouble.
Bobby starts the car, and heads aggressively into traffic, cutting off a taxi that blares its horn. Bobby lowers his window and gives the guy the finger. I feel sorry for anybody who crosses him today. He is not in the fucking mood.
“Are we killing them? I want to kill them.”
“I am sure you do,” Angelo says with a warm smile that contains true affection for Bobby’s brutality. “But we need them alive. They are our conduit to the south.”
Bobby needn’t have worried about me hearing anything. I haven’t heard a damn thing that I have also I understood. Angelo’s criminal activities are many and varied. We at the agency know that we have barely scraped the surface of his malfeasance. I am now getting an insight into his world that no other agent has ever had, or at least, that no other agent has ever lived to report upon.
We drive to the other side of the city, to a house in the suburbs. Children ride by on bicycles. Others play hockey in the street. Bobby slows down and manages to act like 99% less of a vehicular psychopath around them. I wonder if it is because he has softness in him somewhere, or because he’s keeping a low profile. Either option seems unlikely.
He pulls over outside a cute little cottage-style house with a pink mailbox and gets out of the car without a word to Angelo. Two small children come by on scooters, their happy, oblivious normalcy making him look like a living shadow in his dark suit.
I want to ask Angelo what is happening, but I know he wouldn’t tell me. He’s probably enjoying my confusion. I expected an abandoned warehouse or maybe a gleaming high rise to be their destination, not this little slice of normality.
Of course, it makes sense. Many nasty things are hidden in plain sight. Any kind of foul dealer could be operating under cover of suburbia. We could be here picking up drugs, or perhaps Bobby is in there paying off a weapons deal.
He returns with a plain white box big enough to carry several kilograms of cocaine, or any other heavy compact drug. It’s very strange to see him doing his job, carrying out crime so brazenly.
He gets back into the car, puts the box on the passenger seat, and I smell the unmistakeable scent of baking. Not drugs. Not even the sweet scent of legal weed. I smell sugar and fat. I smell cake.