Page 158 of Dark Romeo

Dante leaned in and stabbed a golden-ringed finger into my face. “You are one lucky motherfucker. Any other night and your head would be hanging from that chandelier.”

“You’d try. That’s as far as you’d get.”

He snorted, dismissing me with a hand. “Get him out of my sight.”

This was not ending here. I elbowed one of the men who was trying to shove me towards the exit and lunged towards Dante. Unfortunately, the other guy was still hanging on to me. “I challenge you, Dante Veronesi!” I yelled as loudly as I could. Everything seemed to freeze. I swear I heard gasps all around me. “You. Me. Outside. Right now.”

Dante glanced around, his gaze finding the undercover, then leaned in. “You want to duel outside my club. Right when there’s an undercover cop in here? Do you think I’m stupid?”

“You could have fooled me.”

Dante nodded his head. “I see. This is a trick. We duel and the pigs swarm this place. They’ll have grounds to investigate further until my family is brought down.”

“No. No cops. You and me, outside.”

Dante laughed. “You want a duel, so be it. But not here. Midnight tomorrow in Little Italy. Dead Man’s Alley.”

Mercutio inhaled sharply. “Roman, you can’t?—”

“Done,” I said.

Dante grinned. “See you then. Unless you chicken out beforehand.” He waved his hand in dismissal. I let myself get dragged away.

Mercutio and I were thrown out of the club into the back alleyway. It stank of piss and the sole streetlight had long since been broken.

“This is real leather, assholes,” I yelled at the retreating bouncers as I brushed down my jacket. They didn’t bite. Looked like I wasn’t getting my fight tonight. I was resigned to taking it out on my boxing bag later. Again.

The door to the club shut, cutting the music down to a dull thumping. “Do you believe those guys, Merc?”

Mercutio stood there staring at me, a stunned look on his face.

I let out a sigh. Time for the lecture. “What?”

But he didn’t yell or rage or rant at me as I expected. It would have been so much easier if he had just yelled. Instead his face crumpled into one of disappointment, lancing me right in the gut. Why was it so easy for everyone to be disappointed in me?

“Roman,” he whispered. “What have you done?”

JULIANNA

____________

Espinoza and I hadn’t been making any headway on the Eddie Sanchez case. We had a body but there was no workable evidence. There were no witnesses to the actual shooting and no weapon.

We got our hands on security footage from a pawn shop across the street from the Sanchez apartment. We saw Eddie take off in his car at around seven thirty, just like Rosa said. Rosa never followed him out. She was scratched off the list of suspects.

That left only Roman Tyrell and the unreliable witness who saw somebody like Roman at a gas station several miles away from his actual murder site. It was thin evidence, at best.

My cop instinct kept wanting to blurt out Roman’s confession. It kept bubbling up onto my tongue at the most inappropriate moments. I knew Roman had killed Eddie. I knew it had been him at that gas station. I knew he somehow manufactured that insurance policy so that Eddie’s family would be taken care of after he died.

It didn’t stop me from missing him. It didn’t stop me from loving him.

It was past ten thirty. We’d both just clocked off work. Espo was driving me home. For the first time in a few weeks, we didn’t just drive in silence.

“I’m telling you, it’s a tragedy,” Espo said from the driver’s seat.

I leaned back in the passenger seat as Verona’s downtown flashed by, flexing my toes in my black leather work boots. “Why can’t Lacey and Jasmine from toxicology be lunch buddies?”

“Jasmine will put Lacey off me forever. You know how girls like to talk.”

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