Page 26 of Rescued By the Mafia

Dante pulled Iris tight against his side. To Elise, he said, “That piece of shit is stalking her.”

Elise’s eyes widened.

“Tell me everything he said, and everything he did in front of you.”

Elise stuttered. “I— He just— He was locking the door. With a key. He told me he was Iris’s boyfriend from her hometown, that he’d come to take her away for a bit, and she’d said I could use her car if I wanted.”

Iris felt her throat constrict. She didn’t want to be here anymore. She didn’t really care about the car and if Elise was technically fine, that was enough.

“Boss,” the man who’d driven their SUV said. There was something off in his tone, but Iris didn’t know him well enough to understand it. Or her head wasn’t clear enough.

Dante, however, seemed to understand it clearly. “Goddammit. Clear out, now!” He scooped Iris off her feet as he barked the order, turning and striding swiftly back toward the SUV.

Iris latched onto him on reflex.

She caught sight of Elise’s confused, widened eyes as the men around them—the men who’d surrounded her—peeled away.

She was set down in the SUV, the door clicked shut, and Dante jogged around to the side she’d previously sat on as the driver jumped in. Carlo had Dante’s door open in expectation and anxiety twisted Iris’s stomach. Why did it feel like something was wrong?

A sound she couldn’t immediately identify, like a sizzling pop directly followed by bursting glass and the tell-tale whoosh of fire, exploded just beyond her peripheral vision. She jumped, head spinning back toward the Corolla and where they’d left Elise, in time for the SUV she was seated in to rock as if it were sitting on the ocean. A wave of tangible, choking heat washed over her with it, and all Iris could see out her window was thick, black smoke and flickering orange flame.

“Fuck,” the driver cursed as he rolled the SUV’s engine over.

The door on Iris’s other side slammed shut and Dante’s voice filled the cabin. “Get us the fuck out of here!”

Something crashed into the window in front of Iris’s face. The window held, barely cracking, but the scorched, bronze-tinted shrapnel may as well have sliced through her. Iris shoved away from the window, tears mixing with the smoke to burn her eyes. That was her car. The Corolla had exploded.

Did Paul … try to blow me up? She struggled to make sense of it. How he could have timed it so that she was even remotely nearby, and why he would have turned to such a blatantly violent method? He’d been abusive, but he’d always denied his violence to others. And gotten away with it. What plan could he have had for denying this? How had he orchestrated it? And what about Elise?

Dante pulled Iris into his lap, arms banding tight and strong around her. “Just lean on me, honey,” he said, speaking quietly. “We’re going home. He can’t touch you there.”

Iris twisted enough to bury her face into the crook of his neck and let him take her weight. “E-Elise…”

He stroked a hand up her spine in a soothing motion. “She’s gone.”

Iris bit back a sob and wrapped her arms around his neck.

Mikey and Romeo pushed to their feet when Dante strode back into the sitting room later that night.

To say the rest of their evening had gone to shit would be an understatement of fucking epic proportions. Iris hadn’t touched her dinner, and the only man Dante could blame for that was the one who continued to evade him. The one who’d blown up her motherfucking car, damaged two of his SUVs in the resulting explosion, sent one of his men to the ER, and murdered Iris’s former roommate. The woman had been obnoxious, but Iris’s grief over her loss—almost surely induced by guilt—meant Dante was enraged over the death nonetheless.

“How is she?” Romeo asked.

Dante blew out a breath and moved to his preferred wingback chair. “She cried herself to sleep.”

“Shit.” Romeo and Mikey settled back on the sofa and Romeo scrubbed a hand through his hair. “For what it’s worth, I doubled up perimeter security. Carlo volunteered to take over bodyguard duty if you’ll let him, said he was impressed by something she did before everything … you know.”

Dante inclined his head. “I’ll talk to her about that in the morning.”

Mikey leaned forward. “Digital security’s tight,” he said. “I had a team sweep over the vehicles to make sure nothing’s compromised. The damaged SUVs are going to take time to repair, but we should get them back in a couple weeks.” He slid Iris’s phone, which Dante had procured from her pocket earlier, across the table. “Nothing’s wrong here, either.”

Dante reclaimed the phone and tucked it away. “Good. Did you learn anything about the bomb?”

Romeo and Mikey exchanged a short look that confirmed they had.

Mikey lifted his tablet from the arm of the sofa. “My source says it was remotely detonated, and more than likely manually triggered.” He tapped on the screen a few times and turned the tablet around, displaying what looked like a blueprint. “If the initial investigation is correct, then whoever set it had to have been within a certain radius—meaning they had eyes on you the whole time.” He indicated a portion of the screen that offered an example of his words, but Dante didn’t need the reference.

Dante scowled.

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