Page 15 of Assistant to the Mafia

“Why is she with you and not at a safehouse? Why did you get involved, Romeo?”

“Would you rather I hadn’t answered when she called?”

“You know that’s not my point.”

Romeo glared into the empty room, grateful they were having this discussion over the phone. They were both going to need a little time to cool their heads before it turned into a rational, productive conversation. “If I’d done nothing, or if I’d only sent a response team and instructions, that line you’re so worried about would still have been crossed. That’s not on me, brother.”

Dante cursed. “We’re talking more about this tomorrow.”

“I assumed.” Romeo pulled the phone from his ear in time to see the screen change, indicating Dante had hung up before he could do it himself. That was fine. The important part of the message had been delivered.

He tucked his phone away again and let his head rest against the door, listening to the shower. In the near-silence that rushed into the room, he was sure he could hear Grace sobbing and he hated it. He hated that she had been targeted, that she had been so scared, that she’d had to see even half of what she’d seen. He wasn’t sure yet what exactly she’d endured, but he hated all of it. He wanted nothing more than to go in there and hold her, comfort her, reassure her that she was safe and the nightmare over.

That was the last thing he could do, though, so he held his ground and waited.

It felt like everything had devolved into chaos and she was struggling to keep up. Grace wanted very much to hurry through this shower and get back to Romeo’s side, because Romeo was the only place where she felt like the ground wasn’t collapsing beneath her feet. But she made herself linger. She made herself stand under the spray, soaking and scrubbing everything with soaps that weren’t hers. Soaps that smelled like him.

She forced her mind to go backward, back to Sean’s unexpected and confusing phone call, and then to play the night’s crazy events forward again. She would never understand what had happened if she didn’t first at least sort through the things she had personally witnessed.

The tears started as the sound of that explosion replayed in her memory. She’d heard other, smaller and more muted, popping sounds minutes later. Not the same, yet something in the back of her head insisted they were. Something insisted she was sure she knew what that explosion had been. She didn’t want to think it, didn’t want to picture it, so she scrubbed harder.

She remembered hurriedly shoving a chair in the vicinity of the door, wedging herself in the far corner of her bathroom, and Romeo’s strong voice in her ear. “Don’t talk. Just listen to me. Stay down, make yourself as small as you can, and stay silent. Help’s on the way. If someone puts his hands on you before I get there, scream at the top your lungs. Find something—anything—to bash his face with. The one thing you never do is give in. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

His words had helped her drown out the alarm blaring through her apartment, only for her to realize it had silenced by the time she was off the phone. She certainly hadn’t input the code. And in the silence, she could hear movement, what sounded like multiple people. Male voices.

The door had rattled, someone trying to get in, and she’d slapped a hand over her face to keep from screaming. She’d screamed anyway when the knob was shot off seconds later, the lights flicked on, and a man with his face half covered in a bandana locked an angry stare on her. He held a gun in one hand, a gun he promptly leveled at her.

Romeo had told her to fight back, to not give in, so Grace had done the dumbest thing possibly ever. She’d lifted her phone and snapped a photo. With the brightly lit room and him facing her almost directly, she got a great shot.

By the time she did that, he was surging forward, slinging insults in what sounded like Portuguese, and had a hand in her hair. He wrenched her up, she tried to fight him off, and somehow, she took a hard hit to the jaw that had her seeing stars. The struggle ended with him and his bulkier buddy dragging her by the arms from the bathroom while she attempted to get her feet under her again.

Then another wave of chaos, with shouting in the hall and more men pouring into her apartment. These men were not wearing face coverings and didn’t really look like stereotypical gangsters, but all of them were armed and intimidating. One of her assailants released her, drawing a gun on the newcomers, and an eerily well-orchestrated wave of popping noises sliced through the air.

There had been blood. So much blood.

Grace folded her arms around herself and sucked in watery breaths. It had gotten on her.

The man whose picture she’d taken, his blood had splattered nearly the entire left side of her pajama outfit. She couldn’t tell now if her skin was still stained red from the way it had soaked through, or if the redness was from too much scrubbing. She hoped it was the latter.

She remembered hitting her knees as the other bodies fell, the room suddenly going silent again. She remembered looking around, seeing a mess beyond the death and invasion. She remembered still being afraid. Were these new men there to rescue her? Or were they merely the first wave’s competition?

Someone had tried to speak to her, but the words had garbled in her ears and Grace had scrambled to put her back to a wall. It wasn’t until she recognized a face, another of Dante’s employees though for a different business brand, that she felt a flicker of something other than imminent dread. But she was still confused and frightened and in too much shock to communicate properly.

There were too many strangers in her apartment, and none of them seemed bothered by the carnage. She wanted them all to go away. Their calmness and insistence on hanging around, with their visible weapons, kept her in a heightened state of fear.

It was only when Romeo had walked through the door, plowing past the men still standing, and the ones who weren't, like none of them mattered, that she felt something else. Hope.

Grace blew out a slow breath, the memory of his arms around her and his steady heartbeat beneath her ear as he held her helping to calm her again. Forcing herself back through that insanity didn’t make any of it make more sense. But she supposed she had recalled one potentially useful thing. She’d forgotten about the picture.

She tipped her head back, using the water from the shower that had started to run cold to wash away her tears. Then she turned the whole thing off, found one of the towels, and hurried through drying herself.

His towels were soft and somehow more luxurious than she’d expected, and she found herself wanting to just wrap her body in them instead. But she couldn’t, even though they were actually large enough. So she dried her body, wrapped up and scrub-dried her hair, and paused again.

He carried me. Romeo had lifted her into his arms and walked an unreasonable distance without making a single indication of discomfort.

Her gaze slipped to the fogged-over mirror. She knew what it would show, of course. At five-foot, nine-inches she was not a small woman in stature any more than she was in her weight. Her height made it easier to take a power position in the psychological warfare that often came with her job, because she always wore heels to work so sometimes she even stood above the men. But the overall combination just made her feel self-conscious. She’d always wanted to feel more feminine and delicate, not unlike the way she would have preferred to have a family by the time she’d turned thirty.

Grace turned abruptly from the mirror. Clearly Romeo was strong, stronger than she’d given him credit for even, but this was not the night to get lost down that rabbit hole.

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