Page 6 of Under His Embrace

“Stop,” I ordered, sprinting full-speed after him. He wouldn’t get away, not with me hot on his heels and with the gun in my hand. Pumping my arms fast, I lacked a chance to aim at him, but once he shot shelter behind the beat-up station wagon, I lifted my firearm and pulled the trigger.

He wasn’t fast enough to duck. The first bullet from my gun shattered the only window blocking him. Then the second hit him in the side.

The loud curse proved I’d gotten him where it hurt, where it would count. I couldn’t kill him yet, but as I ran around the car and trained my gun on him, I saw that I’d wounded him to the point that he wouldn’t run.

Blood and body matter splattered the pavement. He fell from the hit that cut through him from the right. If I didn’t shatter his ribs, I would have damaged plenty of other organs and vital body parts.

Just in case he got any ideas, I shot both his legs too.

“Fuck!” he roared it to no one. Under this cold, gray sky, it was just me and him out here near the place I’d grown up. Beckson wasn’t well populated, and the first signs of civilization only showed up closer to Main Street in town. Where Chloe’s parents lived in a?—

Dammit. Not now.This was no time to let my thoughts wander to her.

Out here off the highway, it was uninhabited and barren, save for the piece-of-shit motel that I assumed would’ve been torn down years ago.

“Who do you work for?” I asked, holding my gun to aim at his head.

He spat at my feet, then resumed wincing and rolling to his back. Both of his hands were covered in blood, but no matter how hard he compressed the wounds, he wouldn’t live.

“Tell me who ordered you to shoot up that shop.”

He groaned, not answering.

“Tell me now.”

“Fuck you. I ain’t telling you shit.”

I narrowed my eyes at the slowly dying man. He’d bleed out soon enough, but he was with it enough to know what I was asking for. Intel. Information. Answers.

He intended to hold out on me and take those details to the grave. I wasn’t shocked. I’d encountered many people who preferred to die before giving away a single piece of information. It was just my luck that he had to be one of them.

As I watched him struggle to breathe, blood spilled out of his mouth. Time was running out for him. It was running out for me, too, to get any answers. Studying him was a form of getting information, though. He wasn’t as polished and cutthroat as the Giovanni soldiers. They were trained too well. They knew how this worked. If this man was someone Stefan Giovanni hired, he would’ve taken his gun and killed himself already. That was how Stefan expected his soldiers not to tell anyone a thing.

In the same manner, I didn’t think this guy was a survivor from the Domino outfit. All the Mafia Families looked the same and held themselves in the same manner. This man wasn’t from any crime family that I recognized.

His slurred speech and grungy appearance suggested he might be a member from the Devil’s Brothers, but I didn’t think that was correct either. He wasn’t wearing a cut and he seemed slightly different from the bikers who’d been making our lives hell lately.

“I ain’t telling you sh?—”

I shot him, not in the mood to wait him out. He’d made up his mind not to tell me anything, and I expedited that process. I didn’t have all day to wait around. Liam might have better luck in that room, and that was why I turned to rush back there and hopefully help interrogate that shorter man.

No one appeared as I sprinted back to the motel. Not a worker. No guests. Only the distant drone of vehicles speeding along the highway met my ears.

I slowed to a jog as I ran to the open door to room four.

“Dammit,” I announced as I walked in.

The short, bald man was dead, lying on the ground with a bullet hole between his eyes. Liam was an expert marksman.

“He wasn’t telling me anything,” he replied, uninjured near the bed. “I tried, but…” He sighed and shrugged.

“Yeah. The other one didn’t talk either.” I furrowed my brow, assuming not all was lost. Liam stayed crouched near the bed, hovering over another body. “Is that the employee?”

“It is.”

I walked closer. “Dead?”

“No. But he reached her and she knocked her head on the edge of the nightstand in the commotion before I could get him away from her.”

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