Page 32 of Mob Bride

“Carrie, you need to go. I doubt these are the only men here. There’re bound to be more to come, but right now there’s no one to collect his body, so take advantage of that and go. Run.”

“You’re going to stay behind to watch what happens?”

“Yes. I’ll stay to make sure whoever comes thinks it was me. You don’t need that target on you. It’ll only blow up your investigation. You don’t need to explain to your agency why you murdered him.”

Chapter Eight

Carrie

“Murder?”

“Yes, murder. Carrie, look at the scene. I know you waited for him to get closer to get the clear shot. Maybe you even wanted him to see it was you, but what it’s going to look like to your investigators and his men is that you murdered him, shooting him in cold blood before his men could get to him.

“What are you doing?”

“Texting our cleaners.”

“Cleaners?” My brow furrows, then my eyebrows shoot straight up. The team that’ll come in and remove any sign of a crime scene at all. They’ll clean up all the bio-waste, all the shell casings. Anything that could lead law enforcement to Shane’s family. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me he has them on speed dial. He pauses as we both hear sirens and angry voices.

“Carrie, there’s no time left. Go. I’ve got this.”

“I amnotleaving you on your own to deal with this.”

“It would be so much better if you did. Which one of the two of us has been in this position before? We both know the answer to that.”

It’s against my better judgment, but I listen to him and turn in the direction I came from, which is the opposite direction of the sirens and the angry voices. I get far enough down the path to duck out of sight, but still see what’s going on. Shane’s got his gun raised and pointing again at the oncoming voices.

“Which O’Rourke are you?”

Oh, fuck me in the ass with a pogo stick. It’s Tymoteusz. I definitely can’t leave Shane now. I don’t know if he’ll need me, but there’s a good chance he will. I don’t want to reveal myself, but I don’t want him getting killed on my behalf.

“Does it really matter which one I am? You know I’m an O’Rourke. We’re all one and the same.

I hear Tymoteusz grunt. “What the fuck happened to my cousin?”

“What does it look like? He attacked me on a run.”

“Oh, yeah. You single-handedly took down these men without a scratch.” Tymoteusz’s disdain rings in the air.

Shane points to where we stood off the trail. “I had a better vantage point. Jacek and his men didn’t plan well, and I could shield myself and they weren’t. They were easy picking.”

“Fuck you, motherfucker.”

“What? Did I say anything that isn’t obvious? It’s not my fault your cousin’s batshit bonkers. Or at least he was.”

I watch Tymoteusz approach, and Shane hurries to reload his magazine. I don’t even carry a spare with me. He just whips it out of his sweatpants’ pocket as though he were pulling out a candy bar. It boggles the mind. He reloads and aims and shoots the trail, right between Tymoteusz’s feet. It all happens so quickly nobody can anticipate what he’s doing. Tymoteusz’s men are ready to shoot, but he holds his hand up.

“No. It’s bad enough Jacek’s hit. We can’t take out O’Rourke. He knows that. He’s banking on the fact his family will annihilate mine if we touch a pretty little red hair on his head.”

Even from this distance, I can see Shane shrug, and I can picture his smirk.

“Tell me what you want to do.” Shane calls out as though he’s asking what they want for dinner. “Do you want my cleaners to take care of this? They can get here faster than yours. You going to take Jacek’s body? You want us to dump it? I know you hate him, so I don’t think it would bother you if we disposed of him for you.” The cadence of Shane’s speech is so casual; it’s flippant even. As though he’d be doing Tymoteusz a favor, and a covert one for me.

In some ways he would be, but that’s not how I imagined this conversation to go.

“Where’s Kaja?”

“Who?” Shane’s confusion is genuine.

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