Page 83 of Consumed By the Mafia

“You … bitch…” a different, familiar voice groaned over the crunch of broken glass. Something shook around her, more glass crunched, fabric shuffled and ripped, and that voice cursed low. “Knew you didn’t have … what it takes.”

Dale.The voice was Dale, once one of her most trusted colleagues. A man who worked willingly for the Irish mob and had not only sold her out, but was now trying to kill her. She remembered now—and with remembering came a fresh resurgence of pain. Abigail gritted her teeth and pried her eyes open, realizing she had blood rolling down her face. Of course, the windshield had shattered in the crash. She had spots of blood in multiple places.

Bright light washed over the upside-down SUV and squealing tires indicated that more than likely one, or both, of her fellow convoy vehicles had flipped around to check on the scene she’d made. It hadn’t exactly been subtle. She wanted to be reassured by that, but she had no way of knowing if any of the other new additions were also Coughlan plants.

A shadow fell over her side as she forced her arm to move despite the pain. Her seatbelt was sliced and she fell unceremoniously, dropping onto her shoulders and sliding awkwardly up. Broken glass stabbed into her skin and dragged with the movement, causing her to yelp. It almost overshadowed the sharper discomfort in her ankle. The crash had damaged something there.

Rough hands hauled her out the broken side window even as shouting reached her ears and she realized, with not as much surprise as she wanted, that it was Dale who’d cut her from the seatbelt. Dale who was manhandling her. “Let go,” she attempted to say, adrenaline helping her regain the strength to fight as her body cleared the window frame. She reached over her own shoulders, ignoring the pain, and tried shoving him off. “Let go!”

Dale shoved her around, twisting her in place on her knees, and pressed a piece of bloodied, jagged glass up to her throat. “I’ll have to kill you myself now, Abs. I didn’t want to do that.” He didn’t sound too broken up about it.

“What’s going on here?” someone shouted.

“Drop the weapon!” another voice called.

Abigail sucked in a breath, glaring up at her former friend through the blood dripping over her eye. “Doesn’t matternow, you filthy traitor,” she said. “They can all see.” That wouldn’t pacify her, but it wasn’t her she was worried about.

She wanted to see Ryoma again. More than anything else.

Dale’s nostrils flared, his chest heaving. His face and arms were cut up, too, but it gave her little solace. He opened his mouth, and Abigail saw her chance.

“He’s working with Coughlan!”

Dale’s eyes blew wide.

“He’s the one who leaked my location,” Abigail continued, speaking fast and loud. “He said Coughlan wanted torecruitme and they had to retaliate when I obviously wasn’t going to cooperate.”

Dale let out a wild roar. “Damn you!” He shoved the glass again up to her skin, against her throat, and she felt it bite into her flesh.

Two quick, successive gunshots followed, like thunderous cracks of lightning, and Dale dropped.

Abigail sucked in rapid breaths, her heart racing.Holy fuck.She’d honestly thought he was going to kill her. Tears rushed her eyes. She jumped when one of the local agents crouched down at her side.

“Come on, Fitzgerald. Let’s get you back to headquarters and cleaned up.”

twenty-five

Stay

It was all overthe morning news. Everything from local stations to national online publications were reporting on the takedown of a major criminal network involving over a dozen speculated dirty cops and the Irish mob. Blurry, hard to make out photos of men in brightly labeled FBI vests hauling away other men still wearing police blues were plastered across every damn screen Ryoma laid eyes on. It should have been satisfying.

Instead, each and every time he saw the same fucking headline, his temper only spikedhigher.

He dropped his knuckles as calmly as he could on the door to the suite Cris and Felicity were borrowing. It’d been a long goddamn night, he wasn’t the only one who’d slept like shit, and he was about to crawl out of his skin.

Felicity pulled the door open seconds later and offered him a tired smile. “Morning,” she said. She turned and started back for the large bed that took up only half of the space, leaving him to follow.

Ryoma stepped inside, even managing not slam the door, before ambling further into the room. The couple was going to be staying at Mikey’s for a while. In part because Cris had been ordered to bed rest for the next few days and a gradual return to functionality after that if all went well. Also in part because the tower was structurally unstable at the moment.

The bomb itself had been discovered to have been planted in one of the residences on floor twenty-four—an associate of Marchesi whose body had been found two days earlier in the front seat of a car, with a gun in his lap and a hole blown out of his head. Everyone assumed he’d known about the bomb. Nothing they could do about that now. The better news was, though the bomb had destroyed most of twenty-four and twenty-five, and destabilized the building as a result, the actual damage hadn’t extended up to the penthouse. So as long as it didn’t collapse before repairs could be made, Cris and Felicity could eventually go home.

Ryoma was glad for that, for their sake. He knew the tower was importantto Cris.

Cris let out a low grunt as Ryoma made it up to his side. “You’re not here to gush about this takedown.” He fingered a printed-out paper resting in his lap.

“A guy can’t check on his friend?” Ryoma asked, arching a brow. He flicked a glance at the paper and was surprised to see it wasn’t the same picture he’d seen everywhere else. “That’s at least new.”

“Mikey printed it for us,” Felicity said as she crawled up to her husband’s side. “Said he had a hard time finding it, too.”

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