Page 8 of Savage Hero

The baby starts fussing when the girl steps out of the car. And this would have been the perfect time for me to shoot her in the head, baby be damned, or tell one of the sicarios to do it for me so the cleaning ladies don’t have to try to get blood out of my clothes again.

But then she looks up at me, and those navy-blue eyes narrow. Her gaze shifts and she lets out a disapproving sniff.Her voice is deep and extra gruff when she says, “You’re hit, Papi.”

Thankfully, only one sicario is close enough to hear her, and he immediately walks away, perhaps sensing the sudden violent anger that explodes inside me at the girl’s blatant disrespect.

I grab the back of her neck and almost throw her to the ground before I can control myself.

Lucky for her, that’s when Vito arrives. “Savage!” he calls out, his shiny dress shoes clapping over the marble stairs leading down to the gravel drive. He loves wearing suits, and he keeps trying to convince me to wear one too. I don’t see the fucking point. He looks like he’s on his way to the fucking Opera.

“Shit man, what the fuck happened?”

I tighten my grip on the girl, and a tiny jolt of satisfaction stabs through me when she growls at me like an angry poodle. “I’ll debrief you later. First gotta take care of—”

“The fuck you got a baby from?” My cousin doesn’t always take a hint. While dark haired and dark eyed like me, he takes more after his own father than mine. Vito stops in front of the girl and the now fussing baby girl, ducking a little so he can look her in the eye. “Ola, little man. This a present for the Capo?”

No fucking way he can’t see she’s a girl. Has the whole fucking Domingo Cartel suddenly lost their ability to see past such a bad disguise?

Christ, I need to punch something.

Or someone.

Someone with a really bad mustache.

“I’ll meet you upstairs.”

“Savage. The baby,” Vito says, throwing out his arms as I walk the girl past him. “I need answers, man.”

My reply is a grunt, and in punishment for drawing so much goddamn attention to herself, I dig my fingers into the girl’s neck. She hisses at me but doesn’t turn around, doesn’t stop walking.

Is she honestly that concerned about the baby? For all I know, she held onto it as some kind of bargaining chip, using the momentary weakness I displayed back in the restaurant as a way to leverage her own safety.

Christ, does she really think we’re the kind of monsters that would hurt an innocent child?Then again, she just survived a drive-by where five strangers who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time were brutally killed in cold blood.

Cartel life has never been chocolates and roses. It’s rife with knife wounds and fatherless homes.

You’d think she’d know that already.

* * *

I takeher to the pet parlor on the ground floor of the villa. It’s small, it’s out of the way, and it has a lock on the door. There also happens to be a tub if she needs to piss, and running water in case I decide to leave her there indefinitely. I’m ready to lock her in, but then she turns and regards me with her dark blue eyes, and I suddenly need answers. Not all of them. Just one.

“Name,” I growl.

She shrugs. “Petunia,” she says in what I’m assuming is her normal voice. It’s not as deep as it was back in the restaurant, but it’s still husky as fuck—as if she spent as much time screaming as the baby wriggling in her arms.

I narrow my eyes at her. “Name,” I say again. Calm. Cold. Dead inside.

She gives me the finger. And then gasps when I surge toward her, crowding her against the wall.

“The baby, you fucking heathen!” she growls, eyes widening as if she’s genuinely concerned. She struggles when I pry her fingers off the baby’s soft cocoon of pink fabric and makes an angry sound when I finally get it out of her hands. But then she just watches as I put the kid in the dog basin.

“Why don’t you just kill her?” she demands. “And me, while you’re at it. That’s what you freaks do, isn’t it? You murder babies and decapitate—”

She cuts off when I spin around and push her into the wall, my forearm against her throat. I rip the beanie off her head, that terrible fake mustache from her top lip. It leaves behind an angry red mark that for some reason I want to soothe.

With my fucking mouth.

She’s wildly beautiful with her thick, sandy-colored eyebrows and dark lashes. If it wasn’t for her pouty lips, her sharp jaw would look too severe. But with the mustache gone, there’s no disguising the fact that I’m pinning a woman to the wall.

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