Page 233 of Syndicate of Sin Bundle

After parking the car behind some bushes, he nodded to the shed behind the run-down house. “We bring the money there. Five minutes, tops.” He pulled the bags from the back and handed me two. “It’s simple, reginetta. Don’t fuck it up.”

I took a deep breath through my nose, cursing the weather for all this damn rain we’d been getting, and sprinted toward the shed. Alessandro took his sweet time, the rain drenching his hair, making his dress shirt cling to his abs and his hair stick to his forehead.

When he unlocked the shed, I pushed the door open and walked into a heap of spiderwebs. I cowered back and scrunched my nose, bumping into Alessandro.

“Watch it,” he said, locking the doors behind us.

He turned on the lamp in the far corner of the room and pulled up one of the floorboards in the very back.

Stacks of cocaine and piles of money lay under it, and my eyes widened. I glanced around the room at the floor. There must’ve been thousands—if not millions—of dollars here that needed to be cleaned. But at least that was what the whores were for, working at my father’s strip club and cleaning the money before we used it.

I threw the bags down on the ground next to him.

“What are you doing in America?” I asked, crossing my arms over my chest and wanting to move on from his flirtatious remarks in the car. “Why are you here?”

He groaned, a thick strand of hair sticking to his forehead. “I thought you’d said that once I brought you back out, you’d stop asking questions? That was the damn deal.”

After putting the wooden boards back into place, we walked back to the door. Without responding to me, he unlocked it and walked back out into the rain.

I hurried after him, right by his side the whole time. “You haven’t answered any of my damn questions,” I said.

I didn’t know why I wanted to know more about him, but I did. There was something about him that made him different from the other men in the family, and I wanted to figure out what exactly it was.

When he reached the car, I snatched his wrist in one hand and stuck the tip of my gun right into his wound. “Why are you here?”

“Put your little toy away,” he said, stopping dead in his tracks.

But I pushed it deeper into his side. He let out a guttural growl, turned around, snatched my gun right from me before I could even react, and stuck the tip of it right under my chin.

“What did I tell you?”

I didn’t know what I hated more: the way he had so easily disarmed me—after the years of training I had been through—or the way I couldn’t help but get excited at how damn insane this man was.

“Don’t stick your nose in places it doesn’t belong,” he said again. “This is the last fucking time I’m going to warn you.”

And because I didn’t believe him, I pushed him even more. “I deserve to know.”

He hadn’t hurt me yet. He hadn’t put a bullet through my head, like he had promised. He protected me. Over. And over. And over.

He stepped closer to me, pressing me against the car with his hips. “You’re going to get a bullet straight through this pretty little head of yours if you keep asking questions, and it’s not going to be by me.”

“You think I’m afraid?” I asked, matching his intensity.

“You should be, reginetta.” He ran the tip of the gun down my chest, pushing my wet shirt to the side and pressing his hips even further into me. Our clothes were soaked, yet I could feel the hardness of his cock rubbing against my stomach. “You should be fucking terrified.”

And while I wasn’t terrified of this side of him … I was terrified of what I might let him do to me one of these days. I didn’t want to fall for another unfaithful family man to get my heart broken again just because he had swooped in and saved my ass a couple of times.

I took a shaky, deep breath and pushed my hands into his chest. He stumbled back a couple of feet, cursed under his breath, threw my gun to the ground, and wrapped his hand around my throat, pinning me to the car door. His eyes were dark—pure and utter darkness. His jaw was twitching. I could feel his muscles tense against my body.

“If you think you can—”

Headlights blazed down the dirt road.

He paused mid-sentence, looked toward the light, then pulled me down behind the car and pressed a hand over my mouth. “Stay quiet.”

The car parked a few feet away from ours, and he cursed, then pulled out his gun. Nobody stepped out of the car, yet he pushed me even closer behind the tire, pressing his body against mine. Someone took out a flashlight and shone it on the ground near the tires, and then … I heard it.

Three shots to each tire. The car was behind the bushes, so the rain made it hard to see … but they aimed and shot out each of the tires with pure ease. I had seen a shoot-out before. I had seen the aim of some of these men, but none of them were like this.

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