Page 54 of Owning Nicci

The world seems to narrow down around the two of us, my heart pounding in my ears as I hear Vince’s cry, silenced in the instant that my bullet hits his forehead. And then, before I can pull myself out of the haze of satisfaction, I hear Savio shout myname. I hear another shot going off—and a pair of muscled arms grab me from behind.

I smell leather and cigarette smoke as I hit the ground hard, and I feel the muscled weight of a man’s body shoving me down into the carpet. “Fuckingbitch!” a voice growls into my ear, and I try to wrench away from the grasp he has on me, struggling as I kick and punch. I hear Savio curse, hear another shot go off, another, and I can’t see if someone hit Savio. I can’t see what’s happening at all, and I throw my head back, slamming it into the other man’s face as I wriggle away.

Savio is coming toward me. The other three guys are on the floor, dead, and I hear myself call out Savio’s name as the guy who wrestled me down, who must have been in another room, grabs my ankles and hauls me back. Savio is reloading his gun, and I hear him yell for me to hang on, but I’m not about to wait on him.

My gun is an inch away. The man hauls me backward before I can grab it, his hand closing on my face, thick and meaty. He squeezes my cheeks together, shoves me down onto my back as he crawls over me, and he must weigh over two hundred pounds, all of it muscle. I can’t breathe, and he jerks my head up, slamming it back down into the floor. The room swims around me, and all I can think is that at least this man doesn’t seem to want to fuck me—but he definitely seems to want to kill me.

I scrabble at him with both hands, reaching up to claw at his face. He slams my head back down into the floor again. I open my mouth to try to draw in a breath, gasping for air—and a hot, wet spray hits my face as a hole opens up in the man’s head above me. I taste iron, thick and warm, and I gag, bile filling my throat as the man slumps to one side.

I roll over as I hear Savio rushing toward me, spitting onto the carpet to get the taste out of my mouth. Savio’s arm goes around me, pulling me up, and the whole room spins as I get tomy feet. I’ve never been this lightheaded in my entire life, and I’m not sure that I’m not going to pass out.

“Nicci.” Savio’s voice is urgent. “Can you walk?”

“I’ll figure it out.” My voice is thick. “We need to go.”

“No shit.” His arm is still around my waist as we head for the back door. I can hear the dogs barking in the neighborhood, louder now, and I wonder how much noise we actually made. “The driver is coming around,” Savio says, pulling a burner out of his pocket. “I’ll call the cleaner. We have to get out of here, quickly, before someone calls the cops.”

The world is still tilting around me as we hurry out into the backyard. The car is waiting a few feet away, and Savio ushers me toward it, tapping out a message on the burner with his other hand. He pushes me inside, sliding in after me, and gives an address to the driver that I don’t recognize.

“Where are we going?” I lean my head back against the seat, closing my eyes. My head hurts. Everything hurts.

“A safe house. Little cabin upstate that I own. It’s where I was going to take us earlier—before you insisted on hitting Vince tonight anyway.” There’s no recrimination in Savio’s voice, just a matter-of-fact tone, and I nod. I was the one who insisted on it. And I don’t regret it.

“Don’t fall asleep,” Savio says. “You might have a concussion. No telling.”

I rub a hand across my face, wincing as I feel the bruises where the man gripped my cheeks. “I know.”

“Knowing doesn’t mean you won’t.” There’s worry in his tone, and I crack one eye open, relieved to see that he’s not moving back and forth now, the way everything was a moment ago.

“You saved me again.” My voice sounds a little hoarse. “For someone who hates me, that ends up happening an awful lot.”

He looks away. “You belong to me,” he says flatly, but it doesn’t sound the same as when he’s said it before. There’s something hollow in his voice, and my heart trips, traitorously, in my chest. “You were expensive,” he adds, leaning his head back against the seat.

I swallow hard. He says it as if that’s the only reason, but I’m not sure that I believe that any longer. I’m not sure he does, either.

My chest tightens as I remember the way he scooped me up and carried me to his room earlier this afternoon. The way he pulled me down and held me in his lap.I hate him,I remind myself—but it doesn’t land the way it usually does.He hurt me, too. He used me like they all have.

I steal another glance over at him. He’s looking out of the window now, jaw tight as it always seems to be, and I can’t help but think that it’s different. He hurt me, yes. Used me, yes. But there seems to be a reason for it that’s not the same as all the others. Something more personal. I’m not sure that it’s out of the desire purely to hurt, to take pleasure in my suffering. That it’s as malicious as my father and brother and all of those other men have been.

He’s been using me for revenge, just as I’ve been using him. And can I really throw stones, when I’m still planning to kill him? When the very last bullet I’ll shoot will have his name on it?

I swallow hard as guilt threads through me. I suspect that Savio’s feelings for me are starting to run deeper than he’s said. That it’s more than just that he’s invested a staggering amount of money in owning me. He’s fighting it tooth and nail, I can see that, too, but I don’t think things are the same for him now. The fact that he hasn’t breathed a word about putting me in my place again, despite all my defiance today, is proof enough of that.

Dead man walking.He called my father and brother that today, not knowing that to me, he’s the same thing. I’ve decidedthat I was going to kill him from the moment I realized what he’d done, that he’d bought me from my father and made me his captive, and nothing about that has changed.

It’s not going to, no matter how many times he saves me. No matter that my heart cracked open a little today, when I saw the rage in his face at the story I told him. When he said, viciously, that he was going to kill my father and brother for what they did to me.

He’s a hypocrite for saying it, though, after what he’s done. And I’ve never promised him anything.

I’ve promisedmyselftheir blood. His blood. And then my own freedom.

It doesn’t matter if I’m starting to question whether or not he might be a better man—deep down—than the one I thought he was at the beginning. I'm starting to wonder if we might be more alike than even I realized, if he, too, has been through things that warped him into a villain that he never meant to become.

I bite my lip, looking out of the window as we drive through the Lincoln Tunnel, out of the city towards upstate New York. I don’t know how long this drive is going to be, but I close my eyes, fighting sleep.

Next to me, I hear Savio shift in the seat, and a part of me wishes he’d reach for me.

21

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