Page 41 of His Juliet

“Yeah. I just… umm… Why are you whispering? Is someone there?”

I grinned. “Why, are you jealous?”

There was a beat of silence. “Well, if you’re busy?—”

“No,” I said quickly, cutting her off. “I’m never too busy for you. There’s no one with me. I’m just… at the library.”

I was struck by the urge to smack myself over the head with my own gun.At the library?What the ever-loving fuck kind of answer was that?

“Oh. I used to love the library. I didn’t know they were open this late.”

I pressed my fist against my mouth to stifle my laughter. Damn. How could she be this fucking cute all the time?

“I’ve got my connections.” Now I wanted to build her an entire library. I had plenty of empty rooms in my apartment.

“Well, I won’t keep you, but I was just thinking maybe I could order a pizza to the bookstore tomorrow night, and if you had a minute, you could come by. You wouldn’t even have to steal the pizza this time.”

Two bullets hit the side of the container I was crouching behind. I quickly pressed my phone to my chest and returned fire, my smile widening when I hit one of the Albanian soldiers.

“Romeo? What was that noise? Are you okay?”

I hated the panic in Juliet’s voice, but I reveled in her worry for me.

“Just a car backfiring. I’d love to have pizza with you. Eight o’clock work?”

“Eight is good. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“My girl just invited me to have pizza with her, so yeah, I’m doing fucking great. I’ll bring the pizza, though. You want the same as last time?”

“Oh, you don’t have to?—”

“Juliet,” I said sternly.

She huffed an annoyed sigh. “Yes, same as last time, please.”

“Good girl. I’ll see you tomorrow night. Now get some sleep, angel.”

I hung up before she could answer and shot at the remaining soldiers.

23

ROMEO

“They planteda false trail to lead us to the port tonight, and we fucking fell for it.” Matteo’s icy rage radiated through the conference room, matching what we all felt. It was five in the morning and none of us had slept. The Albanian soldiers hadn’t been a match for us, even with the element of surprise on their side. We’d killed most of them and taken three of them alive.

They were currently waiting for me in the basement.

Even so, two of our soldiers were in the hospital with gunshot wounds.

“How are they getting around our soldiers, our cameras? This is our city!” Matteo slammed his fist down on the table.

Franco was hunched over his laptop with dark circles under his eyes. He was the one who’d found the intel about the port, and I knew he was blaming himself. This was bigger than him, though. We couldn’t keep underestimating the Albanians.

“The soldiers we fought at the port were not well trained,” I said. “They had the numbers and the element of surprise. They should have been able to take more of us out. But they were disorganized. Their shots went wide. Some of them tried to run away.”

“They were young, too,” Enzo added. “Clearly undisciplined. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Unless they were just a diversion, a sacrifice to distract us from what the Butcher was actually doing tonight,” Matteo said.

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