Page 58 of Murder & Mayhem
“Let’s go.” O’Malley started to drag me out of the alley. I automatically grabbed his arm, not really to fight back, but so I didn’t fall. “No funny business,” he snapped at Bailey.
“I won’t.” There was something off about Bailey’s tone, like he was planning the exact opposite. I tried to catch his eyes to tell him not to do anything reckless, but he was blatantly not looking at me.
I was dragged backwards, my bare feet scraping across the uneven ground. I dug my heels into the pavement, hoping I’d bleed and leave a trail. A warped version of “Hansel and Gretel” for when the brothers finally got there.
He pulled us out of the darkness of the alley, not worried about being on the main street. I managed to twist enough to see behind him, and there was a windowless van with the sliding door open and a huge dude with a rifle waiting. No one was going to fuck with that, not in this neighborhood.
My fight finally kicked in. There was no way we were getting into that van. O’Malley didn’t want us dead, otherwise we would be by now. This newfound clarity lit a fire in me. I didn’t need to win this fight, but I had to slow it down until backup showed up. I met Bailey’s eyes and gave him a please fucking run look, then I slammed my elbow back with as much force as I could manage into the fucker’ssolar plexus.
“Ungh.” O’Malley’s grip loosened slightly. I dug my nails into his forearm and tugged down as I aimed a kick at his shin.
My foot missed and I lost my balance, but I was still free from the gun against my head. Bailey screamed as the guy in the van came barreling forward.
“Run, Bailey! Find Gideon. He’s a big ginger dude. He’ll help you.”
O’Malley got control again, his fist striking me in the side of my face. “You little fucker!” he snapped, his fingers curling in my hair and painfully tilting my head back. I swung blindly, desperate to get him off as he nearly tore every strand out of my scalp.
A gun went off. Bailey screamed. I connected to flesh with one of my fists. Then another hit to the side of my head made my vision swim. I heard Bailey call my name.
“Bailey, run! Run!” Then, more blinding pain exploded before darkness took me.
CHAPTER 22
DOMINIC
“Can you go faster?” I snapped at Gid as he drove at what felt like a leisurely pace down the road.
He clicked his tongue in annoyance. “Can you fucking chill? I’m going thirty over the speed limit as it is. We don’t need cops up our ass, Nicky. It’ll only slow things down.”
I grunted, not wanting to admit he was right, but it wasn’t fast enough. Not when Jamie was out there alone, barely dressed, and trying to find his brother.
“We’re two minutes out,” Skye, one of Luca’s guys, said through the comms. Skye and Brooks had shown up just minutes after Jamie had disappeared. Their first impression of me had been a very mature meltdown where I’d destroyed my phone and nearly broken my brother’s nose. It wasn’t my proudest moment, but thankfully they didn’t seem to be holding it against me.
They’d gone ahead on Brooks’s bike while we’d taken the SUV that we kept at the house just in case we needed a bigger vehicle. Gid had wanted to ride, too, but weneeded room for Jamie and Bailey and whoever else. We had no idea what shape Bailey would be in, and we had to be prepared for anything. It meant that two strangers would be the first ones on scene, but I had to deal with it and trust them to protect the brothers if necessary.
Time dragged on. We were only five minutes away, but it might as well have been an hour. I still couldn’t understand how things had gotten so fucked up. It was my fault. If I’d kept my shit together, then Jamie wouldn’t have run. Probably. He might not have done it on purpose, according to Gideon, but maybe he would have been in a better state of mind and thought things through.
Two minutes had passed and there was no word from Skye and Brooks. “Team Castellano,” I said into the comms, calling them by their leader/partner’s name, “come in. What’s going on?” Silence.
I looked at Gideon, but he shrugged. “We’re three minutes away,” was all he said.
“Ari! Ari, do you have visuals?” He’d also arrived right before Brooks and Skye and was set up in the house, watching us all from the body cams and whatever other surveillance he could hack into. He was getting help from Luca’s guy, Diego, as well.
“Yeah. I see them. Stay calm, Nicky. They have it under control.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I snapped, absolutely not staying calm.
“There were some complications, but they know what they’re doing. There’s nothing you can do till you get there, so no point worrying.”
Jamie really had gotten under my skin because while my brothers always irritated me, I had never been so close to hurting them as I had this weekend, since I’d met my boy. So ifAri thought he could get away with not telling me what the fuck was happening, then?—
“We’re here, Nicky.” Gideon swung the SUV in a sharp right and then slammed on the brakes. We skidded a few feet but eventually stopped on an angle in front of a poorly lit bar. I barely paid attention to that as I was out of the SUV before Gid put it in park, sprinting toward the scene in front of me.
Two men lay still on the ground. A third was pushed face-first against the van, fighting uselessly against Skye as he held him still, a gun pointed at the guy’s temple. Brooks was sitting on the back of another guy, a knife sticking out of his shoulder blade and his arms zip-tied behind him.
Kneeling next to another still body was a teenage boy wearing filthy jeans and an equally filthy T-shirt that might have been white at some point. I recognized him immediately: Bailey. He was brushing the hair off the face of the man and whispering something, quiet but frantic.
I was there in an instant, kneeling on Bailey’s other side, staring down at Jamie’s unmoving body, terror thrumming through my veins.
