Page 39 of The Enforcer's Revenge
If anyone deserved Valium, it was probably Tino, but she still had to say, “It's probably a bad idea.”
“Why?”
“You were just telling me about bullets. You shouldn’t takeanythingthat lets you do that. What if it was someone else besides me?”
“Oh fuck, I told you about that. I’m sorry, baby.” Tino stared at her, his dark eyes wide. “Cazzo, those fucking Russians, so hard to kill,” he mumbled, looking back to the ceiling again. “It’s not like you can just take a knife to them. You gotta shoot ’em from a distance and hide the evidence. Fucking evidence. I hate the Bratva. Dunno why the Don keeps getting in these pissing contests with them. Goddamn bullets. I’m making Nova cut the next set out.”
Brianna gagged when she realized what he meant.
She closed her eyes, trying to fight the image that one statement had created. And she fought doubly hard not to think about the hands caressing her bare skin cutting bullets out of dead bodies, but it was impossible.
“You should definitely skip benzos,” she said with grim certainty. “Never take them again.”
Tino just hummed in agreement.
Then he was quiet, and it took her a little while to realize he’d fallen asleep. If only Brianna could be so lucky. She lay there for at least an hour, wide-eyed and paranoid.
Eventually, when she was sure Tino was sleeping deeply and not having any sort of medical emergency, she rolled out of bed again. They had a machine to check for government-placed listening devices, and Brianna made a beeline for it. The entire building was under video surveillance—inside and out—and guys watched those particular feeds 24/7.
Cosa Nostra was good at protecting their compounds from outsiders, including the government.
They hadn’t found a bug once in all the years she lived there.
She still scanned the entire apartment.
The sun was up by the time Brianna got back in bed with Tino, finally content that the only one who knew his dark secrets was her. It should make her feel better, but when sleep finally claimed her, Brianna dreamed about dead Russians and bloody bullets instead.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Brianna didn’t sleep well.
Big shock.
She kept jerking awake, sweaty and nervous, to check if Tino was breathing. He always seemed fine, his muscular chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm, but Brianna couldn’t say the same for herself.
It was Saturday, and fortunately, she didn’t have practice. It was past noon by the time she heard Carina moving around the apartment. Tino was still passed out when he was usually an extremely light sleeper.
Normally, that would make her nervous as hell, but this wasn’t the first time he had crashed in her bed. She suspected he’d been on a binge the entire time he’d been gone and likely hadn’t slept in days. This deep, unmovable sleep was part of his crash. It was how he recovered. So, she slipped out from under him and showered.
She spent the time washing and double-conditioning her hair. She took extra care shaving and even exfoliated because she didn’t want to get out of the shower. She wanted to scrub the night off her. She needed the water to take away the images herimagination was churning up of Tino cutting into dead bodies and searching for bullets.
Brianna knew what he did for a living.
They all knew.
Tino just made it so easy to forget that the Borgata made him a killer. He didn’t want to burden any of them. He joked around and made sure everyone saw him as fun and carefree to hide the horrible existence he lived.
Until the nights when it got to be too much, and it left him open and exposed to Brianna. She never told anyone, even Carina, how tortured he truly was. Like Tino, she believed they were better off not knowing.
What would it solve?
Unfortunately, the hot water ran out before she was ready to get out. Brianna didn’t bother with any clothes after the shower. She just slipped on her robe, her skin still dewy, and her hair wrapped up in a towel. Clothes seemed too hard.
Carina was doing dishes. Usually, Brianna did them, but sometimes Carina had too much energy and needed something to do with her hands.
“Made you breakfast.” Carina pointed to a plate on the counter that had a pile of overcooked scrambled eggs with a side of broccoli. “Your favorite.”
Carina hated broccoli. The fact that she cooked it was epic.
