Page 37 of Primo DeLuca

“I’m here. I made you a promise that I wasn’t going to let anything happen to you. Do you remember what we talked about right before I showed you how to work the surveillance equipment in the safe room?”

“Yes,” she replied.

“Tre! Due! Uno!” I counted down in Italian before seeing her jerk sharply down and out of the man’s reach. He scrambled to retake control of her.

Good girl.

One flex of my finger on my rifle’s trigger, and the asshole dropped like a sack of stones. A loud scratch sounded from the phone hitting the floor, but the line remained open.

“Shit,” I heard Nevah say. “Primo, if you can hear me, I think they have someone else hiding outside,” she yelled, and I could hear her running, her feet tapping out a thundering beat. She was running towards the panic room, and she hadn’t left the phone behind.

That’s my girl.

Within seconds, the one who was hiding revealed his position, creeping out of the shrubs near the fence. His intention had been to shoot me in the back while I approached the front door.

I patiently held my position and waited until he was creeping across the living room floor. He stood above his dead friend and glanced around like an idiot before I blessed him with one of my devastating kill shots.

Clinging to the shadows, I hopped back across my neighbor’s fence, grabbed my shoes, and dashed into my backyard. Once inside the house, I crept along the dark hallway and snuck a peek into the living room at my handiwork. I avoided any area that could be seen from outside the house in case they’d been smart enough to have one more lookout.

I used my phone to tap into the intercom inside the safe room.

“Nevah, it’s me coming down.”

“O…” she said, lifting her finger from the button too soon and cutting off the rest of her word.

I cracked the pantry door open, stepped down, and typed in the pin to pop the safe room open. Nevah tackled me before I made it past the threshold.

“Primo,” she cried, cuddling her face into my chest. I squeezed her in a tight hug, kissing the top of her hair.

“I apologize for allowing my world to sneak up on you like this.”

She glanced up, eyes glistening with unshed tears and her face surprisingly calm despite her body’s coiled tension. Those big, pretty eyes were a weakness I was finally admitting to myself.

“Life as I knew it is gone, isn’t it?” she asked.

“Yes, sweetheart, it is. And I apologize for that, but it won’t always be this way.”

She didn’t answer, but the emptiness filling her gaze bothered me. I didn’t want this life for her, but I didn’t have anything else to offer other than me and protection.

“Let’s get out of here.”

She nodded. “Yes. Please. This time, I go where you go. I don’t care where it might be. What scares me even more than dying, is dying tragically and alone.”

“I don’t think—”

“No,” she cut me off. “I stay with you, or I just as well walk out into freeway traffic. What if the next one rapes and tortures me?”

Her words prompted unsavory images of her beautiful flesh bloodied and scarred. The notion of it had me ready to kill someone who didn’t exist.

“Okay. You stay with me. But I must warn you; I don’t run from trouble. I hunt it down and bless it with a solution.”

She swallowed and stared at me like I was the dark shadow standing above a freshly dug grave. Her thinking gaze remained on mine, searing into the depths of me for answers I still couldn’t give, until she pointed a finger at her chest.

“I’m not as green as I may appear. I grew up in a neighborhood nicknamed, The Grind in the Sunset Heights housing projects. I scratched, clawed, and worked my ass off to get out of there. I’ve seen dead bodies. I’ve seen people killed. I’ve slept under my bed at night to avoid a stray bullet. I know how it feels to live life under the gun. I know hunger and neglect. But, I don’t want to die a horrible death alone and for no other reason than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

I noticed right away when she’d said the wrong place and time, but not the wrong person. The sentiment embedded in her words, even if she didn’t realize it, meant the world to me. She was inadvertently cementing herself to me. We were never going our separate ways if I had anything to do with it.

The projects she’d grown up in bore a certain level of fame for the amount of danger and death they produced. It also bore the name, “The Walking Graveyard,” because children had about a 50/50 chance of making it to adulthood. Based on where she grew up, she understood this life better than I could have imagined.

Her upbringing may have prepared her for the street life, but was she ready for me? I wasn’t ready to show her who I was outside of who she currently saw me as, but life had plans other than the ones I made that would allow her to see all my sides.

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