Page 42 of Blood Lust

“You okay?” I asked as I leaned out and took a few shots of my own.

Pietro, Dean, and Vittorio spoke quietly among themselves. Pietro motioned us forward.

“We’ll cover you,” Vittorio mouthed.

“Can you make it?” I asked Phil, who nodded with a wince.

As my brother, Dean, and Pietro fired out into the warehouse, Phil’s guy and I helped Phil to where the others waited. His blood got on my pant leg and my hands, but that was the least of my worries.

“Are the keys in the truck?” Vittorio asked Phil.

“Yeah, they should be,” Phil grunted as he ripped off his T-shirt and tied it around his leg.

Dean went down in a flurry of bullets, but we managed to get into the truck, and then Pietro crashed through the overhead door of the warehouse. We skidded to a halt and poured out of the truck and into our SUVs and then took off like bats out of hell. Phil hauled ass down the road with his goods after giving a promise to contact me later.

I was livid. Fighting to keep my temper in check, I told Vittorio, “Call the Ankeny boys and get them out there to clean up that fucking mess. Tell them if anyone is still there, I want them alive. If they have to torch the place to cover up the bullet holes, so be it. I also want the camera footage—I want to know who the fuck that was.”

Vittorio was on his phone and arranging things immediately.

As we raced back to Chicago, I tried to call Lia, but she didn’t answer. Granted, sometimes she lost herself in her work, but with the day’s events, I was worried. What if whoever that was went after her too?

We stopped at one of our safe houses to quickly clean up because I couldn’t go walking into a high rise in Chicago, covered in blood. That would get the FBI knocking on my door before I could secure the lock. The entire time, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was about to bring my world crashing down.

Once we arrived at the downtown building, I called home. Pietro got off on our business floor to go through the footage from the cameras, and I continued up to my penthouse.

When I was met with absolute silence, I felt immediately wary. I didn’t dare call out in case someone was waiting there too. Cautiously, I went through my home. With each room she wasn’t in, my fear escalated.

That fear and the day’s events were to blame for the lack of control I had when I found her in my destruction room. I snapped.

“What are you doing in here? I told you not to come down here!” I shouted from just inside the doorway. She jumped and screamed.

The second the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to draw them back in. Except shame, pain, and anger held my tongue as she shoved past me and out the door. That’s when I saw the trail of blood she left behind.

“Fuck!” I muttered and sprang into action. She hadn’t made it far when I scooped her up. She gasped and held on to me as if she thought I would drop her. Then she started to fight me. Not stopping, I carried her to the kitchen.

“Put me down!” she snarled as she thrashed in my arms.

“Don’t make me spank your ass!” I threatened and she stilled. “Thought that would get your attention,” I muttered under mybreath as I sat her on the counter. Blood dripped onto the floor from her foot, and I cursed as I quickly grabbed a towel from the drawer. I got down on one knee and held it under her heel as I lifted her foot to see the injury.

“What are you doing? You’ll get blood on your suit,” she growled as she tried to jerk her foot free from hands.

“I don’t care,” I muttered, trying to see if there was still glass in it. Once I was certain it was only cut and determined it wouldn’t need stitches, I opened the cupboard next to me and pulled out the first aid kit. She hissed when I rinsed the wound with saline in case I missed something, then whimpered as I cleaned it with antiseptic. When I bandaged it, she sniffled, and I looked up.

Her glossy doe eyes blinked down at me, and regret became my bitter pill. When the single tear spilled over and rolled down her cheek, I rested my forehead on her knee, then kissed it.

“I’m sorry,” I told her, my voice cracking. “I shouldn’t have reacted that way, but I wish you hadn’t seen that.”

“Gabriel,” she whispered, and my eyes burned as she reached out and scraped her fingernails along my scalp. “Whatisall that?”

My shoulders fell in defeat. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s so… violent.”

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. It was so much less than I wanted to do when I was dealing with my demons. She had no idea.

Shit had gone down in Davenport that shook me to my core. Expecting a meeting with a trusted colleague, I had been totally unprepared for the attack. I lost two good men and damn near lost my brother.

Worried that she might be in danger too, I called her several time during my race back to Chicago. She hadn’t answered.Further escalating my fears. Then, when I couldn’t find her, I’d panicked.

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