Page 11 of Ruined

“There should be a hat box.”

“There wasn’t a fucking hat box.”

Angelo’s eyes narrow just a fraction as Bobby swears at him. “Go ask.”

Bobby sighs and slams out of the car. I can feel his rage depart with him, though I know it will be back, along with him. Less than sixty seconds, the cloud of his intensity returns. He wrenches the door open hard and fast, taking his temper out on every inanimate object in the place.

“Here.” He jabs the box into the car without looking, catching me off guard and also in the face.

Blood spurts out of my nose. It wasn’t that hard of a blow, but it did catch me at an unfortunate angle and now I’m bleeding all over the nice white shirt Angelo loaned me. Big red dollops of blood land down my front. I reach up to stop the bleeding with my hand, but that just puts it on my fingers, and from there, fucking everywhere.

Angelo comes to the rescue, shaking out a handkerchief and pressing it to my nose, stemming the flow of blood. He doesn’t make the mistake of tilting my head back. He knows better than that.

I feel immediately and completely taken care of. It’s wrong to feel this way. He’s an enemy and a captor, but with one hand on the back of my neck, and the other pinching my bleeding nose firmly, he feels like… I don’t even want to form the thought of the word in my head.

“What a fucking mess,” Bobby says as he ducks his head down to see the results of his carelessness, an expression of distaste on his handsome though petulant face. “We’ve got business to do.”

“I’m aware,” Angelo replies. “Go up front and relieve the driver.”

Smart. Angelo lets the driver take them into the city, but he doesn’t let the guy accompany them to any of their actual destinations. I bet if that driver were to be interrogated, he’d have a whole lot of intel that points the interrogator in entirely the wrong direction. Every single aspect of Angelo Vitali’s life is a misdirect of a misdirect.

Angelo looks back at me as Bobby gets out and into the driver’s seat. “Can you hold this?”

Of course I can. I’m a federal agent. I can take care of a bleeding nose. I take over the task of holding my nose while Bobby does as he is told and gets into the front seat.

“You should come up here,” Bobby says to Angelo, lowering the partition with a smooth hum.

“I’ll stay here with the prisoner,” Angelo reminds him. “Lest we have a bleeding, oddly-dressed woman running through city streets being the very opposite of disguised.”

I look at Bobby. Now that the partition is down between us, I can see his dark gaze in the rear-view mirror. He is jealous as all hell. He needn’t be. He made me bleed. I plan on returning the favor.

I’m very grateful to Bobby, actually, because my blood, my fucking DNA is now all over the back seat of that car. All they need to do is swab it. Assuming they ever show the hell up.

“Put the kiddy locks on,” Bobby suggests. She won’t be able to escape. Then we can talk business without her hearing everything.”

“She can hear, as far as I am concerned.”

“Right, because we’re going to kill her anyway,” Bobby says with a vicious glare at me.

“Because I will never let her go.”

Those words sink into the fiery hot core of my body, giving me an immediate and intense gut reaction. He speaks as though I have always belonged to him, as if there’s no option in the world but for me to belong to him.

Angelo is being overly possessive, but that is how he is. Dismissive of most people, but instantly and endlessly attached to a select few. I have no idea what has made him interested in me, but as I look up over my bloody handkerchief and meet Angelo’s eyes, I feel dark tendrils of obsessive attachment wrap around me. It occurs to me suddenly, all at once and entirely too deeply, that I will not be able to escape Angelo Vitali. Even if I get away, he will come for me, again and again. I feel waves of comfort and fear washing over one another, mingling and becoming some new feeling that has no name and yet settles in my body like an old friend.

Fuck. Me. I am in trouble.

Bobby starts the car, and heads aggressively into traffic, cutting off a taxi that blares its horn. Bobby lowers his window and gives the guy the finger. I feel sorry for anybody who crosses him today. He is not in the fucking mood.

“Are we killing them? I want to kill them.”

“I am sure you do,” Angelo says with a warm smile that contains true affection for Bobby’s brutality. “But we need them alive. They are our conduit to the south.”

Bobby needn’t have worried about me hearing anything. I haven’t heard a damn thing that I have also I understood. Angelo’s criminal activities are many and varied. We at the agency know that we have barely scraped the surface of his malfeasance. I am now getting an insight into his world that no other agent has ever had, or at least, that no other agent has ever lived to report upon.

We drive to the other side of the city, to a house in the suburbs. Children ride by on bicycles. Others play hockey in the street. Bobby slows down and manages to act like 99% less of a vehicular psychopath around them. I wonder if it is because he has softness in him somewhere, or because he’s keeping a low profile. Either option seems unlikely.

He pulls over outside a cute little cottage-style house with a pink mailbox and gets out of the car without a word to Angelo. Two small children come by on scooters, their happy, oblivious normalcy making him look like a living shadow in his dark suit.

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