A Righteous Kill (44 page)

In the past, Hero always thought she’d wanted someone like her father. Steady but pliant to the whims of the woman he adored. Quick to smile and slow to anger. Doting and long-suffering and levelheaded. Well, for an Irishman.

Who would have guessed she would end up with a feisty, exciting, passionate Latino with an anger management problem? Hero smiled to herself. If anyone could handle Luca Ramirez, it
would
be her. If anyone could offer him the love, patience, support, and sense of family he’d never known, she would do it gladly. She could spend the rest of her life trying to make up for his past. They could heal each other, building a cocoon of strength around their love constructed of trust and shared experiences, and years of every type of passion they could devise.

She was all in. Both feet. Luca Rodrigo Ramirez-Dimas was
her
man. And she was his woman, patriarchal societal constructs be damned. Hell, she’d probably even marry him.

“We’ll have to figure out last names,” she realized aloud.

“Hmm?” he asked drowsily.

She kissed his ribs. “Well, we can’t hyphenate, right? I mean, Katrova-Connor-Ramirez-Dimas?
I
wouldn’t mind, but that’s just mean to the kids. What about when
they
get married? Where would the madness end?”

His relaxed muscles instantly went rigid, nearly bouncing her off of his chest. “
Kids
?” he echoed incredulously. “Hero, what are you talking about?”

Of course Luca would be afraid of their future. Afraid of the depths of their rare and intense connection. He’d need a little time to get used to the idea. She sat up, expecting to find an expression of abject terror on his face. She wasn’t disappointed.

She decided to back up a few steps. “I’m falling in love with you,” she said in a low voice.

He jerked up, as well, pulling the blanket over his lap while flashing the whites of his eyes. “Wha— just—cut it out.”

She gave him a patronizing smile. “I can’t. In fact, I’m already done falling. I’m in deep. I love you.”

His scowl darkened. “Well—
stop it
.”

Hero wanted to laugh, but knew now was not the time. “You can’t tell me not to love you. I’m not asking for you to say it back to me, I’m just letting you know how I feel. If it takes you longer to identify your emotions for me, I acknowledge and understand that.” She felt so enlightened. Emotionally aware and together for the first time in months.

His eyes went from wide panic to a narrow glower. “Why the
hell
would you go and do that, Hero?”

“I can’t help it,” she shrugged. “It’s kind of your fault.”

He cringed away from her like she held a tarantula in his face. “Is this because I just had sex with you?”

“You just made love to me,” she corrected.

Luca jammed the palms of his hands into his eye sockets and then scrubbed them across his face. “That wasn’t—I mean—your friend just died and I—wanted to comfort you.”

“I know that’s part of it. But you can’t tell me you didn’t feel what just happened between us.” Hero crossed her arms over her breasts, calling him on his emotional limitations. “Don’t go pretending that was all pity sex because examining your emotions makes you uncomfortable. I thought you were more evolved than that.”

He blinked at her, a familiar storm of fury gathering across his handsome features. “Don’t put words in my mouth, Hero, that’s not what I—”

“If you want to comfort someone, you give them a hug, not more orgasms than can fit on one hand.” Hero interrupted, winding up for a much-needed tongue lashing. “Don’t cheapen what happened by acting like you were doing me a favor.” She grabbed his hand in both of hers and pressed it to her heart. “Look, I’m not trying to pressure you into anything right now. I’m just telling you that
this
, between us, is something rare and incredible. It’s not pretend anymore. This is
real
. Instead of fighting it because it scares you, why not, for once, take a chance on something that matters?”

Luca stared at the hand she cradled in both of hers like it betrayed him. His jaw worked as though he chewed on a particularly gristly problem and he wasn’t sure if he was going to swallow it or spit it out.

Coming to a decision, he rolled away from her and stood, reaching for his briefs and pants and jerking them over his hips. “I’m going to say this once,” his voice was low, his teeth clenched. “I don’t do relationships, and I sure as hell don’t do love. After this is over, I’m walking away from you, Hero. I
have
to.”

Hurt speared through Hero’s chest. “That would be the biggest mistake you ever made, and we both know it.”

“What do you know about the mistakes I’ve made?” Luca boomed. “Listen to yourself! You don’t even know what the fuck you’re talking about!” He zipped up and bent to grab his shirt, grappling with it in his temper. “Look,” he said, controlling his volume. “Don’t go mistaking gratitude for love.
That’s
the problem here. You’re young and traumatized and more than a little distraught right now—”

“Why do men insist on treating me like I can’t know my own self because I’ve been a victim? I
love
you, Luca Ramirez. I know I do.”

“Stop. Saying.
That
!”

“No! It’s the truth,” she insisted.

Luca’s lip curled with a calculated cruelty she’d never before seen on his face. “Grow the fuck up!” he bit out at her. “You’ve spent your entire life bossing around your older brothers and charming your way into getting what you want, but you can’t pull that shit with me.” He threw his arms wide. “
Yes
! I fucked you. That doesn’t mean you get to start naming our kids, and it doesn’t make me a dick for not wanting them. I only did it because I thought you were the kind of woman who got what this was.”

Hero stood, needing to feel solid ground beneath her, and wrapped the blanket around her naked body. “Yeah, well, John the Baptist made assumptions about what kind of woman I was, too.”

“Don’t do that.” He tucked his shirt into his pants, more like shoved it in short, furious motions. “Don’t bring
him
into this. This is between you and me.”

“Regardless of how much they scare you, I know you have feelings for me.”

“You want to know what happened to the last woman I loved?” He growled, pacing away from her.

“Yes.”

“She filed assault charges and a restraining order.”

Stunned, Hero just blinked at him a few times. Feeling like he’d doused her with freezing water. “Wait. What?” She hadn’t thought it was possible to look angry and ashamed at the same time, but he did.

“In college. I came home from studying one night and found her fucking a third-string Quarterback on
our
bed. I put him in the hospital, Hero. I broke his bones with my bare hands. Ended his football career, and I got kicked off the team. The
only
thing that kept me from jail was that he admitted to reaching for me first. But I did something worse that night. I pushed my girlfriend down when she tried to get in between us. I put my hands on her, Hero, on the woman I thought I loved.”

She tried to keep the utter shock off of her face, but judging by the look of grim victory spreading across his features, Hero could tell she’d failed.

“You know what they say,” he continued, knowing he’d succeeded in shutting her up. “Once a man—does something like that— he’s liable to do it again. That kind of behavior escalates.”

Hero’s mind raced. She knew the statistics, knew this was a major red flag, but a part of her was unwilling to accept defeat. “But you can choose not to. People can change.” She wished her voice sounded stronger. That her argument wasn’t so weak.

He made a raw sound of derision and shrugged on his holster. “Not in my experience. Look, by some fucking miracle of paperwork, I was accepted into Quantico, and this is what I’ve chosen to do with my life. Put my past aside, my job is not conducive to a wife and kids, and I’m not willing to give it up.”

Hero snorted. “That’s such a pussy thing to say.”

“Excuse me?”

“Plenty of FBI agents have
strong
marriages.” She held up her hands to stave off his interruption. “Yes, I’m aware of the divorce rate, but things would be different for us. You keep weird hours? Great! So do I. If you want it bad enough, you make it work.”

Luca shook his head, suddenly looking more exhausted than angry. “I
don’t
want it.”

Hero stared at him quietly for an eternal moment. “You think you’re being noble, Luca, but you know what you are?”

“Enlighten me.” His voice was so dry and rough, she could have lit a match against it.

“You’re a coward.” Hero let the blanket fall, turned, and walked stark naked into her bedroom. A part of her wished he would come after her. That he would come to his senses and realize the truth. That he would understand what it was she offered him.

He didn’t.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“I do desire we may be better strangers.”

~William Shakespeare, As You Like It

Luca’s simmer was about to boil over as he scowled at the various projections and whiteboards smeared with
his
work by the fuck-sticks they sent from DC to take over his case.

Agent Corelli and Agent Reinhardt were about as different from Luca and Vince as they could possibly get. Dressed in identical black suits, sporting identical haircuts, and lean, yet unimpressive builds, they gave off a very “Men in Black” vibe. All they needed were the matching shades. Reinhardt was the lighter copy of Corelli, as though printed out when the toner cartridge needed to be changed. Corelli had dark brown hair, Reinhardt had light brown hair. Corelli had dark brown eyes. Reinhardt had light brown eyes. Corelli was the senior agent with a very large nose that kept him from being handsome, and Reinhardt sported only one eyebrow. Not like a unibrow, but like one was missing. Under different circumstances, Luca would have wanted to hear that story. Their biggest differences, though, were that Corelli was an ass jockey whereas Reinhardt was just an ass hat.

“We boring you, Ramirez?” Corelli leaned on the conference room table. His East Coast accent wasn’t endearing like Vince’s, but irritating in a way that made him sound like he belonged to a canceled episode of Jersey Shore.

“I’m just taking notes on
my
case.” Luca offered him a disingenuous smile from where he leaned back in his conference room chair jammed between a still-furious Trojanowski and Agent Donahue, his colleague with the longest elbows in the history of the world.
Jesus
.

Vince was at Hero’s doing the day shift protective detail thing. Luca couldn’t decide which place he least wanted to be. Here getting his ass handed to him by a fuck-stick, or there getting his ass handed to him by Hero.

This was less painful. But barely.

Corelli eyed his yellow legal pad, and then cast a pointed look at everyone else’s laptops and tablets. “Maybe you should have taken notes on Agency Policy and Procedure, Ramirez.”

Luca’s teeth ground together. Corelli was, of course, referring to the impromptu press conference, the final straw in Trojanowski’s decision to bring in the big boys from the DC office.

Maybe
you
should eat shit and die,
Luca thought, but kept it to himself. What do you know? Personal growth.

Corelli’s eyes gleamed victorious as he turned to the whiteboard. “Due to some poor decision making on your part, we believe our unsub is about to do something desperate and dangerous, possibly harming a large number of people.”

He used the appropriate term
unsub
, short for unknown subject, refusing to call the killer by his media-given name. Agent Corelli was by-the-book.

“How do you figure?” Luca asked. “That’s not even remotely close to his M.O.”

“He strayed from his M.O. the moment he attacked Ms. Connor,” Reinhardt said, cocking his non-eyebrow. “And his erratic behavior has only escalated since then. Historically, the next step has been something akin to mass-shootings, murder-suicides, or terrorist activity.”

Luca contained an epic eye-roll, waiting for the new guys to tell him something he didn’t know. “Look, he was thrown off his game because Ms.
Katrova
-Connor is still alive, despite his best attempts to get at her.
That’s
why he changed strategies, not because of something I or the Bureau did or didn’t do.”

“Sounds like he’s not the only one becoming desperate.” Corelli smirked.

“We should
all
be desperate to stop him from reaching his goal,” Luca insisted. “I’ve been following this asshole for a year. I know him as much or better than anyone. He’s intelligent, fanatical, and utterly focused on
one
thing. Killing Hero.” He pointed to the photo of the Asmodeus symbol on one of the corkboards. “He’s just waiting for the appropriate time to strike.”

“I hear you, Ramirez,” Agent Reinhardt said in a placating voice. “And we’d agree if not for the most recent incidents with Mrs. Steinman and Mr. Winthrop. A firearm was used, a man was tortured, and the woman ritualistically disfigured
post mortem
. It’s sloppy, it’s desperate, and the use of a gun has every one of the profilers convinced that John the Baptist is going to break with his predicated actions.”

“Well, the profilers are
wrong.
” Luca slammed his notepad on the conference room table. “You have the texts he sent. You have the interview of Josiah Winthrop stating that
he
was the one who likely shot Angora Steinman. I believe the gun was used because it was readily available at the scene. It doesn’t have anything to do with escalating behavior. John the Baptist thinks that Mr. Winthrop and I have been somehow tainted by this demon he’s after. We’re both supposedly
involved
with his victims. In my opinion, his actions aren’t out of the realm of his scope, but another part of the puzzle. If we—”