Submission Specialist: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 2) (31 page)

Kendall

Unlike the hallway outside Jace’s door, nobody downstairs tried to stop me, despite my obvious panic.  I rushed out the front doors and straight into one of the waiting taxis.

“Where to, miss?” the driver asked.

“Just go!” I did my best not to scream.

He shrugged and set off at a frustratingly calm pace.

“Hurry!” I said.

The driver looked in the mirror.  “If you want me to hurry, you’re gonna have to tell me where to go.”

I was about to tell him to take me to the nearest police station, but the words caught in my throat.  Could I
really
go there? What if Jace owned the police? What if he
didn’t
but they asked me why I fled the scene of a crime to go have sex with a murderer?

Worst of all, would they even believe me? Did
I
even believe myself? This was
Jace
, the man who took my virginity, who stood up for me and showed me love like I’d never dreamed of.  How could the best person I knew be the worst? I needed time to get through this.

“Woodville,” I said.

“Where?”

“It’s a couple hours south-west of the city.”

“You got enough cash to pay for that kind of ride?”

“We can stop in Foxdell and I can get cash out, please just go.”

“OK, you’re the boss.”

I sat back in the seat as the driver picked up the pace a little.  The faster he went, and the further we got from where I’d witnessed Jace kill Lorenzo, from where the Mafia had unleashed automatic weapons at us, the further my heart rate edged away from the red zone.

Pretty much every emotion that existed washed over me as the taxi driver listened to music in some foreign language and we passed city limits.  I looked out my window at the city that had chewed me up and spat me out in ways even the people back in Woodville couldn’t have imagined.

Out to my left in the distance, I saw a huge plume of smoke as something burned.  It kind of reflected what was going on inside me and was typical of the kinds of carnage I’d seen in the last day.

Every time I saw an image in my mind of Jace, even the image of him with that gun, I was surprised at how much my heart still went out to him.  This was another thing on the list about love that nothing had prepared me for.  I still saw everything that was good about him.  But… he
killed
somebody, and he was so calm about it.

That’s cause it wasn’t his first…

A shiver ran down my spine.

But what happened to standing by him no matter what?

In a way, my life flashed before my eyes.  All the people who had put me down over the years, all the people who didn’t think I was worth loving.  And then Jace.  He was like an explosion of color in the timeline of my life.

He held me up so high that I almost forgot how sharp and hard the ground was.  It was the first time I dared to harbor the hope that I might be special to somebody.

I remembered in the car yesterday, when it seemed like every gun in the world must surely be firing on us, and Jace was lying on top of me.  He had been ready to die defending me.

A lump formed in my throat and my eyes watered anew.  I held my fist to my mouth to stifle a sob and no matter what I did, I couldn’t hold a train of thought together.  It was like my brain looked over everything and pressed a ‘nope’ button, shutting off.

This was too much for me to handle.  How was I supposed to explain this to my mom and dad?

“Hi Mom, hi Dad, I’m home just like you said I’d be, but guess what? There’s a murderer who’ll probably be looking for me and we can’t go to the police yet until I can explain why I left a crime scene to go fuck him.  Is my room still the way I left it? What’s that you say? Nope, bareback.”

I hid my face in my hands at the sheer depressing absurdity of the situation and cried quietly until I felt like I had a headache from dehydration.  When I next looked up, we were just heading into the town of Foxdell and I realized I couldn’t face my family yet either.

“Hey, can I change my destination, please?”

“Where would you like to go?”

“I’ll still need to get cash out here, but then there’s a cabin about fifteen minutes north-west of town.  I’ll go there instead.”

My family had stayed at the cabin, owned by a family friend, for vacations a few times.  My sisters had sweet summer romances with boys camping in the area, boys who had probably never ended up killing anybody.

At this time of year the cabin and surrounding area would be pretty secluded.  The very core of my being reached out for that vague concept of peace and quiet to try to wrap my head around this chaos.

“Sure thing.  Having a pretty rough day, huh?” asked the driver.

“Yup.”

“Don’t do anything crazy, OK? I don’t wanna see your picture on the news.”

I nodded but, no matter what I chose to do, I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep my word on that one.

Jace

The elevator doors closed between Kendall and me, sending her towards the ground floor.  All I wanted to do was chase after her and try to explain everything, tell her who I really was.  And why.

Would any of it make any difference? Probably not but, especially now, it was the only hope I had to hold on to the first really good thing to come into my life since I was six years old.

The only thing that held me back was the sound of gunfire and explosions coming from the phone that Jonny was holding towards me.  With one last glance at the numbers going down on the readout above the elevator, I cursed and snatched it from him.

“It’s Lou at the Sicaria plant,” said Jonny.

“What’s happening, Lou?” I yelled over the cacophony.

“The fuckin’ Picollis, sir! They firebombed us and started pickin’ everybody off like flies when we came out! A few of the guys got some cover and we’re returning fire, but it’s bad, real bad.  I don’t know how…”

“Lou? Lou?”

“The fuck? They’re pulling out… I don’t… ah
shit
, I can hear the cops.  Sir… there’s bodies everywhere, a pallet of money and some drugs inside too, if it doesn’t burn first.  They came before the truck arrived for today.  What the fuck do I do?”

“Did the Picollis leave anybody behind?”

“Uh… yeah, looks like we got a few of ‘em.”

“Get somebody you trust and see if any of them are still alive, if they are, then drag their asses out of there, I’ll want to talk to them.  Tell everybody else to get the hell out of dodge, I’ll sort this out.”

“Yes sir.  Sorry, sir, they came outta-”

“No time for that, Lou, go do it,” I said.

“Yes sir.”

Fuck. 
Fuck.  FUCK
.  I handed the phone back to Jonny.  The Sicaria plant was more than a mild-mannered commercial dry cleaning plant and illegal drug distribution depot on the south side.  If the Picollis knew how much cash and drugs were in a vault under that building, they would have come with everything they had.  Lucky that
Lorenzo
hadn’t known either, I guessed.

This was going to take some serious bribery to sweep under the carpet.  I had to make sure that when the fire department sent in their specialists to determine if the site was safe after the fire was put out, they were all paid well enough to not see a damn thing.  Same went for the police department when
they
went in to do their thing.

I owned the police already, but the fire department wasn’t something I’d invested heavily in.  If this stunt was big enough for the Feds to start taking a renewed interest in what was going on, that would be a whole other level of shit to deal with.

“Call Stefano,” I said to Jonny.  “Tell him Kendall’s on her way down, everybody get the fuck out of her way.  Make sure one of
our
taxis is ready for her in front of the building.  Tell the driver to do what she says and not fucking complain.”

Jonny started dialing straight away, and I turned to Marzio as I pulled out my own phone.  Damage control had to start straight away.

“Get a clean-up crew into my penthouse.  Lorenzo was working for the Picollis, so he’s dead.  Anybody got a fuckin’ problem with that?”

The four of them hurriedly shook their heads and murmured their “no, sir’s.” I held my phone to my ear and listened to it ring.  The Police Commissioner had to know some of what his men were walking into today, and I needed to get some contacts in the Fire Department pretty fucking fast.

*****

By the time I was beginning to get a handle on the metaphorical fires, the real ones at the Sicaria plant were still burning hot, and Kendall had a couple hours head-start on me.  According to the taxi dispatch, they’d been heading to Woodville, but the driver had ended up dropping her off in a cabin slightly north of Foxdell.

This was a day that just wouldn’t fucking quit.  I sat in the back of my car as the driver took us out of the city on the 28, past the Ex Machina headquarters.  It was the first chance I’d had to take stock of the situation.

From killing Lorenzo, to making sure no more of my men were killed while unprepared, to calling in all the favors I needed to smooth the Sicaria shitstorm out, it was all like a battle through hell.  It was just one more skirmish in the war I’d been fighting for over two decades.

If I didn’t win this fight for Kendall’s heart, though, it would feel like the war was lost.  Her phone was turned off, and I had barely any idea what to say even if she did answer.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and rubbed them.

After that day in the car with my parents, my whole life was a blur of violence and meaningless sex with meaningless women.  I’d always done everything I could to distract myself from the rage of losing so much to the Picollis, but it was always there, bubbling under the surface.

It was still there now, but since Kendall came into my life and worked her way into my heart like some unstoppable petite assassin, I realized there was pain there too.  It had been with me forever, like black poison.

I’d thought I’d felt good fighting, destroying everybody that stood in front of me.  I thought I’d felt good fucking my way through a never-ending river of women.  I thought that killing so many of the Picollis felt best of all.

None of it compared to the way Kendall made me feel though, because Kendall wasn’t just a distraction.  She was my home, the place where I could finally relax and take off the body armor I needed to carry around everywhere else to keep myself alive.

It had never been OK to let any of that poison out before those quiet times with Kendall.  If I didn’t fight for her, and win, then that poison would build up inside me again.  Who knew what I’d do without her?

I’d fought on so many fronts over the years.  Hand-to-hand, with guns, with knives, real poisons, explosives, face-to-face, backstabbing, one-on-one and a massacre.  I’d always won.

The problem was, this was a completely different kind of fight and I had no idea what to do.  For the first time since I’d bashed that kid’s face in at Wellfort, I was ill-equipped.

We were almost at the cabin when my phone rang.  When I looked at the caller ID, I almost managed to choke on my own tongue when I saw it was Kendall.

Jace

My men spread out around the cabin as I walked up the steps to the front door.  To my relief she said she wanted to talk, and asked me to send somebody to pick her up.

She didn’t seem surprised when I told her I was only a couple minutes away, because I owned the taxi company she’d caught a ride with, she only sighed with resignation.  I took what comfort I could over the fact that she called me at all.

It must have been shocking for her, walking in on that scene with Lorenzo.  I could barely remember the first person I killed, or even saw killed, but death was just the logical conclusion of all the violence I’d been surrounded with for years by then, so it wasn’t so bad for me.

Kendall was from a different world though, she didn’t know what it took to survive in mine.  I hoped that, together, we could do more than survive.  I wished for that harder than I’d ever wished for anything, even revenge.

A thousand hopes and fears raced through my mind as the door swung open.  Would she run into my arms? Had she talked to some law enforcement agent outside of my control?

When I saw her, my heart reached out for her, and my hands mirrored the sentiment.  It hurt more than I could have dreamed when she didn’t reach out for me too, instead keeping one arm wrapped protectively around her mid-section.

On the bright side, there weren’t any police officers apparent behind her either.  I stepped inside, glancing at her sore-looking red eyes and then looking down.

I hated being the cause of the pain etched on her face, and I was still terrified that she would never be able to accept me for who I was.  Unfortunately, the cat was out of the bag, so that choice was gone.

“I… I don’t know where to begin,” I said when she closed the door.

“Why!? Why did you kill him? Why is the Mafia
really
going after your businesses?
What is going on?
”

Now that she didn’t need her hand to close the door, Kendall had both arms wrapped around her stomach.  By the sounds of it, they might have been the only things holding her together.  She was at the breaking point.

“Lorenzo was working for the Picollis, he told them where our car was going to be, and when, yesterday.  He led them right to us.”

“Why? Why do they care so much about you?”

“Because I nearly wiped them out.  I didn’t do a good enough job, though.”

Kendall’s eyes glanced around the room in various directions, as if clarification might be found in the fireplace or the baseball bat mounted above it.  She shook her head and returned her gaze to me.

“I don’t,
understand
, Jace.  How could you do that? How did
you
get involved in this?”

“I’ve been involved in this since forever.  You remember that car crash with my parents?”

She nodded.

“It wasn’t just any crash, it was a mob hit organized by the Picolli Family,” I said.

“How could you know that?”

“Some wiseguy came to Wellfort one day and told me.  He showed me a picture of the Picollis’ mark, and I
remembered
men with that tattooed on them showing up in my dad’s store sometimes.  I didn’t remember much, I was too young, but I recognized it.”

“Who was that guy?”

“I have no idea, never got a name,” I said.

“How do you know he was telling the truth?”

I walked over to the window and pulled the curtain back to look out, checking that my men were alert and watching out for trouble.  It was a stalling tactic.  Inside my heart was racing, pumping hot blood to my head where I could feel it burning on my face.

“At first, I
didn’t
know.  I just believed him.  I was too young to know any better, but it sowed the seed.  I vowed to myself that I’d pay them back for what they did.  I’d pay them back a million times over for what they took.  I had no plan, then.  All I knew was that I had to turn myself into the kind of person that nobody could fuck with. 
That
was the only kind of person who could do what I needed to be done.  This was the one thing to hold on to, so I fought, and I fought, and I fought with
everybody
, with anybody I could find.”

“But how did you make
sure
?” Kendall asked.

“When I was old enough to figure it out, I went to the library and looked up old newspapers.  I found a story about my family on one of those microfiche things.  There it was, in black and white, a picture of our car, smashed up and with some bullet-holes in the door for good measure.  I read as far as my mom and dad’s names, along with ‘Picolli’ and I couldn’t go any further.  That was enough.”

“What did you do then?”

“I started looking for them.  Back then, if you looked for them, they were easy enough to find.  I still didn’t know shit about them, but I soon learned they were huge.  They owned the city, they networked with other crime families that owned the rest of the country, there’s this whole world that most people never see.  I had this idea of jumping out of an alleyway and surprising the boss, killing him and that would be the end of it, but I learned that somebody just as bad would be waiting to take his place.  It was too big for one kid to take down.  From the outside, anyway.”

Kendall’s brow furrowed.  “But not from… the inside?”

“Yeah.  That’s what I thought.  I had to at least get on the inside to learn about them.  I went up to one of their soldiers and told him to give me a job.  He kicked the shit out of me.  I came back the next day and asked for a job, he kicked the shit out of me again but I got a good punch in.  I thought he was going to shoot me, but then he told me to fuck off.  I came back the next day and asked for a job, he called me a stupid little fuck, but he gave me a package and told me where to take it.  It became a regular thing.”

“Why didn’t you just
leave
, Jace?” she asked.

I remembered my time in Wellfort and those kids who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fight.  That hopeless look in their eyes.  I knew I was, at most, half a step away from that if I gave up.

“Because the kids that didn’t fight had
nothing
,” I said, quietly.  “I grew out of the little kingdom of Wellfort and found that the earnings of an errand boy didn’t cut it in the wider world, so one day when one of the guys got shot, I asked to be the one to do the payback, in return for a pay rise.  They said sure, fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen? Well, I did a good job. 
That
guy never crossed our path again, but he did limp for the rest of his days.”

I turned away from the window and slowly walked back towards Kendall.  She didn’t back away, but the closer I got, the more she seemed to shrink.

Although I was close enough to reach out and touch her, it was like there was a force radiating from her body, personal space that I didn’t have permission or the power to enter anymore.  The possibility that I might lose this fight hit home, and my face contorted with the grief that idea let loose.  It took me a few moments before I could wrestle myself back into some semblance of control to continue.

“I… I took as many of those jobs as I could and built a name for myself, earned some respect.  I learned everything I could about their structure, how similar they were to a large corporation.  I learned who was in charge of what.  I learned who wasn’t happy with the way the Picollis ran things.  I learned who could be bought off, if it came to it.  It was going to take me years to do what I needed to do, and then I literally won the lottery.  It fast-forwarded my plans by a decade, maybe two.  In a single day and night of the most brutal shit you can imagine, I seized most of their cash, killed their key men, paid off the rest, assured the police and politicians that the same arrangements they made with the Picollis were still good with me, and I took their place so they could
never
come back.”

“Jace… you have no idea what this is like, how
crazy
this is for me.  I can’t force myself to stop loving you, I tried to just turn it off but it wouldn’t.  I don’t understand how this can work!”

That force around her was weakening.  Maybe just being this close, our love was overpowering it.  I edged a little closer, just about tearing myself apart from the inside with the need to hold her.

“On my way over here, when I was trying to think of what to say, I tried to remember the first person I killed, to see if I could remember what it
felt
like, maybe something like what you were going through.  I figured out that the first thing I killed was a part of myself.  I didn’t have any room in my life for weakness, for sentimentality.  All that was left after that was pain and so much fucking anger, but being with you was the first time I felt anything like peace.  Can I tell you something, Kendall?”

Her barrier weakened further, and she looked up at me with hope.  Those eyes, oh man, those eyes.

“One thing I
do
remember about that car ride with my parents was when they looked back at me.  They had love in their eyes.  I didn’t see that look again for over twenty years until you had it.  You still have it, Kendall.  You’re the love of my life, and I need you.”

I could see the turmoil in her eyes and the quiver in her lip.  She held herself all the more tightly, but that barrier came down.  Painfully slowly, she shuffled forward and closed the last remaining distance between us, leaning into me and looking even more timid than the day we met.

My own hands were shaking when I brought them up to embrace her, I was half-scared that she might disappear in a puff of smoke when I did.  Her body was real, warm, and reassuringly familiar when my palms slid across her back and I held her tight against me.

After a few moments, she held me too and I buried my fingertips in her hair, stroking her cheek with my thumb before kissing the top of her head.  Gently rocking from side to side, I almost felt myself melting into her.

“Can we run away?” she asked.

“If I do, then they’ll take over the city again.  I won’t let that happen.”

“Will it ever be over?” she asked.

“They’ll never give up until I kill them all.”

“How do you know?”

“I wouldn’t.  This is who I am, Kendall.  I love you, can you stay with me and make all of this mean something more than revenge?”

“I love you too, Jace.  I… I’ll stand by you.”

Never in all my life had more powerful words been spoken to me.  With Kendall at my side, I could take on the world, keep stamping on the Picollis until their lights went out completely.

I wished I could have stayed in that moment forever.  Instead, I heard engines and wheels on the gravel track and I had to let go of her to rush back to the window.

Black car after black car was pulling up.  My security was scrambling to get to defensible positions, but I didn’t have enough men.  The Picollis had followed me.

“Boss!” one of my men called from outside.

“What’s happening, Jace?”

I pulled Kendall to the ground, away from the windows, as the first shots started ringing out.  Soon there were a lot more bullets coming in than going out.

“The Picollis.  Here.”

Reaching inside my jacket, I handed Kendall my gun.  She held it with a look on her face like it was a live snake.

“I don’t know-” she began.

“
Listen to me
! The safety is off, all you need to do is point the gun and pull the trigger.  I want you to find somewhere to hide.  Don’t come out
no matter what!
You understand? The walls of this cabin are good and thick, you stay away from the windows and you’ll be OK.  If somebody gets in and finds you, shoot them in the face.”

“I can’t-”

“You can.”

“If I’ve got your gun, what do you have?”

The nearest window to us shattered, razor-sharp shards of glass falling to the floor a few feet away.  I looked over the fireplace at the baseball bat with a lightning symbol burned into it.

“I fucking love baseball.  Now
go
.  We’re going to be OK.  I love you. 
Go!
Stay down!”

“I love you!”

Kendall crouched and ran through a doorway into another room.  I blinked away tears.  That was going to be the last time I ever saw the woman I loved.

I prayed that it was, because if I saw her again, it would only be because the Picollis found her and wanted to kill her in front of me.  That thought almost seized me up and froze me to the spot. 

Selfish as it was, I couldn’t bring myself to wish she had never come into my life, but I did wish I’d never existed so she could have been safe.  If the Picollis somehow didn’t know she was here then she had a chance, but I was a fucking dead man.

I crawled over to the kitchen area and shrugged off my jacket, leaving it on the floor.  I took off my empty gun holster and put it in a drawer as the one-sided battle raged outside.  Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my phone and looked up at the baseball bat ruefully.  I was a fucking dead man.