Bound by Danger: An Enemies to Lovers Mafia Romance (Born in Crime Book 2), page 25
Where the fuck am I?
Then I remember.
The warehouse. A bomb. My men. Did they get away? Why was I running? I was running toward something. The warehouse? The bomb? Shouldn’t I have been running away?
The image of my car comes to me so clearly that I jerk upright before my brain can actually process the command. Pain hits me like I’m being plunged through the surface of a barely frozen lake into the frigid water below. It stabs at me from all angles, rushing into my mouth, my lungs, and my stomach, deadening my limbs.
A wave of nausea sweeps over me, but I push it back, forcing my eyes open. At first, all I can register are black, shadowy shapes, but then the faces come into focus. John. Elisa. A man cloaked in black. A shadow. The shadow. My shadow. The man who ran. Who looked over his shoulder. The face that was so familiar, but always just out of my reach.
“No!” Why is he here? John. Elisa. They’re in danger.
I try to bolt from the bed to launch myself at this man. The enemy. A man who wants me dead. A machine beeps wildly and a stand jams into the side of the bed when I move. An IV. I realize I’m connected—no, tethered—to an IV stand, with a bag dripping shit into my arm. There’s something stuffed into my nostrils, too. Plastic. I rip it away, then go for the IV next. Elisa makes a sound, something that doesn’t work with my sluggish brain. John leaps for me, but he’s not fast enough to keep me from pulling the needle from my hand. Blood spurts in an impressive arc across the room. Everything is white except for that fountain of crimson.
“You!” I clear the bed. I’m not in any hospital, and I figure that out fast. I’m in one of our surgeon’s private clinics. I’m stripped down, but my boxers are still there. This place doesn’t give out those nasty hospital gowns, which is nice. Because I have nothing stopping me, aside from the pain, from reaching the shadowy bastard in my sights.
I channel the pain, using it like I’ve been taught, as a bolt of adrenaline that can so often mean the real difference between becoming worm food or keeping to the right side of the turf. The shadowy bastard doesn’t move. He stands his ground, a mountain of black. Until I plant my fist in the middle of his face. Then he gives. Bones crunch against my knuckles, my knuckles crunching against bone. The shadow proves he’s human by letting out a grunt, and then I’m hauled away by my brother while the shadow deflates. The bastard wavers back a few steps, but then he straightens back up. I’m dragged back to the bed and sat down hard. John’s arms pin me there, his hands pressing down hard on my shoulders.
“Dario. Calm down.”
“That’s the guy,” I pant. My whole body feels like a wall of pain. I’m dizzy, my head is pounding, my eyes are swimming with black spots and bright lights, and my stomach is churning violently. “The one I was telling you about. I chased him. I—”
“You’ve been out for a few hours,” John says, leaning in so that I can see his face. He eases up on my shoulders. “There’s a lot you have to catch up on.”
I stare at him blankly, not sure I’m up for the challenge at the moment. He gives me a minute, and I hear Elisa make a strangled sound. But she doesn’t approach, which means that John has something important he needs to tell me before she can do any comforting or nursing. Sara isn’t here, which I think has to mean something, but right now, right at this moment, my brain hurts too much for me to figure out what that is.
“This man, Logan… he saved you. He was the one who warned you about the bomb. He warned all our men first. You weren’t supposed to be there yet, but he saw you running up to the warehouse and called you. He would have been in time if you hadn’t run back to the building like a fucking idiot. What were you thinking?”
“The car,” I croak. “Couldn’t just leave it.”
John’s hands tighten on my shoulders again, but at least he doesn’t shake me. His fingers bite in, and I realize that every bit of me took quite a beating. “The car was special, I fucking know that, but you could have been killed! I don’t need to lecture you about what can be replaced and what can’t, but know that your thick skull is one of the latter.”
“The latter?” I croak. “What the hell does that mean?” Normally, I think I know what it means, but right now, there isn’t a whole lot of processing going on.
John snorts. “It means that we can get you another fucking car, but if your skull was split wide open, we wouldn’t be able to put it back together.” He twists me so that I have to face down the shadow. “He saved you. Saw you get caught in the blast and pulled you out of it. He dragged you away and stayed with you until our men came for you. He insisted that he come along.”
“Why?” My voice sounds horrible, but not as horrible as it feels to try to sort through what my brother is saying and respond accordingly.
“Keep your ass on the bed this time,” John warns. “And don’t go ripping out anything else. Not that there’s much more damage left for you to do. You’re bruised, and you have some burns. Maybe a concussion, but they’re not sure yet. You’re lucky you’re alive, that you’re not deaf, and that you still have all of your body parts attached.”
“How?” I ask. Another croak.
“A crate of car parts. Came in early this morning. About an hour before you got there.”
“Fuck.”
The shadow twitches, off to my right. I want to leap off the bed and plant my fist in the fucker’s face again. I don’t care that he saved me. Maybe. I mean, I guess I do. I do care that he warned my men, and me, but I need to know how he’s connected to all of this and if I need to do more damage to his face. Apparently, the first time hurt me more than it hurt him. If I was feeling my best and hadn’t just survived a bomb blast, I might have been more effective.
“Listen to me, Dario, because this is a lot to explain and I’m only going to go through it once.” John’s lips thin out and his jaw clenches. “Or maybe twice, if you need it. I had to have him repeat the story after he finished it for me, and I’m in good shape. You’re a wreck, so I’ll give you a pass if you need me to repeat bits of it.”
I nod, trying not to let the pain overwhelm me. I have the sinking feeling that this isn’t going to be good, so I’d better concentrate. Then again, that feeling might just be my stomach trying to keep up with my throbbing brain, which feels about fourteen sizes too big for my skull right now. Did John say something about a concussion? I’ve had one before. You really can’t play football for any amount of time and not walk away without one. I remember how much it sucked, and I was lucky. I have a thick skull, as my brother mentioned, and I’ve only now had the pleasure of a repeat performance.
John senses that I’ve got together what shit that I can scrape together right now, and he starts.
“That man over there? He looked familiar because he is familiar. Family. He’s family. His name is Logan White. He’s our half-brother.”
“What the fuck?” I try to leap from the bed, because that has to be a lie, but John keeps me steady.
“I know. That was my reaction, too.” His lips twitch at the corners. “Well, maybe not my exact reaction, but I was skeptical. I’m still skeptical.”
“How is it possible that he’s related to us?” But even I know how it’s possible. I barely knew my parents. I knew that they loved each other. I thought they did, anyway, but what does a child know about love and how that works? All the ways it can go wrong?
“Dad,” John confirms. “He had an affair. This was before he married our mother. We both know marriage can be more about obligation than love. Dad was in love with someone before, but then he married our mother instead. He was seeing the woman before he got married, but after that, he knew where his obligation lay and he ended it. Her name was Emma White. She was a model, but not here. She spent most of her time in LA. Our dad met her when he was traveling for business. We moved here later.”
Logan, if that really is the shadow’s name—and I refuse to attribute a name to the bastard, nor afford him the honor of calling him a blood relation yet—he could be lying. Just because he warned me about a bomb and pulled me away from a blast doesn’t mean a thing. It doesn’t mean that I trust him now or that I ever will. I don’t feel like I owe him for saving my life. He could have planted that bomb. He could be lying about this whole thing just to get close to us. I turn my eyes toward him, trying to focus on what I see and get beyond John’s words.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Logan says. His voice is deep and calm, not rough and not raspy. Just deep. Like John’s. The sound of it hits me harder than the fact that this guy looks like my brother in ways that I can’t deny. I guess he probably looks like me, too, if I look hard enough. “You’re thinking this is a bunch of bullshit. I’ll tell you the same thing I told John. I knew nothing about the other half of my family until very recently. I grew up with a parent whose modeling career ended after she gave birth to me. She was a single mom, and we struggled. She had no one to take care of her, so I did that. She never talked about my father. I did what most kids do when they need to work because there are bills piling up and no way to pay them. I grew up fast, left high school at sixteen, and started fighting. Mostly underground shit, since it paid better than anything else I could get with no education. Didn’t matter that I got beat to shit most nights. I got used to it. Did more beating than getting beat in short order. When you’re angry as fuck about everything, it serves you well there.”
“I’m sorry, are we supposed to feel sorry for you? Any asshole can invent a sob story.” I rake my eyes over Logan’s face. “You don’t look like someone who used to get beat up.” Yes, he’s a big guy, like John. Like me. But his features are too pretty. His nose has been broken a few times, sure. That’s obvious. But other than that, he has the same chiseled features that we do. Hard jaw, a granite brow and cheekbones. Dark eyes like mine, but not like John’s. Raven black hair.
Logan shrugs. “Like I said. I did the beating, most times. That’s not what I want to tell you. It’s just a part of it. I acquired some other skills along the way through connections I met while fighting. Not skills that you can use in polite fucking society, either. When I was twenty-two, I got hired by a guy named Scott Morgan. He wanted a bodyguard for his kid, but not the deranged kind that would take someone’s head off without provocation. Someone who knew how to fly on the right side of the law because that’s the image he needs to maintain. He’s a judge.”
My head now feels like I just stuck it back into the warehouse right as the blast went off. My brain feels extra thick and sluggish. I’m struggling with the name, but I shake off the fog and focus. Scott Morgan. Ricky Morgan’s father. I instantly remember just about every single detail of that chance encounter with Ricky that night. Was it chance at all?
“I’ve been Ricky’s bodyguard for years. The guy’s an asshole, but he seemed harmless enough. He’s an entitled prick, to be sure. Has lots of rage issues. I thought that’s where it would stop. But I guess you crossed him, and he wanted me to make you pay.”
“Crossed him? How?”
“You…” Logan coughs. “He said that you forced his girlfriend.”
“Forced?” Now, I’m coughing. “What the fuck? I have never forced a woman to do anything. Ever. That’s not how I operate. Who the fuck is his girlfriend?”
“Megan Knox.”
It takes me a second to even remember her, but when I do, the roar comes back with a vengeance. The roar of the explosion. The roar of the blood in my ears. The roar of my own heart pounding my ribs to a fine powder. “What the fuck? We never even did anything! I took her home after we had dinner and was gone ten minutes later, she was such an entitled brat!”
Logan nods. “I started to figure as much. That she lied. Ricky already had a grudge against you. He didn’t like you, and this was the excuse. You must have humiliated her or upset her somehow, and she wanted to use Ricky to get back at you. She couldn’t admit that she was cheating on Ricky, which I’m guessing is what was happening, so she invented some story to make him think you’d forced her against her will. Of course, that drove Ricky crazy. He already hated you. Hated that you were a better athlete in college, had more friends, and all of that juvenile shit. The guy’s a piece of work. Obviously, I wouldn’t say much better of his girlfriend. Anyway, he told me to cause trouble for you. Paid me extra to do it. At first, it was harmless enough.”
I scowl. “You call putting a bullet in my shoulder fucking harmless?”
Logan steps back and leans up against the wall. Maybe he thinks he’ll appear less threatening that way. He looks like a hulking goon, all dressed in black like that, that’s what he looks like. “Relative to blowing your head up like a watermelon, I suppose that the shoulder is harmless enough, yeah. I did my research. Figured you could take it. I thought it would end there, but Ricky wasn’t satisfied. He had another guy, someone he paid, tip the cops off about your warehouse after I found it for him.”
“Logan didn’t know who you really were. Or me,” John cuts in. “He didn’t know who he was.”
There’s no way that I’m going to believe that, but I want to hear the rest of this shit badly enough that I keep my mouth shut. Anyone who knows me knows what kind of control that takes.
“That’s right,” Logan confirms, “I didn’t know.” He pushes off the wall again, but doesn’t move forward. He keeps his hands at his sides, where everyone can see them. If he wanted to murder us all, he could do it in short order. I assume that our men searched him and took away any weapons he might have had on him, but someone trained could use anything in this room to their advantage.
I feel extremely naked without my Glocks strapped to my chest.
“It started getting worse,” John directs the story back on track.
Logan nods. “It did. Ricky went from wanting to harass you to wanting to do you permanent harm. I tried to convince him that, as the son of a judge, he couldn’t do things like that, but he was certain it would never be traced back to him, and if it was, his dad would take care of it like he’s taken care of every other scrape Ricky’s ever been in. I was watching you, obviously. I’ve been watching you for a while. You never knew that I was there. I could have killed you any time I wanted. That’s how you should know that I’m telling the truth. Then, a few days ago, my mother died. She’d been sick for a long time. I went to see her in the hospital, and she must have known that this was it for her, because she told me something I’d wanted to know my entire life. Who my father was. The thing is, none of this was random. Ricky’s father knew who my dad was. When someone else recommended me for the job, he did a damn thorough background check. And he contacted my mother and made her confirm it. It’s the reason I got the job. Because he had something he could always use over me. That knowledge. He could hurt me with it, given who your family is and what they do. You don’t operate on the ride side of the law, and he felt pretty secure in his ability to connect me or frame me for things I hadn’t done, if I ever did wrong by his son. I didn’t know any of that, but it’s what got me into this. Ricky going after you was totally random, though. I mean, not exactly random. After you tangled with his girlfriend, in whatever capacity it actually happened, Ricky was just looking for an excuse. He’s a piece of shit—a bored little shit, too cocky—but I think you know that already. He has lots of people he hates, and even more who hate him.”
“He needed something to do, so he decided to ruin my life.”
“Essentially.” Logan glances around the room when Elisa stirs in the corner. She doesn’t say anything, but she does shift from one foot to the other. It’s clear that she’s in a hurry to get this over with. It says a lot that John has her here right now. It says that he trusts Logan to be around her and his unborn children.
It makes me wonder how much more I fucking missed while I was unconscious.
Actually, no, it makes everything that I missed that much more obvious.
“And then he got out of control. Things started escalating,” I conclude. “You didn’t want to do it, because planting bombs or killing people can get someone into a lot of trouble, and then your mother died and revealed who you were and you couldn’t do it because you couldn’t take out your half-brother.”
“I know it sounds fucked up…”
I laugh at that, but it’s a garbled laugh that comes out as a hoarse croak and half of a cough at the end. My throat is apparently not so up to par when it comes to anything more than talking. “In our line of work, fucked up is an everyday term. You get used to it. Things that sound crazy aren’t so crazy after all. Like how you ended up here in New York when your mother was from LA. She probably moved here, hoping to be closer to my father. I’m guessing that he did help her out at first, even if he wasn’t involved, but that stopped when he was killed.”
Logan’s face is absolutely unreadable. So are his eyes. They’re hard as rock and black as the night. He’s well-trained, I have to admit. Too well trained to show any emotion when he doesn’t want to. “I believe that’s correct,” he says. “My mother was in and out of consciousness when she was telling me about our dad. She was barely hanging on. I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. After she passed, I got closer than I should have. I needed to. I needed to look for myself and see if I could see a physical resemblance. I don’t know how I could have missed it before.”
“That day I chased you…”
“Yes. That day, I should never have looked behind me. I knew you saw my face. But I’d also seen yours again, and I knew the truth. I couldn’t let Ricky do what he was going to do. He paid someone to plant a bomb in those car parts. The fucker has unlimited money, unfortunately. His dad comes from a pile of it, as old as it gets. I had a falling out with the son of a bitch. Called his dad and told him I was done, and if he wanted to know why, to talk to his son. I thought maybe he’d be able to get through to him, but… there were other things going on. Things that, well, maybe they made Ricky’s father slightly bitter towards me. He was happy to have me gone. Probably thought I was making shit up, trying to paint his slimy son in a bad light. Obviously, he didn’t talk to him and calm things down.
