Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 95833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 479(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 479(@200wpm)___ 383(@250wpm)___ 319(@300wpm)
I scream then as Nico tries to get up and fails, blood flowing from the wound in his body, his fists pressed down into the piping hot blacktop. His gun is forgotten at his side.
I run to him. There’s nothing else in the world as I throw my arms around him and pull him toward me. He grunts in pain and I get blood all over the white dress but I don’t care about anything but him right now.
“Nico, Nico, oh my god, you’re shot, you’re shot.”
“I’m okay,” he says through gritted teeth. “He missed my heart, the bastard.” When I check the wound, it’s a leaking red hole in his shoulder an inch or two above where his heart should be.
I collapse against him and cry as he staggers to his feet.
“It’s okay,” he says, hugging me tight. “I got you back. I got you.”
“I thought he was going to kill me. God, Nico. Rinaldo stole me and he wanted to marry me and he dragged me out here and—how did you find me?”
“Casso gave me the family’s resources to track you down. I had a lead.” He grins at me and I see the pain in his face. His skin’s pale and his eyes shine as he leans forward and brushes hair from my forehead. “We gotta go before the cops arrive.”
“Nico.” Too many feelings rush through me. Joy at being found, fear over losing him, and confusion—because beneath it all I keep seeing him strangle my father to death.
He climbs in behind the wheel. I hurry and get into the passenger side before he revs the engine, spins the wheel, and drives away going fast.
We leave Rinaldo’s corpse behind to rot in the sun as sirens begin to blare in the distance.
Chapter 33
Nico
No matter how many times I get shot, it’s never fucking easy.
The Famiglia knows a doctor in Vegas that agrees to tend to my wound in an empty, gutted office in the back of a seedy business park that’s mostly abandoned. The guy’s small, with dark hair and a pinched face, and he looks annoyed. “You’re lucky,” he says as he takes out the bullet and stitches me up. “You’re going to feel like crap for a while, but you’ll live.”
Karah doesn’t speak. She looks like hell: that ill-fitting dress makes her seems insane, she smells like piss and sweat, she’s utterly filthy and covered in scratches and more bruises, but the doctor doesn’t comment beyond cleaning her cuts.
The further we got away from Rinaldo’s body, the deeper she burrowed into herself. She’s hiding from me—holding herself away and thinking about what she saw.
By the time we’re back on the road and heading home to Phoenix, she’s fully immersed on whatever is running through her head.
I want to explain. I want to tell her everything, but it’s not the time. My shoulder throbs and she’s a total wreck because of what happened. I stop to buy her new clothes at the first place I come across, and she sits there in a pair of tights and a black trucker t-shirt with a screen-printed big rig and the words “Freedom to Roam” embossed above a flying eagle. I thought it might make her smile, but she only wordlessly pulls it over her body and stares at the floorboard.
We drive the five hours home in near total silence, only the sound of the wind and the soft radio breaking through the heavy, oppressive monotony. The drive back is its own sort of hell—a suffering I deserve and nearly relish, like a punishment I’ve always craved and never knew would set me free.
“How’s she doing?” Casso asks back at Villa Bruno. I lean against a pool table in the rec room and accept the glass of whiskey he offers.
“I’m not sure. Gavino met us when we arrived and he whisked her away to her room. She seems pretty out of it, but she’s alive.”
“I still don’t understand what the fuck she was doing running away last night.” Casso paces back and forth. He’s a tightly wound mess and has been ever since I found their father dead in the library. “The security cameras showed her jumping the fence and running off. I just don’t get it.”
“I don’t understand it either. She lost it when she saw your father’s body but that doesn’t explain why she’d run away.”
He stops and glares at me. He knows I’m lying and leaving something out, but he hasn’t figured out what I know yet. It’s been an exhausting day and I’m not sure I have it in me to keep up this charade, and besides, Karah’s going to tell them all the truth sooner or later.
When she does, this is over, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
It’s almost a relief.
I want to get caught. I want to be punished for what I did—because I deserve it. But more than that, I want them all to know that their father was a piece of shit who deserved to get strangled by my hands, and I don’t feel bad about it. I won’t lose a moment’s sleep over Don Bruno’s death.