Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75337 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 301(@250wpm)___ 251(@300wpm)
Sure, I could visit her at the diner, but I was pretty sure the school wouldn’t look too fondly on a known mafia member on parole showing up and sitting in a classroom because he just couldn’t get enough of his woman.
I needed to get a grip.
And I didn’t have to worry about her.
Anthony would be there.
Sure, the bastard could potentially get impaled by a fork or scalded by some coffee or something, knowing his luck, but he would do everything in his power to protect Whitney while she was under his watch.
So I’d met up with Cesare out front of Lorenzo’s place.
“Coming up for air finally, huh?” he asked as we went into his trunk to grab some extra guns.
“What?”
“Seems like you’ve been buried between Whit’s thighs for a solid week straight,” he said, smirking.
“Hey,” I snapped, making his brow lift. “Don’t talk about her like that.”
“Shit,” Cesare said, sighing and shaking his head.
“What?”
“Brio said you were head-over for her. I’d insisted that your old ass wasn’t going to suddenly become monogamous at this stage of your life. Now I owe that bastard a hundred bucks.”
“I never saw it coming either,” I admitted, shrugging. “Guess those fuckers were right about it just being different when it’s the right one.”
“The right one, huh?” he asked, climbing into the passenger seat of my car. “We talking rings and picket fences?”
“This is New York, man,” I reminded him. “Best we can do is wrought iron in front of a Brownstone.”
“Shit. Are you actually considering that? You know a house would likely mean you need to buy some actual furniture, right?”
“I have furniture.”
“Man, you have a couch and a bed and a poker table. I mean actual decor.”
“Guess that would be the perk of having a woman around. To add in all that soft shit. Curtains, carpets, all that shit.”
I actually hadn’t been giving that far in the future much thought. But the more we talked about it, the more I wanted it.
A ring and a better place full of her books and all that soft shit that made her apartment feel more like a home than mine.
A future.
Forever, even.
That was what I wanted with Whitney.
“Hey, think of it like this,” Cesare said as we parked the car outside of the thrift shop that served as a front for the enforcer’s gang’s illegal activity, where we’d gotten word he’d been crashing for the past few weeks. “You get to finally put a hole in the guy who put holes in your girl. Granted, she wasn’t your girl at the time, but still. He hurt her. You can avenge that.”
That was exactly what I needed to hear to get my head on the job instead of on the possible future I wanted with Whitney.
“Getting rusty, old man,” Cesare teased when it took me a few extra seconds to get the lock undone on the front door.
“When you spend fifteen years behind bars, you can lecture me about rusty skills,” I said.
“Fair enough,” he agreed, reaching in his jacket for his gun with its silencer. “You take the lead. This is your kill,” he said, shrugging and moving to the side so I could go in first.
I didn’t know much about the enforcer of the Lewis Crew. What I did know was that while he definitely had some bodies on him, he wasn’t anything like Brio, or even like all of us.
What he had in his favor was no one really knew who he was and that he had a lot of guns. So he could easily roll through your neighborhood, shoot you and your crew up, and waltz right back out.
Hell, the bastard didn’t even have good aim.
He’d hit Whitney, for fuck’s sake.
Cesare’s tap on my back made me glance back to see he was pointing toward the left side of the building, making me veer in that direction, figuring he must have seen something I had missed.
And then, there he was.
On a roll-away cot with a gun tucked under it.
Out cold.
“Kinda anticlimactic, don’t you think?” Cesare whispered.
But, apparently, the guy slept light, because he shot up so fast, grabbing his gun as he went, that it was hard to take aim until he’d managed to squeeze off two rounds.
“Fucker,” Cesare hissed. “This was a nice suit,” he added, making me realize he’d been grazed even as I took aim and watched as the guy’s body jolted as my bullets landed.
Two.
Three.
Four.
“Think he’s good,” Cesare said, stepping forward toward the body. “You sentimental fuck,” he added, smirking over at me. “The thigh and the shoulder. Then two to the head. It’s practically poetic,” he concluded, giving the guy’s leg a little kick.
“Come on. Let’s get out of here. I’m sure the Lewis Crew is still scrambling, but I’d rather not wait around to make sure.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You just wanna go send Anthony home, so you can make puppy-dog-eyes at your girl,” Cesare said, tucking his gun away and making his way back through the building.