“Don’t, man,” he gasped, his voice barely audible. Blood bubbled from his lips. He was struggling to suck in air. “Keep the fuckin’ drive. It’s all yours. Just walk away.”
I had no sympathy for guys like this. Dominic and Freddy came up with a scheme to steal the drive that would’ve left Sofia dead if I’d played along. Dominic didn’t give two shits about the guys from the Accardo Family I’d already killed, and he’d betrayed Freddy. Sure, Freddy was a piece of shit who’d used and betrayed me, but I wanted to be the one to make him pay.
“Please,” he begged. He coughed blood and his face scrunched up in agony. “Let bygones—”
“No,” I said and pulled the trigger.
With Dominic dead, I needed to deal with this mess. I was bleeding. I had gunpowder traces on my body. Usually, I’d ditch my weapon after a job so it couldn’t be traced back to me or to other hits, but I’d had this pistol with me since being sent after Sofia. It tied me to four kills now, and I couldn’t get rid of it yet because I didn’t have another.
I returned to the dining room, carefully unscrewing the hot suppressor from the end of my pistol and putting both in my overcoat pockets. Moving my wounded arm sent lightning bolts of pain flashing into my brain. Blood had soaked my left sleeve and occasionally dripped onto the floor.
First I needed to deal with the bleeding, then with the mess in Freddy’s house. I could use bleach to degrade the genetic material in the spilled blood, but the probability was high that I’d miss something, and those forensics guys were good. I needed to burn down the house. It was the nuclear option.
Hell, forensics might even have my DNA already. Or Sofia’s. I’d paid cash and used a fake ID to rent the motel room, but if they’d figured out which room we’d come from before the shootout—and detectives weren’t stupid—then they had genetic material from us.
As for me leaking red, I couldn’t go to the hospital to get it fixed up. Doctors were legally required to report gunshot wounds. Instead, I headed into the hall bathroom and found a first aid kit. Then I found some painkillers in Freddy’s medicine cabinet and snatched those too. Percocet, mostly. Freddy liked his pain relief in the opioid variety. I used scissors to cut up some of Freddy’s cotton sheets and wrapped the wound as tightly as I could twist it.
Time was speeding past, getting away from me, and I knew it. Either someone had heard Dominic’s gunshot or they hadn’t. Or they hadn’t known what it was. I was staking everything those last two possibilities. 9mms didn’t sound like big movie pistol gunfire. The shot had been incredibly loud, but it was inside with all the windows closed. If the neighbors heard it, they would stop and listen, wondering if it had been a gunshot but telling themselves, “Nah, it couldn’t be.” My pistol was “silenced,” so they wouldn’t have heard my shots outside the house. The neighbors would probably go about their business—if they even bothered to glance out a window to see if anything was amiss.
That’s what I was crossing my fingers for, anyway.
I returned to the garage and pried open the gas tanks of both of Freddy’s vehicles. I used every flammable accelerant he had on hand—lighter fluid for his grill, a half-full gas can for his riding lawn mower, and some turpentine I found near paint cans.
One flick of a borrowed lighter later, flames raced through the dining room and into the family room. I ran like hell, back through the garage and out to the yard. People might dismiss a single gunshot in a decent neighborhood, but no one ignored a fire.
Seconds later, I was in my car and driving away with smoke in my rearview mirror and my left sleeve soaked in my own blood.
CHAPTER TWELVE
SOFIA
“You’re shot!”
Leon stood in the doorway to the cabin, looking both smug and pleased at the shock on my face. The left arm of his overcoat was tacky with blood. It had a hole up high, near his deltoid.
“It’s sweet that you noticed, Princess.” He held up a first aid kit with bloody fingerprints on it. “Don’t worry. I brought band-aids.”
I gritted my teeth to keep my sudden impulse to strangle him under control. He could be so needlessly infuriating. He had some of the worst characteristics of men—believing himself invulnerable, shrugging off wounds as if they were nothing, being “manly.”
And he was still calling me Princess like an obnoxious child with a tired joke.
“Get inside,” I ordered, rushing over and shutting the door behind him. He started to turn to face me, but I took hold of his jacket and peeled it off him. I needed to see how badly he was hurt.
I dumped the jacket on the floor. The blood-wet sleeve hit with a thick splat. He’d wrapped the wound tightly with some kind of cloth that was soaked dark red. Blood had dried tacky all the way down his left arm to his fingertips.
I pushed him toward the couch, being careful of his wound. “How much blood have you lost?”
“Not sure. What are my options?”
I practically pushed him onto the couch where we’d made love last night. He held out the first aid kit to me like a little boy offering a present.
I set it aside on the coffee table. “Sit still. Does your brother have any serious first aid supplies? Not this over-the-counter stuff?”
“Maybe. He’s always been the smart one.”
“And you’re definitely the dumb one,” I murmured, opening the first aid kit and sorting through it. It had bandages and gauze, but this was for minor scrapes and burns. He really needed the emergency room.
“Dumb but sexy.”
