“Viktor fucking Sobol,” Rocco bellowed as another shot rang out.
Sobol’s gun arm jerked wide, blood streaming, and his gun tumbled from his grasp.
Alessa turned and her heart leapt in some stupid, ill-timed relief.
Rocco led a large-enough group of men—more than a few of whom she had known for years—up the sand, past her abandoned, borrowed motorbike. He held his gun out, trained on Sobol, and he looked absolutely lethal.
“Go to Hell, Cavallo,” Sobol snapped. “Your old man didn’t even die, and how many of my men have you killed today?”
Rocco squeezed the trigger again, putting a hole in Sobol’s dominant hand. “Not enough.”
Sobol stumbled back, nearly falling over the Joshua tree behind him. He pulled his wounded arm in tight to his body. “H-how the hell did you even find me so fast?”
“You weren’t that hard to track,” Cristiano replied cooly.
Rocco held out his empty hand. “Alessa.” His tone was clipped. He was clearly displeased.
She really didn’t feel bad about that. But she did take his hand and allow him to pull her up against him, positioned in such a way that she didn’t lose sight of their target.
Sobol was breathing harder, but by no means out of the game. He glared at them both, his focus shifting back and forth, and he finally snarled, “You sent your bitch to—”
Rocco pulled the trigger again, twice more. One shot took out Sobol’s left ankle, the other nailed him between the legs. His arm tightened around her waist. “You don’t talk about my woman that way. You don’t talktoher.” He pivoted, suddenly shifting her into Emanuele’s grip, and strode forward. Anger radiated off of him as he adjusted his aim to compensate for Sobol’s collapsed, wailing form. “You don’t fuckinglookather.” He pulled the trigger again, this time putting a bullet through Sobol’s oversized gut. “Or, that would be my advice, if you were going to make it out of this desert alive. But you’ll be seeing Hell long before me, you sniveling piece of shit.”
The final bullet went into Sobol’s head, silencing the man’s screams and ending his threat simultaneously.
While Rocco’s back was still turned, Emanuele gently patted Alessa on the shoulder and murmured, “You were pretty badass. Welcome back.”
She should have offered him a smile, but she couldn’t look away from the man she’d come rushing across the country to see.
“Alright, let’s pack it up,” Cristiano said from off to the side. “Someone have a plan for the bodies?”
“We’ve got a guy in the morgue,” Rocco said as he turned toward them. “Ugo will coordinate. Em, make the call.” He said all of this without removing his stare from her.
He’s so pissed.
That was fine, though. She’d been pretty pissed, too.
Rocco was furious. Not that she’d defied him and taken herself back to Vegas, per se, but that she had then promptly proceeded to rush into the heart of a confrontationunderprepared. He didn’t know exactly how she’d even pulled that off, so helistened in the SUV as she explained to her former colleagues something about intel from a man named Miguel who had piggybacked off the same tracker Cristiano had used to get her to them. It was brilliant in its simplicity, and that only made him angrier.
She’d shown up to a gunfight on a motorbike that may or may not have been running properly, because she’d taken it—with permission—from one of the Cavallo men’s side-hustle garages. Which also meant there was an owner out there, somewhere, they’d have to pay off. The idea of the motorbike breaking down on her made his blood burn, but it hadn’t happened, so Rocco couldn’t kill anyone for it.
Worse, though. She’d shown up to the gunfight in a goddamn summer dress. A dress he’d bought for her the previous Friday. A dress he had envisioned peeling off of her in any number of ways. Now he was going to have to rip it off and set it on fucking fire.
No one questioned him when he chose to leave the minutiae to someone else. If anyone questioned his intentions when he pulled Alessa with him from the SUV, leaving Em to take their guests to the hotel, it was only Ryoma and whatever he mumbled in Japanese.
The elevator ride was quiet, and tense, and in the back of his mind he thought she felt a little angry, too. It took him the entire ride to remember why. Remembering what he’d felt it necessary to do not twenty-four hours earlier failed to take the edge off the outrage he was feeling in the moment.
“Are you hurt?” He was proud of himself for asking the question calmly.
She turned, her back to the living room, and crossed her arms over her chest. “No. Some scrapes, maybe, but nothing that’s bleeding.You’rethe one who’s hurt. Do you think I haven’t seen the bandages?”
Rocco ground his teeth in an effort not to shout. “Yes, I took a couple close calls. Nothing direct. Nothing worth stitching. It was a gunfight, Alessa, injuries happen.”
“Uh-huh. You think I don’t know that?”
He raked his gaze over her. In the better lighting, he could clearly see where she’d scraped up her leg and a portion of her arm, surely where she’d had to dive and roll on the harsh desert floor. The areas were red, but nothing seeped or dripped. “Considering you showed up to a fucking shoot-out in adress? I have my doubts.” He needed to get a better look at her, though, and make sure those were the worst of her injuries.
“Oh, well, I’m very sorry, sir.” She moved her hands to rest her knuckles on her hips. “You see, this guy I’m kind of in love with went off tofucking dieand just left me behind like I was deadweight. So yeah. I cried about it. And then I got my ass on the next plane, because I. Am. Not. Dead. Weight!” As she spoke, she stomped up and jabbed her pointer finger into his chest, her voice rising with each emphasized word.
