Hitman's Hookup: A Bad Boy Romance (20 page)

She stepped back and smiled at me easily. A second later, it felt like needles were shooting through my neck. The place where she’d put her lips burned and stung like a thousand scorpions. I gritted my teeth and tried not to writhe. But it wasn’t working. I dropped to my knees and nearly brought Matthew down with me.

“Don’t worry. This feeling will pass. You’ll get up in a minute,” she intoned gleefully.

I was writhing on the ground. Victoria looked at me dispassionately, then turned to one of the guards. “He won’t have come here alone, I daresay,” she said. “Go look for his partner. And take backup. I’m sure she’s made quick work of Ramirez and Smith.” Three of the remaining six men left the room at once, guns cocked.

My vision was blurry from the tears in my eyes. But a minute later, Victoria’s prediction had come true and the pain passed. I caught my breath.

“Get up, you look ridiculous,” Victoria spat.

I clambered to my feet without Matthew’s help. I heard a yell in the hallway. Corina. A minute later she was being dragged into the living space by only two of the three guards who had gone to fetch her. She shot me a fiery look as she pulled herself to her feet and spit in the face of the seven-foot man who had retrieved her. “That’s for pulling my hair, asshole,” she said. The guy smirked.

“This little bitch dropped Parsons like he was a sack of goddamn potatoes,” said the guy who Corina had just spit on.

Corina took one spiky-heeled-boot and jammed it onto the guy’s toe. A loud
crack
echoed through the room and the guy howled in pain. “That’s for calling me bitch.”

Grimes was yelping like he was being devoured by a hundred alligators.

Victoria rolled her eyes. “Grimes, will you ever recover from your toe being stubbed?”

Grimes paled and gritted his teeth. “Stubbed? It’s fucking
broken,
” he howled. But one look at Victoria’s face and he shut up. “
Yes
, ma’am.”

“Good, now that we’re all here. Time for the grand reveal.” Victoria snapped her fingers as if we were all supposed to follow her. I got close to Corina as we walked. “How many down?” I hissed.

She blinked three times.

Five to go in total. We were led down another corridor; this was where the disinfectant smell was emanating from. It grew stronger as we walked. I heard a familiar beeping noise. We turned the corner and I saw Lily standing over a gurney. She had a stethoscope around her neck and was crouching over a man in a gurney.

Patrick Romano was laying there, and he was alive.

Well.
Mostly
alive.

“Jesus Christ,” Corina said loudly.

“You didn’t know he was alive?” I hissed at her.

She shook her head. “You’re losing your touch, Cruz. Two kills in a row now totally unsuccessful.”

I almost laughed. Lily met my gaze and gave me a small smile. She was fine. She didn’t even look scared.

Victoria looked from me to Lily. “Aw, a lover’s reunion. I was expecting tears, maybe a quick hug. Then again…she’s probably not too happy with you right now.” Victoria cackled. “Oh, this is too much fun.” She looked at Lily. “Any luck yet getting Patrick to respond to stimuli?”

It was hard to look at Romano. He had a breathing tube in his mouth and was a sickly grey color; his papery skin was clinging to his bones. He looked like a shell. The heart rate monitor was barely beeping.

“Not yet,” Lily replied. “It’s hard to know how to treat him without knowing what was used to…poison him.” She gave me a significant look.

“And that’s why I needed Cruz alive,” Victoria intoned. “So I could know what it was that he used against my husband. Because whatever you wrote in the chart? That wasn’t it. Doctors here tried an antidote but it didn’t work. Nothing has worked, actually, as you can see.”

Romano was a ghost of his former self; shriveled and lifeless. I swallowed, my mouth dry.

Victoria was staring at me intently. “Ah, so the assassin finally sticks around to meet the outcome of his work and doesn’t like what he sees?” She pouted at me sarcastically. “You poor, sad executioner. I bet your girlfriend can help you with some sleeping pills.” Victoria strolled over to me, her face inches from mine. She slapped my arm, the one with the knife wound that had re-infected. I groaned in pain. Victoria looked happy. She dug her fingernails through my jacket, pressing hard into the wound. I screamed. She laughed. “What did you inject my husband with?”

I felt myself fading in and out of consciousness. The intensity of the pain was too much. “Will you at least let Lily go if I tell you?”

Victoria nodded. “You can all go if you tell me.”

“It was a narcotics overdose,” I hissed. “Injectable oxycodone. He should have died from it.”

Victoria removed her talons from my arm and reached into her bra. She fished out a small black remote that she pointed toward a light fixture on the wall. I squinted through the tears in my eyes and saw a small, red light blinking from what had looked like a screw hole in the fixture. “There,” she said, pressing a button on the remote. The light stopped blinking. “The camera’s not recording now.” She faced Lily. “What is the prognosis for my husband based off of a narcotics overdose?”

Lily beamed. “We just have to wait for him to wake up,” she said happily. “He’ll be totally fine once he wakes up from the coma in a week or two. Just keep his fluids up and feeding tube going. He should be fine.” A cloud crossed her face. “But he really shouldn’t look this bad if you’ve been keeping up the fluids and nutrition.” She reached down to grab his chart.

Victoria snapped her fingers and one of her goons stepped up and grabbed Lily, who screamed. He put his calloused fingers over her mouth and I almost slipped my loose bonds to save her. But a look from Corina stopped me. It wasn’t time to make our move yet. My heart was pounding. I wanted to rip the guy’s hands off his body and force feed him his own flesh.

Nobody touched Lily like that and got away with it.

Victoria put on a patronizing voice. “Now, Lily. When I turn the cameras back on, you’re going to say clearly that there is no recovering for my husband. None at all. Understood?”

Lily’s eyes were flashing with anger and panic. She was screaming from behind the guy’s hand. Victoria walked over to a small set of medical drawers in the corner and pulled out a plastic-wrapped syringe. She unwrapped it, tossing the garbage casually onto the ground, and used her teeth to pull off the plastic needle cap. She pulled back the empty syringe and held it up to the light. It was empty but for the air she’d just drawn into it. Then she walked over to Patrick’s thin arm and opened his IV port. “Cruz, unluckily for you, my husband was a man of intense but simple pleasures. The first pleasure was women who were not me.” She wrenched his frail arm up and I heard bones cracking. Patrick’s heart rate increased on the monitor. “The second was a seven-times daily snack of oxycodone. So his tolerance for the drug was higher than that of an elephant’s.” She twisted his flesh. “Which is why he’s in a coma and not dead.” She broke three of his fingers in quick succession. “The reason he looks like a skeleton is because I have, as your genius girlfriend pointed out, been withholding fluids and food in an attempt to kill him. It wasn’t working.”

“What a goddamned relief this will be when I’m finally free of him,” she continued in a gravelly voice. “Grimes, call Mr. Romano’s father. Tell him it’s over and that we have the man who killed his son. He’ll be taken care of soon enough.”

“What about the bitch here?” Grimes asked, indicating a still-squirming Corina. He reflexively moved his feet out of Corina’s reach.

“Hand her to Milford,” she said. Another block-faced man stepped forward and gleefully dug his fingers into Corina’s upper arms.

“I have steel-toed boots,” Milford said with a smirk.

Corina smiled at him and then jabbed her knee into his crotch. The man sidestepped the blow at the last second.

Victoria turned to me. “I guess I should probably pay you for doing me such a favor. I couldn’t just off him myself. My
beloved
father-in-law would have been suspicious of that. So I let him fake Patrick’s death stateside to make the other cartels think they had the upper hand. And I agreed to watch over his poor, ailing body as long as it took. And that I would find the man who killed him and kill him myself.” She put on a dramatic, fake, wistful look. Tears even misted her brown eyes. “But thank fuck that’s over now. Now
I
get to be in charge of this fucking business, officially.” She inhaled deeply like the oxygen was bringing her some kind of immortal strength, a dreamy smile on her face.

I could hear Lily’s muffled screams and they tore into me with a pain that was worse than the poisoned lipstick Victoria had imparted upon my skin earlier. Victoria held up the air-filled syringe and pushed it into her husband’s IV line. Lily kicked her feet helplessly into the air as the goon pinned her back easily.

“Set her down,” Victoria said. “Put a gun on her. I’m turning the cameras back on. Now, Lily, remember what we discussed?”

Lily was crying. But she nodded as soon as three guns were on her, out of frame from the camera. Victoria pressed
record
once again on her little remote and Lily talked, her lip trembling. “There’s nothing I can do based off his vitals. It’s only a matter of time. Any moment now. Honestly.”

As if on cue, Patrick’s heartrate monitor flat lined. The goon wrapped his arms around Lily again, covering her mouth and moving her out of range of the camera.

Victoria let out a wail of absolute, total grief as she flung herself over her husband’s body. Everyone watched in silence. One of the bodyguards pulled her off of him. “We should clear the room, Mrs. Romano,” he said.

Victoria sniffled and nodded, inhaling large gulps of air. “Alright. Yes, that’s for the best.” She faced the rest of us. “These people killed my husband. Kill them all.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

LILY

I could taste the salty skin of my captor mixing with the salt of my tears. I wasn’t really crying. I was upset, yes. But the tears were a lubricant on the asshole’s grip and a distraction. He thought my guard was down.

I knew since Cruz had walked through the door that a distraction was what he had been waiting for. This was my moment. The door clicked shut as Victoria left us with the five bodyguards; the four goons and the young kid who was currently holding Cruz.

Inhaling deeply and masking it as a hyperventilation from my tears, I took my teeth and bit hard into the guard’s palm. He yelled and pulled away like I was a hot burner. I turned and kicked him hard in the balls. He crumpled to the floor but another guard was on me in a second. I tried to kick him away but couldn’t. All I heard were three, muted gunshots and suddenly I was on the ground.

I froze and turned my head around to look. The guy holding me had a perfectly round gunshot wound in his fleshy forehead; blood trickled out of it. Two other guards were on the ground with the same wounds. Cruz was holding a smoking gun with a silencer on it and the young guard behind him was pinned to the wall from apparent fear.

Corina was kickboxing the guy who was no longer holding her in his grasp. She looked like she was having fun.

“End it, Rina,” Cruz intoned.

Corina rolled her eyes and with three swift jabs of her hand to pressure points, her quarry was on the ground and not breathing. “You always steal my fun,” Corina said, sticking out her tongue. “You okay, Matthew?” Corina asked the young man.

He looked sick to his stomach at the death that surrounded him. “Yeah, I’ll be okay.”

“Let’s finish this, then,” Corina replied with a smile.

I didn’t know what freaked me out more; how easily Cruz had dropped these three men with almost no noise, or how I found myself wanting to smile the same way Corina was right now. Patrick let out his final death rattle. I stared at his sunken cheeks. He looked like a different person than the cheery man I’d operated upon just a few weeks before.

I realized that I was finally crying, for real. Cruz was over at my side in an instant, brushing my braids over my shoulder. I fell into his arms, breathing in his musky smell and feeling his muscles underneath his clothes. “We’ve got to go, Lily,” he breathed into my hair.

I straightened up and wiped my face on his shirt. “Let’s do this,” I replied simply.

The look in his eyes nearly knocked me to my feet. It was a look of deep love.

“Could you two maybe eye fuck and make up later?” Corina asked from the door. “Matthew and I have a mission to complete.”

We followed them into the hallway. “Mission?” Cruz whispered. “Lily
was
the mission.”

Corina and Matthew didn’t respond; each one of them holding their guns at the ready as we snaked our way through the penthouse once again.

I heard Victoria’s voice on the phone as we approached the front living room. “And I can finally drop this fucking last name. I always preferred Victoria Williamson anyway.”

I heard Cruz gasp beside me as the name Williamson pinged in my brain. That was the name of the guy who’d killed Eric, Matthew’s dad. Corina shot him a look of disgust and held up a finger. But it was too late; Victoria had heard us. She turned around and dropped the phone on the ground. “Oh fuck,” she said, raising her hands in the air.

“No,” Cruz said loudly. “No way. You’re a Williamson?”

“Shut up, Cruz,” Matthew said quietly.

Suddenly everyone drew their guns. Corina was pointing her gun at Cruz; Cruz at Matthew, whose gun was pointed at Victoria.

“Well, well, well,” Victoria said, smiling. “Isn’t this an interesting twist?”

Matthew’s face was stony and cold. But there was emotion fraying the edges of the façade, betraying his confidence and strength.

“Matthew, don’t do this. She didn’t kill your father,” Cruz pleaded. “Just because she’s a Williamson doesn’t mean she killed your father.”

Victoria laughed. “Wait a second. You’re
that
Matthew? Eric Lawson’s kid? Wow. What a coincidence that is.” Then she rolled her eyes. “Well, obviously you infiltrated me on purpose, so not
that
much of a coincidence.” I could tell she was trying to play off her fear, but her eyes weren’t lying. She knew that this was serious.