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As I step back toward the hallway’s safety, I collide with something solid and unyielding. Before I can turn, a rough hand clamps over my nose and mouth, pressing a chemical-soaked cloth against my face while injecting me with something.
The jolt sends me backward, my head slamming into the guy’s chest. Panic surges, primal and overwhelming.
My finger squeezes the trigger. The deafening blast reverberates through the room.
“Fuck!” Dominic hisses, but his curse fades beneath me as a fog floods my senses.
My head spins, reality blurring at the edges.
“Holy shit, man,” my captor curses, his voice vibrating against my skull.
I thrash against his grip, movements growing wild and desperate. My vision blurs, darkness creeping in from the periphery. The gun slips from my nerveless fingers.
My heartbeat thunders in my ears—slower now, heavier.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
My body feels impossibly heavy, then weightless. I’m falling into nothing.
Thud. Thud.
I’m going to die. I’m going to fucking die.
Thud.
My last conscious image is Dominic’s face contorted in pain, crimson blooming across his leg, staining his pants and my pristine white carpet.
Then darkness pulls me under, and I’m gone.
Chapter three
Dominic
“Fuck!”
I grit out, white-hot pain tears through my thigh as I double over, blood seeping through my fingers. The bullet lodged in my flesh burns like hellfire, but the wounded pride stings worse. Shot by a woman. Not just any woman—Alessa fucking Russo.
It’s not supposed to be this messy. We’re supposed to find her in her sleep, drug her with whatever my brother, Luca, had concocted, and drive her to the airport where my private plane has been waiting for the past four hours.
When we broke in at the butt crack of dawn, we didn’t anticipate that she was a goddamn morning person or that she would beout and running at four-fucking thirty in the fucking morning. I found her little planner on her bedside table. Six-mile run, 4:30 AM.
Creatures of habit are creatures waiting to be hunted.
I could’ve waited for her outside and grabbed her in the shadows of that overly bloated lobby, but something made me want to see her face when she found me here. Wanted to watch those green eyes widen—see if they still darkened the way they did when I made her forget her own name, begging for more while I buried myself to the hilt.
There’s power in watching someone’s face when they realize they’re not in control anymore.
The Commission wants her alive and talking, sure. But they don’t need to know I’ve got my own reasons for keeping this personal.
But then she walked in with a fucking gun—wielding it like she was born with steel in her hands. Those French-tipped fingers wrapped around the grip with perfect form, her stance a textbook example of someone who’s fired more than just practice rounds.
For someone supposedly not wanting anything to do with mob life, Alessa Russo handles a piece like she was born to. That stance, that grip—you don’t learn that at some bullshit self-defense class. That’s in her blood.
And God help me, but seeing her curves in those jogging tights while holding her gun with such lethal confidence made my cock stir.
Part of me wanted to cross the room and taste the fear on her lips, see if she still moaned the same way when I pressed her against the wall that night.
“Shit, man,” Luca adjusts her unconscious body in his arms, her red hair cascading over his forearm like spilled wine. “Are you okay?”