Page 13 of Sin City Obsession (De Salvo Empire #1)

Chapter seven

Letting Go

“Alessa already told me she found a name,” Dante De Salvo greeted when the call connected. Even through the speaker on Rocco’s phone, the other man’s voice was smooth in a cool, unaffected, chilling kind of way Rocco never felt as though he personally achieved.

He didn’t let it rattle him. That, or the fact that it was arguably inappropriate for him to be making this call altogether. “I know,” he said. “I was with her when she called. This isn’t about that.”

“Oh?”

Rocco dropped into his office chair, his hands flexing uselessly over the armrests.

Useless. It was exactly how he’d been feeling from almost the moment the gunfight had started, now some three hours prior.

One of his men had taken a bad ricochet less than a minute after arriving on-scene to back them up and ended up leaving in a bag.

Ignazio was in the hospital. Em was wounded but functional.

And Alessa … technically she was also wounded, but it was what Rocco couldn’t see that had him rattled.

He blew out a breath. “I don’t know a more delicate way to ask this, so I’ll be straight with you.

Some shit went a little sideways after we shook up Gwathney’s meathead, probably unrelated, but it’s got me worried.

I watched Alessa get into the face of a guy almost twice her natural size like she was picking ice cream flavors, but we get into a shootout with a few punks and she freezes like Greenland . Explain that to me.”

Dante was silent for a moment before he replied with a question of his own. “Was the shootout on foot?”

Rocco frowned. “No. We got chased off the interstate by some local street racing crew.” It sounded dumb as shit said out loud, but facts were facts.

“You should ask her about that.”

“I tried.” Multiple times. She’d shut him down so thoroughly he was starting to think he’d hallucinated the passion they’d shared earlier in the day.

“Then you clearly have to try harder,” Dante replied, his tone unwavering. “It’s her story to tell.” He disconnected before Rocco could even process the rejection .

Rocco cursed and shoved away from his desk. Complete waste of my fucking time. He should have guessed. But he didn’t know where else to turn to get the information if Alessa herself wasn’t going to open up.

Did she have to?

He supposed she didn’t. But the reaction she’d had was so unexpected, and seemed to have come over her so quickly, that something inside insisted the answer mattered.

Not to mention the odds of getting caught in another altercation—on foot or in a vehicle—were not exactly minimal in their lifestyle.

He drummed his fingers over the arms of the chair again. The time displayed on his otherwise blackened phone screen told him it was pushing seven. Alessa had supposedly retired to her suite for the evening, but it wasn’t actually late. Hell, the sun was still up.

Alessa had been clear about wanting to be alone.

But the more he played it back in his mind, the more he was sure what he’d seen was a trauma response.

What had triggered it, how old or new it was, he had no way of knowing.

What he did know was that she was alone, away from anything familiar and in some degree of pain, while she was attempting to pull herself back together.

Another unpleasant thought chased in on the heels of the last and he ground his teeth. She had fucking better be alone.

Rocco shoved to his feet, reached for his phone, and someone tapped cautiously at the door. Irritation flared in his chest. “What? ”

One of his men stepped halfway into the room. “The team tracked down that street racing crew,” he said. He paused. “Did you … want the report?”

Rocco moved forward. “You have until I’m in the elevator.” He did kind of want the report, but ultimately, he knew what he’d do with it regardless.

The other man nodded sharply, pushed the door wide to make space, and began talking.

“Hospital and yard reports indicate we definitely did more damage to them than they did to us, overall. The specific guy who ratted on you doesn’t seem to have been involved in the shooting, but we matched his description to a name.

And we identified the prick who runs their crew. ”

As his thumb descended on the call button for the elevator, office locked up for the night, Rocco asked, “Was the ringleader in the shootout?”

“Not as far as we can tell.”

Rocco nodded, unsurprised. “Round him and his cowardly friend up. They’re the ones we really want. Em’s out of commission for the night, but whoever you send, make sure they understand that not only do those fuckers die—they deliver one last message in their deaths.”

“What message do you want to deliver, sir?”

The elevator made a soft ding as it arrived and, a moment later, the doors slid open to reveal an empty box.

Rocco spared the man at his side a pointed glance.

“Do not fuck with the fucking mafia.” He stepped onto the elevator, tapped the button he needed, and put his back to the wall.

“I’m on my cell if there’s an emergency. ”

The other man bent at the shoulders. “I’ll get it done, sir,” he said as the doors slid shut.

She might have made a mistake.

Rocco had been so insistent on asking about what had happened to her, why she’d frozen and so obviously freaked out the way she had, that Alessa had shut down.

She wasn’t sure if it was a secondary panic response or a defensive mechanism, let alone what she was defending exactly.

Her pride sure felt like it had been obliterated.

Regardless, she’d shut down every one of his attempts and ultimately slammed a door that was technically his in his face.

With the benefit of a little time to breathe and a good, old fashioned adrenaline crash, she could see how perhaps that wasn’t the wisest, most mature thing she’d ever done.

Not that he was entitled to her life story.

Simply that she could have been more level-headed in her handling of the situation once they’d returned to the hotel.

The end result, however, would have been the same.

She was alone.

Alessa curled in tighter on herself on the sofa, the room’s television on just to fill some psychological void. Sunlight still streamed in, bright, vibrant, and scorching, from the wall of windows she hadn’t bothered to set back to privacy. It was just her. She didn’t see the point.

Maybe her parents had been right. Maybe she needed to take some time off.

Alessa let her head drop sideways against the sofa cushion, a self-loathing sigh escaping her.

I’m stronger than this, dammit! But all it had taken was one vehicular shootout, one time of being still in the car when it swayed—from Ignazio collapsing into the wall of the SUV, she’d learned—for her to succumb to her guilt and every suppressed fear she’d developed.

It never would have been her in that SUV four months previously, chauffeuring Grace anywhere.

If Alessa had been in town that day she would have been on a different job, because she had never for a singular moment been assigned to the underboss’s private security detail.

Romeo had, of course, pulled from his own detail when he’d assigned his future wife a driver.

And Al was, objectively, a good choice. Al had been an excellent defensive driver.

He’d always been a little too personable for the kind of field work Alessa did, but that was part of what made him a good candidate for Romeo’s detail.

Romeo’s detail involved the protection of a young girl who would need to know and feel comfortable around her guards.

And Al had been so proud of that promotion.

Her throat clogged and she dug her nails a little harder into her calves.

Survivor’s guilt was a stupid thing. She’d always thought a person had to at least be directly involved in the traumatic incident to develop it, but it turned out she had been wrong.

Because it would never have been her in that SUV, but she still felt like it would be better if she were the one who had died that day instead of her brother.

All she did was hunt and kill people for a living.

His job had been to protect.

Yet she was the one still breathing.

Alessa jerked upright when someone pounded suddenly on the door.

Her gaze dropped to the phone she’d abandoned on the coffee table, but she saw no sign of having missed any messages.

For a brief moment, she debated ignoring her visitor.

But she was pretty sure she knew who it was. More than likely, he had a key.

She released her death grip on her legs as the knocking resumed, winced a little when her arm shifted wrong, and crossed quietly to the door.

She didn’t bother turning off the television or grabbing her phone.

If they’d already snatched Gwathney off the streets, he could stew overnight. She wasn’t in the headspace for work.

As she’d suspected, Rocco stood on the other side of the door.

The sight of him made her chest burn. It wasn’t a sensation she was familiar with, let alone something she had the mental energy to analyze. So she ignored it and frowned. “I asked to be alone.”

“You did.” His gaze drifted past her for a beat before resettling on hers. “Funny thing about that,” he said. “I never actually agreed.”

Her brows leapt up her forehead and she opened her mouth to question his absurdity, but it was already too late .

Rocco moved forward, using his larger size and stubborn force of will to push the door wider and make entry. He stepped entirely inside, grabbed the door, and snapped it shut behind him.

The burning in her chest grew hotter as her mouth went dry. Alessa was just off her game enough that she couldn’t decide whether to smack him, yell at him, or collapse against him. He’d encroached on her personal space so thoroughly, she could easily do whichever she chose.