Page 24 of Sin City Obsession (De Salvo Empire #1)

Chapter twelve

Hard to Breathe

Numbness washed over Alessa as Rocco stepped away. He didn’t finish whatever his thought had been, and she didn’t push.

She had hoped Rocco was different. She had thought Rocco was different.

Since she had come to understand what it meant—what it took —to be the top dog in a mafia circle, Alessa had shied away from that type.

Feared many of them. Even the ones who thought higher of themselves than they would ever achieve, she avoided.

Whether they feared her, repulsed her, enraged her, or simply didn’t appeal to her, the ultimate thing they all had in common was their own lack of interest in a woman who didn’t need their strength or brutality to survive.

But she had thought Rocco was different.

He’d known from the moment they’d met why she was there. Whatever he had believed about her, he had to have at least suspected she wasn’t weak. Maybe he’d thought he had cracked her, maybe he thought he’d seen behind her mask and she couldn’t fool him.

Alessa dragged in a deep breath, letting the increasingly foul odor in the air ground her.

She couldn’t explain why that moment felt more like a breakup, more like a goodbye, than anything she had actually experienced.

He’d stopped when she called to him. He’d apologized for whaling on her captive.

He’d even kissed her forehead tenderly. But he hadn’t been able to hold her gaze, or finish the thought in his head.

She could guess why. He’d seen her in action now. He knew she was too much like all the men he employed, similar even to the side of himself he often held in check. Except seeing that in a potential partner would be the opposite of attractive.

She appalled him now.

Alessa pulled the wire strippers from her back pocket and stepped wide around the damp spot seeping into the carpet squares around Gwathney.

She told herself not to think about how much she would be disgusting Rocco in the next few minutes.

Because no matter how much she might have wanted him to care about her, or how much she might have started to care for him, this was what she’d been sent to do. She could not leave the job unfinished.

Any pain she felt when it was done, she could also reflect on once it was done.

“N-no, wait, I-I’ll call him off!” Gwathney begged, trying to lean away from her as she crouched beside him. “I’ll call him off! Just give me a phone!”

Alessa forced a smile to stretch her lips. “You think I’m dumb enough to give you a phone?” She pointed the wire strippers at him. “No, Mr. Gwathney. It’s much too late to call off your hound. He’s a dead man now.”

Gwathney shook his head, the motion slow and jerky.

Lou groaned, the sound an odd combination of gruff and wet from blood building up in his throat. Rocco had beaten him badly enough that his face was already bruising and really his entire head looked out of joint.

Alessa locked her stare onto Gwathney. “Where’s the documentation of your deal with Richardson?”

Gwathney swallowed hard. “I-in the safe, in my office. That’s the real paperwork. The stuff on the drive is fake.”

She pressed the pointed tip of her tool up, under his jaw, just above his Adam’s apple. “How do I get into those files?”

His lips trembled. “P-please…”

She added pressure. “Answer the question, Erik.”

His nostrils flared. “The tablet is biometric! I use my thumb. Left thumb. Everything’s saved from there. All the digital stuff, I mean. No typed passwords.”

“Just your left thumb.” Fantastic. She really didn’t want to keep his damn thumb around, on ice no less, while they slunk back into his office and hunted down his tablet. “And where is your tablet?”

Gwathney’s voice shrank like a wilting flower. “M-middle drawer on the right, in my office. The keys are … in my coat pocket.”

Alessa indulged him, eased the pressure off his neck, and dipped her free hand into his pockets until she found a small set of keys.

There were only three on the ring, and one had been customized black with electric green edging.

It wasn’t hard to guess which one she needed.

“Very good,” she said, holding them up to eye-level before curling her fingers around the keys and tucking them away.

“Cooperation is good, Erik. It means less pain.”

He sucked in a breath.

She smiled. “Now, how about that safe? Tell me everything.”

Rocco wiped his hands clean with some damp paper towels he’d grabbed from the attached half-bath, a strange, unsettled feeling twisting in his gut.

He hadn’t meant to snap. He’d even told himself to guard against the urge.

It hadn’t exactly been hard to anticipate that insults would be flying in this situation.

But the moment that gorilla bastard had spit on her, all Rocco had seen was red. Rage burned like lava through his blood. The other man’s foul words roared in Rocco’s ears and he’d thought nothing at all of demonstrating the consequences that came with disrespecting his woman.

Until he realized he had disrespected her, too.

The understanding left him cold, all his remaining fury directed inward.

So he stood back, like he was supposed to, like he’d promised to, and watched.

He watched as Alessa teased terrible pain and in the process extracted crucial information.

He watched as she tossed instructions to Em like it was second-nature.

He watched as she played her captives with precision—and he realized something in her behavior had changed.

The tone of her voice was flatter. Her facial expressions looked tighter, like they were forced, and instead of gesturing while she talked, she had taken to holding perfectly still.

Rocco clenched his fists at his sides. He knew he’d fucked up, knew there was a chance she was mad about it, but this felt worse than that.

“Looks like we had ice left in that freezer, after all,” Em declared as he re-entered the room, holding a small pot and a roll of plastic wrap.

“Perfect,” Alessa replied as she finished sweeping her paring knife through Lou’s bloodied shirt.

She’d already sliced open Gwathney’s, and as she had the first time, she made no effort to remove the fabric.

She simply pushed it aside to expose their chests.

Then she straightened, tucked the knife into her waistband once more, and walked around to the backside of the pole.

“Bring it here. We need to ice that thumb as soon as it’s severed. ”

Rocco had clear line-of-sight for the moment Gwathney realized he was going to lose his thumb in the most unpleasant way imaginable. It would have been satisfying if he weren’t feeling so … ignored.

He ground his teeth as he watched. Alessa hadn’t lifted her eyes to him once since his apology. She’d looked in his general direction a few times, but never high enough or to the side enough to make eye-contact.

“Did you need one of the bigger knives?” Em asked as he carefully rounded the space to move closer to her.

Rocco saw her short, sloppy ponytail dance when she shook her head.

“I’ll be using these.” Her words carried, but she was obscured enough by the pole and increasingly squirmy bodies that Rocco couldn’t see what she referred to.

Em let out a whistle. “Remind me not to piss you off.”

“Hold still now, Erik,” Alessa said moments before Gwathney let out a fresh whimper. “This is going to hurt.”

Gwathney tried to beg her out of it, his voice building steam just in time to shoot up into an ear-splitting wail that almost disguised a very unnatural snap.

Even Lou, half-conscious, was aware enough to pull away.

Rocco watched Em rip off a sheet of plastic and pass it to Alessa. From his perspective, it looked like something small was wrapped into the plastic. Then Em stood, pot in hand and lips pulled thin the way he often did when he was uncomfortable, and stepped away.

“Keep it cool until we’re done here!” Alessa called, her voice barely projecting over the ceaseless shrieks and convulsion-like struggles coming from Gwathney. She stood, stepping backward away from the men and the pole, holding the wire strippers low in one hand.

It took Rocco a moment before he spotted the blood sprinkled across her shirt and seemingly dribbled over the top of one leg.

She didn’t have nearly as much blood on her as he did, objectively, and he knew none of it was hers.

But the idea made him want to go to her.

It made him want to run his hands over her skin, to check for injuries that shouldn’t be there, to make absolutely sure.

Alessa dropped the wire strippers onto the growing pile of used tools and crouched down in front of her remaining selection again. Again without a glance in his direction.

Rocco drew a hard breath. He shouldn’t interfere. He’d already interfered once, and this was the result. For all he knew, she was just punishing him.

Her fingers hovered over the hack saw and he swore he heard her let out a low, almost disappointed, hum.

Then she shifted her weight and grabbed up the nearest of the handheld blowtorches.

She pushed to her feet as she examined the device, turned, and with her back to him and the newly returned Em, said, “This next part’s not for the faint of heart, or stomach.

Neither of you has to stick around if you don’t want to. ”

Rocco saw Em’s head turn his way, but he never removed his eyes from Alessa. Something had definitely shifted. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. “Alessa—”

“If you’re going to stay,” she added suddenly, “try to hold your breath.”