Page 45 of Sin City Obsession (De Salvo Empire #1)

Chapter twenty-two

What Makes a Queen

Alessa had never actually met Viktor Sobol, but her longtime friends who spent too many hours online had very helpfully acquired a small pile of information for her while she’d been in the air.

Including recent photographs of him and his higher-ranking officers—one of whom she’d just put a bullet in.

The other guy she hadn’t seen in the digital file, but that only meant so much.

What did bother her, greatly, was that she had enough faith in Miguel’s skills to be sure he knew what the fuck he was saying when he told her he was tracking their guys’ signals to this location. But she hadn’t seen anyone other than Sobol and his three human shields.

Granted, the sun was down, so it wasn’t exactly well-lit, and she’d been going faster than she should have for a woman not accustomed to driving anything at all on that type of terrain.

It wasn’t impossible she’d missed a person or three.

At the moment, she had to pin her hopes on that, because in the time it had taken her to put down the first two of Sobol’s companions, she’d found herself with two more guns squarely aimed at her.

She didn’t actually know why they weren’t shooting. Yeah, she had a gun, and yeah, she’d managed to round it on Viktor himself before everything came to a Hollywood stand-still. But she was obviously outgunned and outnumbered.

The larger, more rotund of the two squaring off with her raised his lips in a leering smile. “I’m not having a good evening, my dear. But underneath that feral ferocity of yours, I can see where you might be worth keeping around. If you agree to drop that gun, that is.”

She let her lip curl in distaste. She would much rather have told Sobol to go suck on a cactus, but they would probably immediately shoot her.

She hadn’t exactly slipped into any Kevlar as she’d rushed out of the airport.

Hell, I didn’t even stop to change into pants.

In hindsight, that had been dumb. But at least she’d left her suitcase with the guy Ugo had sent to pick her up.

In exchange for what weapons she could carry, of course .

Exhaling slowly, Alessa removed one hand from the grip of her gun and spread it out, palm splayed, in a classic show of submission.

“I know when I’m caught,” she said. She let the tension slip into her tone, but still measured her words.

They were not a true acknowledgment of surrender and she sure as hell wasn’t about to let Viktor Sobol touch her.

He didn’t seem to translate it that way. He jabbed his elbow in his underling’s direction. “Go, grab her. Tie her up with something.”

To his credit, the other guy—the other face she’d been sent—looked skeptical. “Boss,” he said in a matching tone.

Viktor scowled. “I’ve had a shit day. I want to get out of here, and I wouldn’t mind relieving myself in some tight pussy later. If she’s any good, you can use her after.”

I’m going to be sick. Her hand flexed over the gun. She really, really wanted to shoot him. Several times.

His man sighed and lowered his weapon, taking a step forward. In the next instant, two shots rang out, so close together they couldn’t possibly have come from the same gun. The man about to approach her twisted sideways from the impact and fell directly across Sobol’s feet.

Alessa’s eyes widened and her breath hitched. Inappropriate excitement tingled down her spine.

Sobol reared back, his gun swinging to the side. “ You !”

“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 talk to her.” 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 fucking look at her.” 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 confrontation underprepared .

He didn’t know exactly how she’d even pulled that off, so he listened 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 Ryōma 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’re the 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 a dress ? 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 to fucking die and 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.

Rocco growled and walked her backward until the backs of her legs made contact with the sofa.

He lowered his voice, his words carefully spoken but brutally honest. “Perhaps you should have considered that that guy loves you too much to even entertain the idea of endangering you. You might have it entirely backward. The queen is never deadweight. The queen is the fucking lynchpin. And even if it upsets her, there are times she must be protected.”