My eyes flutter rapidly, trying to stay open despite the drug that’s filtering through my bloodstream right now. I should have known. It was all too fucking easy. “You… work for Barbieri?” I ask nobody in particular, my tongue feeling like it’s filling my entire mouth.
Dave appears in my vision, standing next to his brother, his face crumpled up in confusion. “Who the fuck is Barbieri? We don’t work for nobody, sweetheart. We just know a good opportunity when we see one.”
I see the tug of a smile at the side of Jimmy’s hard-set mouth, and then I’m fucking gone.
EIGHT
JASE
We’re running.
Julz sits across from me, fixing her long brown hair up in a messy top-knot. She sees me looking at her and gives me a tight smile, a smile that says she’s freaking out as much as I am.
We weren’t in Colorado a year before the cartel caught up with us. The cartel run by my father’s family in his absence, the absence created when Juliette shot him dead. It’s strange how na?ve we were back then, how we thought that killing my father would solve everything.
And now, sitting in the back of a limo we hailed at the airport, an hour after we’ve touched down in New York, it’s starting to sink in just how much danger we’re still in.
The limo pulls into the curb and glides to a halt, the sound of the bustling city outside almost too much for me to handle. I’m fucking angry that we’re here, fucking angry that we’ve had to leave our home, fucking angry that we’ve had to leave our daughter’s grave behind. The thought of the Cartel or the Gypsy Brothers defacing her headstone fills my veins with so much hate, it’s a wonder my blood doesn’t run black.
“We’re here,” Julz says somberly, peering through the heavily-tinted limo window at the apartment building Elliot’s directed us to. We’re here in a holding pattern, waiting for new fake passports and bank accounts to come through before we find a more permanent bolt-hole. We thought we’d wait it out in Colorado, figured we’d have enough time up our sleeve before they found us.
We were wrong.
I pay the driver and grab our bags out of the trunk. There isn’t much, because there was no time to pack much before the warning call came through. A motorcade of slick black cars, flanked by motorcycles, speeding towards us as we slept. Motherfuckers didn’t even try to be subtle about it.
A chartered flight was waiting for us at the airport thanks to generous friends, and Elliot’s arranged somewhere for us to crash for the night, although I doubt I’ll do any sleeping. There’s every chance those motherfuckers followed us, and we can never be too careful. It’s become the way we live. It’s fraught with tension.
It’s exhausting.
At least we’re not dead, I reason to myself. Almost on cue, a painful twinge sparks in my chest, a reminder that some things can never be truly forgotten. When Dornan Ross, my own fucking father, shot me in the chest, I was almost dead. I pulled through, and I’m fine now, but the doctors tell me they’ll never be able to pull all the tiny fragments of the shattered bullet from my chest, no matter how many times they try. So now I carry them with me, a lasting mark of his hate, the same way Juliette carries her own scars from him.
The pain’s not necessarily a bad thing for me, though. It’s a reminder. We won. We fucking won, and I got my girl back. My Juliette.
My chest hurts a little less at that thought.
We enter the apartment building we’ve been directed to and head up the stairs to the ninth floor, automatically bypassing the lift. Sure, we could get cornered in a stairwell just as easily as a lift, but the stairs feel safer. There’s a key shoved in a dying pot plant by the door, very subtle.