by Sienna Blake
“What?”
I turned to her. “I like to fuck rough.”
Her mouth dropped open. “W-what?”
I leaned in, her face blurring through my alcohol-soaked vision. I hated her because she wasn’t Julianna. “I fuck rough and I fuck hard. If you come home with me tonight you’ll probably get hurt, but I can guarantee you’ll like it.”
Her cheeks flushed and she licked her lips, swiping some of her glossy lip shit off. “I don’t usually do this.”
“I don’t give a shit about whether you do or don’t. You have three seconds to make up your mind. Are you in or are you out?”
She inhaled, then let out a breath. “In.” She pressed up to me for a kiss. I turned my head and her sticky mouth landed on my cheek.
I wiped the goop off with the back of my hand and leaned across the bar, swiping a bottle of Jack from behind the counter. “How about we stop talking and get the fuck out of here?”
“Let’s get out of here.” Julianna’s voice rang in my mind, tinkling like silver bells.
The blonde beside me giggled, breaking through my thoughts. I grabbed her hand, bottle of Jack in the other, and led her to the exit, ignoring the yells of the bartender behind me and Mercutio trying to calm him down.
Anger swirled inside me. I hated this girl trailing after me. I hated my father for what he’d done. I hated Julianna for being the one woman I wanted and couldn’t have. Most of all, I hated the monster I’d become.
19
____________
Julianna
I hadn’t slept well last night, tossing and turning, thinking of a certain dark-eyed man, missing his hands on me, wishing I could hear his voice. I still hadn’t heard back from him. He would have landed in London hours ago. He should have seen my text by now.
He was ignoring me. Deliberately. I felt a stab in my gut. Was he really that bitter about how we left things? Did I really deserve the silent treatment?
Or he’d already forgotten about me, I thought bitterly. I was just another notch on his belt. Just something to pass the time...
Don’t be ridiculous, Julianna. You were the one who rejected him. He had every right to ignore my painful reminder. I would have to accept that he didn’t want to speak to me again.
It would be almost three p.m. in London now. Perhaps we’d be walking arm in arm along the Reine, or licking croissant flakes from each other’s fingers or lying on a blanket on the grass at Tuileries Garden. If I had said yes.
When I was little, my mother told me that if I was lucky, one day I’d meet a soulmate. I had asked her what a soulmate was. A soulmate was the truth, she said. A mirror. They reflected yourself back to you, exactly as you were. All of you, even the pieces you hated or the ones you hid well. At first, it would hurt. And it should hurt. No tree broke through the canopy without stretching for it. No flower ever saw the sun without opening up.
The wake of Roman’s presence had left me reeling, viewing my life from a perspective I’d never seen before. He left me turning over each piece in my hands.
Roman had been a soulmate. Undoubtedly.
A soulmate I’d stupidly let walk away.
The saddest part was that he’d never know how much he’d affected me. I’d never be able to tell him thank you. I’d just be a memory he’d sometimes pull out and dust off.
I shook myself. No point in feeling sorry for myself. I would be glad I had a chance to meet him.
Next time, if a soulmate came along again, I would hold on to him and never let him go.
“Rough weekend?” my partner Espinoza asked as I jumped into his dark blue work sedan the next morning.
I thought I’d done a good enough job of covering up my bags with concealer. Obviously not. I should have known he’d pick up on it. Even though Espinoza had only been my partner for six months, he seemed to notice this stuff.
“You could say that,” I said.
Espinoza’s thick, dark brows furrowed as he studied me. He wore his smooth brown baby face with the rugged air of a confident man, which always meant there were at least a few women hanging around wanting more. He was a confirmed bachelor in his mid-thirties, dating regularly but never with a serious girlfriend, at least not for the time I’d known him.
I avoided his eyes and nodded to the road. “We gonna park here all day or are we going to work? Murders aren’t going to solve themselves.”
Espo let out a snort. “Oh, I see.”
“What do you see?”
“You’re losing sleep over a guy.”
I flinched. Dammit.
“Hah!” He nudged my arm with his elbow. “Come on. Who is he?”
“He’s no one.”
“Ooooo,” he sang, “Capi’s got a boyfriend.”
I rolled my eyes. “Shut up and drive, Espo.”
“Am I gonna get a name?”
“Drive.”
“Not even a name?”
“Espo,” I warned.
“Alright, already. Jeez, I tell you about my women.” Espo pulled out into traffic.
I made a face. “And I’m still in therapy because of it.”
Espo tapped his fingers on his chest. “Here. You hurt me right here.”
I let out a laugh. I caught the flash of his grin out of the corner of my eye. “What’s on the menu this morning?” I asked, changing the subject.
“A body dump off Brunswick Street. Hope you skipped breakfast.”
Finally. I was being assigned a real case. Looks like my father had taken what I’d said to heart. My stomach fluttered with nerves. This was my chance to prove myself. I could not screw up. I grabbed the handle above the door as Espinoza took the corner hard.
Ten minutes later we had parked and were walking down an alleyway in Little Italy. The smell of rotting cabbage and sour fish hit my nostrils, making me scrunch up my nose. This alley backed up a large Italian restaurant called La Cucina that specialized in wood-fired pizzas. Best pizza in the city, in my opinion. We signed in with the officer manning the crime scene perimeter, pulled on shoe booties and snapped on rubber gloves.
“After you,” Espinoza hiked up the yellow crime scene tape for me that had been strung across the alley.
“Nice to see chivalry isn’t dead,” I teased.
Lacey, our newest and youngest medical examiner, was already at the scene. Young, only in her early thirties, she had moved in from out of state. Rumor had it she had graduated with a doctorate in forensic pathology from Harvard Medical School. From my dealings with her, she was thorough, sharp and professional. Best of all, she didn’t take any shit from anybody, most of all because she was a woman of color. She was bent over a body, her thick dark hair tied back from her pretty chocolate-skinned face.
Espo let out a low whistle. He was staring at Lacey’s ass.
I slapped his arm. “Are you really ogling her at a crime scene?”
“What?” Espo gave me one of his trademark “I’m so innocent and even if I weren’t you still love me” grins.
I rolled my eyes. “You are hopeless.”
“Hopelessly in love.”
“You’re hopelessly in love at least once a week.”
“Nu-uh. Put in a good word for me?”
I shook my head firmly and gave him what I hoped was a “leave her alone” glare. I sidled up to Lacey and said a quick hello. From what I could see, the body was male, laying on his back, wearing dark slacks and a dark shirt, soaked with blood. His face was turned away, his clothes torn and he’d been beaten up before he died.
“Morning, beautiful,” Espinoza said, flashing Lacey a grin. Obviously, my glare wasn’t scary enough. “What do you have for us?”
Lacey shook her head, the hint of a blush playing at her cheeks. “This man was tortured, brutally, before he died. Cause of death was the gunshot wound to the head.” She pointed to his forehead. I moved around the body to get a better look. His face was like an overripe grape, purple and engorged, eyes almost completely swollen shut, lips b
usted up, a small dark bullet wound on his forehead.
“There’s no blood pooling around the body, indicating he was shot somewhere else and dumped here,” continued Lacey. “Lividity also confirms he was moved.”
I nodded. There were dirt and smears of something oily around him but no blood. “Time of death?”
“I won’t know for certain until I get him back to the lab. Based on liver temp and the ambient temperature of this alleyway, I’m estimating sometime on Sunday night.
I leaned down to feel in his pockets. They were totally empty. “No wallet. No I.D. No phone.”
“No eyes on the alleyway,” Espo said, indicating the lack of security cameras. “Maybe one of the nearby traffic cams caught something. I’ll get uniforms to start canvassing the area for witnesses.”
“You won’t get anything,” I said, a heavy feeling in my chest. Verona’s Little Italy was filled with undocumented workers and people hiding from authorities. The locals were notorious for turning a blind eye and keeping their mouths shut. This body dump was a pro job, cold and calculated.
“I know,” said Espo. “But we have to try.”
I nodded. “We have to try.”
“Ligature marks around his wrists and ankles suggested he was tied up for a while,” Lacey pushed up the sleeves to reveal the bruising around his wrists. “And he’s missing fingers…”
I shuddered as I counted three, four, five missing digits. “Have we found the fingers?”
“Not yet. The techies are still looking.”
Around the alley, three crime scene techs scoured the area, one of them with a camera in her hand, snapping pictures.
“So…he was tied up, beaten, tortured, then killed with a single gunshot to the forehead, execution-style, then dumped. This was a professional hit. They wanted something from him before they killed him.” I spotted something. “He has a tan line on his left ring finger. A ring was there. He was married.”
Lacey let out a whispered curse. “I hope he doesn’t have kids.”
“Let’s hope not.” A heaviness descended on me. I knew what it was like to lose a parent like this. “Hey, Espo,” I called over to him. He was standing over at a dumpster talking to a crime scene tech who was digging around inside. “Any luck with I.D. in the dumpster?”
“No.” Espo jogged back over and walked around the body so he could see the victim’s face. He scrunched up his nose and tilted his head. “This badly beaten, it’s going to be a bust trying to do facial recognition against the missing person database. I doubt his own mother could recognize him now.”
“I had his fingerprints scanned,” Lacey said. “Or at least, what fingerprints he had left. One of the techs is running them now.”
“So far no gun in the dumpsters either,” said Espo. “Though I doubt the boys will find anything there.
I nodded. “This killer was too smart to throw the weapon away near where the body was dumped.”
“No casings have turned up either.”
“And there’s about a million pieces of trace evidence around him,” I said, pointing to the grit, oil, and food waste around him. “Maybe forensics will find something on the body.”
My phone beeped in my pocket, so I pulled it out.
Dad: Don’t let me down.
He’d specifically assigned me to this case. Determination knotted in my throat as I tucked my phone away. I would not let him down.
“We’ve got a hit off the database,” someone called. A crime scene tech, a young man, came jogging over with a palm-sized machine. “He’s in the system.”
“Vincent Torrito, or Vinnie to his friends,” Espo read off the screen. Above the text was a small arrest photograph showing a rough-looking man, mid-thirties, with hair cropped close to his skull, a disfigured nose from being broken several times, and a stud showing in his ear. “And boy, does he have some bad, bad friends.”
“Now I recognize him,” I said. “He’s one of Veronesi’s men, a known mid-level dealer. Vice picked him up a week ago on drug charges and captain got a chance to interrogate him about the murder of Tyrell’s son.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Espo. “The massacre down at the docks at the Tyrell’s warehouse? Vinnie didn’t say shit as far as I remember.”
“Of course, the Veronesis are denying any involvement.” None of the mob members would talk to the police, not even about a rival family. They had their own style of justice and judgment. I stared down at the dead man. Whatever he knew, he was truly silent now. “Vinnie didn’t talk to us, but…somebody thought he knew something.”
Espo cursed. “Two weeks ago the Veronesis supposedly gun down Jacob Tyrell. Now a Veronesi body turns up. This fucking thing is going to blow up into an all-out war.”
* * *
The canvas of the neighborhood turned up nothing, as expected. Nobody heard or saw anything Sunday night.
Once the body was back in the morgue, Lacey narrowed time of death down to between seven thirty and ten o’clock Sunday night. The body hadn’t been there when a restaurant worker had gone out for a cigarette at eleven p.m. Sunday night. When another worker had taken out the trash first thing Monday morning at seven minutes after five, he’d found the body, so it’d been dumped between those hours.
During a tearful interview with Mrs. Torrito at her home, a one-bedroom apartment in a rough Verona neighborhood, we’d found out that Vinnie had left the apartment on Friday night without telling her where he was going. He hadn’t come back.
When I asked her why she hadn’t reported him missing, she shook her head. “He goes off sometimes. Comes back a few nights later, sometimes banged up, but he always comes back. He wouldn’t just leave Jimmy and Jake.”
His kids.
Jimmy and Jake clung to their mother’s side as she cried, both watching me with solemn round eyes. The boys were seven and nine, and I prayed to hell they didn’t know what their father was when he had been alive.
Vinnie’s car, a black sedan, was also missing and currently unaccounted for.
I came into the station early Tuesday morning to find the place a hive. A canvas of the nearby traffic cameras turned up footage of several vehicles driving around the area between eleven p.m. and five-oh-seven a.m. We ran the license plates on the vehicles. Only one name stood out. A black Escalade was seen driving into the area in the body drop window, at around two a.m. The Escalade’s windows were tinted and the security footage was grainy, so we couldn’t get a visual on the driver and passenger. It was registered to none other than Tyrell Industries, a company owned by the Tyrell family, one of the ruling mob empires this side of the country.
“Let’s round up Giovanni Tyrell,” I said as I stared at the still of the black Escalade on the large screen in the tech room.
“And his son,” said Espinoza, standing beside me and chewing on a lollipop stick.
“His son?”
“Word on the street is, since Jacob died, the youngest son has been recalled back into the fold. The prodigal son has returned and there’s a new heir to the throne. The new Prince of Darkness has come home.”
20
____________
Roman
I woke up with rough hands shaking me, then a slap on the face.
“Fuck you,” I muttered to my assaulter. “When I wake up properly, you’re dead.” Fuck, my head hurt. What time was it? Hell, what day was it?
I attempted to open my bleary eyes. My cousin, Benvolio, was glaring at me like I was a petulant child late for school. He looked like the rest of us Tyrells, a generous crop of dark hair, strong jaw, dark hooded eyes and a permanent snarl to his lips. “Wake up, fucker,” Benvolio slapped my face again. “Have a shower and get dressed.”
I shoved him back so he couldn’t hit me again and sat up, rubbing my face. Sometime last night I had passed out on the couch in the living room of my new apartment, all three bedrooms of opulence, cold and impersonal like a hotel. My foot kicked at an empty bottle of Jack across the plush cream rug. �
��Where’s the fire?” I grumbled.
“The cops are coming to take you to the station.”
Cops? A shot of adrenaline rushed through me. Now I was awake. “What?”
Benvolio rolled his eyes. “Shower. Now. A Tyrell never goes in public without wearing suitable attire. Reputation is everything.” He pointed to the fresh suit still in its dry-cleaning plastic, hung across the back of a straight-backed dining room chair.
Reputation is everything. I snorted. “You’re sounding more and more like my old man every day.”
Benvolio’s eyes narrowed. “And you’re not sounding enough like him.”
I gritted my teeth. For a long moment, we glared at each other, Benvolio hating me because I was next in line to the Tyrell throne, me hating him because he wasn’t.
Benvolio pointed towards my bathroom. “Shower. Go.”
“What? You’re not going to wash my ass for me?”
“I don’t get paid enough to wash your fucking ass. Why don’t you get one of your groupies to do it for you? Speaking of groupies, why are you alone? Shouldn’t you have a naked girl or three draped over your dick?”
I snorted. “What the fuck do you know?”
“Please. Your sordid reputation in Europe even reached us in Verona.”
I didn’t answer him. I got up, walked to the bathroom, and tried not to barf all over the pristine cream marble tiles. In the shower, I let the hot water run over me. I felt like someone had taken a baseball bat to my body. My muscles ached. My head throbbed.
What hurt worst wasn’t physical. I felt raw and torn, a mere cavity inside me where my soul had been, where hope had once lain. Not even that pretty and willing blonde from the other night could soothe me.
After I got her back to this apartment, Rachel, or whatever her name was, had begun to undress. I’d stood there drinking straight from the bottle. I kept comparing her to Julianna. Her tan was fake, not like Julianna’s smooth, natural glow. Her body was too skinny and I could feel her ribs when she pressed up against me, not like Julianna’s soft, warm flesh and perfect natural curves.