Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 76846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76846 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Politicians, especially spoiled ones who’d been in office, objectively, a little too long, all tended to be a little, well, childish. They blamed everyone else for their wrongdoings. Threw tantrums. I almost expected them to hold their breath until they went blue to get their way.
I stuck my new phone on the charger as I walked into my study to bring up the news conference, wincing my way through it, and jotting down notes on how we could fix it before sending out emails to the team.
It was easy to fall back into work, to let the rest of the world, and all my worries, fall to the background. Maybe it wasn’t a healthy coping mechanism, especially when I wanted to get my boss out of the race and in prison for his connections with human traffickers. But it helped me not to feel so overwhelmed.
If I stopped working for even ten minutes put together, the fear became a scarf around my throat, tightening and strangling with each passing second.
It was easier just to keep going, keep grinding, until my eyes were so heavy that it was impossible to keep going.
Done for the day, I took a comically short shower, jumping at every random sound from my neighbors or Kevin as he wandered around the apartment, wondering why we hadn’t gone to bed yet.
When I finally did climb into my bed, though, sleep was evasive. I lay there staring at the ceiling, wondering if maybe I should have grabbed one of the big chef’s knives in my kitchen, slipped it under my pillow, or grabbed a bat to keep beside me.
I tried to remind myself that I was as safe as I could possibly be in my apartment.
There was no other choice anyway. Even if I’d gone to the police and told them that I’d been involved in the shooting, that I was the one being targeted, what were they going to do? Wasn’t it always a running theme in movies that women who went to the police got, at most, a cruiser that went around their neighborhood or parked out front of their home? As if someone couldn’t come in between shifts or slip in through the back.
Aside from hiring a bulky bodyguard or something like that, I was on my own.
Eventually, I worried myself to a fitful night of sleep, waking up constantly because I’d turned onto my side and rubbed against my stitches.
When I woke up, I was groggy and paranoid, gaze constantly going to my door and the windows with the drapes pulled closed, a moody Kevin swatting at the material, mad that he couldn’t sun in the morning rays like he always did.
“Sorry, buddy. It’s just for a couple of days,” I told him, even if I had no actual idea how long this might go on for.
I ordered my ride-share, and didn’t go downstairs until I knew he was out front.
I tucked my obvious blonde hair up into a baseball cap, then I ran out the door and into the car, praying that no one could pick me off through the window like they did in movies.
In the end, though, I made it into work, where I kept myself safely surrounded by as many people as possible as we worked on the messaging we had to put out.
Then, around noon—because he didn’t have any actual assassination attempt to worry him—the senator strolled in.
It was time to try to get some information.
CHAPTER SIX
Elian
“I don’t like it,” Renzo said as we stood in the back room of the butcher shop that was now Rico’s legitimate business.
It ended up being a convenient choice, actually.
During the working hours, it created a lot of income that the family could use to wash their illegal money with.
After hours, there was a room in the back with a drain in the floor and decades of blood that had been spilled. So if we ever needed to spill some of our own, we had a nice, easy way of getting rid of the evidence.
Rico had set up an office toward the back where a lot of us went to have meetings with the boss or each other instead of relying on taking walks down the street like we used to.
Whether anyone would admit it or not, we were all getting really fucking paranoid about our safety. Because of the moves the Bratva was making, because we didn’t know just how far they were going to take this.
I mean, they’d tried to kill an innocent woman whose only crime had been being inside a building while a phone call had been made.
They didn’t even have any proof that she’d actually overheard it.
That was how paranoid and ruthless these bastards were.
“I don’t like it either,” I agreed. “But what other choice is there? It’s not like I could force her to stop going to her job, stop living her life.”