6
1144 Words
She motions to the bed. “Sit.” I sit down, and she comes over to unlock the chain around my arms. I rub them to get the feeling back. “You’re going to call your brothers. You’ll tell them you’re staying with me at my beach house for a couple of days. Keep it on speakerphone. If you try to tell them what’s going on or I even sniff out a code word,” she pulls a Glock from the back of her jeans, “I will end you.”
She hands me my phone with her other hand before sitting back down in the chair, the gun lying on her thigh aimed casually at me.
I pull up Evander’s number, dial it, and flip it to speakerphone. He is my best option not to say something stupid like Mateo would. Evander is the oldest and, mostly, the more mature of the two.
“Hello?” he answers on the second ring.
“What up, bro?” I ask in my most ‘I haven’t just been kidnapped’ voice.
“Just got back in. Where are you?”
“I’m staying with Alessa for the next couple of days,” I tell him and close my eyes.
Please don’t say something to get me killed. Please don’t say something to get me killed.
He chuckles. “Are you now?” I hear him relay the message, knowing he just told Mateo.
Mateo’s voice filters through the line. “Damn. p***y that good?”
Fuck. I look over at Alessa, and she raises an eyebrow.
“Shut up,” Evander growls to Mateo, and I could f*****g kiss him. “Keep in touch, brother.”
“Will do,” I tell him and hang up, laying the phone in Alessa’s outstretched hand.
“That’s all it took?” she asks skeptically.
“I’m not a prisoner there. I told you they aren’t like Frankie.”
“That remains to be seen,” she retorts, jamming the gun into the back of her jeans. “You have a bathroom, and I brought you some of Gage’s clothes because they’re the closest to your size.” She walks to the door and opens it.
“Alessa,” I say softly before she can step through. “I’m not lying to you. I do love you.” I needed her to know I meant it when I said I loved her.
She turns back with sadness in her eyes. “I wish I could believe you.”
She walks out, shutting the door behind her. I can hear the lock click into place from the outside.
I flop back onto the bed in my newly found jail cell. It’s a standard room, except there are no windows or way of escape. It could be worse; they could have left me in the cold basement.
Small favors.
Now I just needed to find a way to make her believe me. I had already decided I wasn’t letting this girl get away from me, even if she just had me tied up in a basement.
Of all the scenarios we ran through when we made this plan, this wasn’t one of them. Evander had talked to someone and got some makeup to keep my tattoo covered until we were ready to tell her. I got the tattoo almost a month before I met her; we all three had them now. It was our way of embracing the change in the Perez family. I had been helping out at one of the restaurants today and lost track of time, leaving just enough time to shower, get dressed, and run out of the house.
I have never seen so much hurt and betrayal in someone’s eyes before. I wasn’t the type of person who went around purposely hurting someone. Seeing that in Alessa’s eyes with whatever haunted look came along with it broke me. I’ve been begging my brothers for a month to let me tell her the truth, and they kept saying it wasn’t time.
It looks like it was time, after all.
It also looks like it might be my time to leave this world.
Violently.
Chapter 3
Alessa
W
hat a clusterfuck.
I showered as soon as I got into my room to get Leo’s scent off me. His cologne and something just him were clogging my nose and hurting my heart. After I shower, I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.
How could I have been so f*****g stupid?
Someone knocks softly on the door. “Come in,” I call out, and Gage sticks his head through the door with a smile. He walks in and lies on the bed beside me, one arm behind his head, staring at the ceiling like I am.
“This isn’t your fault,” he tells me. “We’re running checks on him now that we know his real last name, and everything by the last name he gave you before checks out. He was with his mom.” He looks at me. “You like him, don’t you?”
“Yeah,” I answer honestly. “But now it doesn’t matter, Gage,” I reply.
“Les, look at me,” he says gently, and I look over into his blue eyes. “He’s a f*****g i***t,” he declares, causing me to laugh. “No, seriously. He got to see you naked, and he f****d it up.”
“Shut up,” I tell him teasingly. Gage is always saying stuff like that, trying to get a reaction out of me. We’ve known each other since his dad came to work for my dad when Gage was ten. He became instant friends with Ryder and me, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.
He sobers. “I get it, but what if we can make peace with the Perez’s? Can you do that?”
Gage knows what I went through with them. “No one from that time is alive anymore,” I muse. “It’s what needs to be done, and ending a feud like that will shake the foundation of the families.”
Gage nods. “In a good way,” he points out. “Your office dweller is working through everything now. We’ll have answers by morning.”
My “office dweller” means Holden, my hacker.
“Stop calling him that,” I tell Gage.
“Why? He never comes out unless it’s to eat or work out with one of us. Then he drags his ass back in there like a zombie.”
“That’s where he’s comfortable, you overgrown child.”
Gage leaps up from the bed and starts shuffling around like a zombie, arms stretched in front of him. “Must have food. Must hack s**t. Must please the master.”
- Writer
