Heartbreak hotel

Chapter 12

Sitting at his makeshift desk in the makeshift office of the makeshift building, Roman scowled. The chair was too uncomfortable to sit in for extended periods, and the window only caught the very early light of the sun. His desk was small enough to fit one PC and a small monitor. At the same time, his other one could have held four monitors this size with enough space for his paperwork and a drink. Where he had complete privacy with one-sided mirror glass as a door, or there was a whole seating area for him to entertain guests, with a TV in case he wanted to relax. One wall had been lined with nothing but bookshelves of books he had planned to read, but now, more than four people in that room left him feeling claustrophobic. What a useless downgrade.

Roman thought back to how he had even put himself in this situation.

It had been your average job, where he had sent Rick and Ravi, wanting nothing but the best from his brother and nephew. After all, a very important and rich client had requested the death of his mistress, and while Roman had found the whole situation diabolical, he was in no place to make judgments on his clients. What mattered to him was that they paid upfront and in cash.

Roman watched the downfall of the scheme the duo had created, live from the perspectives of both Rick and Ravi. He had been watching through the security cameras of the mansion with nothing out of place. He was in a car with several laptops scattered around. They should have been in and out in less than five minutes.

No one had expected that the mistress had been expecting them, but instead of becoming an ambush on her, they had been the ones to be ambushed. Though nothing out of the ordinary had been picked up by the house’s security cameras, he realised they might have been hacked. He disregarded that laptop and picked up the one with Rick and Ravi’s live feed. Roman tried to let the man know what had happened, but something blocked their communication line, though it seemed Ravi and Rick could hear one another just fine. Rick had prepared enough chlorophyll-laced handkerchiefs for her husband and the two live-in guards. With there being an extra ten guards, Rick had been left in hand-to-hand combat, killing seven of those guards, which had led to more time for the cleanup crew, not to mention Ravi, who had the task of killing the woman.

Ravi had memorised the entire blueprint of the large mansion to memory, but he hadn’t expected her to have somehow been tipped off on the scheme, and in her place, she had sent an extra guard to pretend to be her. Ravi ended up with a knife in his torso. In a panic, he shot the woman three times, once in the forehead and twice in the chest, for ruining his favourite black shirt.

“Where are you at?” Rick had asked Ravi.

Roman saw his nephew roll his eyes at his uncle as he responded quietly. “Just been stabbed.”

There was silence. “You what?!”

Ravi reported what had happened to his uncles, though Roman had begun panicking. His nephew had been stabbed, and this would be the first time they had failed a job. Of course, Rick would never allow that to happen, and so he resorted to torturing one of the live-in guards, which, of course, led to more overtime for the clean-up crew when he found out that instead of leaving the house as she should have, she remained hidden within the vault.

“Do we have to do this?” Ravi asked as he found Rick in the underground cellar.

“We’ve never failed a job now, and I don’t plan to start now. So, stand there, away from everything and make sure that the knife does not move.”

“You never let me have any fun.”

Rick whirled around to glare at his nephew. “Do you not see the knife sticking out of your torso? Do not f*****g move.”

Rick got into the vault by killing the two guards, but not before he got them to open it. Inside, he killed the mistress, shooting her for extra measure because, one, she had gotten his nephew stabbed, and two, she had made things so much more difficult.

Roman had appeared outside the mansion in the unmarked car, where Rick helped Ravi into the back before scrambling into the passenger seat, sweating. “I can’t believe you let him get stabbed!” Rick snapped as Roman pulled out of the large driveway.

“Me!” The man yelled back. “You were the one who went inside with him.”

“You had access to all of the cameras. You should have been able to see there were more than we had initially thought.”

“They must have hacked the cameras. Everything seemed to be normal. I only saw things go to s**t through the cameras attached to you.”

Rick ran a bloodstained hand through his hair. “Oh, we cannot f**k up another nephew! At some point, we become the problem.”

“I think we are the problem,” Roman muttered. Right now, he was driving around aimlessly. They were too far from any building with his name on it. Ravi would bleed out before they got there. But they had to do something.

“You’re the problem,” Rick snapped as he turned in the seat to check on Ravi.

“I’m still stabbed,” he hissed, trying to put pressure on the wound without moving the knife too much.

Roman was pondering what to do. The hospital and one of his buildings were out of the question; the former would ask too many questions, while the latter wasn’t close enough, but from the amount of blood pouring out of Ravi, he didn’t have long, and he would not be the reason his favourite nephew died. “Ash and Sebastian,” Rick practically yelled, scaring Ravi and Roman.

Roman frowned, “What about them?”

“They live about fifteen minutes away from here.”

Roman thought about it. Would they enjoy having him appear at their house at three am, dragging in a stabbed Ravi? Probably not, but they were out of options, so with Rick putting their address into the satnav, Roman pulled an illegal U-turn, and he drove there in seven minutes, breaking many traffic laws, but that would be a problem for another day.

They should have been quieter; they were aware, but it was hard for two men to drag their barely conscious grown-ass nephew in the dark while trying not to move the knife currently embedded in his torso without some yelling. They dragged him up the porch. Ravi hit his knee and let out a hiss. Roman winced. They weren’t winning Uncles of the Year this year.

Rick pounded on the door, and he knew the optics of how this looked, a loud pounding on some of the most well-known underworld members' doors at three am on a random Tuesday, so he expected some delay. In the meantime, they struggled to keep Ravi away.

“Are we bad uncles?” Rick muttered, shifting some of Ravi’s weight onto him so the man wouldn’t use any energy to stand.

“Definitely,” Ravi muttered.

When the door finally opened, Ash and Sebastian were standing there. Roman knew the two were holding guns, which had been promptly hidden when they saw who it was. Roman spotted Erza’s kid, Silas, on the stairs, sitting with the newest addition of the Tomas household, Soren. Though he didn’t have time for greetings, they barged past the two men and through the sliding doors, with him and Rick yelling at one another as they dragged an unconscious Ravi to the couch, where they gently laid him down.

“Hey, Tomas’s! Miss us? Where’s Lucky?” Roman asked, looking around the room, through all the bodies, trying to locate the one surgeon among the bunch.

It didn’t seem like long ago; he had been in his city, dealing with the Tomas’s from a distance, and now he was living with them. God, things would go south soon enough, and he was not looking forward to dealing with that fallout. When his makeshift office door was thrown open, and in walked a young woman with dark, dark hair and brown skin, and when she threw a knife at him, which he barely dodged, he sighed.

“Hello, Kat.”

~*~