Bloody Heart: A Second Chance Mafia Romance (Brutal Birthright Book 4)
Bloody Heart: Chapter 38

I take Henry back to my house. We drive up to the ancient Victorian, surrounded by trees that have mostly lost their leaves, the grass so thickly carpeted that you can barely see green between the drifts of red and brown.

The house looks creepy in the dark. The old woodwork has darkened with age, and the leaded glass barely shows the light shining out from inside. There aren’t many lights burning anyway—only the one in our housekeeper’s room, and my father’s.

“Do you live here?” Henry asks, nervously.

“Yes. So does your grandfather.”

“Grandpa Yafeu?” he frowns.

“No, your other grandfather. His name is Enzo.”

I drive down into the underground garage. It smells of oil and gasoline, which aren’t unpleasant scents under the right circumstances. At least down here it’s brightly lit and clean. Nero has always been tidy, if nothing else.

Henry looks around at all the cars and motorcycles.

“Are these all yours?” he says.

“Mostly my brother’s. He likes to fix them up. See that one over there? It’s sixty years old. Still beautiful, though.”

“It looks funny,” Henry says, looking at the bubbly headlights and boat-like length of the old T-bird.

“Yeah,” I agree. “It does.”

I take Henry upstairs into the kitchen. I’m surprised to see my father sitting at the little wooden table, drinking a mug of tea. He looks equally surprised that I’ve appeared with a child at my side.

“Hello, son,” he says, in his deep, rasping voice.

“Papa, this is Henry,” I say.

“Hello, Henry.”

“Hi,” Henry says, shyly.

“Do you want some tea, or cocoa?” Papa says. “I think Greta has the kind with marshmallows . . .”

“I like marshmallows,” Henry says.

“Let me replace it.”

Papa gets up from the table, shuffling around the kitchen, searching the cupboards. He never cooks anything himself, so he doesn’t know where Greta keeps anything.

He’s wearing a clean, pressed dressing robe over striped pajamas. His slippers are leather, and likewise clean and new. My father never let himself go physically, no matter how destroyed he was after my mother died. He still put on his dress shirts with the French cuffs and the cuff links, his three-piece suits and his oxfords. He gets his hair cut every two weeks, and he spends thirty minutes shaving every morning.

The only part of him that grew wild is his thick gray eyebrows, that hang heavily over his beetle-black eyes.

He was a big man, once—not as big as me, but physically imposing. He’s shrunk down over the last five years. Lost weight and height. He’s as intelligent as ever, though. I’ve seen him beat Nero at chess, and that’s not easy to do.

He replaces the cocoa, then heats milk in a saucepan on the stove. We have a microwave, but he’s never trusted it.

“Where did you come from, boy?” Papa asks Henry, not unkindly.

“We were living in Los Angeles for a while,” Henry says. “Before that, we were in Spain.”

“Who’s we?”

“Simone is his mother,” I tell Papa.

Papa pauses in the act of spooning cocoa into a mug. His eyes meet mine. He looks over at Henry, more carefully this time. I see his gaze combing over Henry’s height, his hair, his eyes, the way he slouches in his chair at the little kitchen table.

“Is that right?” my father says, softly.

“Yes,” I nod. “That’s right.”

Papa pours the hot milk into the mug and stirs. He carries it over to Henry, taking the seat across from him.

“I’ve known your mother a long time, boy,” he says. “I always liked her.”

“She’s famous,” Henry says, sipping his cocoa. The foamy milk leaves a little mustache over his top lip. That makes him look especially like a Simone—a very specific and precious memory I have of her, from a long time ago. I press my thumb and index finger into the inner corners of my eyes, turning away from him for a moment, and breathing deep.

“She’s a very beautiful woman,” Papa nods. “I was married to a beautiful woman myself, a long time ago.”

“Papa,” I say. “I have to go out again. Can you take care of Henry? He can sleep in my room.”

“I can,” my father nods. “He doesn’t look tired, though. Henry, are you tired?”

Henry shakes his head.

“What do you like to do for fun?”

“Do you have any board games?” Henry asks, eagerly.

“I have a chessboard. Have you ever played chess?”

He shakes his head.

“I’ll teach you. After we finish our drinks.”

I step into the living room, out of sight of Henry and my father. For the hundredth time I check my phone, to see if Du Pont has texted me yet. Nothing. No missed calls, either.

It’s almost midnight. In seven hours I’m supposed to meet Du Pont god knows where, to stop him from killing the woman I love. And I don’t have a fucking clue how I’m going to do that.

My phone rings in my hand, startling me so badly I almost drop it.

“Yes?” I bark.

“You sound stressed, Deuce,” a drawling voice says.

“Fucking hell, Raylan!” I cry, inarticulate with surprise.

“I got your message.”

I don’t stop to explain—I rush right in.

“I need to know everything you know about Christian Du Pont. He’s a fucking psychopath. He—”

Raylan interrupts me. “Why don’t I just tell you in person?”

“What do you mean?”

“I caught a transport into Chicago. We’re on the tarmac right now. You can come pick me up, or I can take a cab.”

“You’re here? Right now?”

“You better believe it.”

My whole body goes limp with relief.

I don’t know what the fuck we’re going to do. But if anyone can help me, it’s Long Shot.

“Stay there,” I say. “I’m coming to pick you up right now.”

I pick Raylan up at O’Hare. He’s unshaven, hair so long it’s over his collar, clothes and skin both filthy. He grins when he sees me, his teeth and eyes white against the dust.

“Sorry,” he says. “I meant to shower somewhere along the way.”

I hug him, not giving a fuck about the dirt, which puffs up in a cloud as I slap his back.

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this,” I say.

Raylan shrugs it off like it’s nothing for him to have flown halfway across the world to help me out.

“It’s been too long, Deuce,” he says.

It’s funny seeing Raylan with his same old duffle slung over his shoulder, his torn-up cargo pants and a battered pair of boots that I hope to god aren’t the same ones we were issued in the field. His country-boy drawl is the same, and the grin that flashes across his face.

He looks a little older, though. He was just a kid when he worked as my spotter, freshly enlisted, barely over twenty. Now he’s got the lines at the corners of his eyes that you only get from squinting in bright desert sun, and he’s deeply tanned under the dirt. He’s got a lot more tattoos, too. More than the military would have allowed.

He’s not in the army anymore. He works for a mercenary group called the Black Knights. Sometimes they’re employed by the army as Private Military Contractors. Other times he disappears for months at a time on murkier missions that skirt the line between legal and illegal operations.

I don’t give a fuck what he’s been doing. All I care about is that he looks as sharp as ever—fit and practiced. I need a trained soldier at my side for this. My brothers always have my back, no matter what. But they don’t know battlefield tactics. That’s what I’ll be facing in Christian Du Pont—not a gangster. A tactician. A soldier.

“You got your rifle in there?” I ask, nodding toward his duffle.

“Of course,” Raylan says. “A couple other goodies for us, too.”

He throws his bag in the back of my SUV and climbs in the passenger seat.

“Goddamn,” he says, sinking into the soft leather. “I haven’t sat on anything but canvas or steel in a month.”

“Probably haven’t had any AC either,” I say, turning up the air.

“You got that right,” he sighs, tilting up the vent to hit his face.

“So,” I say, once we’re back on the road. “Tell me what you know about Du Pont.”

“He got transferred into my unit about eight months after you went home,” Raylan says. “He seemed alright at first. He wasn’t exactly popular, but nobody disliked him. He was quiet. Read a lot. Didn’t drink, so some of the other guys thought he was a bit of a stick. He knew his shit, though. He was accurate as hell—and hungry. He wanted to go out early and stay out late. Wanted to rack up his numbers. It was obvious he was competitive. And after a while, I could tell he was competitive with you, specifically. ‘Cause he’d ask about you. Ask how many hits you’d gotten in a week, or a month. What was the most you’d done in a day. You were kind of a legend by then. You know how army time is—six months is like six years, and stories get crazier every time they’re told.”

I nod, uncomfortable. I never liked any of that shit. I didn’t like the attention, and I didn’t want to be treated like some kind of hero. To me it was a job.

“Anyway, it started to get weird. If we hit all our targets, he’d start looking for someone else to shoot. He’d say, ‘What do you think about those men down in the market. You think that one has a gun under his clothes?’ Plus, he didn’t like the Iraqi police or their ERD teams. We were supposed to be working with them, driving the militants out of Mosul. Each team had a segment of the Old City to clear. We were supposed to create escape routes for civilians to get out.

“Once we started closing in on the insurgents, we had them cornered by the al-Nuri mosque. They were using some of the civilians as shields. So the snipers were supposed to pick them off, out of the crowd. Du Pont shot four of the ones we knew were ISIS. But he hit six civilians too. And I knew how accurate he was. There was no fucking way that all six were an accident. One was a pregnant woman, not even standing close to anybody else.

“Then when the civilians started to run, we tried to guide them out through a gate on the west side. All of a sudden the gate just fucking exploded. Whole thing collapsed, burying a dozen people, including a bunch of the ERD team. Du Pont said there must have been a grenade or a mine there. But it blew right as he took a shot over by the gate. I think he planted the bomb himself, and then I think he fucking set it off with that shot. Couldn’t prove it, though. We were on opposite sides of the perch, and I didn’t actually see what he was doing.

“There was an inquest. He was on notice. For a while he was careful. He got paired with a different spotter. And that guy was a piece of shit, too. His name was Porter. If Du Pont was still fucking around, Porter was covering up for him. They’d go off to their assigned position, and then they’d come back hours later, and what they said they were doing never quite matched up with what we’d seen them doing.

“Finally a girl got attacked—”

“What girl?” I interrupt.

“A local girl. She worked for us as a translator. We found her body burned with gasoline in an empty house. Dress pulled up around her waist. Couldn’t prove it was Porter and Du Pont who did it—but that was the last nail in the coffin. They both got the boot. Barely escaped court-martial. Discharged and sent back stateside. We were all relieved to see them go. I left the army and went private contractor a few months after.”

I nod. It’s about what I expected, reading his file.

I fill Raylan in on what’s been happening here. The rally, the shot at the restaurant, and what Du Pont said when he called me on Simone’s phone. As I talk, it starts to rain—fat droplets spattering against the windshield and breaking apart,

“Wait . . .” Raylan says, sneaking a look over at me with his eyebrow cocked. “Are you talking about your girl from way back?”

I told Raylan a very brief, highly edited version of what happened between Simone and me. But Raylan is a sneaky fucker. He uses that southern charm and casual manner to get all kinds of information out of you, bit by bit, when he’s got all the time in the world at his disposal. I’m guessing he formed a fairly accurate picture of the situation, over time.

Now he’s trying to hide his smile and his amazement to hear that Simone and I have reconciled. Sort of.

“I thought you were looking slightly less miserable than usual,” Raylan says. “The one that got away is back again . . .”

“She was,” I say, gruffly. “Now she’s with that murdering piece of shit.”

“We’ll replace her,” Raylan says, seriously. “Don’t worry, Deuce.”

But I am worried. Very fucking worried.

“He’s smart, you said,” I say to Raylan.

“Yeah,” Raylan admits. “He’s very fucking smart.”

“He’ll have the advantage, wherever he wants to meet.”

“Yup. But there’s two of us, only one of him.”

I think about that. Think how to best use it to our advantage.

“Let me see what you brought in that bag,” I say.