Dimitri doesn’t laugh along with Rocco. He doesn’t move, speak, or breathe. He just stares straight into my eyes long enough to see the pride in them before he shifts his focus to Matteo. “You’re the man of the house now, Matteo. Mama and Sissy are now your responsibility.”
As Matteo’s chest swells with smugness, Rocco slaps Dimitri’s with the back of his hand, eager for carnage. The shit-eating grin stretched across his face doesn’t linger for long. Dimitri barely shakes his head, but it is the equivalent of jabbing a knife into Rocco’s ballooned chest. It deflates as quickly as Matteo’s ego when it dawns on him who is actually in-charge while Dimitri is gone.
“Protect my castle, Rocco. If it falls, I fall. No fear.”
Although Dimitri could say more, he doesn’t need to. The expression on his face is very telling, much less the look he gives me before he completely obliterates his crew’s belief that he’s a cruel, cold-hearted man. He doesn’t farewell me with a peck on the head like he does Matteo and Fien. He kisses the living hell out of me. Tongue, lips, and teeth all get in on the act. It’s the most heartfelt embrace we’ve ever had, and it has his men cheering and his kids clamping their hands over their eyes. They’re acting disgusted by our PDA, but their smiles expose an entirely different set of emotions. They know what love is because we show them at every available opportunity.
Please don’t take that the wrong way. Our children will never be subjected to the repulsive, disgusting things my father forced me to endure when I was a child, but I will never hide the fact I love their father from them. He is my world, and until they find their own partners willing to go to the end of the earth for them, he is theirs as well.
“Play to play,” I breathe against Dimitri’s kiss-swollen lips. “Kill to kill.”
“And take down any fucker stupid enough to get in my way,” he finalizes, smiling. “Rest, Mama Bear, because when I get back, I’m going to pretend you’re not already knocked up with my kid.”
Acting as if his murmured comment didn’t ignite a firecracker low in my stomach, Dimitri bites my lips, runs his tongue across the sting, pivots on his heels, then hotfoots it to his ride. He climbs into the driver’s seat, but his ignition remains unfired until I’m bundled into the backseat of a fleet of SUV’s and driven away.
He never leaves before us because he doesn’t want our last thoughts of him to be of him walking away from us. You never know when you may see someone for the last time, so forget the arguments, the bitterness, and the hate, and cherish the good times.
Don’t dwell on the person you could have become.
Be Dimitri.
Forgive yourself for accepting less than you deserve, but never give up until you have everything you deserve.
He fought the odds. He beat his demons, and now he will help his brother do the same. I have no fear about this because the good takes time, but the bad can make things occur at the speed of light.
My husband is a murderer, a liar, and a thief, but I love him, and at the end of the day, that’s all he needs to bring him back to us.
7
Dimitri
“Jammers are blocking most signals. Even old school isn’t cutting it. Hunter is working on a back channel, but I may lose you once you reach Rico’s building.”
As Smith’s fingers hammer his silicone keyboard, I take the street a block out from Rico’s building like a bat out of hell. I’m stunned he’s living in Ravenshoe, but it makes sense when you realize the ties he has here. Not only was his wife born and raised in this area of Ravenshoe, his sister resides here too. He has ties to the community, and it’s greatly benefiting me. Usually, Hunter would hang up the instant Smith reached out to him. Tonight, he granted him access to Ravenshoe’s security system without an exchange of favors.
“The security guard on the door has no record,” Smith advises just as I reach the west entrance of Rico’s building.
“That isn’t necessarily a good thing,” interrupts a rough, gruff voice I’m going to assume is Hunter. “Isaac does security checks on all his staff—”
“Except his wife,” Smith butts-in, laughing.
Hunter acts as if he never spoke, “So he’d have some type of online record. If he doesn’t…” A smirk raises my lips when he finalizes his sentence by making a throat cutting noise.
I throw open my door before moving to the trunk of my car. It is loaded to the hilt with my weapons of choice. “How many men are they facing?”
“An army,” Smith answers before adding numbers into the mix. “Around thirty or forty are storming in via the front entrance.”
My jaw almost cracks with annoyance. Nikolai has more than enough men to push back with force, but they’re not at his disposal right now. Not even I would turn up with four dozen men in tow for a family dinner. “How far out are Nikolai’s men?”
Smith breathes heavily down the line. “Five, ten minutes.”
“They don’t have five minutes.” If the noises pumping out of Rico’s apartment are anything to go by, they may not even have two. Silencers are a great way to reduce the number of 911 callers contacting the closest precinct, but it has nothing on the wounded cries of fallen men, and the putrid scent of death.
“How many men are there between Nikolai and me?”
I grow impatient when nothing but the frantic taps of keyboards being overworked sound through my earpiece for the next several seconds. Mercifully, Hunter’s grizzly timbre soon gobbles it up. “You’ve got two in the foyer and six in the stairwell. I’m still scanning the faces of the men in the buildings surrounding your location.”
Bang, bang. I lessen his count by two by taking out two men hiding in the shadows of the back entrance. They could have been civilians, but even rich businessmen who like to pretend they’re alpha males scream like banshees when they trip over deceased bodies while exiting a building. You don’t step over them like they’re dog shit unless you’re in this industry.
Once I have a customized M6 strapped to my back and several guns stuffed down my pants, I close the boot of my car and hotfoot it toward Rico’s building. Adrenaline is surging through my veins, just not all of it is compliments to the rush of a raid. I hated handing my family’s protection to Rocco. The only reason I did was because I didn’t want to disappoint Roxanne. She’s so convinced the sun shines out of my ass, even if I were to return with the blood of a hundred men on my shirt tonight, she’ll still take my dick between her lips with a ghost-like grin on her gorgeous face.
I don’t want to lose that for anything.
Not for money.
Not for reverence.
Not even for my brother.
I am here solely for my wife.
“Left or right, Smith?” I ask after breaking through the paned glass door of Rico’s building.
I’m pissed I need to get orders from him, he’s usually on the ball, but I guess his delay is understandable. We’ve never played in this playground before. It’s all new.
“Left. Three doors down. Security pad code is 3281.”
The eerie silence that usually encroaches every takeover bid overtakes Smith’s breaths battering my ears when I creep down a hallway lined with bodies. I don’t need to check if the first three victims are breathing. It’s clear they died a quick, painless death. The fourth man isn’t so lucky. He’s gripping his shirt like his hands can fix the bullet wounds in his chest.