Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

Dav

I stayed there in the bed until her eyelids started to twitch as she drifted into the depths of REM before slowly untangling myself from Cinna and making my way out of the room.

I hadn’t slept.

I’d been too worried about her, constantly opening the door to check and make sure she was still breathing, not trusting that she didn’t have some kind of brain injury.

It was pure paranoia on my part, but I couldn’t reason with my anxiety until I finally heard her whimpering, letting me know she was awake.

I’d had the pills for hours at that point.

If you had a roll of cash and someone willing to go out and find a dealer, you could have just about any kind of pain medication you wanted. The clean shit. Nothing laced in it.

My men had probably cleaned out three dealers to get as many pills as I now had sitting in a plastic bag in a kitchen drawer. But I wanted to make sure I had enough to keep Cinna comfortable. I knew from looking at her that she was gonna feel worse before she started to get better.

She’d still been a little in shock, still recovering from the adrenaline, before she fell asleep.

Once all that subsided, the pain was going to be insufferable.

In the kitchen, I put a pot of coffee on before reaching for my phone and adding a bunch of shit to my cart. Things to keep dressing her wounds and replace what I’d taken out of my medical kit. A shitton of ice packs. Over-the-counter meds that would help with swelling. A few brace options for her wrist. An assortment of panties.

I didn’t bother with more clothes, since her life would be much easier if she just kept going without pants and wearing button or zip-ups until her wrist healed.

I didn’t say it to her yet, because even hurt and emotional, Cinna was Cinna. And she wasn’t going to hear reason. But I wasn’t going to let her go home when she woke up. I wasn’t going to let her go home… period.

She needed somewhere to rest and recover. She needed someone around to help her with things. Like wrapping her ribs and wrist. Like cleaning up her feet, as needed. Cutting up her food. Getting her things. Even washing her hair.

She hadn’t really wrapped her head around just how injured she was. And maybe that was because she hadn’t even looked at herself yet.

I had a feeling that keeping her dosed consistently for the next two or three days might be the best bet. Get her through the worst of the pain. She’d still be sore. And her ribs and wrist would still be killing her, but all the other pains would have subsided by then.

Each time she woke up whimpering, desperate for me to press the pills into her mouth and hold up the water for her to rinse them down with.

I caught cat naps between those doses, waking up with my heartbeat punching against my ribcage, worried she might have stubbornly snuck out when my eyes were closed.

But she was always right there, lounging in my bed. Like I’d imagined countless times before. More, even, than she would imagine with all my rampant flirting.

In her eyes, I was just a dog in general. And I guess she wasn’t exactly wrong about that either. I damn sure enjoyed more than my fair share of women. So the flirting I did with her was just an extension of that. Casual, not serious.

But if there was ever something I was serious about, it was how much I was into Cinna.

In a physical way, sure. She was drop dead fucking gorgeous. I’d spent more than a few moments in the shower thinking about her long, silky hair wrapped around my hand as I fucked her from behind, or gliding across my thighs as she went down on me. And I was pretty sure if this woman existed in ancient times where they did that kind of shit, monuments would be built to honor the woman’s breasts.

It was more than that, though.

Cinna had been a capo for nearly as long as I had. I got to watch her grow from a young, angry girl, hungry to prove herself just as capable as—if not more than—her male counterparts, into the fearless capo she had become.

I’d seen her kick the asses of men twice her size. Intimidate bosses with decades of seniority on her. Out-strategize the best criminals in the area.

She was a fucking marvel.

And, me? Yeah, I’d been doing some marveling at her.

But I had to respect her steadfast determination not to sleep with any of us. I couldn’t pretend to understand what it was like to be a woman in a male-dominated field, how much rampant sexism she’d had to deal with to finally get the respect she had now.

Even now, though, there was shit she had to deal with that none of us men ever would.

My mind flashed back to the rolled waistband of her pants. Because someone tried to, after already beating the shit out of her, make her suffer one final indignity.

My phone rang on the coffee table, making me knife up and reach to silence it, wincing, waiting to hear Cinna stirring.

“Yeah?” I answered, sliding the answer button blindly.

“That’s how you answer the phone?” Renzo, the boss of the Lombardi crime family, my and Cinna’s boss, asked.

“When I got something warm and pretty in my bed waiting for me, yeah,” I said, forcing a lightness into my tone that I didn’t feel.

“It’s two in the fucking afternoon,” Renzo scoffed, but there was a chuckle in his voice.

“Right. Like you don’t want to be curled up under the sheets with Lore right now,” I shot back.

“That’s fair,” he agreed. “You heard from Cinna?” he asked.

“Cinna?” I asked as I caught motion at the corner of my vision.

And there she was, her body popping with stiffness as she leaned to the side to favor her screaming ribs.

“Yeah, you know, tall, pretty, two tons of attitude in a one-ton bucket,” Renzo said, making my lips curve up.

“You left out her killer rack,” I said, getting Cinna’s attempt at an eye roll at that.

“Not all of us think solely with our dicks, Dav.”

“No, man. Haven’t seen her. You expecting her for something?” I asked.

“Not in particular. She’s been working on something she’s been evasive as fuck about. Just wanted to make sure she’s good.”

“I’m sure you know Cinna. She can take care of herself,” I said, patting the couch next to me.

There was a short pause, but she eventually moved across the floor to lower down, trying her best to hold in a hiss of pain as she did so.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Just got a feeling about something going down,” he admitted.

Renzo had killer instincts. It was likely how he managed to stand on his own against all four of the other crime families in the city when they saw us as enemies before he finally united us all through his marriage to his wife, Lore Costa.

“There’s always something going down,” I reasoned, getting off the couch to grab a few of the ice packs out of the freezer. Bringing them back, I handed them to Cinna, who started pressing them against her ribs and face.

“Yeah. Would feel better if she’d at least return a text,” he said.

“She was probably working late. Might be the only person who outworks you,” I reminded him. “Probably trying to get some sleep.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “Well, let me know if you hear from her.”

“See Cinna, tell her to contact Daddy. Got it,” I said, getting another eye roll out of Cinna.

“Go on back to your warm and pretty,” Renzo said, ending the call.

There was a beat, Cinna likely choking on the words a few times before she finally forced them out.

“Thank you.”

“No big,” I said, shrugging it off. “But we gotta find your phone,” I added. “You need to at least text to check in with him.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, but gave me nothing else.

“Is there a reason you’re not telling me where your shit might be?”

“In an empty warehouse a few blocks away,” she admitted. “But what are the chances that they would have left my phone if they found it?”

“I’ll go check it out. If it’s not there, we can call, get it bricked, and get you a new one.”

“I can—“

“Keep your perfect ass planted on the couch while I go and find your phone? Yes, you can do that. And maybe, while you’re at it, you can try to get some food down too. All those meds on an empty stomach are just asking for your stomach to cramp up.”

“I think my jaw hurts too much to chew on anything.”

“Exactly why I got ice cream, mashed potatoes, and yogurt,” I said. “Pick one and choke it down.”

“Your bedside manner needs work,” she said as I made my way toward the fridge.

“Got a feeling being nice won’t get me the results I want with you,” I said, opening the door.

“Yogurt,” she decided. “I don’t know what warehouse it was,” she told me. “It had been abandoned for a long time. Full of beer bottles, garbage, old condoms. Looks like a hangout spot for kids or addicts who are looking for a private place to shoot up.”

There weren’t a ton of empty warehouses around. It shouldn’t be too hard to find the one she’d been attacked in.

“You shouldn’t go alone,” she said, a strange edge in her voice I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard from her before.

“Cinna, my sweet girl, are you worried about me?” I asked, a smile playing with my lips as I handed her the yogurt and a spoon.

“I don’t want to be responsible for all the local escorts being without a job,” she said, tone saccharine sweet.

“Cinna, baby, what about me makes you think I would need to pay for it?” I asked as I reached out to tuck some of her hair behind her ear.

Was that a little shiver I felt move through her at the barely-there touch?

The way her gaze immediately cut away let me think it was.

That was… interesting.

“Fine. Go get yourself killed going out alone,” she said, shrugging a shoulder.

“I’ll be extra careful just for you,” I promised her as I went to grab some more of the pain pills, leaving them with a bottle of water on the coffee table. “You’re not due yet, but I dunno how long I’m going to be, so I’m leaving them with you. Is there anything else you want me to look for?” I asked.

“My boots.”

“The flat ones or the ones with the chunky heel?” I asked.

“You know what kinds of boots I have?” she asked, pausing as she slipped some yogurt between her lips.

“Maybe if you had more than two pairs of shoes, I wouldn’t,” I told her as I slipped into my shoes before reaching into the closet to grab a gun.

“This is where I would normally say something about how if you died tomorrow, the person who would miss you the most is your personal shopper, but my head hurts too much to be witty.”

Her anxious gaze slid from me as I donned my coat to the door and back again.

She didn’t want me to leave.

But I think it had more to do with not wanting to be alone when she was in such a vulnerable condition than worrying about me going to the warehouse in the middle of the day with people all around.

I went back into the closet, finding another gun, and bringing it over to place it on the coffee table in front of her.

“I will be an hour, max,” I assured her.

“Whatever. Take your time,” she said, but she visibly relaxed at having the gun nearby.

“An hour,” I told her before turning and making my way out.

It wasn’t hard to find the building.

Especially when she left a trail of breadcrumbs all through it.

A can of mace, kicked in a corner.

A knife, the blade still flicked open, then discarded in a shuffle, judging by the human-sized area on the ground that had been wiped clean of dust and grime.

Then, finally, her boots.

The one with heels.

She must have had a gun. I’d never seen her without one. But, clearly, they must have gotten it from her at some point. Because there was no way anyone could have done that level of damage to her if she’d had a weapon on her.

She was quick, accurate, and ruthless with them.

I didn’t end up finding her phone, figuring she was probably right about them taking it.

So I stopped to buy her an unlocked one at the store before making my way back to the apartment.

I should have knocked.

But I didn’t realize how freaked out she would be until I opened the door, catching her off-guard, and finding her sitting off the edge of the couch, the gun aimed right at me, and her hand shaking so violently that if I was someone there to attack her, there was no way she would get a good shot off.

“Got your boots,” I said, trying not to embarrass her. “And your mace. And knife. But no luck on the phone. So now you get to sit and program this thing for the next few hours,” I told her, bringing the box over.

I took the gun out of her hand, replacing it with the box.

“Thanks.”

“Is that two thank-yous in one day? Pace yourself. You might pull a muscle,” I teased, watching as she shot me the ghost of a smile.

“Once I get this up and running, I’ll get going—“

“Back to bed. Where you are going to take another nice pain med nap.”

I expected resistance.

And I guess it was proof of how much this attack had shaken her when all she did was nod.

“Right.”