Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (59 page)

“First thing, we don’t separate. I am with you always. If you need defending, I’m going to do it.”

I admired the way he assessed and took control of a situation. I admired his passion and heat, his old world attitudes and how he was willing to bend them to accommodate his respect for me, and how unwilling he was to let go of his responsibility to protect me from all the evil I’d brought on myself. I couldn’t have asked for better, and that made me want to shield him from the worst of me.

“I love you, Capo.”

“Say you understand.”

“I understand. We stay together. All the way back to Los Angeles.”

“And you do not pick up a weapon to defend me. As long as I’m alive, I am your weapon,” he said.

“You’re not dying.”

“Say it. Say I am your weapon.”

“You are my weapon.”

“I see you, beautiful Contessa. Don’t think I’m blind.”

“What do you mean?” My voice was sharper than I wanted it to be. I was afraid he saw my emotional discomfort and mistook it for guilt. But it wasn’t guilt he saw. I’d turned my back on heaven when I pulled that trigger, and I felt no regret. I didn’t want him to see the empty hole where guilt and sorrow should have been.

“You don’t have as much practice at this, and today, before the passports come, I’m going to teach you to defend yourself for the day I may be gone.”

“Please don’t say that.”

“Call it a sleep then. I need you to know what to do if I sleep.”

I nodded, because I knew what I’d do if anything happened to him. I’d find the bastards who did it, and I’d put them to sleep with Paulie. I was a talented psychopath. I had a real God-given gift.

I kissed Antonio so he wouldn’t be able to look in my eyes and see what was broken and what was whole. He owned me with his lips, protected me and told me I was worth saving when I felt less than worthy. I loved him for trying, for telling me how precious I was without saying a word. I wanted another hour with him, so he could fuck me so hard I became the human he thought I was.

theresa

t felt hard and warm, the surface supple to the touch, with curves designed to comfort the force of a closed fist.

“You know how to use it?” Antonio asked, even though he knew the answer.

The long brushy desert behind the hostel was perfect for target practice, and the owner didn’t seem to mind bullets flying as long as we didn’t disturb or shoot the guests. It was as good a pastime as any while we waited for passports to be fashioned out of lies.

I took aim at the empty Coke bottle, putting the pin of the front sight into the notch of the rear sight. Squeezed. Missed.

He smiled on one side of his mouth, lips full in the blasting Mexican sun, face cast in hard shadows that accentuated the flawless angles of his face. “I can see that it bothers you.”

“What? That I missed? Everyone misses. It’s a small object, and you put it far away.” Was I whining? Maybe.

“But it bothers you.”

He put his fingertip on the back of my neck and started to say something, as if he would teach me how to shoot. That was why he’d brought me out here. Before he could start, I leveled the gun on the bottle and squeezed, expecting to waste a bullet.

The bottle shattered.

He pressed his hand to the back of my neck.

“I’m getting anxious.” I pulled the trigger again. A
ping
echoed over the rocks when I hit the bottle just at the edge. It spun then fell. “Every hour that passes… I might miss him.”

“I think we can make it,” he said.

“Then what?”

He ran his hand down my neck. “The Carlonis can’t find out we’re alive. I shamed Donna Maria by running from her granddaughter. She’ll want me dead and pay good money for someone to do the job. But these are the American mafia. They watch too many movies. The Italians I think I can make peace with. Once that’s done, I’m going to marry you.”

“Can’t be a big church wedding.” I bent my elbow until the gun pointed at nothing but the sky. “Not without family.”

“No. Maybe.” He ran his hand up my arm and over my body until he found my chin. I felt safe and loved when he looked at me like that, eyes shadowed by the sun but still intense enough to compete with its blaze. “I want something so badly, and I’m afraid to even say it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t want to tempt God.”

“Say it.” I felt more than heard the breath he took. “God can’t hear you out here.”

His glance toward the heavens was almost imperceptible. “I want to go home. I want to take you into my family. To make you a part of… we’ve always looked for a new life. Maybe that was the mistake. Maybe we need to make the best of the old life.”

“How? I don’t even know how.”

He leaned forward, and I leaned into him until I felt his stubble on my lips. “Me neither,” he said. “But come home with me and try. Come home with me.”

I wondered, not for the first time, when it had happened. When I’d fallen in love. When I’d committed myself so irrevocably. When the thought of a world without him hadn’t seemed grey and flat.

It wasn’t the sex. It wasn’t the way he fucked me as if he wanted to peel my skin off and enter my soul. It wasn’t the way his unreasonable demands made me wet rather than angry. It wasn’t the violence, or the knowledge that he would do anything he had to in order to get what he wanted. He’d murder, steal, hurt himself. Hurt me.

Nor was it the way he took on responsibility for my brother as if Jonathan was his own. Daniel would have asked me what I wanted to do then explained why he was too busy to be with me for it. Or we’d talk about what to tell the media. But my problems would be inconveniences, puzzles to be solved. He wouldn’t own them. Antonio owned me, meaning my body, my soul, and my family. I didn’t know how to own him with the same surety. I didn’t know how to want things for
us
.

But he was teaching me how to be his. When we’d arrived in Tijuana, I’d been under the influence of such momentum, I couldn’t imagine going in reverse, not even for my family, not even to see Jonathan one last time. Antonio had slowed me down, pushing against the inertia of movement from here, to there, to the goal that blinded me. Thank God for him, in that moment and every moment since. Thank God for his level head and his perspective.

Except now, behind a filthy hostel as we waited for our fake passports.

Now he seemed desperate as he whispered, “Come home with me. Be a part of me.”

I could have just said yes, but there was no lying between us, not even to make the other happy for a second’s breath. “They’ll never accept me.”

He nodded and stepped back, his hand dropping off me. His white shirt and linen pants clung to one side of his body when the desert breeze picked up, and they fell in a graceful drape when it died.

“You have one more bottle, and two bullets,” he said. “You’re a little to the left, so when you aim, you have to compensate.”

I aimed carefully, holding the gun at the sharpest point of the triangle of my arms. Squeezed. I had no idea how far off I was, but the bottle was unimpressed.

“Little right,” he said, putting his fingers together.

I tried again. Another fail. I shrugged.

“Missing bothers you,” Antonio said, taking the gun. “I see it in your face.”

“It’s not a big deal. I have you.”

“You do. And if you never destroy another bottle, you’re still perfect.” His eyes grazed my body, running over it in a zigzag, as if imprinting the details into his mind. I felt brazen and desired, the center of a vital universe.

“Do we have time to go back to the hotel room?” I asked, imagining his body twisted around mine, his rough hands on my ass, his mouth on my...

“No,” he said, popping the empty mag and sliding in a new one. “Because… don’t look. Don’t change anything, but… take this.” He handed the gun to me, sliding his fingers over my wrist. “There’s a man behind the water heater at the back of the hostel, and one behind the big rock to my right, back there. If they kill me in front of the right witnesses, they get my title. My territory. My crew. So I can’t reclaim it when I return.”

“What?” I didn’t move, but the conversation had turned so casually, I felt like a purse someone had turned upside down and shaken.

“They’re going to try to take me alive.”

I had to take a second to absorb what he said. “How did they find us?”

“The forger, maybe. There might not be any passports.” Nothing about him indicated panic. He looked as if he were about to stroll in the park.

“Don’t leave me.” I choked on the words.

“Are you ready?”

I barely took a breath when I nodded. I was ready.

The whole of my vision went as far as the light that surrounded him, and the hard metal of the pistol between us became a world. I didn’t see either of the men he spoke of, only a light patch of dust behind the shed.

“One behind the water heater,” he said, tipping his head to the hostel behind him. “One behind the big rock to your right.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked as if considering where to go for dinner.

“As soon as I raise my arm, drop to the ground.”

“Then why the gun? If you’re putting me in a defensive position?”

“Only shoot to survive.”

“I’ll shoot anyone who tries to hurt you.”

“Don’t. Trust me.”

I trusted him. I did. The salt of the entire visible world was at my command with him. I feared nothing. Not death, not pain, not my own sin. God was my ally, and evil was my slave inside the quiet torrent of his eyes.

I trusted him to protect me, but not to protect himself for my sake.

He squeezed my hand, then he walked away, his own gun sticking out of the back of his waistband.

What happened then happened so quickly, I didn’t have a chance to think about the feeling that he was shrinking in my vision, or the way the landscape seemed to squeeze him into a smaller space. He was ten steps to shelter. I still didn’t see anyone. My gun weighted seventy pounds or more, and the Sicilians, who wanted him alive more than they wanted me dead, were waiting until he was close enough to get a clear shot.

That, I knew.

And I knew he walked slowly to draw them out.

And I knew the pain in my chest that grew with every step. The twisting feeling, as if my lungs were being played like an accordion.

I was afraid. Desperately afraid.

And my patience ran out like a broken hourglass.

I raised my arm and pointed the gun at Antonio’s back as if I could ever shoot him. “Capo!”

He didn’t spin toward me but pulled the gun from his waist, and shots, everywhere, pinged, popped, cracked against the mountains. I dropped, but not like a child in an earthquake drill. I dropped with intention and pointed the gun in the direction of the shots behind the boulder, while Antonio dropped and rolled to aim behind the water heater.

A rough scrape to my right left a divot in the dirt, missing me by inches. I’d never felt so vulnerable. So distant from my sun, like Mercury cast into Pluto’s orbit. Like a child in an earthquake drill that turned out to not be a drill at all.

I exhausted my bullets and froze. Antonio rolled. Alive? With no more forward movement to take and the center of my orbit down, I was out of ideas, out of thoughts, only knee-deep in a fog of fear that I hadn’t kept pressure on the guy behind the boulder long enough to keep Antonio from getting shot in the back. Oh god, he was out there, alone, and I was light years away.

He rolled onto his stomach and took another shot at the water heater.

One thousand years passed in a split second.

Then the explosion.

I screamed as water poured from the water heater, bathing the sand in a miniature ocean that grew and flattened while the noise and light of the pilot light hitting the broken gas line sent flames everywhere. Cracked masonry. Smoke. Steam. If I had been confused and afraid before, I was wrecked when I tried to stand.

Until he came to me. Through the dense air, he came and yanked me up. As if slapped back into reality, I felt safe again. My guts stopped twisting, and the world slipped back onto its axis.

“What the hell were you doing?” he growled.

“If they thought I was going to kill you, they’d shoot at me, not you!”

He squeezed my arms so hard, I thought he was going to cut off my circulation. His jaw was tight against his skull and his lips were parted. I wanted to kiss the snarl right out of him, but he pulled me into the smoke and steam. I ran with him, step for step, in complete synch like the winners of a three-legged race. If gunshots still rang out, their sound was muffled by the roar of the flames we headed right into.

Heat. My skin didn’t have time for sweat, just hair-curling heat. I didn’t ask what he was doing by pulling me into it. I just did what he asked, and I feared nothing.

“Get to the street!” he shouted, pointing left while keening his body right.

“No!”

“Theresa!” He said my name like a command.

We had no time for words. Under the thunder of the flames came another gunshot. I felt nothing, but Antonio looked at my arm. Following his gaze, I saw where a bullet had torn my sleeve. The edges smoked from the heat of the projectile, or the fire from the water heater. It didn’t matter. The calm in his face was gone.