Kissing the Killer: A Bad Boy Mafia Romance (Barone Crime Family)

C
opyright
© 2016 by B. B. Hamel

All rights reserved.

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T
hey say
killers can’t love.

They say killers don’t feel a thing as they move through a room like an angel of death, their guns blazing, bodies dropping all around them. The hit men that work for the Russians and for the Italians don’t care about life or death, only cold hard cash.

He was one of those angels. Instead of wings, he had thick, roped muscles and black tattoos all along his perfect skin. His cocky smile said I owed him my life, and maybe a little bit more.

I never wanted to be owned, not by anyone, not for any reason. My father thought he owned me, and all I got from that was a roof over my head and a black eye every other week.

My father was a stupid man. He was a member of the mob, but not an important one. The only thing he loved more than drinking was gambling, and he owed thousands of dollars that he couldn’t pay to bookies all over Chicago.

It didn’t surprise me when the angels of death came for him with lead and steel. They killed my father and were going to kill me until he changed his mind.

“Look what we have here,” he said to me later, after he’d dragged me from my home and locked me in a closet. Fear and something else lanced through my chest. “You’ve got lips that make my fucking dick hard.”

He was crude and so cocky. He was good with his hands and with a gun, and he thought that made him unstoppable.

But I could see through him.

“I’m taking you with me,” he’d said earlier, his voice deep and soft in my ear. “Unless you want to die here.”

I hadn’t had a choice, of course. I either let him take me or his partner put a bullet in my head.

I knew what he wanted from me. He wasn’t pretending it was anything but my body.

“I’m going to make you glad I took you,” he whispered to me days later, after so much had happened, his hands moving down my skin. “You’ll be begging me to sink my thick cock between your legs before this is done with.”

I couldn’t argue with him. I could barely speak, my body rolling with desire and anger.

I wasn’t going to be owned by anyone, not ever again. I didn’t care if people wanted the both of us dead.

I didn’t care that he was the only one who wanted to see me alive.

My angel of death. He sent chills down my spine. “I’m going to taste you,” he said. “I’m going to slide my tongue along that clit until you can’t breathe.”

I wanted to feel him, his muscles, his dangerous smile. I wanted everything he promised.

But I wasn’t his. I wasn’t giving in, no matter how much I wanted to.

I was going to escape from my angel of death if it was the last thing I did.

I
t was supposed
to be an easy fucking job. We go in, kill the old, drunk, Russian asshole, and then we get the fuck out of there.

Nothing I hadn’t done a hundred times before, maybe a thousand.

I parked the car at the end of the block. It was a quiet neighborhood, especially at three in the morning. Nobody was moving around and the houses were all dark.

“Nice spot,” Abram commented.

“Not bad,” I grunted. “Which house does the old man live in?”

Abram nodded toward the end of the block. “Last on the left.”

I killed the engine. “We got a plan?”

He shrugged. “We’ll break in the back, kill the guy, and then get back home.”

“Works for me.”

I pushed open the car door and then checked the gun tucked into my jeans. I cocked back the slide and chambered a round and made sure the silencer was on tight. Abram was behind me, checking his own weapon.

He nodded at me and then headed down the block. I followed behind him, keeping my head on a swivel.

I’d done this hundreds of times before. We were hit men for the Italian mob, angels of death working for the Barone family. I had more blood on my hands than I could ever hope to wash off, and mercy wasn’t something I had ever thought about before.

I was young when I joined the Barone family. When I was five, my father ran off with some cheap stripper he’d met downtown, and that only pushed my mother deeper into the bottom of a bottle.

Mom died by the time I was thirteen, drank herself to death in less than ten years, though she’d been warming up for that drinking marathon for years before that. After Dad left, Mom lost her will to live completely, and she did nothing but drink and drink vast amounts of cheap fucking liquor.

One day I came home and found her tipped over in the bathroom, vomit leaking from her mouth. I’d never forget that image, not for as long as I lived. It didn’t matter how much death and violence I saw; I’d never outrun the image of my mother dead in the bathroom.

The state took me in after that. I entered the foster system, but that shit didn’t sit right with me. I was in and out of care homes, the good people at the adoption services trying hard to find me a permanent place to live, but I was a troubled kid. I got into fights, I stole shit, I pushed back against my guardians. I did everything in my power to raise fucking hell, because I didn’t know any better.

Until one day, I met Gian. He was just a young, mid-level asshole in the mafia back then, but he gave me my first job. I was working in the back of a deli, slicing meats, cleaning up, and after hours I would serve drinks to the wise guys and empty their ashtrays.

Slowly they took me in. The mafia taught me everything I knew about being a man and then some. Gian rose up through the ranks and brought me with him, eventually promoting me to full-time hit man. I didn’t see much of Gian anymore, since he was one of the big bosses, but I owed him and the mafia everything.

They saved my life. I was on a dark path, one strike away from going into the juvenile detention system. From there, I could just imagine what my life would have been like: petty crime, drugs, senseless violence, and ceaseless poverty.

But the mafia gave me purpose. And money, lots of fucking money, so long as I was good at my job and followed orders.

I did what I was told, and I was rewarded for it. I killed who they needed killed and I never asked questions. I trusted them, trusted my superiors, and it never occurred to me that they might not know what they were talking about.

We stopped outside the rundown row home and Abram gestured for me to go around back. I nodded and slipped past the building, silent as a shadow, keeping low and close to the building. I jumped the back fence and landed on my feet, light and easy.

There was no light, which suited me just fine. For whatever reason, I could see great in the dark and had no trouble navigating around where other people were just blindly stumbling.

The yard was a shithole. It was full of trash, literal bags of garbage, and it stank to all fucking hell. I couldn’t believe a man lived with this, but apparently he did. I moved along the concrete back porch and stood next to the back door.

I checked the windows but couldn’t see past the blinds. I listened for a moment before getting out my lock pick tools. I made quick work of that lock and gently turned the knob.

The door fell open. Inside was a grungy kitchen, plates piled up in the sink, table covered in half-full ashtrays and newspapers. The smell outside followed me in as I softly shut the door behind me.

I didn’t hear a fucking peep. I stayed silent in the kitchen for a minute, listening, but there was nothing. I moved down the hall toward the front door, passing photographs hanging on the walls. I unlocked the front door and pulled it open. Abram slipped inside, shutting the door behind him.

“Well?” he whispered.

I shook my head and gestured at the stairs. He nodded.

I climbed the steps, Abram at my back. There were magazines piled up against the wall, a sure sign of a hoarder. I got to the top of the steps and looked down the hall.

Nothing. Total silence. The doors were all shut, but I knew these row homes like the back of my hand. They were all the same in Chicago, more or less. The master bedroom would be the first door on the right, and that Russian scumbag would be in there.

I pressed my ear up against the door and listened. Inside I could faintly make out the rumbling sound of a drunk-as-fuck man snoring like a chainsaw.

Abram nudged me and pulled out his gun. I nodded, taking mine out, and then kicked open the door.

We rushed into the bedroom. The place was dingy and small, or at least it seemed small because of all the boxes stacked all over. I wasn’t looking too closely at them, but they were all full of junk as far as I could tell. In the center of the room was a single bed, a bare mattress suspended on four metal legs and plywood. A fat man was lying there, snoring like a beached whale.

Abram walked over to the man and kicked him. He grumbled and rolled over but didn’t wake up. Abram grinned at me and then kicked the guy again, much harder. He jolted awake, confused and disoriented.

“Rise and shine, mother fucker,” Abram said.

We held our guns out to him.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Shit shit shit. Please, no. You don’t have to do this.”

“Do you know why we’re here?” I asked him.

“I can get you the money. Look, under this mattress. I can get you more later. Please, you don’t have to kill me. I’m not worth anything dead.”

“Fucking asshole,” Abram muttered.

“Listen to me, Karsov,” I said to him. “We’re not your fucking bookies. We’re here from the Barone family.”

Comprehension slowly dawned on his face, followed by an even deeper fear. He was realizing that he wasn’t going to be able to talk or buy himself out of this.

We were angels of death, hit men for the mob. You didn’t meet us and live to talk about it.

“I have more,” he said softly. “I can give you more.”

“And what, turn around and give some secrets back to the Russians?” I asked him. “Gian knows you’ve been playing both sides, and he is very, very fucking pissed.”“I haven’t,” he said. “I swear it. Please.”

“Gian says this is the price of your own greed. Good night, Mister Karsov.”

Abram and I pulled our triggers at the same time, putting bullets through Karsov’s skull.

He collapsed back onto the dirty mattress, blood spreading out around him.

Abram looked at me, slipping his gun back into his pants. “Easy,” he said.

“We’re not done,” I said. “Check downstairs. You know the drill.”

He made a face. “The guy doesn’t have family. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I gave him a look. “Go, Abram.”

“Fuck. Fine.” He left the room and headed back downstairs.

I moved back out into the hallway, keeping my gun out. I didn’t think I’d need it, but it was our job to make sure that there were no witnesses. Hit men couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be known. If our identities got out, we’d be under attack almost immediately. Too many people wanted me dead for killings I’d been ordered on to ever be able to give my true identity. That was part of why we worked in pairs; we were meant to watch each other’s backs, but also to split the killings between us. It was harder to get revenge if two men were equally at fault for the death of your family. But we rarely worked with the same partner twice in a row, since the bosses didn’t want us to get too familiar with each other.

I knew Abram, but not well. We’d worked together on a hit a year earlier, another in-and-out job. I didn’t know much about him, though I’d seen him hanging around. We kept a distance from each other out of mutual respect for the most part.

I looked through the first two rooms and found nothing. They were about as dirty as I was expecting, and full of junk as well. The guy was clearly a hoarder on top of his gambling and drinking problems.

I had only one more room to check. I went to the last door in the hallway and tried the knob.

It was locked.

Gritting my teeth, I got out my lock pick set and quickly worked it open. I pushed the door slowly in and stepped inside silently.

It was the cleanest room in the house. The bed was neatly made, though the covers were thrown back on one side. There were pictures on the walls and a clock on the side table, plus a little desk and a laptop against another wall.

I looked around and sighed. I walked over to the closet and threw it open.

She looked up at me defiantly, her lips hanging slightly open. I took a step back and felt like someone had kicked me in the chest.

She was beautiful, absolutely fucking gorgeous. Big green eyes, long, full hair, and a body like nothing I’d ever seen. She took a step out of the closet toward me, her body covered only by a thin white T-shirt and black panties. Her legs were long and muscular, and I could feel my cock stirring in my pants.

But what really drew me to her was the hideous bruise around her otherwise beautiful eye. It looked a couple of days old, and most of the swelling had gone down, but I was familiar enough with bruises on women to know exactly what it meant.

“Who did that to you?” I asked her.

She stared at me silently for a second. “The man you just murdered,” she said.

I nodded slowly and raised my gun. She didn’t flinch or move, just stared back at me.

“Well?” she asked after a moment. “Are you going to do it or not?”

I took a sharp breath. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to pull the trigger. I didn’t understand it, but I kept staring at that bruise and thinking about the state of the house.

This poor fucking girl. She was probably about my age, maybe a couple years younger, and she clearly had been stuck in a fucking hellhole living with her horrible father for a long time. And to top it all off, that dead bastard in the other room was beating her.

None of that should matter. My job was to kill her and leave. I wasn’t supposed to leave any witnesses.

“Get back in the closet,” I ordered her as I lowered the gun, “and don’t make a fucking noise.”

“What?” She stared at me, surprised. I could see the fear slowly creeping back into her face.

“Hurry. Get in.”

As she stepped back, I heard a creak in the hallway.

“Brooks? The fuck you doing?”

Abram stepped into the room and stared at us.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked again, raising his weapon.

“No,” I said, stepping toward him.

“What do you mean? We can’t leave any fucking witnesses. You know that.”

I didn’t know what I was doing. If Abram hadn’t come upstairs, we could have just left and I never would have had to hurt the girl. She could have gone on living, finally able to escape from her piece-of-shit father.

Instead, I was digging myself further and further into a hole, all for this girl I didn’t know. All because of her defiant look, her black eye, her beautiful body and lips.

“Abram,” I said, putting my hand on his gun, “this one is mine. I’m taking her with me.”

“Shit, Brooks,” he said. “You sure that’s a good idea?”

“I said I was fucking taking her with me. The bitch is mine.”

He looked at me and slowly lowered his weapon. It wasn’t completely unheard of for one of us to take a little prize home, but only the sickest, most sadistic bastards ever did.

Because once you were done using your prize, you had to get rid of it.

“Shit, man,” he said. “I didn’t know you were like that.”

“Guess you thought wrong,” I said.

“You know you have to ice her eventually, right?”

“I fucking know that.”

“Well then.” He grinned at me. “You have some fun with her.”

I turned back toward the girl and grabbed her by the arm, dragging her out. “Come on,” I said to her.

“Where are you taking me?”

Abram was staring at me. I shoved her down onto the bed and loomed over her, pinning her down. She stared back at me, fear fresh in her eyes again. I fucking hated doing this, but I had to play my role. Otherwise Abram would get suspicious.

“Listen to me,” I said softly. “You’re fucking mine now. You understand? You want to keep breathing for however long you have left, you’ll do exactly as I say. Understand?”

She stared at me, anger in her eyes, mixing with the fear. “I understand.”

“I’m taking you with me,” I said, pressing my lips against her ear. “Unless you want to die here.”

“Okay,” she answered.

“Good.” I moved back and dragged her off the bed. “Come on.”

Abram grinned at me as I marched her back down the hall. I practically dragged her down the steps, Abram following close behind. I didn’t know what he was thinking or how he felt about this sort of thing, but I couldn’t bother asking. We got to the bottom and I shoved her at the door.

“Walk,” I said.

She didn’t even glance back at me. She just stepped out the front door.

Abram came up behind me. “Damn, man,” he said. “If I had gotten a better look, I might have taken this one myself.”