The F King: A Bad Boy Romance (Still a Bad Boy Book 3) (15 page)

S
omething was wrong with Sarina
. It seemed like more than just stress over her next test, despite how much study time Millie was forcing upon her.

Last night, after dinner, she kept on asking me things like where I’d go if I wanted to make a fresh start. She asked me if I loved her, and she looked like she was on the verge of tears the whole night, but wild horses couldn’t drag what she wanted to say out of her.

For all I knew, this was just something that women did after being in a relationship for a few months. It certainly wasn’t something I’d seen the morning after any of my one night stands. I’d just finished booking a couple days away for the weekend after her test, hoping a change of scene would get her to come clean about whatever was bothering her, when a message came through on my phone from another unknown number.

‘This is what you get, cocksucker. Turn on the news.’

My blood ran cold. Holding my phone out in front of me and reading those words over and over again, I picked up the remote.

I could barely feel my fingers as I turned on the news channel. A solemn journalist stood outside somewhere, with the wind playing havoc with her hair and the word “Live” in the bottom right corner.

“… again, authorities have not released the name of the victim, but witnesses are saying it is the most brutal act of violence they’ve ever seen.”

The picture cut to something that might have been recorded earlier, a wide shot of Highston General Hospital… where my mom was. The journalist’s voice came through again, narrating the piece.

“First was a shower of glass, narrowly avoiding expectant father Jeremy Pendergrast as he wheeled his wife into what was supposed to be the most wonderful day of their lives. Instead, something out of a horror movie rained down in front of them.”

The screen changed to show a man looking pale and shaken.

“Legs. Just somebody’s legs from, you know, the waist down. Oh God… they hit the ground right in front of us with just… this terrible sound… just… meat… the blood splattered out… my wife was screaming… I think I was too…”

I dropped to my knees as the numbness from my fingers spread throughout my body. The remote clattered to a floor that sounded a hundred miles away as the journalist picked up with her voiceover.

“A source from inside the hospital, who commented on the grounds that they remain anonymous confirmed that the upper half of the body, a woman in her early sixties, was found, having been crudely hacked in half…”

Without warning, I vomited all over my coffee table, and struggled to hold on to consciousness as the world swam crazily around me. I pushed the table away as I shakily returned to my feet, stumbling to the kitchen before emptying the rest of my stomach contents into the sink.

I could barely even feel the cold water against the fire on my face, as I ran the tap and splashed it on my skin. The burning in my throat from the bile was similarly untouched by whatever water I managed to slurp from my cupped hands.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck…”

My stomach cramped up again, but there was nothing left. I turned from the sink and doubled over. How had this happened? What had they found out?

“What the fuck have I done?” I groaned.

Around the solid knot of my stomach, I could feel anger spluttering like an engine trying to start while submerged in a swamp. With a shaking hand, I picked up my phone up off the floor.

A knock came at the door, and I spun around so fast that I almost toppled over. I looked from the door, to the fire escape, then back to the door again for a couple of seconds, before taking a step in the direction of the fire escape.

“Mr. Crewe? Police, open up!”

I shook my head to try and clear it, but only succeeded in sparking a headache that cluttered my thoughts even more. After creeping up to the door, I looked through the peephole, and saw two men in police uniform standing on the other side.

“Oh fuck.”

“Mr. Crewe? Is that you?”

I bolted for the window to the fire escape and heard a solid thump on the door behind me. The second strike splintered the door frame, and I heard footsteps sprinting behind me.

A hand reached through the window, fingers scrabbled at my clothes, and I barely managed to get away, racing down the metal stairs.

“Stop! Don’t move! Police!
Fuck
! Get down there!”

I didn’t have to look back to know that at least one of them was hot on my trail. Their footsteps clanged on the metal almost as loudly as mine did.

Fiery air burned in my throat, already sensitive from the stomach acid, and I had no fucking idea how I was keeping my balance, let alone achieving such speed down the steps. Yet, however fast I was going, the police officer stayed right behind me, occasionally telling me to “halt” but mostly saving his breath for the chase.

My mind was whirling with complete gibberish, panicked and not making any sense at all. The only thing I could do was run, but after a while it felt less like reality and more like a nightmare, as if the fire escape was no escape at all, it just went on forever.

I was on the verge of losing my mind and simply jumping off the side, when I came to a spring-loaded ladder. I jumped on it and it slid down until the bottom rung was only about eight feet off the ground.

I jumped off the bottom rung, and dropped to the ground. My feet couldn’t have made contact with the concrete for more than a split second before I was hit from behind in a flying tackle that set off an explosion of pain in my back.

Painful pins and needles tingled in my fingers until my knees hit the ground, followed shortly after by my chin, a crushing weight on top of me. I spun around, wincing at the protests from my back, to see that it was the other cop on top of me.

“Stop resisting!”

I launched as solid a punch as I could from my position, catching him in the chin, but without enough power to dislodge him. He retaliated with a punch of his own, and I heard my nose crunch. I saw stars when the back of my head bounced off the concrete.

“Stop resisting!”

The other police officer landed, and between the two of them they managed to flip me back over, get control of my arms and cuff them behind my back, before hauling me to my feet.

“Fuckin’ hell! We came here because we had some bad news,” one of them said, pushing me along the alley towards the front of the building. “Your mother-”

“I saw the fuckin’ news.”

“Yeah, well… once you identify the body, we’re gonna have a big talk. You got something to hide, Mr. Crewe?”

I hung my head and watched the blood dripping from my nose, landing on my shirt. My extremities still felt numb except for a flare of pain in my back that flashed out to my fingertips every few steps.

This was completely fucked. The Acardis would be waiting once the police released me. I’d be in the chains Giovanni had threatened me with. I’d never see Sarina again. My mom was
dead
and I’d never see Sarina again.

This was all happening so fast that my head was spinning. One cop pressed down on my head as he bundled me into the back of the cruiser.

I looked dazedly out the windows as my stomach cramped again.

The cops got in the car, and the passenger cop turned to glance at me as the two of them pulled at their seatbelts. Before either of them could secure themselves, the sound of an engine from our left came loud and clear, and I stared into its headlights with less than a second to prepare for impact.

The noise of breaking glass and crunching metal was all-consuming. The cop car flipped over on its side at impact, and the three of us bounced around in there like the balls in a lottery.

With my hands cuffed behind my back, I had no chance to brace myself, and it was all happening so fast that I might not have had any chance anyway. The car teetered on its side for a second, then finally lurched over on to its roof.

It was all I could do to groan when I heard doors opening and footsteps approaching rapidly. A man wearing a balaclava opened the front passenger door, looked in, pointed a gun at the cop’s head and shot him five times at point blank range with no hesitation.

Some fucking huge guy, also in a balaclava, reached in the driver’s side door and dragged the other cop out, and I lost sight of him for a second. The next thing I knew, the cop came down on the sidewalk head-first so hard that I could hear the crunch, and he went completely limp.

The back door opened and the huge guy dragged me out of the car, around the back of their van. They threw me in and I landed on top of two men in suits, beaten to a bloody pulp and restrained, though they were as still as the dead.

The doors closed and, seconds later, the van left at high speed.

“
D
on’t worry so much
,” said Millie. “You’ve been killing it in the assignments, you can afford to have a shitty test.”

“Yeah.”

I put my bottle of water into the mini-fridge in our dorm floor kitchenette. Tests were never going to be my forte, when I was only getting such good grades on the assignments because the police department outsourced them for me.

This was especially true given how little time I’d spent keeping up with that aspect of my persona, in comparison with the time I’d spent with Ryan. Not to mention how little I cared about my commerce degree. The charade would be over soon.

Last night, I was within a hair’s breadth of telling Ryan, but every time the words were on the tip of my tongue, an image flashed through my mind. That hurt and betrayed look that would be on his face fueled what I could only describe as
terror
in my heart.

He might do the worst thing possible. He might not love me anymore.

So I chickened out, again, and now deflecting Millie with test worries was the only way to explain my mood. I couldn’t answer a single thing she quizzed me about at the library, no matter how much extra time we spent there.

“I’m gonna head down to the cafeteria to catch the ass-end of dinner, you coming?”

“No, I’m staying with Ryan tonight.”

“Oh, OK. See you in class tomorrow?”

“Yep.”

Millie reached up and patted me on the shoulder. “See ya.”

“Bye.”

Without a care in the world, Mille headed back to the elevator so she could extract whatever nutrients as was possible from the cardboard they called food here. I’d only taken a couple steps towards my room when my phone rang.

I dug it out of my pocket. I didn’t recognize the number and almost declined the call. I wasn’t in the mood to participate in a survey, or hear about the benefits of another cellular network, but that would have been a first on this number, anyway.

“Hello?” I said.

“Sarina!”

The voice on the other end was absolutely frantic, laced with so much panic that if I knew the caller, I certainly didn’t recognize them now. Heavy breathing partially masked the sound of yelling and thuds in the background.

“Yes… who is this?” I asked.

“It’s Shelton! You need to get out
now!
”

My eyes darted around. I saw nobody, but lowered my voice to a harsh whisper anyway, as my heart started to beat faster.

“What’s going on?”

“You are
compromised
, Sarina! A dirty fuckin’ cop ratted you out! They’re
coming
for you! You understand me? Get out! Run!
Disappear
until the dust-”

The sound of splintering wood came down the line and cut off Sergeant Shelton’s words. Less than a second later, I heard the phone clatter to the ground as several gunshots went off. People screamed and then it all went silent for a second, before all I could hear was the sound of a single set of footsteps approaching.

Two more shots were fired and then the footsteps receded into the distance, until I couldn’t hear them anymore. The blood drained from my face as I hung up.

Josiah Shelton had just been murdered, and I was next. For several seconds, I stood there frozen and unable to even think, and then I thought about Ryan. If I’d been ratted out, then what did that mean for him?

Last night, I’d been too afraid to tell him the truth. I’d told myself I was waiting for the perfect time, the perfect wording to come to me. That time and those words would never come now.

I had to disappear, or I was dead. And I only had today, tonight,
one
conversation, to convince Ryan to come with me. If it wasn’t already too late.

My survival instinct kicked in and I raced to my room to retrieve my gun, flicking through the contacts on my phone to Ryan’s number. I was ready to hit dial as I flung the door open.

A hand reached out, grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into the room
hard
, sending me falling to the floor. My phone bumped out of my hand and skidded under my bed.

I scrambled back to my feet, turning to meet my attacker as I arranged my keys in my fist to poke out between my fingers as quickly and as secretively as I could.

I saw that there were two men in my room. The one who yanked me in had his head out the door, looking both ways as if he was going to cross the street, and the other was holding a gleaming machete.

Satisfied that the hallway was clear, the first guy closed my door and stood behind the machete-wielder. I folded my arms over myself protectively, looking as meek as possible but hiding my keys.

The one with the machete spoke first. “Y’know, for somebody with “Screamer” written on her door, I expected a lot more noise. Doesn’t bother me though, there’s still time.”

Screaming would probably only put some innocent college student into harm’s way.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“The fuck does it matter, bitch? All you need to know is that the Acardi Family sends its regards.”

The world slowed down to a pace where my entire life flashed before my eyes between each heartbeat, and I saw that machete rise as the guy lifted it for a swing. I leapt forward with every scrap of speed I could possibly muster, unfolding my arms to cock my own fist back as I went.

He was still halfway through a swipe of the blade that would have cut me off at the knees when I stepped inside the arc of the swing, too close for him to hit me, and trapped his arm under my own. With a swift uppercut, I impaled his stomach on the three short spikes of my makeshift knuckleduster, then landed another one on his neck, sinking them in and twisting as I pulled out.

The machete dropped to the floor, sticking into the ground tip-first as the man fell backwards, with his eyes bulging in shock and clamping his hands to his throat to try to stem the flow of his lifeblood leaving his body. He crashed against the wall and sank to his ass on the floor, gurgling. He couldn’t have known that it used to say “Badass” on my door, before the current nickname.

The man who’d thrown me into the room was wordlessly shocked by the turn of events. He was fumbling inside his jacket when he saw me reaching for the machete with my free hand. Judging that he wouldn’t be able to draw his gun before he lost his head, he found his voice and charged me.

“Fuckin’ bitch!”

I swung for the fences, but he managed to partially block my punch so the keys scraped along the side of his head instead of taking out his eyes. A second later, his forehead connected with my face, just below my eye, and I saw stars as his momentum propelled us both backwards.

My heel caught on the machete protruding from the ground and I felt a searing pain along the back of my calf, before I fell against the edge of my bed with my assailant on top, knocking the wind out of me. We both fell to the floor.

Gasping for air, I jack-hammered my fist into his torso, stabbing him as many times as I could while he frantically struggled to catch my wrist, punch me, smother me, anything to stop the wounds from adding up to something that would take his life.

I swung again and felt his fingers wrap around my arm, holding it fast. He punched me in the face hard enough to bring the stars back. In a daze, I felt my fingers pried open and my keys ripped out of my grasp.

My vision cleared again when I felt his hands wrapping around my throat. The first thing I saw when that haze lifted was all that hate in his eyes.

I tried to think. I tried to remember my training, but this was real life. In training, I was never distracted by a brutal assault before a lesson about self-defense technique. I never fought somebody who had been sent with the sole purpose of killing me.

You’ve got about five seconds to remember before you lose consciousness.