Until You Come Back To Me, Book 5 (20 page)

Ted’s
eyes stretched.
 
“What are you doing?”

“You
mean eliminate the mastermind like you?”

“Wait
a minute.
  
Mr. Gabrini, let’s reason
now.”

“Oh,
I’m Mister Gabrini now?
 
I’m no longer
the joke you played?
 
I’m no longer the
fool you sent across the world for the hell of it?
 
I’m Mister to you now?”

“You
were always Mister to me,” Ted said, staring at that gun, his heart hammering.

“Well
you’re still vermin to me.
 
You’re still
the mastermind, the enemy that has to be eliminated to me.”

“No!”
Ted cried, but it was only an echo.
 
Sal
shot him and shot him and shot him, without a second’s hesitation.
 
He was tired of this shit.
 
These assholes were playing him like he was
some chump, sending him around the world to get around the corner only to find
that he had wasted more time and his wife was still missing.
 
He was tired of this shit!

But
after Reno pulled over by the first wooded area they came to, and Tommy kicked
Ted Coggan’s dead body out of the Van and the Van drove off, none of them felt
triumphant, least of which Sal.
  
Because
Sal felt scared.
 
He felt as if he was
settling scores, but the biggest score he had to settle-that touchdown called
Gemma’s return-was just as elusive now as when she first went missing.
 

“I
want my wife!” Sal screamed out with such emotion as they drove back to the
airstrip that even Reno felt its’ sting.
 
Tommy took his brother’s hand, and held onto it.

It
was a small, eleven-hundred square foot block house on a quiet residential street
in Vegas.
 
A normal-looking house in a
working class neighborhood with closed blinds at every window and one vehicle,
a cargo van, in the driveway.
 
Inside the
small, quiet, normal house were windows with sound-proofed, eight-inch thick
wood covering every window, and every bedroom locked, from the outside.
 

In
the second bedroom of the small, quiet, normal house was Sal Gabrini’s wife,
sitting on a twin bed, her legs drawn up and her back against the wall.
 
They shot her with a pellet gun when they
first abducted her, leaving her temporarily immobile, and the sting still
resonated in her back.
 
But she otherwise
physically okay.
 

Mentally
was another story.
 
Because the only two
things she could not stop thinking about, during the entire time they had her
in that filthy room, was how was she going to get herself out of this, and Sal.

She
thought constantly about Sal.
 
She knew
the kind of man he was.
 
She knew he was
sick with worry, and was probably losing it, as a new day dawned and there was
still no sign of her.
 
She knew he was on
the case, but how was he going to be able to find her?
 
She didn’t even know where she was, who took
her, or why.
 
They hadn’t told her
anything!

Another
hour came or went, or at least that was the passage of time Gemma guessed that
it was, when the door to the bedroom was unlocked, and then opened.
 
The man Gemma heard one of her captors call
Screw was the only face she had been seeing, and before her kidnapping, she had
never seen his face before.
 
But it
wasn’t Screw who walked in this time.
 
To
her shock, it was her mentor.
 
It was
Judge Rory Calhoun.

At
first Gemma’s heart leaped with joy.
 
She
was being rescued!
 
But then she saw the
look in his eyes, and remembered their last encounter when he tried to kiss
her, and she knew Sal would not have sanctioned him anywhere near any rescue
attempt.
 
She was not looking in the face
of a rescuer.
 
She was looking in the
face of her kidnapper.
 
She knew it as
sure as she knew her name.
 
And her heart
sank like a stone.
 
She would have
preferred fifty gunmen walk through that door, than Rory Calhoun.

He
closed the door behind him, and walked over to the bed.
 
She stared at him with unblinking eyes as he
stood before her.
  
Then he opened his
suit coat and placed his hands on his hips, revealing a holstered gun.
 
She looked down at the gun, horrified, and
then back up at him.
 
“Just in case,” he
said with a smile, “you think you can overpower me.
 
You may try, but you will more than likely
not succeed.
 
And you would be dead for
your effort.”
 

He
smiled again, and it was a smile that was now so reptilian to Gemma that she
could not believe she had not seen this side of him before.
 
His handsome face now looked sinister and
evil. His black skin that used to be so smooth and glorious and beautiful, made
hers crawl.
 

But
he didn’t care about the monumental shift she was experiencing before his very
eyes.
 
He hadn’t changed; he was always
an asshole.
 
Her perception of him, from
idol to idiot, was the only thing that changed.
 
“What’s the first thing I taught you when you clerked for me,
Gemmanette?” he asked her.
 
“I taught you
to never attempt a demonstration that you are not one hundred percent confident
will produce the desired result.”

“Why
are you doing this?” Gemma asked him.

Rory
actually thought about it.
 
“It’s
complicated,” he said.

“Why
are you doing this?” Gemma asked him again.
 
“Because I rebuffed your advances?”

Rory
smiled, and then he laughed.
 
“You cannot
possibly be that self-absorbed,” he responded.
 
“You actually think I would risk my life, my livelihood, my everything
for you?
 
Get real, Gemmanette!
 
You’re the one who had a crush on me back
then.
 
You’re the one who would have
given me your body if I would have wanted it.
 
But I nurtured you.
 
I treated you
with dignity.
 
That was why you loved me
and respected me, because you knew I didn’t take advantage of you.
 
I looked out for you.”

“Then
how can you do this to me now?” Gemma asked, with pain in her voice.
 
“Why aren’t you looking out for me now?”

Gemma
could see a flash of regret in Rory’s eyes.
 
There was still some humanity there.
 
“Because I have a boss too.
 
And
my boss wanted you captured and detained.”

“Who
is your boss?”

“That’s
none of your business.”

“What
does he want with me?”

“That’s
for me to know, and for you to, eventually, find out.”
 
Then he glanced down at her body as if he
knew her body had something to do with what that boss of his wanted with her,
and he rubbed his forehead.
 
Then he
exhaled, as if there was nothing he could do about it, and looked menacing
again.
 
“I just wanted to let you know,”
he said, “that we will be moving you within the hour.”

Moving
her, Gemma thought.
 
That meant the boss
had arrived and was waiting.
 
That meant
whatever all of this was about, was about to go down.
 
And she became desperate.
 
She wanted to panic, but she knew that would
only make her weaker.
 
And as Rory turned
to leave, she knew she had to act and act fast.

“I’ll
suck your dick,” she blurted out to him, “if you let me go.”
 
She knew she was throwing a rock down a
sinkhole, but it was the only weapon she had.
 
She saw that look in his eyes in his hotel room that time.
 
He wanted her then.
 
He might still want her.

And
at least Rory stopped walking.
 
He didn’t
dismiss her proposition outright.
 
He
turned and looked at her.

“You
have an hour,” she said.
 
“There’s a lot
I can do to you in an hour.”

He
looked down, at her body.
 
He always
craved it, even when she clerked for him.
 
But he had morals then.
 
He was an
ethical man back then.
 
But that was
before everything changed.
 
Now he didn’t
give a damn.
 
Now, just looking at
gorgeous Gemma, he knew he still wanted her and there were no morals and ethics
or concern for her future standing in his way.
 
He knew this would probably be his last chance to fuck her.
 
He knew this would probably be her last
chance to get fucked.

He
walked up to her, pulled out his aroused dick, and allowed her to pleasure
him.
 
He wasn’t about to let her go after
she did her duty, he wasn’t that crazy by any stretch of anybody’s imagination,
but Gemma didn’t know that.
 
Because she
still had morals, and she still was an ethical person.
 
Because she probably thought he still had some
humanity, some courage left to show.
 
She
was wrong, he thought, as she pleasured him.

She
wasn’t wrong, Gemma thought, as she sucked her mentor’s dick.
 
She knew what she was doing too.
 
She wanted him relaxed.
 
She wanted to lull him into that false sense
of lust.
 
And he was getting there fast,
as if he wanted a rush job.
 
He even held
her head and began pushing it further and further down on his rod, a rod that
reeked of salty sweat and pre-cum, a rod that made her want to gag.
 
But she didn’t.
 
She pleasured him in a way that she knew was
getting through to him.
 
He even sighed
his approval and slowly closed his eyes.

And
that was when Gemma made her move.
 
She
moved her mouth up further, until his penis was firmly between her teeth, and
then she bit down on him so hard that he immediately began bleeding out.

Rory
screamed the scream of a lion, and flung his dick out of her mouth.
  
He bent over in the kind of pain that took
him to his knees, and then onto the floor.
 

Gemma
grabbed his gun as he was going down.
 
He
couldn’t even fight her for it, as both his hands tried to staunch the flow of
blood that he knew would kill him almost as fast as a bullet would.
 
Gemma grabbed the keys he also had, the keys
he used to unlock her bedroom door, and she took off out of the bedroom, down
the hall, and out of the house altogether.
 
She thought there would be resistance.
  
She thought there would be an army of men upfront, waiting to put a
quick end to her quick getaway.
 
But no
one was there.
 
Was this a one man
operation?

The
only transportation at the house was a cargo van.
 
She ran to it, praying that one of the keys
in her hand was the key to that van.
 
But
when she opened the unlocked door, she suddenly got another thought.
 
The men who kidnapped her, that man called
Screw and his partners, could be waiting inside the very van she just
entered.
  
She pointed her gun toward the
back when she entered.
 
But no-one was
there.

She
got in, and began to search the set of keys until she found the right one.
 
And she cranked it up.
 
But as soon as she cranked up, men appeared
from the backyard.
 
One of those men was
Screw.
 
And when he realized she was
behind the wheel of the van, and was getting away, he and his partners pulled
their weapons and began to fire.
 
Gemma
slung the van in reverse, slammed on the gas, and took off, driving on two wheels
and nearly flipping the van, and nearly ending any chance she had of
escape.
 
But she was too determined to
succeed to fail.
 
She course-corrected
and swerved her way down the road of that quiet, normal neighborhood and away
from that quiet, normal house of horrors.
  
Her getaway would have looked normal too, except for the hail of bullets
peppering the street behind her.

It
was eleven o clock at night.
 
It was the
second night of Gemma’s absence.
  
Sal,
Reno, and Tommy had been blanketing the city again, visiting everybody who ever
knew Gemma, and every crook she ever represented.
 
But they found nothing.
 
Now they were back home, in Sal and Gemma’s
living room, and the entire house was littered with the pain and anguish of the
people inhabiting it. Tommy was there, of course.
 
Sal knew he wasn’t going anywhere until Gemma
was safe again.
 
Reno and Jimmy were
still there, with Jimmy hanging outside with security.
 

Trina
had to leave, to care for and protect her and Reno’s minor children.
 
She was more than capable of protecting them,
nobody messed with Trina, and Reno knew she was more than capable.
 
But he was a very cautious man when it came
to his family.
 
That was why, despite
Trina’s abilities, he still had his men guarding her and his children as if
they were guarding the Pope, the President, and the Queen of England all at the
same time.
 
Jimmy’s wife Valerie was also
under guard at the PaLargio, just in case.

Gemma’s
parents were also at Sal and Gemma’s home.
 
Rodney and Cassie Jones sat in that living room in a state of dread and
anguish too.
 
No calls had come in.
 
No ransom notes had been received.
 
It was as if they snatched Gemma, and the
snatching itself was the victory.
 
It was
as if they already had what they wanted.
 
And Sal knew, as Rodney and Cassie stared at no one but him, they placed
all of the blame, and all of the shame, right at his feet.

Tommy
looked at his brother.
 
If pain had a
classic look, it was on Sal’s face.
 
He
was beyond anguished.
 
Every moment where
there was no news meant another moment where Sal came closer to his breaking
point.
 
Tommy sat beside him.
 
Tommy walked beside him.
 
Tommy wasn’t letting him out of his
sight.
 
Sal had not even drifted off to
sleep for one second of this ordeal and Tommy, who dearly loved Gemma too,
stayed awake right alongside him.