Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80715 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 404(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
“You wouldn’t worry about her?”
“Of course I would. Every moment of every fucking day. But any daughter of mine would be fucking tough, and she could handle herself.”
We sat at the round dining table together, me wearing his black T-shirt while he wore only his boxers. Thankfully, the apartment came with plates, eating utensils, and drinking glasses, so we were able to take everything out of the containers and eat a meal like I’d cooked it from scratch.
He’d ordered a steak with a side salad, and he’d ordered me cacio e pepe with a side salad. The perfect meal to hit the spot. We ate together in comfortable silence. His elbows were on the table, and he ate like he’d skipped breakfast and lunch.
“How was your week?” I asked.
“Same. Busy.”
“What do you do when you aren’t working?”
“Work out. Eat. Sleep. That’s about it.”
“You don’t get burned out?”
“No,” he said before he took a bite of his steak and chewed it. “It’s not the kind of job that comes with burnout.”
“But you must be tired.”
He laughed uproariously. “Oh, I didn’t say I wasn’t tired. I’m always fucking tired.”
“What have you been working on?”
He finished his bite before he sank back into the wooden armchair. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Because every time I talk about it, you pull away—and I fucking hate that.”
I pulled away because I was scared of what I was getting myself into. Scared what this relationship might cost me—an arm or a leg, or maybe my life. “Well, I can’t keep my head buried in the sand.”
He set his plate aside, only the juice from the meat left behind. I’d found a bottle of wine in the cabinet and we shared that, but it was practically vinegar compared to the stuff he usually ordered. But he was nice enough not to complain. “President Barsetti has received intel from MI6 that a terrorist attack is on the horizon. But that’s all we know. No further details. We’ve forged an agreement with the European countries to make sure arms aren’t being sold to enemies of Western civilization, but I fear some are slipping through the cracks. I usually confer with the First Emperor of the Fifth Republic on this matter, but that power recently changed hands. I’m waiting for the dust to settle. I fear a violation may be happening there. I’ll know more soon. Within our borders, we’ve had issues with black market dealings. Young people have been disappearing in pockets throughout Italy, mainly Rome, and we know someone is harvesting their organs for a secret transplant list. I caught on to their scheme and tracked them down, but the head of the operation was killed by his own men, and they moved their operations. Now, I have to start over. But make no mistake, I will find them and kill them all.”
He was a different man when he spoke about these things. No hint of a smile or bemusement. No jokes. His tone dropped, and a lethal stare burned in his eyes. Even his composure and body language changed, his muscles stiff and flexed, his jawline tight.
“We also implemented a new hotline, for lack of a better description. Do you know what the number one cause of death is for women under thirty-five?”
Frozen by his tone, I didn’t speak.
“Murder. They’re fucking murdered by their partners. If women ask for help at the wrong time and it comes back to them, they’re murdered. If their abuser goes to jail, he gets out eighteen months later and kills her. There’s never been a good solution to it, because even if a woman is lucky enough to get away from him, he just finds another woman . . . and does the same to her.”
“Then what is the hotline?”
“It’s a service we started about six months ago. You call the number and hit one if it’s an emergency. As in, she’s gonna die in the next couple minutes if help doesn’t get there. That location is broadcast to the entire force, and whoever is closest to that location heads over there. Because the police take forever and will just take him to jail, so the cycle continues. We kill him and make him disappear.”
I was terrified and also deeply impressed.
“They hit two if it’s not an emergency. As in, they’re in an abusive relationship and need help getting out of it. We interview them and review their case, just to make sure their account is true before we ruin someone’s life. And depending on the severity of the situation, we either kill him or we implement our own rehabilitation service.”
“What’s the rehabilitation service?”
He stared me down before he answered. “We treat them exactly the way they treated their victim. Stalk them. Blow up their phone with threatening messages. Show up at their apartment and beat the shit out of them whenever we feel like it. We keep an eye on the victim, and if he goes within a mile of her, we break his nose and his collarbone. And so far, it’s worked pretty damn well. Once their rehabilitation ends, they’ve learned their lesson. In jail, they just sit there and fester in their rage. But in our rehabilitation program, they actually learn.” He grabbed his glass and took a drink before he crossed his arms over his chest. “That’s just this week.”