Page 81 of Worth the Risk

“You’re going to kill us all!” Paulo shouted.

“How does it feel to have the shoe on the other foot,Uncle?” Bella sneered as she bounced and wobbled.

“Get their guns,” Dan ordered her.

Paulo’s was an easy grab, but the driver jerked on the wheel, sending Bella who was between the two front seats flying. She landed in her once-uncle’s lap. Dan had expected tricks, and he held on with an iron grip, snarling in the man’s ear, “If your plan is to kill us, I’ve got a better one. You first.”

Running out of air, the driver let go of the wheel with one hand and gripped his forearm. When he didn’t give an inch and his oxygen supply dwindled, he used both.

With him otherwise occupied, Bella pulled the gun from his waistband. “Got it,” she exclaimed.

“Great, baby. Put his foot on the gas and you’re gonna have to steer fast before we crash.”

She looked up to see what he did. They had crossed the median and were on a collision course with a massive truck that no doubt had MACK emblazoned on the grill.

With a gun in one hand and the wheel in the other, she yanked hard in the opposite direction, but there were cars that way.

“Lay off the gas, Luka. Do you want to die?” she screamed, but he was limp and had passed out.

She tried pulling on his leg while steering and getting nowhere. “He’s dead weight. I can’t—”

Dan resolved this issue by yanking out the headrest, hooking his arms under Luka’s, and dragging the hulk of a man, 300 pounds at least, into the back seat.

Chapter 18

THROUGH THE ONE-WAYglass, Dan watched her perched on the end of the metal chair, looking small and vulnerable behind the large battered table, and scared to death. He frowned at his choice of words, considering what they’d just been through.

At least they hadn’t cuffed her. But she had done nothing wrong and wasn’t being charged. When the police had arrived on the scene, one dead mobster, one unconscious, and an innocent victim who’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time in the cargo hold, not to mention a debris field for miles from a careening out-of-control SUV, Bella had broken down sobbing. Whether from her cover being blown or the trauma she’d just endured, her story came tumbling out. When she started named-dropping Mafia lieutenants and that of the consigliere to the Giordano crime family, they stopped her and brought her to the station for questioning.

When her story seemed too unbelievable to be real, a nearly decades-old murder, a father who wasn’t actually her father whom she suspected was the killer, and how her family hunted her cross-country because she knew something that could bring down Lorenzo Giordano and likely start a gang war, they wouldn’t let her leave until she talked to the feds.

Dan had listened to it all, flanked by Cap and Dex who were there to lock him down if he couldn’t keep his cool. But, with Bella out of immediate danger, the enormity of her situation hit him like a ton of bricks. That she’d stayed a step ahead of them for as long as she had was a miracle. If not for him asking Jonas to dig deeper, they might still be searching for her, and the clusterfuck of a day that left one in their close-knit community dead, another severely injured, and had almost killed two more wouldn’t have happened.

He watched her pull a tissue out of the box and wipe her tear-stained cheeks then blow her nose. Angie, who, like him, used to work at the SAPD until corruption invaded the department, had brought her coffee, which had gone untouched, and a box of Kleenex she was going through quickly. As soon as she tossed one onto the growing pile in the small wastebasket beside her, she reached for another.

Seeing her trembling fingers sent him to his feet and started him pacing.

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