Page 2 of Beautiful Sinner

He claps his hand on my shoulder. “You’re my best friend. I could use you to gain more power but I don’t want to. There’s enough Mafia men and women to force into marriages. You don’t need to be one.”

“Perks of being friends with the boss, I guess.”

“You have that right.” He nods at the van. “Now, let’s check out these guns. Make sure they’re all there.” Dante whistles and the driver pokes his head out of the window.

“You can open the back,” he tells us.

“He doesn’t want to get out of the damn van,” Dante mutters as he pulls open the large back door.

“It’s not exactly safe. Some of the other drivers have been killed. He’s just trying to be careful.”

“I’m putting my life on the line here. He should do the same.”

I smile with a shake of my head. “Not everyone is as courageous as you are, Dante.”

“Why do you say it like that?” His eyes move over the boxes of guns. There are at least fifty of them.

“Like what?”

“Like being courageous is a bad thing.”

“It’s not. It’s just… you’ve done some pretty reckless things in the past. Not everyone is like that. I can’t blame them for that.”

He sighs. “If you say so.” He climbs into the back and opens the first box. “Come count these for me.” He’s already moving into the second box by the time I climb into the back of the van.

All the guns are there in the first box. All twenty of them. All machine gun rifles.

Powerful guns. Easy to kill a large crowd of people with. I shudder at the thought. I may have killed my fair share of people in my life but it’s never something I took glee in. I’ve always hated killing but the life I grew up in demanded I do it. Unlike Finn or his brother Aiden who both chose to be hitmen, I recoiled from murder. I prefer being Dante’s second in command and giving out orders and checking supplies and making sure our operation is running smoothly instead of killing people.

I will kill if it means saving my own life or the lives of the people I care about. But other than Dante, I don’t have many people I care about.

The image of my mom enters my mind. Her short brown hair, so similar to mine. Her wide dark eyes that I see whenever I look into a mirror. Her olive skin turning pale when she…

No. Don’t even go there.

Thinking of my mom never ends well.

It doesn’t help that my features are so similar to hers. It only makes it harder to forget about what happened to her.

I check half the boxes of guns while Dante does the rest. “All there.”

He nods. “Same for me.” He jumps out of the van and raps his hand on the side of it. “All good. Make sure these get to the city.”

When I jump down next to him, Dante leans closer to me and murmurs, “We’re going to follow just in case. If Viktor gets his hands on these guns…”

“I know.”

It dawns on me then just how quiet everything is. The road were on – no other cars. The trees around us – no people.

Something doesn’t feel right.

“You feel it too?” Dante asks me and I nod. We’ve always been fairly in sync with each other. “Let’s get back to the car.” Dante has bulletproof glass on every car he owns. His entire house is riddled with it.

We slowly head to the car with our guns drawn. If anyone is going to attack it’s –

A grenade lands right by my feet. Acting on instinct, I kick it towards the tree line from where it came and watch as the tree goes up in a large explosion. I hear the sound of a scream before everything goes quiet again.

But that’s when multiple men come running out of the tree line, shooting at us.

---