Page 50 of Reacher
“Wait until she finds out that’s what they called her. She’ll go nuts.”
He wasn’t wrong, she’d go fucking nuts. We had the heads up from the prospects on the gate a few minutes later, when they let the mafia guys through with my old lady.
We met them downstairs, and I was horrified to see her over a guy’s shoulder as he carried her inside, and she was silent. Why wasn’t she yelling, kicking, and fighting him? My woman was all about sass, and being a pain in everyone’s ass.
“What the fuck did you do to her?”
I forcibly removed her from his shoulder, and held her against me. She was out cold.Motherfuckers.
Stitch called ahead to warn the doc that we were on our way, and I carried her up to his infirmary, laying her carefully on the bed he pointed to. Now that I could focus on her, I could see she had the beginnings of a bruise on her face, a cut lip, and a bad cut on the side of her head.
As the doc started tending to her, I turned to the two mafia bastards who’d followed us up here.
“Which one of you did that to her?” My voice was low, cold, and dangerous as fuck. They’d hurt my old lady, and I’d kill the culprit with my bare hands.
The first guy, who had a matching cut on his own lip, held his hands up.
“We tried to take her peacefully, but the bitch kept fighting us.”
My fist hit his face before I even realised what was happening, and he crashed back against the wall, half landing on one of the chairs, before he fell sideways onto the floor. The other guy made a move at me, and I raised my fist again.
“Wait! Wait. Look, we’re sorry. She wasn’t afraid of the gun, so we had to subdue her. We were just doing what we were asked; bring the bitch in. We did our job.”
I lunged forward, gripping his throat in my hands, as I forcibly guided him back against the door.
“Call my old lady a bitch one more fucking time, and I’ll show the doc my surgery skills by removing your fucking lungs for you. You hear me?”
He cursed, grabbing at my hands, and trying to peel my fingers from his throat.
“Jesus. You’re a psycho, man. She was attacking us, and we had to stop her, or she’d have got away. Our instructions were to bring her in.By any means possible.”
Jesus. Surely that wasn’t what Stitch had said to Massimo fucking Rossi, and as a result of his ‘interpretation’ of that request, Ally was now beaten and unconscious.
“Which one of you fucking punched her?”
The guy in my hands paled. “It was just a backhand, that’s all.” I slammed him back against the door.
“It’s acceptable in your world to harm women? To aim guns at them?”
The guy stared at me, not even trying to fight back.
“Listen, man, she was savage. She was out of control, and I did what I had to do to keep her contained.”
“The bruise on her head suggests you struck her more than once, asshole.”
He glanced at his friend, who was still dabbing at his cut lip, the new damage that I’d caused on top of what my old lady did to him.
“Tell him, boss.”
The guy he called ‘boss’ shrugged. “We were sent to extract her, and we did. She got testy, and we had to subdue her. You have her back.Again, we did our fucking job.”
“Your job was never to harm my fucking old lady.”
“Pres, maybe we should just let them get the hell out of here, so you can look after Alicia.”
Stitch tried his best to calm me, but my blood was boiling in my veins. These two bastards had put their hands on my oldlady, and they’d die for it. They’d suffer for every single mark on her skin.
“Come on, man. We did what we were sent to do.”
