Page 21 of Dimitri
Do I feel bad about what happened to Eddie? Yeah, in a way. I’m more remorseful for his family than him. They have nothing going for them and will most likely never get off welfare, but they didn’t deserve to lose their son the way they did.
I reached out to them a couple of weeks ago to offer my sympathies. When I got an automated message saying their number is no longer in service, I sent them a letter instead. Having their services cut is nothing out of the ordinary for the Cordovas.
“Are you ready?”
Ignoring the apprehension swishing in my stomach, I raise my eyes to my rock the past three months. My best friend, Estelle, grew up in the housing estate next to my nanna’s ranch. With my grandparents refusing to sell no matter how elaborate the offer, housing developments popped up all around them. Now they have the only ten-acre block left in this area of Erkinsvale.
The executor in charge of my grandparents’ will said I could make an impressive profit if I were willing to sell their decades of hard work. Sadly for him and his commission-seeking cousin, I missed my nanna’s funeral because I was in a coma, so the last thing I’ll ever do is see her legacy bulldozed.
She loved and took care of me when no one else would. Then she died alone.
I can’t forgive myself for that.
The injuries that placed me in a coma for a month weren’t my fault, but I do blame them for my nanna’s death. She had told me time and time again that Eddie was no good. If I had listened, she wouldn’t have been out searching for me when I failed to make curfew, and then she wouldn’t have been knocked down a ravine by a drunk driver.
Mistaking my remorseful face as sympathy for Eddie, Estelle says, “Don’t look so glum, Roxie. You survived for a reason.” I roll my eyes when she chuckles out, “We just need to find out why that is.” That’s just like her. Even when we should be blowing snot bubbles out of our nose while in the throes of despair, she finds humor in every situation.
When I take a right out of the hospital room I’ve called my home the past three months, Estelle wraps her arm around my shoulders. “Nu-uh. Claudia isn’t there anymore, remember?”
My sigh is soundless, but Estelle still hears it. My ex-roommate wasn’t as lucky as me. Even with numerous witnesses saying they saw Claudia’s boyfriend’s hand on the steering wheel in the lead up to their crash, prosecutors pushed forward with their case. Claudia will give birth to her son in prison since she was served three years for involuntary manslaughter last week.
“We could visit her next weekend?”
I raise my eyes to my best friend, loving that she can read me like no one else. “Yeah?”
She bumps me with her hip, causing me to smile. “Yeah. You know me, always open for a three-hour drive to a maximum-security women’s prison.”
“How could you not when you say it like that?”
Laughing, she breaks away from my side to open the passenger side door of her beat-up Honda for me. Her car is a total write-off, but she loves it as much as she loves me. Nothing screams freedom like your own set of wheels. I’m hoping to scrounge up enough money for my own sometime this year.
“Your chariot awaits, m’lady,” she says, all pompous like.
Giggling about my immature tongue poke, Estelle races around to the driver’s side door. Because I forever admire her animalist grace, my eyes follow her trek partway around. My stare is incomplete because I’m looking at a pimped-out Range Rover parked across from the passenger loading bay. It’s not often you see flashy cars like that in Erkinsvale, and very rarely is there a pair of piercing blue eyes glancing out of the crack in the driver’s side window.
“Roxie…” Estelle stammers out in confusion when I hotfoot it across the street without checking for traffic.
I almost get wiped out by a car traveling in the opposite direction. The whoosh of its outdated metal whizzing past my face is strong enough to add an extra hobble to my shaking strides, but it isn’t to slow me down.
“Hey.” I race faster when the engine of the Range Rover fires up. “Wait!”
It darts out of its parking space so quickly, the smell of burning rubber lingers in my nostrils long after it rockets out of the hospital’s parking lot.
“Who the hell was that?” Estelle asks, out of breath. She isn’t gasping because she followed my sprint. She runs miles every single day. She’s as breathless about the eerie unease ridding the air of oxygen as me.
There’s only one time I’ve felt this restless. It was when I was in the alleyway with Eddie. Not the time he ran me over, but three months earlier, when he brought me to ecstasy under the watchful stare of a pair of vividly beautiful blue eyes.
The pair that just rocketed away were nowhere near as engrossing as the ones that stared at me almost seven months ago today, but they were most certainly just as dangerous.
The knowledge shouldn’t excite me, but for some reason, it does.
Chapter Ten
Dimitri
When Rocco places down his phone to make a quick getaway, I drag the timer on his live feed back a couple of seconds. I don’t want the image of Roxanne Juniper Grace when she spotted Rocco’s gawk half a block down from her apartment building, I want her reflection in the side mirror of the Range Rover Rocco’s manning at my command when she chases him down like she did outside the hospital three months ago. The second in time when her big green eyes are wide and unconcealed.
Restless edginess thickens my cock when I find the footage I’m seeking, which is utterly ridiculous considering I’m in a boardroom with thirty of my father’s closest confidants. He believes I’m in Sicily strengthening foreign ties. I’m here because it’s the last confirmed place the tracker on Rimi’s private jet was pinged. The Castros are either here, holed up at an unknown location, waiting for the heat to die down after their operation killed thirteen FBI agents and two CIA officers, or they took a secondary jet to another location.
