Why He FIGHTS: A Dark Billionaire Romance Series (Why He Sins Book 5) Read online

  There had been so much bad blood between the three boys over the years, especially recently. Crazy Joe had wanted Desmond to preside over the family's businesses once the merger with Stavros had made them legitimate, and Junior had been enraged and heartbroken, feeling as though he and the entire life he'd made for himself in their father's name had been passed over. He'd done all he could to keep the deal from going through. He wanted to keep wallowing in the gangster life, and he wanted to deprive Desmond of his long-sought escape from the bloody and benighted Biros legacy.

  Tensions had been high. Both men had said harsh words to each other.

  But betrayal on this level?

  I doubted Desmond would be able to process it, even when I explained to him thoroughly. He'd loathed Junior, even Peter sometimes, but to believe them capable of murdering their own flesh and blood, just to seize power? If Whitey's bullet didn't kill him, that grim revelation almost certainly would.

  Before Whitey had come along tonight, I had told Desmond that our best bet was to run off somewhere together—some remote place where those who hunted us would never find us, where we could start new lives and finally be our best versions of ourselves.

  Desmond had responded by pointing out that it wouldn't be worth it if we would have to spend the rest of those “new lives” looking over our shoulders. He insisted that the only way to have a chance at a real future together was for him to stay and fight, to find a way to put an end to this once and for all.

  His odds had seemed so frustratingly impossible then.

  Now they were worse.

  Ernesto stood and turned to face me. His shoulders were sloped, and his eyes were so haunted that he looked like he'd aged twenty years since arriving at Desmond's apartment.

  “Is he going to be okay?” I asked, clutching my hands together anxiously.

  “I was able to repair most of the internal damage,” he replied wearily. “Your friend was extremely lucky. The shot nicked his kidney, but thankfully, it missed his large intestine by micrometers. Otherwise, we'd be looking at sepsis and certain death. And since it went out the other side... Well, the exit wound is rough, but I patched it up pretty tight without having to damage more tissue digging around for a bullet. That's the good news.”

  “What's the bad news?” My heart started sinking.

  “He's lost way too much blood. Like, a lot more than he can possibly live without. He needs a transfusion immediately. And I'm guessing you don't happen to know his blood type?”

  I shook my head, my eyes swimming with tears. This couldn't be happening. We couldn't have come this close, only to have him die from blood loss. It was unthinkable.

  He let out a hard sigh. “No, of course you wouldn't. Which means neither of us knows whether our blood type will match his, unless you just happen to be O-negative.”

  Suddenly, my brain lit up like a pinball machine. “Yes!” I exclaimed. “A universal donor, right? I am one! I once heard that during a doctor's appointment when I was in grade school!”

  “Thank Christ for that,” Ernesto breathed, grabbing several vials, a syringe, and a rubber tourniquet from a drawer. “You're about to save Desmond's life, Chelsea.”

  He wrapped the rubber strap around my arm, and I made a fist, feeling the blood collect quickly in my veins. Ernesto swabbed the crook of my forearm and jabbed the needle in, pulling the crimson fluid out of me so rapidly that I started to feel faint almost immediately.

  “So you found out you were O-negative when you were a kid, huh?” Ernesto mentioned, sounding casual. “And you didn't know that right away?”

  “No, I guess I'd forgotten it a long time ago,” I admitted. “Blood type is just one of those things you mean to remember, but instead, it flies right out of your brain the second after you hear it, you know?”

  “That's a shame. If you had bothered to remember something so important, you could have been donating at blood drives all these years and saving God knows how many other lives.”

  I looked up, and his eyes met mine implacably. I felt flustered, suddenly selfish. “You're right. I'm sorry.”

  “You don't need to be sorry,” he said evenly. “But next time you see a sign saying they're looking for blood donors, maybe you can remember this moment and take those few extra minutes to pitch in, huh? You could have a chance to help out a lot of other people's friends.”

  “Point taken,” I responded sheepishly.

  I watched him meticulously pour my blood into Desmond's thirsty veins, one vial after another, hoping with everything inside me that it would be enough... and that all that blood wasn't going in now only to seep out later through a dozen different holes if Junior and Peter caught up with us.

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Two—Desmond

  “No hospitals... promise...”

  They were my words, and the voice was mine. But somehow, they seemed utterly detached, as though they were floating in a distant void somewhere far outside our solar system. They hung there, hopelessly beyond my reach, hanging and bobbing and mocking me in the airless vacuum.

  I tried to chase after them, strangely convinced that if I could just get my hands around them, reconnect with them, reclaim them, everything would miraculously make sense. The breath would fill my lungs again, comforting and familiar, and I could communicate and make myself understood once more. I could inhale that sweet air and form words to ask where I was, what had happened to me.

  I didn't know if there would be anyone there to answer, but I had to try.

  I flailed my arms and legs, pinwheeling them to propel myself forward. But I remained in place. I couldn't even see my limbs. Did they exist? Did I? Or was I something less substantial now, just a faint and ghostlike memory of a man, hovering, waiting to pass on to something deeper and darker and more final?

  Who had I been speaking to, anyway? “No hospitals... promise...” Who had those last words been directed at? Who had I been pleading with so fervently? Maybe, if I could just answer that crucial question, it would unlock the first of many doors that would lead me out of oblivion and back to myself.

  Chelsea.

  A hundred gold and gleaming memories—a thousand, a million—all spilled out happily at the thought of her name, like beautiful blooms tumbling from a dropped flower basket. Running across the grounds of the Biros family estate together as children. Picnic lunches and games of tag. Fingers sticky from popsicles. Upper lips sweaty from the summer sun. Endless questions about the shapes of the clouds in the sky, the names of the bugs in the grass, and what we wanted to be when we grew up.

  And then the day she was gone, and the years that grew darker and darker as they followed, devoid of the light she had brought to my life for so many years. No more Chelsea to anchor me to a world that was bright and warm and safe and normal, a world where people's fathers didn't routinely commit grand theft and torture and arson and murder. No more Chelsea to show me that life could be so much more than the penetrating, achingly lonely shadows and secrecy of organized crime.

  Year after year of doing things that I wished I could forget and quickly becoming someone I couldn't recognize anymore.

  Chelsea's unexpected return had once more put me in touch with the person I used to be, the one I never believed I could find my way back to no matter how hard I tried. She made me see that I wasn't lost, that I wasn't beyond salvation. No matter how many ugly things I'd done in my father's name since then, we could have a second chance, a way to find out how things might have been if we'd been allowed to remain in each other's lives instead of being so cruelly separated.

  Not only that, but we could be more to each other now. We could be lovers. Soul mates. In a world where we had been reunited against all conceivable odds, anything was possible, wasn't it?

  So why weren't we in each other's arms right now?

  What had gotten in our way again?

  I kept trying to shove my mind in the direction of these questions, hoping it would come back with answers. Instea
d, it spun away before it even had a chance to connect, as though it simply refused to get so close to the truth. Did I already know what had happened? Were the answers so horrible that my brain was trying to protect me by preventing me from reaching them?

  I didn't know. I only knew that the space I was floating in was getting colder—the chill was so deep that I was practically numb from the waist down. Chelsea was the summer sun from all of those years ago, and I had to get closer to her so I could be warmed by her rays and feel my body again.

  Once again, I tried to move through the void, to close the distance between us.

  But I couldn't.

  Something was holding me in place. Something in my midsection.

  I looked down, prepared to see that I had no midsection, that every part of myself had faded into something invisible and abstract. What I saw instead was worse.

  There was a vast, yawning chasm where my abdomen used to be, whistling and howling and twisting into the crackling chaos of infinity. It was a black hole like the kind I'd seen in documentaries on TV about the mysteries of the cosmos. Gazing into its hellish and eternal maw, I saw familiar shapes coalescing—the faces of my father, Junior, Peter, all the hired guns who had worked for us, every creep and tough guy I'd ever shaken hands with.

  They were holding me firmly in place with their combined strength. They didn't speak with their mouths, but I could hear their voices echoing inside my head.

  You will never escape us. We will kill you before we ever let you go.

  My eyes snapped open, and when I gasped, my entire torso hurt like someone had dropped a truckload of concrete blocks on it. I looked around, trying to focus—I was in an apartment but not one I recognized. Chelsea was staring down at me with tears in her eyes, and an Asian guy, who looked like he was about our age, was standing next to her, his expression unreadable.

  I started to sit up, and the pain hissed and sizzled through my stomach again like a popped flare.

  “Don't try to move yet,” the man said. “Give your stitches a little while longer to heal. There are quite a lot of them.”

  I looked down gingerly and saw a large square bandage a few inches away from my bellybutton. A spot of blood roughly the size of a quarter had already gathered in the center.

  Whitey, I remembered. I turned my back on him, just for a second, to let him in. The next thing I knew, he'd shot me in the back and he was trying to kill Chelsea. Even though just a week earlier, he'd been guarding her for me while I went to the ill-fated warehouse meeting with the Azzarellos. The one where Junior and Peter mowed them all down and started a war.

  But I'd known Whitey for over ten years. He'd always been loyal to my brothers and me. So why the hell would he turn on the family now?

  “Whitey was under orders from Junior and Peter,” Chelsea said quietly, as though she'd been reading my thoughts. “They sent him to kill us, Des.”

  I shook my head. It weighed about as much as a bowling ball on my shoulders, and I was suddenly acutely aware of how weak I felt. None of what Chelsea had just said made any sense to me. How much blood had I lost? “He wouldn't... must have been... working for someone else...”

  Chelsea crouched next to me, taking my hand in hers softly. The warmth from her spread all through me, filling me completely, and I clung to her tightly. It was such a comfort to be in the real world with her again, able to reach out and feel her, instead of suspended in that numbing purgatory from before I woke up. Now that I had her firmly, I never wanted to let go.

  “I know how hard this is going to be for you to accept,” she whispered. “It's hard for me too. But it's the only answer that makes sense. Who else could have gotten past your family's guards at the hospital so easily, Des? And why didn't Junior let anyone else down in the basement with him when he was questioning those men about who killed your father? He came back upstairs with the answer he wanted everyone to believe, so he and Peter could declare war and seize control of the Biros organization.”

  “He wouldn't,” I slurred, my mind whirling. “Not Dad. He wouldn't have killed Dad.”

  “I didn't want to believe it, either,” she pressed on. “I know how terrible it sounds but think of how upset he was when Joe said you were going to take over for him. Think about how opposed he was to the Stavros merger, how determined he was to cling to the gangster life no matter what. And who would be right next to him every step of the way, huh? Who doesn't even tie his own shoes in the morning without Junior's approval? Peter, that's who. Face it, Des—your brothers have been behind this the entire time. They're coming after us.”

  I tried to picture that. I had hated Junior for most of my life, but in my own way, I'd still loved him too. Wasn't that how things went with siblings? You could fight all the time, despise each other on pretty much every level, but at the end of the day, you knew that you'd have one another's backs when bad shit went down and you needed to really rely on each other. That was a bedrock principle of life, unchangeable and undeniable.

  And yet, deep in my core, I knew that Chelsea wouldn't be telling me this unless she were sure, unless she had thoroughly exhausted every other possibility in that agile mind of hers and come to this conclusion.

  More than that, I knew that Junior was capable of it.

  I didn't want to know—in point of fact, I realized now, I had never wanted to know. I'd seen more than enough proof over our shared lifetimes to know that my brothers were capable of sudden and dangerous bouts of homicidal psychosis. I had seen it too many times. An offhand shove, a perceived insult, a piece of bad news from the wrong source, and their eyes would roll over as black and soulless as a doll's eyes seconds before they visited their savage wrath on the objects of their ire.

  They were unhinged criminals. Dangerous and unstable men.

  But there was always the part of me that stubbornly insisted that those moods and outbursts of theirs were reserved strictly for other people, that no matter how angry they got at me, they'd never go to that same dark and brutal place they saved for their true enemies. If anything, I had sometimes felt protected by their capacity for violence, believing they would only ever use it to shield me from those who would harm me.

  I felt so dumb. Like the owner of some lethally wild exotic pet—a tiger, maybe, or a python—who is stupidly positive that it will only ever use its claws and fangs on intruders and not, someday, its captor.

  “Junior,” I croaked airlessly. “Peter. Jesus.”

  “I'm so sorry, Des,” Chelsea cooed softly.

  I tried to take a deep breath, but once again, the pain shredded my insides with a thousand talons. “Where the hell are we?”

  “My place,” the man said. “My name's Ernesto. I'm a nurse. Chelsea and I met on the plane from New York, and I gave her my number—something I'll obviously regret for the rest of my life.”

  I managed a wheezing chuckle. “Hey, I get it, pal. You'd have to be blind or an idiot not to give your phone number to a woman this beautiful.”

  Chelsea blushed slightly, but Ernesto rolled his eyes. “You forgot Option C. Actually, I invited her for a drink so we could talk some more about you. From everything she told me, you sounded like quite a fascinating character. If I'd known how fascinating, I probably would have dropped it and watched the in-flight movie instead.”

  “How long have we been here?” I demanded. “Did anyone see us? Follow us?”

  “You've been here for a day and a half,” Ernesto replied. “I had to find someone to cover my shift at the hospital, so thanks for that.”

  I nodded slowly. “A day and a half. Good. So if they'd followed us, we'd know for sure because they'd have made their move by now.”

  “I can't tell you how much knowing that comforts me,” he answered dryly. “But even so, now that you're conscious, you two need to start making plans to get the hell out of here as soon as possible so I can call the police and report my role in all this. Sorry to rush you, but every minute you stay here is another minute I'm not report
ing my connection to the dead body they probably found in your apartment the other night, which is another minute that makes me look guiltier.”

  “Ernesto, look, I'm sorry we've caused you so much trouble,” Chelsea began, “and I know you must be extremely pissed off. I'll never be able to repay you, and I'm sorry for that, too... but please, you can't just kick us out! Not while he's like this!”

  “He can,” I coughed, tasting the sickly salt tang of copper at the back of my throat. Dried blood. “And he's right to. Just because they haven't caught up with us here doesn't mean they won't eventually. Every moment we hang around puts this guy in danger.” I jerked a thumb at Ernesto. “He's risked enough for us already. He shouldn't be in the crossfire any longer. Especially if we really are up against hardened maniacs like Junior and Peter. We need to keep moving so they won't find us.”

  “I couldn't agree more,” Ernesto said. He tilted his head, looking at Desmond more closely. “So let me see if I have this straight. You are one of these infamous Biros brothers I've heard about on the news. The gangsters.”

  I wanted to split hairs—to tell him that my brothers were the gangsters, not me, that all I had ever wanted was to legitimize the family business and leave all that criminal garbage behind forever—but instead, I nodded wearily. What was the point? All those laws I had broken over the years, all the people I had hurt... Had all my lofty wishes mattered then?

  And what good were they now, knowing that the Stavros deal was never going to happen? That the last, best hope for my father's dream of cleaning up the Biros name was ruined permanently? The shareholders probably weren't willing to even consider the merger anymore with news of the Biros-Azzarello turf war making headlines each day.

  “And your family,” Ernesto went on, “they're the ones who are shooting it out in the streets with these other people, these Azzarello thugs?”