It was the best option.

“We’re going to leave,” I said definitively.

* * *

Lia was pissed.

I couldn’t really blame her.  I’d told her basically nothing but demanded she put a few days’ worth of clothes in a bag and just follow me.  I didn’t want Odin left on his own—the woman who usually took care of him when I was out of town worked for Moretti, and I didn’t want to risk anything coming out while we were gone, so I tossed him on top of a towel in the back of the car and took him to a dog-boarding kennel.  I’d come back for him later.

I drove my Audi up to the north side of the city and parked it outside a nightclub.  Grabbing our bags out of the back of the car, I led a protesting Lia through the front entrance of the club, through the throbbing techno music, and then out the back door.  Once out back, we made our way down a graffiti-covered alley between the buildings, across the street, and over to a small conference center where I called a cab to take us back south.

I gave the driver an address, and he turned around to look at me.

“That ain’t no place to be,” he said.

“Look,” I replied, “I don’t have a shitload of patience right now, so here’s how this shit works.  You drive me where I say, and I give you cash.  Capisce?”

He narrowed his eyes, said he was charging me double, and then made me pay up front before he’d drive us there.  Under other circumstances, I would have put a gun to his head and told him to be happy if he got paid at all, but I had Lia with me, and I was doing my best not to scare her.

A pissed-off Lia was definitely preferable to a scared one.  As it was, she had completely stopped speaking to me about halfway to where I ditched the car, and she continued to sit next to me, looking out the window with her arms crossed over her chest and her lips smashed tightly together.

I took a long breath and leaned back in the seat to relax a few minutes.  I was rushing all of this, and I knew I hadn’t thought through everything.  Not telling Lia why we were leaving was part of the problem as she was fighting me the whole way, but there was a lot more to it.

I knew deep down that Trent wasn’t going to just let this shit go.  He wouldn’t just come after me; it would end up being a countrywide manhunt.  Any chance of having the charges against me dropped would disappear completely, and he’d probably come up with a few others to tack on.  At best, we would have to live on the run, leave the country, and change our names.

No doubt about it—I wasn’t thinking straight.

Why?

Because Lia was with me, and I didn’t want her scared or hurt.

Rinaldo had been right—having a chick in your life complicated everything.  It wasn’t worth it—not for me or for her.  What I really needed to do was just take her to the airport so I could buy her a plane ticket back to her mom’s.

The very thought brought the taste of bile to the back of my throat.  If I wasn’t doing my very best thinking now, how much more rattled would I be if I hadn’t slept last night?

Fuck the sleep.

Waking up with her—that had been worth the world to me.

My eyes squeezed shut, and I shook my head sharply.  I couldn’t cope with all this shit.  I couldn’t even have named all the conflicting thoughts and emotions going on inside my head, let alone make sense of them.  It was too complicated.  It was too dangerous for both of us.  I should definitely tell the cab driver to head west and buy her a plane ticket.

I didn’t say a word but stared out the opposite window and hoped I’d be able to come up with some way of explaining all of this that didn’t end up with her leaving me.

Chicago has some really beautiful areas to live in.  Auburn Gresham isn’t one of them.  Though it was one of the roughest places in a city littered with crime, it was exactly what I needed for the moment. Not only would it be difficult for the Feds to follow me around the area, but they'd also have to watch their own backs at the same time.

The cab driver took his own sweet time getting there, and by the time we’d arrived near the address I’d given him, the sky was darkening.  He dumped us on the corner, refusing to actually go up the block at night.  I was tired of listening to the guy bitch, so I just got out where we were, Lia still in tow.

“Are you going to tell me what the fuck is going on?” Lia asked as the cab sped away.

“Not out here on the street,” I replied.

We only had about two blocks to walk, but that’s all it took.

Two dudes with hooded sweatshirts pulled down their foreheads and pants shagged down to show their striped boxers came at us from across the street.  I felt Lia tense beside me, but I was nothing but annoyed.

“I got me a damn fine idea,” the guy on the left said as he walked up and blocked our path.  I reached out and pushed Lia slightly behind my back.  “You give me all yo shit, and maybe my frien’ don’t cut yo bitch.”

He reached down to yank up his pants and glanced over at his younger buddy.  The other guy brandished a switchblade, which might have been scary to someone who hadn’t been around much larger knives. The knife-wielder moved his head back and forth like he was listening to some kind of phantom dance music.  Other days I might have laughed, but I wasn’t in the mood for stupid gang shit.  Moretti and Greco’s outfits had put them in their place plenty of times, and I was happy to do it again.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and centered myself before speaking.

“I’ve got a better idea,” I told him.  “You turn around and go back to the slimy cunt you crawled out of, and I won’t blow your dick off and shove it into the sewer.  I’m pretty sure this particular sewer flows right up to the river.   You know the river, right?  It’s where all of us who own your sorry asses work.”

The older guy’s eyes opened wide, but the younger one just looked pissed.

“I think fuckin’ you up would be a lesson you don’t soon forgit!” he sneered.

“Evan,” Lia whispered as her hand gripped my bicep, “just give them what they want.  It’s okay.”

“Fuck that,” I spat.  “I’ll give them what they fucking deserve.”

“You need to listen to yo bitch,” the kid with the knife started to say as the other one tried to stop him.

It was too late, though.  I’d already had enough.

I pulled my Beretta out, pointed it between the younger kid’s eyes, and flicked the safety off.  I could hear Lia’s quiet gasp and watched the younger guy as he started to take a step back.  He seemed confused for a moment, and I thought he might actually be stupid enough to take a stab at me.

“Go ahead, you piece of shit,” I said calmly.  My eyes stayed locked with his.  “Take a swing.  I’ll make sure my bullet doesn’t hit you fatally so you can watch me castrate you with that piece of shit blade.  Dick to throat, I’ll show you what a cut really looks like, and then I’ll slam my fist through your ribcage and fuck the hole I made.  What do you think of that?”

There was a long moment of silence as the kid’s eyes got bigger and bigger.  He didn’t seem able to move or speak.

“We cool,” the older one finally said as he cleared his throat and took a step back.  He smacked his friend on the arm with the back of his hand.  “Come on and let these nice folks git on wid der business.”

They backed up slowly until they were a good twenty feet away, then turned around and quickly made their way back across the street toward some nasty-looking liquor store.  I took a calming breath and turned to face an ashen Lia.

“Come on,” I said quietly.  “Let’s get inside before any other trash wanders up, okay?”

She could only nod dumbly.

“You fuckin’ mo-ron,” the older guy was saying as the pair reached the other side of the street, “don’t you know who dat is?”

I grabbed Lia by the arm and headed for the motel entrance before the gang-bangers started yelling out parts of my resume for everyone to hear.  She’d already seen and heard enough from my own mouth.  It wasn’t something I wanted her to see, but I wasn’t about to risk her getting hurt.  Demonstrating exactly who I was ensured her safety.

They knew better than to mess with the mafia.  We’d put them in their place before, and we’d do it again.  Even though I was in their territory, they still knew power when they saw it.

Lia didn’t say a word until after we’d checked into the motel, found the right door, and hauled our bags inside.

“Are you going to explain that to me?” Lia asked quietly as she sat down on the end of the bed.

“Explain what?”

“For fuck’s sake!”  Lia stood up and put her hands on her hips as she glared at me.  “Explain all of this shit!  What are we doing here, and where are we going?  What the hell was that testosterone display outside?  Where the fuck did that gun come from?”

“I wasn’t going to let them mug us,” I said with a shrug.  “This isn’t a great neighborhood, so I was prepared to deal with it.  I was in the Marines, so yeah—I have a gun.”

“Don’t you bullshit me,” she snapped.  “That was hardly a little display of self-defense.  I am not stupid, and I’m not blind!”

I sighed and dropped my ass to the edge of the little desk and looked her in the eyes.  I knew immediately that she wasn’t buying any of this shit and that holding off on answering her questions wasn’t going to work much longer.

“That guy out there—he knew who you were.”

I rolled my eyes.

“How did he know you, Evan?”

I didn’t respond.  I didn’t even look at her.

I really didn’t know what to say.

“Fuck this,” she snapped.  She stood up, grabbed her bag, and headed to the door.

Moving quickly, I stood between her and the door and placed my hands on her shoulders.

“You can’t leave,” I said.

“Like hell I can’t!” she retorted.  “Am I a prisoner or something?  Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, but it’s not safe for you in this area by yourself.  You might have noticed that already.”

Her eyes tried to burn little holes in my forehead.

“I think I’ll be fine,” she said.  “I think all I have to do is tell anyone who tries to fuck with me that I’m Evan Arden’s girlfriend, and they’d just leave me alone, wouldn’t they?  Or do you have some code name I should use instead?”

Fuck.

She kept telling me she wasn’t stupid, and she was right.  I still hadn’t given her enough credit though.  She kept catching me off guard with her ability to infer the relationship between my words and the actions of others.  Maybe I was just used to chicks who knew enough about what was going on to turn a blind eye to their surroundings, and Lia didn’t fit into that category.  She was trying to figure this shit out, and she knew how to put the pieces together.

It wasn’t helping.

Lia must have tired of me staring at her and tried to push past me again.  I wouldn’t let her, and she glared nuclear bombs at me from her irises.

“Get out of my way,” she growled.

“I can’t,” I replied with a shake of my head.

“You won’t,” she snapped back.  “That isn’t the same.  I’ve already gotten rid of one dickhead who spent a lot of time controlling me, Evan.  I didn’t do that just to pick up another one.”

“Lia, I can’t let you go out there.  It’s dark and it’s the fucking murder capital of the world out that door.  You are not going out there!”

“Bullshit.”

“You want me to bring it up on the fucking internet?  You go look up this neighborhood!”

She paused for a moment and glanced from me to the door and back again.  She took a breath and clenched her teeth together.  The tension in her arms and legs told me exactly what she was thinking: one, she didn’t believe me, and two, she was considering punching me right in the face to get by.

There was an asshole inside of me who wanted to tell her to just fucking go and leave her on her own.  She was making all of this too difficult, and I didn’t have the time to fuck around with it.  It was the same part of me that took over when I fixed my scope between someone’s eyes and pulled back on the trigger.  That part of me, however, apparently wasn’t in control.

“I need you,” I said quietly.

“What?  So you can sleep?”

It was snarky and sarcastic, and I deserved it.

“Yes, but not just that.”

Her look softened, and she dropped her hands from her hips.

“I mean it,” I said with a softer tone.  “I can’t let you go out there by yourself.  Fuck, I shouldn’t be out there, but it was the best option for now.  In the morning…”