Page 38 of Rent a Mob Boss

Tristan puts a hand on my arm, which I didn’t realize until now was shaking slightly. “Let the first team clear the bay. Thirty seconds. Then we go in.”

“I’m going in first.”

“You’re going in with me.” His hand doesn’t move. Neither do his eyes. “Not first. With me. You go in there alone and angry, and you’re dead. Then your daughter has no father, and your girl has no one. You go with me, Dorian.”

I hate him for being right. I hate that he’s always right, and I hate that he’s the only person in my life who talks to me like this. I hate that I need it. “With you,” I growl.

The first team moves. I watch as they cross the street—silent, low, four men who know what they’re doing because I trained them to do it. They reach the loading bay, and there’s a sound like a held breath being released. Then they’re inside, and there’s shouting.

Then there isn’t.

Tristan nods. We go.

The warehouse floor is concrete, open, stacked with crates along the walls. Two of the Castellano men are already down—not dead, but restrained, with their faces against the concrete. Three more are backed against the far wall with their hands up and guns on them. My men move through the space with the controlled efficiency of people who’ve done this before—clearing corners, checking behind crates, calling clear.

I’m not looking at any of them.

I’m looking at the office on the second floor, where the light is, where the door is closed. Where my daughter has to be.

I take the stairs two at a time with Tristan beside me. We reach the door. I don’t knock. I put my shoulder into it, and the lock gives, and inside⁠—

Quinn is on the floor against the far wall with Lillie in her lap, her wrists zip-tied in front of her. Her face is pale, and her eyes are huge. When she sees me, something collapses in her expression. Relief and fury, and terror, all at once, hitting her face like a storm.

Lillie looks up. “Daddy!”

Between me and them, standing in the middle of the room with a gun raised, is a man I don’t know. Castellano crew—young, dark-haired, sweating. He aims the gun at my chest with the unsteady grip of someone who didn’t expect this to go sideways.

“Stop,” he says. “Stop right there, Moretti, or I⁠—”

“Daddy, that man is mean!” Lillie announces from the floor, in the same tone she uses to report that Poptart ate her snack. “He wouldn’t answer any of my questions.”

“Shh,” Quinn whispers, holding her closer. “That’s enough.”

I glance their way and lift my hand slightly, signaling for silence, that everything is under control now. “We’re going to settle this like men,” I murmur, training my gaze on the kid with the gun. “The girls don’t need to be involved. Do they?”

His tongue darts over his lips. A nervous gesture. Sweat rolls from his temple down a cheek that looks so smooth, I wonder if he’s old enough to shave. “You’re not calling the shots here, Moretti,” he reminds me in a voice so deep, I know it’s put-on. “Keep your mouth shut.”

“Don’t talk to my daddy like that,” Lillie warns fiercely.

The man’s eyes flick to her. Just for a second, the involuntary glance of a person who cannot believe this child is still speaking. Lillie, my daughter, my five-year-old, who is sitting on the floor in strawberry socks with no shoes, draws her leg back and kicks him in the shin with every ounce of force her small body contains.

He stumbles. The gun dips.

That is all I need.

I cross the distance in two steps, and my hand closes around his wrist. I twist, and the gun comes free while my other hand finds his throat. I push him against the wall so hard the plaster cracks behind his head. He makes a sound. I don’t care what the sound is. I’m looking at his face, and I’m seeing every minute my daughter spent in this room, every second Quinn sat on that floor with her hands tied. The thing inside me that I set down at the front door of my house every night is fully, completely awake, and it wants only one thing. There is only one outcome that makes any sense.

“Dorian.” Tristan’s voice behind me. Like my conscience in human form. It’s quiet but firm. “Not in front of the girls.”

I hold him against the wall for three more seconds before dropping him. Tristan’s men take him while I turn around. My daughter is running toward me with her arms out, and I catch her the way Quinn always catches her. She buries her face in my neck. “I knew you would come,” she whispers. “I told Quinn you would.”

Quinn is still on the floor. She’s looking at me with eyes I can’t read—there are too many things happening behind them all at once. Tristan crouches beside her and cuts the zip ties with a knife. She rubs her wrists, but otherwise she doesn’t move.

I carry Lillie to her and kneel down. For a long moment, the three of us are on the floor of a warehouse office, and no one says anything. I can’t leave with them, not yet. It would mean letting go long enough to move out of here, and there’s no hope of that for at least a few minutes while I hold them and breathe.

The car ride home is quiet. Lillie is out. Deep, total, the sleep of a kid who has been through something enormous and processed it by talking nonstop for forty-five minutes before shutting down completely. She’s curled in Quinn’s lap in the back seat, her strawberry socks tucked underneath her.

Quinn hasn’t spoken since we left the warehouse. Her face is unreadable. I wait until Lillie is in her bed—the blanket tucked, the locket still around her neck, its small gold weight rising and falling with her breathing. Do I give her a few extra kisses before closing the door? What man in his right mind wouldn’t?