Trapped in his End Game (Series)

He approaches me, his hand shaking-his whole body trembling. “When Jack finds out, he’ll want you dead.”

“It’s not my fault!” I scream. “I was just trying to stall them until I figured out what to do.”

Joe’s menacing face sneers at me, looking just as threatening as the man he just shot. “Stay put. I need to get my car.”

He turns his back on me and walks towards his car, and then a switch flips inside me.

Full, blown panic screaming inside my head.

He will kill you. He will kill you. Run! RUN!

Ignoring the pain in my ankle, I run as fast as I can, stumbling into cars as I head for-what? The casino? The airport? There’s nothing around the immediate area. All I know is the adrenaline racing in my veins, telling me to get out of there, get out of there, get out of there, get out of there.

Screaming tires and metal slide in front of me, and Joe’s ominous face pops out. I run around the car, and hear the door opening and slamming shut.

No!

Terrified, screaming, I sprint away from him, but he’s only seconds behind. Then he grabs me. He grabs me so painfully that I forget who he is, and I fight him furiously. “LET ME GO!”

He smothers my screams with his large hand, which I bite hard. He grunts and twists my arm around my back. Excruciating pain sears up my arm like an exposed nerve, and then Joe’s gruff voice is at my ear.

“I can throw you in the trunk with the body, or you can come in the passenger seat with me. If you make a scene, I will pull over and force you in there.”

I nod, tears streaming down my face as he marches me to the door and opens it. I slip inside, biting my lip against the pain radiating from my ankle.

So this is it.

Entering the car feels like a death sentence. Joe enters the driver’s seat as he opens his phone, looks at it, and crams it back in his jacket. “Fuck!” He gives me a vicious look as he drives back to the body. The lights from the car illuminate the bright red blood and the grotesque head. He keeps the engine running as he parks the car.

“Stay.”

He barks at me as if I’m some dog. Then he gets out of the car and I close my eyes as he heaves the body in his arms and shoves it into the trunk. The car bounces slightly when he slams the trunk shut.

When he joins me in the car, he doesn’t say a word to me. He doesn’t even look at me. I get the feeling he’s purposely avoiding looking at me. He slides the phone from his jacket as we drive out of the casino and dials quickly.

“Vince, it’s me. We have a big fucking problem. Yeah, I know what fucking time it is. Meet me at my house. I’m bringing a package.”

He tosses the phone aside.

Another wave of hysteria works its way through my body, trembling through my lungs. I don’t understand what was so terrible about what I did.

“Joe, please. I don’t understand.”

“Will you please just shut up?”

Heart aching, I fall silent. My mind churns with the blood-soaked image of the man in the trunk.

God, I was so stupid to want Joe. He was right. I didn’t know him.

The drive to Brooklyn is filled with strained silence. I keep looking behind us at the trunk, terrified that the man he shot will somehow jump out of the trunk, still breathing. Finally, we pull up at his brownstone, and he gets out of the car.

I contemplate making a break for it for a split second, but there’s no way I can outrun him with my injured ankle. Plus, I’m afraid to cross him while he’s in a mood like this.

While he’s in the mood to kill.

“Get out.”

He unceremoniously yanks me to my feet and guides me up the steps of his apartment. Opening the door, he pushes me inside.

It’s a dark, tiny place. All around the living room is the evidence of restlessness. Half-finished beer bottles, magazines strewn on the floor, a pile of dishes in the sink a mile high, and most disturbing-a gun sitting on the coffee table. It’s a portrait of an unstable mind, and he’s led me right in the center of it. I assume that he’s leading me to the couch, but instead he leads me to his bedroom. It’s not made. Dark sheets and dark comforter.

All my senses feel like they’re on overdrive. The cold air in his apartment is like a knife dragging on my skin. Joe pushes my collarbone and I fall backwards onto his bed. Our shoes touch. The air is thin. I breathe and breathe, but nothing goes down.

I’m scared shitless to have all these revelations right in front of me. There are picture frames on his dresser, turned away or laying flat. The man has issues. My eyes slide to his unfathomable ones, which stare at me with a mixture of suspicion and anger.

“How long have you been working with Carmine’s crew?”

I blink at him. “Working? Joe, they kidnapped me from work. You weren’t there. They brought me to a restaurant in Jersey and threatened me. They said I owed them forty grand and that I had to stop working with you if I wanted to live.”

His nostrils flare. “And you said, ‘okay?'”

My chest tightens. “What was I supposed to do? They would have killed me-I had to tell them what they wanted to hear.”

“Fine, but then why not fucking tell me the moment you were out of danger?”

“They said they’d be watching me, and besides…you threatened me, too. I didn’t know who to trust.”

“What about the folder of cash?”

“I was going to pay him. It was only ten grand. I couldn’t withdraw forty grand all at once. He got upset.”

Joe crosses his arms, still studying me. “And they told you they wanted you to sell the company to them?”

“Y-yes.”

He shakes his head and rips off his jacket, hurling it to the ground. Then he unties his tie and throws that away, too. “Do you realize what Jack will do once he finds out that you knew New Jersey was trying to take hold of our investment, and didn’t tell anyone?”

“I didn’t know-I didn’t think-”

“That’s fucking obvious.”

The barb stings, but I shove my hurt feelings aside. “Joe, what’s going to happen to me?”

“I don’t know,” he says roughly.

And I don’t care.

Shaking, I stand up on my feet and try to catch his gaze. “You’ve got to let me go. I have to get out of here.”

He pushes me back down. “Not a fucking chance. I’m not a hero, remember?”

My ankle twists under my weight, and excruciating pain sears up my leg. I clutch it and moan. For a moment there’s nothing but the sounds of my shaking moans in his bedroom, and then Joe bends to my feet with a sigh and gently takes my ankle in his hands. His soft fingers move over my skin like a caress as he takes off my heel. I expect him to take it and twist it, but instead he gently bends my foot and touches my swollen ankle, examining it.

“Probably sprained it,” he murmurs. “You’ll have to keep off it for a few days.”

“If I’m still alive, that is.”

He looks up at me under dark strands of his hair and swallows hard. “Marisa-”

A cold feeling fills my chest. He stood over that corpse with perfect indifference, as if blowing out someone’s brain was no big deal. “You killed that man like it was nothing.”

The hard look returns to his face. “What do you care about some wiseguy in Jersey?”

“I don’t. It was just…” Unnerving. Scary as fuck. Take your pick.

Joe seems to understand from the way I flinch from his gaze. And yet, I am not filled with disgust. What he did shocked me, horrified me, but he was protecting me.

Will he still protect me?

The doorbell rings and the air leaves my chest so suddenly, I feel like I’m in a vacuum. I grab his hand without thinking, but he yanks it out of my grip and strides to the door. Already, I see his personality hardening, his movements more purposeful and calculated. I look around the bedroom when I hear a familiar voice outside his door. Joe opens the door and a man I recognize as one of Jack’s lackeys steps inside. Two other men join him.

“Vince.”

The older guy who sneered at me when they broke into my apartment gives Joe a quick hug and looks over his shoulder, right at me. It’s an accusatory stare. I clench the sheets on the bed.

“Where’s the body?”

“In my car.”

Vincent’s dark eyes look around the apartment rapidly as he thinks, and then he turns to the two men. “Take Joe’s car to the shop. No head and no hands, do you understand me?”

My stomach boils with fear and disgust. What’s going to happen? They’re not going to saw off his fucking head, are they?

But Joe, who didn’t flinch at killing a man, certainly has experience disposing of them as well.

I had no idea who I was dealing with this whole time.

It turns my stomach just thinking about the chunks of brain sitting in the parking lot, the way his eyes rolled up in his head before he hit the ground.This belongs © NôvelDra/ma.Org.

The two guys nod solemnly and Joe unclips the keys to his car, slapping them into their waiting hands. They’re gone in a flash.

Vince closes the door behind him carefully. “Who the fuck was he? What happened?”

Joe sighs and sits down at the kitchen table. I can’t stand waiting in here, hearing everything and yet not being part of their conversation.

“Someone from Jersey, who said he had a message for your wife from Carmine.”

Two juxtaposing forces fight over the older man’s face. First, there’s the pale of cold blanching his face as he sits down on the chair, shortly followed by fiery heat. He lunges for the stray beer bottle sitting on the table. His fingers tighten around it, whitened, until I’m sure it’s going to explode in his hands.

“That piece of shit-that fucking piece of shit-What was the message?”

“I didn’t let him talk very long. Vince, I get the feeling he was just trying to get under your skin, that’s all.”

Vince explodes, sounding like a mad bull. “WELL IT FUCKING WORKED!” He seizes the beer bottle and throws it across the room. I flinch at the sound of it shattering into a million different pieces.

“Control yourself, for fuck’s sake.”

But he can’t.

“What the fuck did you just say to me? He threatened my wife again. He should have been killed months ago. I don’t understand why our contacts in prison haven’t done their fucking job!”

“Keep it down.”

My heart feels like it’s going to burst. It’s escalating-the whole thing is. I’m hearing things I have no business hearing. I’m seconds away from lunging forward and locking the door.

“Vince, we don’t have time for this shit. They’re trying to take Worlds Casino from us. They’ve been leaning on her all this time, and probably the other shareholders to get them to sell to Lences Holdings.”

“Her?”

“Her.”

Joe nods his head towards me, and Vincent’s unbottled fury aims itself directly towards me. I launch at the door, slamming it shut and ramming the bolt home as he slams into the door.

God, what’s going on?

I hear Joe behind him, trying to calm him down, but he won’t have it. A vivid flash of Nathan trying to beat down my bedroom door as Jessica tried to calm him down burns into my mind.

“Just open the door!” she screamed. “It’ll be worse if you don’t!”

“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR, YOU BITCH!”

“She didn’t know about your history with Carmine. Will you calm the fuck down?”

The screams ring in my ears as I search his bedroom, yanking open drawer after drawer. What am I looking for? I sweep my hands under his pillow and my fingers touch something cool and metallic. I drag it out from under the pillow. It’s heavy in my hands.

Oh, God. I don’t know if this is the right thing to do.

The wood breaks as he kicks open the door.

I point the gun at the door.

Aim.

The door slams open and a furious Vince bursts into the room. He backs up when he sees the gun pointed straight to his heart.

“G-get the fuck away from me.” My voice sounds strange. I hardly know who it belongs to.

Joe enters the room, but I only have eyes for the man who kicked open the door, who looks at me like he’d love to rip my head off. His chest pulses as he raises his hands, a sneer widening his face. It sends dizzying jolts of fear to my head.

“Drop that fucking gun, or I’ll shove it up your cunt.”

I raise the gun to his face, my hands trembling more than ever. He’s fucking evil, whoever this guy is.

“Will you fucking let me handle this?”

“Handle this?” he turns around for a moment, ignoring me, to Joe’s white face. “You fucking let this broad lead you around by your dick. You were supposed to control her. Instead, she made you into the biggest fucking jerk-off in New York. If I had known fucking her would have turned you into a jamook, I would have sent someone else to deal with her.”

Deal with her?

For a moment, I look at Joe’s strained face, which gives me a guilty look. “What did you expect me to do? Beat it out of her?”

“You’ve gone soft! Ever since your sister died-”

Joe grabs the lapels of Vince’s jacket and slams him into the wall, his face inches from Vincent’s. “Don’t you ever talk about my sister.”

“Fine,” he sneers. “All I’m saying is that she has your fucking gun, and she’s pointing it right at you.”

His hands drop from Vincent’s throat and he turns around to look at me, his expression calm. Vincent takes a large step towards me, and I swing my arm towards him.

Joe raises his hands. “Drop the gun, Marisa. You don’t want to do this.”