Bones: Broken Bones MC by Leah Wilde Read Free Book Online Page B

hand, his words made sense. Standing up for myself seemed feasible. But now, on the other side of the door, I surveyed the wreckage, and it felt impossible again. Wood splinters everywhere. The ruined tables crumbled chaotically around the room. This would take hours to clean. I’d be up all night trying to piece everything back together.
     
    Dominic was wrong. There was no escaping this life of mine.

Chapter 5
    Dominic
     
    I continued home. I could still feel the ghost of Isabel’s fingers on my own, a faint tingling where she’d touched me. The contact had a weird electric tint to it, almost like static electricity. Maybe I was just imagining things, but it really felt like there was something still there, like her fingertips had left a mark. I studied my hand under the glare of a streetlight overhead, but I couldn’t see anything.
     
    I shook my head and let thoughts of her drift away for the time being. Jogging through a small break in traffic, I crossed the street and made my way down the alley to the foot of a fire escape. I jumped up to tug down the ladder. It descended with a metallic shriek, then I clambered up and took the stairs two at a time on my way to the top floor of the building.
     
    Reaching the open window on the top level, I slipped inside. I landed with quiet feet on the tile floor of the bathroom of the empty apartment that Slim and I had been squatting in for the last couple months. The electricity didn’t work, so we had candles scattered throughout the place, but by some miracle the water still ran, so it was as good a place as we could afford for the moment.
     
    I reached to pull open the door and let Slim know I was home, but just before my fingertips settled on the doorknob, I heard voices. I frowned. I didn’t recognize them. Sucking in a breath, I leaned my ear to the crack in the door and listened in.
     
    “Slim, you rat-faced piece of shit, you shoulda known better,” said one of the unfamiliar voices. It was a man’s voice, deep, like it belonged to someone big. There was a faint Italian accent on the edges.
     
    “You made the wrong choice, my friend,” said another softly.
     
    My heart was pounding in my chest. I didn’t like the menace on the edge of these men’s words. I needed to get a closer look.
     
    Tugging open the door as slowly as I could to avoid the squeak of the hinges, I slipped through and crouched low to the floor. The bathroom opened onto a short hallway. The corner of the wall jutted out into the living room. I moved towards it and peeked my head around just far enough to get a line of sight into the living room.
     
    Slim was seated facing in my direction on the one rickety chair we owned. His hands were bound behind him. Standing with their backs to me were the two men I’d heard. One was grossly fat, his belly hanging heavy over the edge of his pants. The other was taller, skinnier, and he was holding a gun in one gloved hand. The fat man was gripping a length of iron pipe.
     
    Slim looked badly roughed up. I saw a cracked tooth tangling by a thread from his mouth. The front of his shirt was slicked with blood, and his head hung forward, too exhausted to hold it up straight. “Please…” he muttered through lips fat and busted.
     
    “Why didn’t you just think, Slim?” the skinny man said mournfully. “We knew you were working with the Broken Bones. You could’ve stopped, and all this mess would’ve been avoided.” The fat man shook his head in disgust.
     
    “I didn’t…” Slim was two words into his thought before the fat man swung the pipe viciously into the side of Slim’s head. The crunch was sickening. I felt the blood rush from my face.
     
    “Don’t tell us what you did and didn’t do,” the fat man barked. “We tell you what you did. And right now, my partner is telling you that you fucked up, capisce?”
     
    Slim nodded, unable to speak further.
     
    “This is what happens when you try to hurt the Capparelli