Hold Him Like Gravity (Lombardi Family #4)

Chapter Fourteen

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Rico

“Looking for me?” I asked as I came in through the back door of the meat shop to find Kick rushing around the corner after, I assumed, looking for me in the office.

“What?” she asked, eyes going wide. “Oh, uh, I was, just going to my locker,” she said, her words tripping over themselves to tumble out, everything about her strung a little too tightly.

“You alright?” I asked as she rushed past me, holding a sweater to her chest.

“Yeah, fine,” she said, getting to the lockers, then reaching out toward hers.

It was then that I realized she’d actually put a lock on hers.

My gaze slid along the line of lockers, not seeing any others with locks. That was… strange.

“You having an issue with your locker?” I asked as she turned the dial to plug in her combination.

“What do you mean?”

“You locked it,” I told her as the lock came undone, making her pull it away, open the locker, ball up her sweater, and shove it inside the locker.

“Oh, yeah. Tips have been good lately,” she said, voice tight. “I just wanted to, you know, keep ‘em safe.”

That was a reasonable enough answer. Still, something was rubbing me wrong about it. I mean, I’d seen her purse just sitting on the table every day since she’d been hired. She’d never seemed worried about her money before. Which made me think something had happened that she just didn’t want to talk about, maybe not wanting to point fingers at coworkers.

“Kick, I need—“ Ricky said, rushing into the back, stopping short when he saw me.

“What do you need?” Kick asked, slamming her locker, and making sure she slid the lock back in and clicked it closed, despite it only being the three of us in the building.

There was no way she suspected Ricky of stealing from her, right?

I mean, no, the guy wasn’t part of my family, so he didn’t get the implicit trust those men and women got. But I trusted him with my business. The man would never steal from me or mine.

“My wife called,” Ricky said, voice just shy of frantic. “My boy is in the hospital.”

“Oh,” Kick said, her hand flying to her heart for a kid she’d never met.

“Go,” I said, nodding at Ricky. When he hesitated, I reached out, grabbing his shoulder. “Go. Family comes before everything else,” I said. “Kick and I got this,” I added, waving around the shop.

“Yeah, of course. Go. I hope everything is alright.”

“Let me know if you need anything,” I said as Ricky grabbed his jacket out of his locker, then rushed out of the back door.

“I, ah, I have this,” Kick said, waving toward the shop as a whole. “If you need to get going.”

“I’m not leaving you alone in a shop at night,” I said, shaking my head at her.

Bastian was usually around, but he’d been offered to work a job with Cinna and Dav, so he was off trying to make some money and gain more favor from Renzo.

“Okay,” Kick said, giving me a smile that seemed even tighter than before. “I have to, ah, finish cleaning up.”

With that, she moved away from me, casting another look at her locker before making her way out front.

I locked the back door before following her to the front, where I locked that door as well, wanting to make sure she was safe as she moved around, wiping down the counters and meat slicers. The chairs were up on the tables, the floor still shiny from mopping.

The place had never been cleaner since she started working.

“How’s Evander doing?” I asked when she caught me watching her.

“He’s staying in more,” she told me.

“Yeah? Something happen?” I asked, watching something dark cross her eyes. But she shook her head.

“He’s just been… clingier. I guess he’s finally warming up to me.”

That was a good thing. So why did she sound like she was about to cry about it?

I wouldn’t pretend to know a lot about women. Sure, the Lombardi family was the only one in the city—so far—to have female capos. And, yeah, I worked alongside them a lot. But Cinna and Saff kind of leaned into either their cold and ruthless—in Cinna’s case—or hot-tempered and impulsive—when it came to Saff. They never really displayed any other emotions. At least not around any of us. Which made sense. I couldn’t imagine it was easy for a woman working in such a brutal and male-dominated world like organized crime. They had to shut that shit down to protect themselves.

Outside of my work relationships, I’d never really spent a lot of time with women. Work had always come first in my life. Which meant time with women was on the short side and purely for fun. No distractions.

“That’s good. What you wanted, right?” I asked.

“Yeah, I just… damnit!” she yelped, snatching her hand away from the slicer, holding it against her chest as she squeezed it into a fist.

“You get cut?” I asked, making my way toward her. Those meat slicers were insanely sharp. Ricky was really strict about teaching the new guys how to use them properly so there were no accidents. I never stopped to consider how you could cut yourself while just cleaning it.

“Yes. Fuck,” she said, wincing. “I’m afraid to look and see if I’m missing a piece of my finger,” she said, looking a little pale at the very idea.

“I’ll look,” I said, reaching for her wrist to pull it away from her chest. “Gonna have to unfurl for me here,” I said as she turned her head to the side like a little kid about to get a shot and not wanting to watch the needle slide in.

Her fingers slid open, all of them covered in a coat of blood. She was bleeding like crazy. Bad enough that I was a little worried a part of her finger would be sitting on the meat slicer too.

“Come here,” I said, pulling her with me toward the sink in the back. “I can’t see through the blood,” I explained as I ran the water warm and pulled her hand under the stream. “Okay,” I said, feeling better when I got a good look. “You aren’t missing any parts,” I told her as she kept her head diverted, taking slow, deep breaths. “You just kinda… split it. The skin is still attached but kind of just hanging on. I’m gonna have to put some butterfly closures on this. Unless you wanna go and get stitches.”

“Ah, no. I’d rather not. You’re sure I can just do the closures?”

“Yeah, I’ve treated shit worse than this with them,” I told her, grabbing some paper towels and wrapping them around her hand. “Squeeze hard. We gotta try to stop the bleeding so I can see what I’m doing to close it up,” I told her.

My hand went to her hip, guiding her with me toward my office, then pressing her down into my chair as I walked away to go grab the medical kit, having little flashbacks to doing the same thing not long ago.

“You alright?” I asked as I came back to spread the box of butterfly closures, a pack of gauze, and a saline solution tube on the top of the desk.

“Yeah. I think it’s slowing down,” she said. “I can feel my pulse in my finger,” she added, seeming to speak mostly to herself.

“That’s normal,” I told her, reaching for a package of disposable gloves.

“Have you ever sliced your finger like this?”

“Once.”

“On a meat slicer?” she asked, watching me as I put the gloves on.

“On a pocketknife,” I admitted, memory flashing to a back alley fight in my early twenties, back when Renzo was fighting tooth-and-nail to take back the neighborhood. All we did was brawl back then. Get knocked around. Break bones. Treat lacerations. Wonder how bad a concussion had to be before we sought actual treatment.

“What? Were you playing with it or something?” she asked as I pulled the tab off the tube of saline.

“If by playing with it you mean trying to stab someone with it while they beat the shit out of me, yeah,” I said, watching her brows raise, her eyes going round.

“Fought a lot when I was younger,” I told her, only half giving her the truth as I leaned the saline against the kit to pull her hand over to me and remove the paper towel. “And this area used to be a lot rougher back then,” I added, checking the cut again before slipping some gauze under her finger, and spraying the saline over her finger to make sure it was clean before I sealed it up. “You good?”

“Yeah. It just burns. It’s not that bad now,” she said.

“It’s probably gonna be throbbing for a day or two,” I said as I carefully applied the butterfly closures. “I used one of these,” I added, reaching to pull a finger brace out of the kit, “for the first few days, so I didn’t keep accidentally bumping the finger while it healed. We’ll tell Ricky that you’re off the slicer for a week or so,” I told her.

“That’s, like, half my job,” she insisted.

“Someone else was handling it while you were home recovering. They can do it again for a few days. There’s plenty other shit to do around here,” I told her as I tossed the saline and reached for a new small roll of gauze wrap. “Gonna wrap it for now. But you’re gonna want to check it occasionally, make sure it’s not looking red or puffy. It should be fine, though.”

“Okay,” she agreed, watching me as I squatted in front of her and started to wrap her finger up and secure it with some paper tape.

“You’re on a bad luck run lately, huh?” I asked, pressing her hand onto her thigh when I was done, my hand still resting there, even though I knew I should pull it away, move away.

“You have no idea,” she said with a deep exhale, her gaze looking haunted for a moment before her expression went blank.

“Anything you could use some help with? I’m good at a lot of shit,” I added. I’d been the Jack of all Trades for the family almost since the beginning.

“No, it’s just… no,” she said.

“It’s something. You’re tense as fuck. Been jumpy too.”

She looked stricken at that for a moment before shaking the look off.

“No. I’m fine. Just too much coffee lately, I guess. I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said, and that, at least, rang true. “Just, you know, can’t shut my mind off, I guess.”

“Been there,” I said, nodding. I’d spent most of my life worrying about the family, about every small cog in the wheel of the whole operation. There were many sleepless nights when shit was going sideways and we were struggling to keep things in line. “If you ever want to talk,” I added.

“Thanks,” she said, suddenly getting to her feet, making the chair slide back hard enough to hit the wall. “But, I, ah, want to do anything but talk about it,” she said as I got to my feet.

We were close.

Just a whisper between us.

We seemed to both realize it in unison.

Up this close, I got to watch her pupils blow wide as she looked at me, her gaze doing a triangle from my eyes to my lips and back again.

There was a litany of reasons why I had no business putting my hands on Kick.

Yet not a single one came to mind right then as my hand lifted, sliding to the back of her neck, and pulling her against me.