Gorgeous Billionaire’s Mafia: The Billionaire's Mafia, #3

By Rachel Foster

Josh is going to have to decide what to do after he just loss Molly. But he needs to protect her even if she doesn't want him to… Because danger is right around the corner. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: 3rd Publishing
• Release date: Mar 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215801215

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Gorgeous Billionaire’s Mafia

Rachel Foster

Copyright © 2018 by Rachel Foster

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Contents

Gorgeous Billionaire’s Mafia

Gorgeous Billionaire’s Mafia

1

Molly

"M

arco!" I screamed, as I shook my brother, trying to wake him back up again. I could already tell that the life had leaked out of him, that there was no part of him left now, but that wasn’t going to stop me. I squeezed his arms, trying to push him back to reality, back to the real world, with me, and I knew that there was no chance that I could change it.

There were footsteps in front of me, and I looked up to see a couple of the guys who worked at the gym hurrying outside to see what was going on. No doubt they heard the commotion and wondered what all the drama was. As soon as they saw Marco lying there in my arms, it felt like all of this became far more real than I was willing to admit to.

Is that...? One of them asked.

Get inside, call an ambulance, I yelled at him. I knew that shouting wasn’t going to make anything better, but I couldn’t stand the thought of passing another second in this mess right now. I needed to get out of here. I needed to get Marco out of here. I needed to get him to a hospital – maybe there was a chance that he could be pulled back from the brink, maybe they could get the bullet out of him and clean him up and bring him back to life...

But I knew, in my heart of hearts, that it was too late for that. And I was sure that, at the end of the day, I knew who had been responsible for this, too.

One of his co-workers ran inside to call the emergency services, and the other came down to kneel on the ground beside me. She reached over and pulled him on to her lap, trying to tip his head back to see how bad things were right now. She grimaced as soon as she got a look at him, and I could tell from the look on her face that she really didn’t know what to do with this.

Do you know what happened to him? she asked me, and I shook my head.

No, I confessed. I just – I just came out here to meet him, and I found him on the ground like this. I don’t know what happened to get him here in the first place...

I’m so sorry, she murmured to me, and she shifted so that she could lay Marco down on the ground properly.

Okay, you support his head, make sure that his airways are clear, she instructed me. I’m going to start some compressions, alright?

Alright, I replied. I would have gone along with anything that she had said to me in that moment, as long as it meant that I didn’t have to think straight, think about anything other than finding a way to get my brother out of this mess that he has landed himself in.

What did he do? I don’t know. I can’t even start to figure it out. I just needed to get my head around it somehow, find a way to clear up the logic inside my own brain so that I could accept that he’d been shot, taken out, taken down. Somebody wanted him out of the picture for good, and I knew that there were plenty of people out there who would have reason to snuff him out. How the hell was I going to find out who it had been, when it could have been any single one of them? I hated this. Hated how helpless I felt. Hated how stupid it was to even be sitting here, pretending that we could bring him back from the edge.

I watched as she did her compressions on him, sealing his nose to blow into his mouth, as his chest rose and fell with each breath she tried to pass through his body. Nothing was working. Nothing was going to be enough to bring him back, and I knew that.

I just couldn’t stop thinking about the last thing that he had said to me. That was the part that fucked me up the most, no doubt about it – what he had said to me about Josh, about our parents. I had to believe that it wasn’t true, but why would he have hit me with that if it was a lie? The last thing that he ever said to me, he didn’t want it to be something that he’d made up just to fuck with me. He wanted to make sure that it was something that I could use, something that I could make sense of, something that I could take out into the world and do something with.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I had known that he’d hated Josh since the first moment that man had come into my life, but this was something far beyond hate. This was telling me that he had killed our parents – that he had killed our parents on that fateful night, and that he had taken our family from us and lied to my face about it.

He had told me that he hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger, but could I even believe him any longer? I didn’t know. I wished that I could work out how much of this was true, come to terms with what parts of it my brother had made up just to satisfy himself, just to hurt us in the last moments of his life. Where had he found out? What had happened that he was so certain of it?

And did that mean that Josh had been with him, too, in the moments before he died? Did that mean that he had been the one to pull the trigger?

I had so many questions, none of them even coming close to an answer, and it made my soul hurt to consider what I was considering right now. That Josh might have killed Marco. I knew that he was wrapped up in some shady business, of course I did, but this was beyond anything that I could think to accept as real. It had to be a lie. It had to be wrong. Marco must have been trying to break us up, even as he lay there dying, because he didn’t want his little sister with someone like Josh.

I was trying to come up with any number of reasons to explain things away, but I couldn’t. I knew that my brother wouldn’t have lied to me in the last moments of his life, but the thought of it, of what it would mean if he had been telling the truth, was enough to make my head feel like it was going to explode. Josh – Josh had been the one to do it. On that fateful night, the night that I had lived and my parents had died, he had been the one to pull the trigger.

Could it be true?

It didn’t take long for the ambulance to arrive, and they loaded in Marco – or what was left of him – and allowed me to come join him. I could feel the rumble of the wheels underneath me, but I could hardly make sense of it, what it meant, where we were going right now. I just wanted this to be over. I wanted them to call the shots and say what needed to be said, because I could tell just by looking at him that my brother was no longer of this world anymore.

Give him peace. Let him go. Wherever he was, he was closer to our parents now than I had ever been since their death, and I hoped that they were there to meet him. The medics were fussing around him, hooking him up to machines, giving him oxygen, working fast and hard to bring him back from the edge, but I had known the moment that he had slumped back in my arms that he was gone for good. I didn’t want to have to think about what it meant, not really, but that was all that I could handle right now.

We arrived at the hospital, and I was led to a waiting room where I could rest and wait until they were done with him. Honestly, I knew what they were going to tell me when they came out of there, when they were finished with him, but I was ready to hear it. Ready to look them in the eyes and nod and know that my brother was lost to me and that there was nothing that I could do to change that.

I wished that there was someone there with me right now. Someone who could have made all of this a little easier to handle. Josh, maybe? No – not Josh. I couldn’t even think about him right now. Wherever he was, I doubted that he wanted to be anywhere close to me if he could help it, wanting to put as much distance between himself and what was left of this family as he could.

What was left of this family. Which was – which was just me, now that I thought of it. The weight of that hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to catch my breath to stop myself from giving out underneath it entirely. I was the only one left, the only one still fighting, the only one still standing. And all because the person who had killed my parents hadn’t been kind enough to take me out right along with them and grant me the freedom that I knew I deserved from this hell that I was trapped in right now.

God, I just wanted to sleep. I let my head sink down to my chest for a moment there in the waiting room, and I was sure that I would have been able to just doze off on the spot if I had been allowed to. But they weren’t going to let me. I needed to be ready to take care of Marco’s body, figure out what to do with it, and I hated the thought that I might have to stand there over his corpse and nod and tell them that yes, it really was him, it really was my brother.

And that he really was dead.

There were plenty of drawn faces around me in this waiting room right now, and I knew that everyone here was probably waiting for the bad news that I was. They might not have been able to come out and say it, but I knew that it was the truth. We were all sitting here in this limbo, waiting for someone to walk in and pull the trigger and tell us that it was over. That we could stop hoping.

Though I had lost all hope the moment that I saw him sprawled in that parking lot.

And I knew that it was not going to be coming back to me anytime soon. I didn’t know what to expect, what next, what I was meant to do as I tried to make sense of the mess that I found myself in, but I would do anything that it took to survive. My brother might have been gone, the rest of my family taken care of, the rest of them all snatched from the face of the Earth once and for all.

But I was still here, I was still breathing, and I was still ready to fight for my life. And anyone who decided that they were going to take a piece out of me was going to have to try harder than ever to make sure that they snuffed me out for good.

Because I was ready. Ready to stand my ground and show them how strong I was. Ready to take them to the mat if I needed to.

And ready to die in the process, if that’s what it took.

2

Josh

A

s I sped through the city, hardly able to keep my eyes on the road in front of me, I wondered what the fuck had just happened back in that parking lot.

I hadn’t shot him. I knew that much. I hadn’t had the time to – I had been too focused on pinning him down, making sure that he didn’t take me out. I had planned to pull the trigger, of course, but the opportunity had been taken from me, and I didn’t know one little bit how I felt about that.

He was fucked. Well and truly fucked. There was nothing that I or anyone could have done to keep him alive. And that meant that it was only a matter of time before he bled to death, or something else – and only a matter of time till Molly found out what had happened to her brother.

My breath was tearing out of my lungs so fast that it almost hurt, and it nearly caused my vision to go a little dark around the edges – I knew that I had to control myself right now, I had to hold myself together. If he had been shot, and he had, and if he was really dying, which I was certain he was, people would be out there looking for whoever had done it in no time at all. And I was sure that they were going to come down to me pretty fucking quickly. He had been pushing himself on to my territory for months now, and people knew about it. If they didn’t, they would soon find out, and then I would be the center of attention when it came to hunting down the man who had killed him.

And I knew that nobody would believe me if I said that it hadn’t been me. Nobody would have believed me if I had admitted to being there in the parking lot with him, pinning him to the ground, fighting him like my life depended on it, and then not being the one to pull the trigger. That wasn’t how it worked, that wasn’t how any of it worked – people would take all of that as admittance that I was essentially guilty, and there was nothing I could do to hide from that except lie, lie, lie about where I had been and what I had been doing there.

Molly. Honestly, it wasn’t Marco that I was worried about right now, but his sister – the woman I loved, who was only a matter of minutes away from finding out that her beloved brother was on the brink of death, if not gone already. I didn’t know if I should go find her, turn the car around and catch up with her and tell her what to expect. If she didn’t know already.

I knew that she was going to turn it on me. She was going to think that I had been the one to hurt him, especially if I had news of his death before it got out into the world at large. And much as I would have liked to pretend that I could keep that all at arm’s length, much as I would have liked to keep her separated from that world that I was a part of, there was no way that I would be able to keep pulling that off if I admitted that I knew that he was gone. She would know, and if she knew, then we were as good as over.

I couldn’t lose her. I should have known that it would lead to this, that taking him out would have led to this violently messy place inside my own head that felt as though it was built around the dread and the fear and the panic of losing her. As I had been sitting in that car, thinking about going out there and taking him on, thinking about how good it would feel to take him out, I had been living in a dreamland. One where I could both balance the demands of the legacy that my father had left me with the love that I felt for Molly, even though I could tell now that it was totally untrue.

My phone rang, and I answered it. I expected to hear Molly’s voice, crackling down the line, the fear and sadness impossible to deny, but instead, a moment later, I heard Nate speaking to me.

You good? he asked me bluntly. So, news of the shooting had already spread, then.

I’m fine, I replied. Why?

Police scanners said there was a shooting near Marco’s gym, he replied. Assumed you had something to do with it.

I fell silent. I did, but I hadn’t been the one to fire that bullet at him, and I didn’t want to take responsibility for it. I didn’t want anyone to be able to look at me and know that I had been responsible for what had happened.

He’s gone, isn’t he? Nate pressed me. I knew that he needed to hear me answer in the affirmative. It was the only thing that was going to be able to get him off the call, and frankly, I wanted nothing more than my own company and some silence right now.

Yes, I replied. It was true, to the best of my knowledge, and even if it wasn’t right in that second, I knew that it would be soon. He was going, going. That was all that mattered. The man who had posed such a threat to the business that I had worked so hard to keep on track after my father’s death would no longer be a threat to it, and that was all I cared about.

Good, Nate replied. I want to sit down and have a debrief with you-

Later, I replied. I need to get myself cleaned up first.

And with that, I hung up the phone and sat in the silence of my car once more. I didn’t want to talk to Nate. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to have to deal with any of this, anything that was going on, anything other than just the feeling of numbness that was flooding through me in that moment. I was far removed from everything else, just able to focus on the sound of that gunshot, playing over and over again in my head – the sight of Marco as he had taken in what had happened, his eyes widening with surprise. The bloom of blood over his body as the bullet had nestled deeper inside of him.

I was covered in his blood. If I was pulled over by the cops, they would know at once what had happened, and I knew that I had to be careful not to give anything away. Nate was relying on me to make it out of this in one piece, and I knew that I had to see this through.

I wasn’t sure how long I was driving. Wasn’t sure that I cared, either. I just wanted out of here, out of this place, straight on with my life, no matter what. I needed to get out of here. I needed to put as much space as I possibly could between myself and what had just happened, because I couldn’t believe that I could still have all these feelings for Molly and have been there when her brother...

I couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t even think about her without that angry twist of fear and hurt. I wanted to scream, pull over and just batter my fists against the steering wheel until some of the horror inside of me had started to ease, but it wasn’t going to work like that. I had to stay focused. I had to get somewhere quiet and silent and private before I was found by the cops and gave away more than I could handle. If they caught up with me, I would be pretty much guaranteed to end up in prison.

Even though I knew it’s where I belonged.

For killing her parents. For putting her brother in that vulnerable position that had led to the loss of his life. For all of it – for all that I had done to Molly over the years, all the stuff that she didn’t even know about yet. All the stuff that I was sure would come out if I didn’t keep my mouth shut. If she didn’t put all the pieces together by herself first, of course...

I hated myself in that moment, maybe more than I had ever hated myself before in