Breaking My Bodyguard novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Back Door
She slips out to a South Side bar to choose her own night; her bodyguard drags her out the back and takes a bullet covering her.
The bar on Halsted had a broken neon sign and a back door that stuck.
I had picked it from a list of places my father's men never went.
I was twenty-three, and I had never once chosen who I went home with.
Tonight I meant to.
I wore a black dress I had hidden in a laundry bag, and I had climbed out of the pantry window at nine.
By nine-ten I was on a stool with a whiskey sour I didn't want.
By nine-fifteen a man in a flannel shirt was leaning on the bar beside me.
He had a nice smile and a tattoo of a sparrow on his wrist.
"You look like you're waiting for somebody," he said.
"I'm waiting for nobody," I said. "That's the whole point."
He laughed and asked my name.
I was opening my mouth to lie when a hand closed around my elbow.
I knew that hand.
It was warm, and it never squeezed, and it had pulled me out of three car doors and one fire exit in three years.
"Miss Santoro," Rafe Basile said. "Time to go."
Ten minutes.
I had made it ten minutes.
The man in the flannel shirt saw the black suit and the earpiece and took his drink somewhere else.
I turned on the stool.
Rafe stood over me with his jaw set and his gray eyes calm.
He was six-two and he took up the whole aisle.
A pale scar cut through his right eyebrow, and there wasn't a hair out of place on his head.
"You climbed out of a window," he said.
"I used the pantry window."
"I know which window. I watched you do it from the garage."
I stared at him.
"You watched me leave and then you followed me?"
"I followed you on foot for six blocks," he said. "I wanted to see where you were going."
"That's insane."
"It's my job."
"Your job is to stand outside doors."
"My job is to bring you home breathing," he said. "Up."
I didn't move.
I was not going to be hauled out of a bar, not in the one place I had picked myself.
"Make me," I said.
He looked at me for a long second.
Then he bent and put his mouth near my ear, and his voice dropped so low only I could hear it.
"Don't tempt me, Livia."
He had never used my first name before.
It went straight down my spine and I forgot what I was angry about.
He took my elbow and I let him.
He steered me past the pool table to the back hall, because he never used the front, and shoved the stuck door with his shoulder.
The alley smelled of rain and garbage.
His car sat at the far end with its lights off.
"Twenty feet," he said. "Walk."
I took one step in my heels.
A window shattered above us.
I heard the shot a half second later, flat and ugly.
Rafe hit me before the second one came.
He pinned me against the brick with his whole body.
One arm covered my head.
A third shot.
Something stopped him with a hard jerk, and he grunted into my hair.
"Rafe."
"Stay down."
He turned with a pistol in his free hand that I had never seen him draw.
He fired twice at the rooftop across the alley.
A shape dropped behind the parapet, and a car started in the next street and tore away.
Then it was quiet, except for the rain.
He pulled me to the car by the wrist and shoved me into the back seat.
He got behind the wheel and drove with one hand.
The other arm hung against his side.
Dark wet spread through the sleeve of his suit jacket and dripped on the leather.
"You're shot," I said.
"It went through."
"You're bleeding all over the seat."
"Then keep your head down so you don't bleed on it too."
My hands were shaking.
I leaned over the seat and pressed my palm hard against his arm above the wound.
He hissed through his teeth, but he didn't push me away.
His phone buzzed in the cup holder.
I read it because the screen lit up in front of my face.
It was a message from my father, sent four minutes ago.
"Silvio Brandolini will be at Sunday dinner. Tell her the wedding is set."
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