Relentless: A Bad Boy Romance (Bertoli Crime Family #1) by Lauren Landish

an actual student.”
    Daniel's short laugh and nod told me both that he agreed but also felt it was impossible. “Ade, I don't even know my real last name. The Social Security number I used to get my concealed carry permit is invalid, connected to a man who died a decade ago overseas in Zimbabwe and therefore cannot for certain be declared dead. Besides, while I learn what your uncle asks me to, I’m more of a hands-on type of man. But yes, I've enjoyed my duty for the past two weeks.”
    “Has it been just duty?” I asked quietly, stopping him. Daniel stared at me, his mouth working silently for a moment, and I could see the answer in his eyes. “That's what I thought. Your duty and honor is stopping you . . . stopping us.”
    “It is what it is. We can enjoy this time, the times when we can be friends . . . but nothing more,” Daniel said, the last words said between tightly-clenched teeth. He started his car and put it in reverse. “If it means anything, I wish things were different.”
    “Yeah . . .” I replied, looking out the passenger window so he couldn't see me cry. “Me too.”

Chapter 10
Daniel
    I took Adriana back to classes, the two of us leaving early enough that we got to her first class twenty minutes early. I went inside and did a security check of the room while she sat quietly in her spot next to the emergency exit. The professor, a bespectacled woman who looked like she probably worshiped Annie Leibowitz, looked on with mixed emotions. She wanted to support Adriana as a female and a victim of violence, but at the same time, she didn't like that I was there. “Young man,” she said as I checked under her podium for any listening devices, “I don't think that—”
    “That's exactly your and everyone else's problem at this school,” I said quietly, low enough that Adriana couldn't hear me. “You don't think. You're more worried about your political leanings, your bureaucracy, and covering your asses, and you've forgotten that there is a very scared, very threatened young woman involved in all of this. But I haven't. I've pledged to keep her safe, and lady, if I were you, I wouldn’t get in my way.”
    She blanched, then nodded. “Just be quick about it, okay?”
    “I'll be done by the time your class starts,” I replied, continuing my search. When I sat down next to Adriana, she looked at me questioningly. “Just a disagreement about Picasso's Blue Period.”
    “Uh-huh. And that's why she's staring at you in abject fear right now?” she asked, amused.
    I shrugged. “I have that kind of an effect on people sometimes.”
    The class started, and it was one of Adriana's more boring classes really, a lecture class that only went to labs and actual production during the last few sessions of the semester. Until then, the teacher wanted the students to supposedly focus, to draw inspiration from the life around them.
    In my opinion, it was all bullshit. You want inspiration? Look around you. The world is a beautiful and fucked up place. Inspiration existed in almost every moment of every day. You didn't need to focus to find an inspiration.
    As an example, I did my first hit for Don Bertoli when I was nineteen, soon after I'd completed high school. The guy I was to take out was a piece of shit meth dealer who'd not only stiffed Don Bertoli on his payments, but had also been caught more than once dealing bad shit, which could cause the police to poke around more than normal. Nobody wants that, and so I was sent in.
    I found the dealer in the parking lot of a Pizza Hut that he used for a lot of his business. I was wearing all black and a face mask, but still in my suit. I was supposed to make sure a message was sent.
    I'd been training for years already, a decade spent preparing myself, knowing that the day would come that Don Bertoli would ask me to start repaying the generosity he'd heaped upon me for taking care of me all those years. Walking across the parking lot, the throwaway S&W 9mm I