The Woman at the Docks: A Mafia Romance Page 4

  Panic swelling, I turned back, sure I made a wrong turn somewhere, and got turned around, not being used to being in the area in the steadily decreasing daylight.

  But turning back seemed wrong too, sending me further into oddly stacked containers, not in the neat, parallel rows they were typically in.

  I generally thought of myself as a pretty calm, reasonable person, not one prone to panicking, to overreacting to any situation.

  But whereas a calm, rational person would have stopped, taken a few deep breaths, then slowly gone back the way they came from, I lost my ever-loving mind and charged forward, heartbeat hammering, sweat pouring, stomach twisting into painful knots.

  That said, I wasn't sure anyone could be calm and rational when illegally trespassing on private property owned by the local Cosa Nostra. After having already been threatened by them. When they were actively looking for me.

  "Shit. Shit shit shit," I hissed, gulping in air as I shot around a corner, finding myself in a larger than usual open space with a narrower exit.

  Praying it was finally a way out, feeling like I was choking on unfamiliar claustrophobia, I bolted down that narrow row.

  I realized it all three seconds too late.

  The movement of the containers from South America, the new arrangement of the stacks, the way I couldn't seem to find my way out.

  They'd created a maze. And I was the mouse inside of it, completely clueless, being driven toward a dead end.

  Where I wasn't alone.

  "I hope whatever you are after is going to be worth all of this," Luca Grassi's voice called, sounding resigned, making my head whip toward the corner to find him leaning there, watching me, seemingly completely unaffected by the heat even in his three-piece suit while sweat dripped off my jaw and fell to the concrete at my feet.

  Even as I turned to run, I could hear footsteps closing in behind me, unhurried, knowing they had me trapped.

  I turned fully anyway, wanting to see the face of the other man who might take my life.

  He seemed to be around Luca's age, wearing all black, handsome in a very lethal sort of way.

  "Fuck. She's prettier than Dario said," the other man said, shaking his head as he looked at my face.

  "No," I snapped, voice a strange, deep sound, completely foreign to me, born of a bone-deep fear of their hands on me.

  "Relax, baby, I don't touch what isn't freely given," the man said, sounding offended. "And Luca here hasn't touched a woman in, what, eight months?" he teased, smirking.

  Smirking.

  Teasing.

  While I was pretty sure I had somehow managed to swallow my own heart, and it had then taken up residence in my stomach, thumping away.

  Luca ignored the bait, moving out of the shadows, coming closer to me.

  "I'll ask you one more time," he started, voice ominous. "Who do you work for?"

  "I work for the state of California," I told him. It was the truth, even if he didn't want to hear it.

  Disappointment darkened his eyes as he sighed out his breath, nodding his head at his man.

  "Don't," he demanded, reaching out for my wrist. "Don't make this difficult," he added when I jerked away, slamming back into the shipping container, feeling a corner of it ram me in the hip.

  Don't make it difficult?

  Did anyone in my situation actually make it easy on them? Knowing what everyone knew about the mob?

  "We just want to ask you a few questions," the guy added, coming closer again.

  "If you wanted to ask questions, you could ask them here," I snapped back, rushing around the back of Luca Grassi who made no move to reach for me. I guess he was the sort to leave his dirty work to his men.

  "It's ninety-six degrees. Think we'd all rather have this conversation somewhere with air conditioning."

  "Nope. I'd prefer to have it here," I told him, pivoting out of his reach again. I didn't like to watch a lot of true crime content, but I knew enough to know that once they took you to a secondary location, you were dead. I couldn't die. Not yet at least.

  "Alright, enough," the man said, lunging forward, grabbing my hips, yanking me backward.

  All my life, I told myself I would one day take self-defense classes, would learn how to take care of myself, make it so that if something bad should happen to me, if someone should grab me, I wouldn't be stuck flailing in the air with no defense.

  I never got around to that, of course.

  So what was I doing?

  I was flailing.

  "No!" I shrieked, body jerking, making the man hiss as he tried to hold onto me. "I'm not a threat to you," I insisted, hearing hysteria slip into my voice. "You don't have to do this!" I pleaded, eyes on Luca Grassi.

  If I wasn't mistaken, there was a flash of regret there before he banked it down, replacing it with a cold resignation.

  "I'm afraid I do, Romy," he said, turning and walking away, leaving his man to wrangle me all the way back through the maze.

  I fought every step of the way. Even when another man showed up to grab my legs while the first one grabbed me under my arms, carting me around between them as I kicked and flailed and twisted as much as the compromising position would allow.

  I fought.

  I screamed.

  Even though I knew where we were.

  Even though the legitimate businessmen had cleared out.

  Even though not a single soul around here would come and save me.

  When my instinct toward flight was taken from me, it seemed I was willing to fight. As weak as that fight might have been.

  "Baby, for fuck's sake," the first man growled when my feet were put down so they could try to shove me into a back seat of a blacked-out window SUV.

  I didn't even think about it, I curled them up off the ground, slammed them into the side of the vehicle, and propelled myself—and therefore this guy—backward, sending us slamming to the ground.

  Unfortunately, his grip only managed to tighten after the fall, anchoring me to him until two of the other men reached down, grabbed me, and tossed me into the backseat beside the man who'd been with Luca Grassi the night before.

  "You alright, Lucky?" the guy next to me asked of the man in black as he brushed off his suit, then reached up to wipe some blood from his ear.

  "Fine," he said, climbing in to flank my other side, boxing me in.

  Luca Grassi climbed into the passenger seat as the driver turned the SUV over.

  I huffed for air as the cold blast of the air vent above me sent a chill across my overheated skin.

  My best bet would have been to simply sit there and shut up, look for any opportunity to get away.

  But did I do that?

  No, no of course, I didn't.

  Because I always had a temper, sometimes struggling to keep a hold on it when it got triggered.

  "Just an FYI," I said to the man named Lucky. "You don't call someone 'baby' when you are kidnapping them," I told him, voice as authoritative as it could be given the situation.

  "You're probably right about that," he agreed, shrugging, leaning back in his seat. Like this was no big deal. Like kidnapping women was a daily occurrence for him.

  Hell, maybe it was.

  What did I know?

  "Keep it up and we are going to have to cuff you," Lucky warned when I raised a fist, one that he caught in mid-air before it could make contact.

  If there was one thing I didn't want, it was to make this situation any worse for myself.

  When it was released, I clasped my hands together in my lap, staring out the windshield, trying to convince myself it wasn't a completely terrible sign that they weren't hooding me, blindfolding me, keeping me from seeing where they were taking me.

  It wasn't a long drive, but it was long enough for my stomach to twist into a million tight knots.

  We pulled down a long tree-lined drive in the middle of nowhere, ripping away any hopes I might have been clinging to of someone else seeing, someone else calling for help
for me.

  The house when it came into view was almost painfully average. From the neatly trimmed—if a bit brown from the sun—front lawn to the quaint light blue paint to the wooden shakes, the charming front porch, to the faux well at the curve of the front walk. It was all so perfectly average. No one would guess something nefarious transpired here, that the local mafia kidnapped women and dragged them here. To do God-knew what with.

  The driver hit a button on his dash, making the garage door grumble open. And in we rode, waiting for the door to close again, blanketing us in complete darkness once the engine cut.

  "Come on," Lucky demanded, hand closing around my upper arm, tight, but not bruising, dragging me out of the car. With the man behind me pushing me along, there was no way to fight.

  So I begrudgingly went along, being led through a door at the side, into a hallway.

  "No," I snapped again when Luca Grassi's hand moved out, opening a door, showing us all a staircase leading down. "No," I cried out again when I was pushed forward toward the stairs.

  Nothing good ever happened to women in basements.

  Ever.

  My hand shot out, grabbing the railing, nails digging at the walls even as Lucky's arms went around my midsection, carrying me down.

  I expected the space to be dingy, dark, smelling of must and stale air.

  Instead, it was a somewhat bright space, the entire area—walls, floor, ceiling—painted in a shiny off-white color. There wasn't much around, though. There was a folding table pressed up against the longest wall. There were folding chairs propped up against the side of it. There were a few cans of paint in a back corner, likely what was used to paint the space.

  I couldn't help but wonder if the fresh paint was put down to cover up some other deed done here. Blood stains that wouldn't come out fully.

  Was there enough paint left in those cans to paint over my blood when it was left behind?

  "Romy," Luca Grassi's voice called. "Have a seat," he added when my gaze shot to his, seeing the other man had pulled out a chair, set it in the middle of the room.

  "Let me go. I won't come back to the pier."

  "It's too late for that," Luca Grassi told me , gesturing toward the chair again, leading Lucky to drag me over, push me down.

  "Why don't you go find her something to drink?" Luca suggested, jerking his chin toward the stairs.

  Lucky moved to do just that. And even though he said nothing, for some reason, the other men followed behind. Leaving the two of us alone.

  "Just let me go." Was that my voice? Sounding so small and airless?

  To that, Luca grabbed another chair, unfolding it across from me, and sat down, legs wide, leaning forward toward me. It was a friendly movement, but felt intimidating coming from a man like him.

  "I'm hoping I can do that," he told me, stealing the more desperate plea from my lips. "If you stop fighting, and start cooperating."

  "You're going to have to forgive me for not trusting a mob boss at his word."

  "There's no such thing as the mob," he informed me, deadpan, something practiced, something he likely said over and over since he was a little boy.

  "Does anyone fall for that?"

  "You'd be surprised," he said, sitting back when the door upstairs opened, and footsteps came our way.

  Lucky came up at our sides, holding out a sweating bottle of water toward me.

  My pride wanted me to refuse. But my mouth felt like cotton. So I took it, had a couple of tentative sips.

  "Want me to stick around?" Lucky asked, looking at his boss.

  "Hang upstairs for now," he demanded, getting a nod before his man ran off again.

  "They're well-trained," I mumbled, helplessness making me mouthy. "Like puppies."

  "They're respectful. Like grown-ass men," Luca corrected.

  "But handsy with women."

  "You were fighting."

  "You were kidnapping me."

  A touch of humor lit his dark eyes at that. "You were trespassing. After having been expressly warned not to do so anymore."

  "So, what? I was asking to be abducted?"

  "You were requiring me to detain and question you,"

  "Do the semantics help you sleep better at night?" I asked.

  "With you acting as a thorn in my side, I don't foresee any sleep until I get the answers I need."

  "Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? Poor little mafia guy. It must be so hard for you."

  To that, his lips twitched. "I've known cold-blooded killers who wouldn't speak to me that way."

  "Hard for them to speak to you with condescension when you and them are on the same level morally."

  "And you're better than me? Skulking around private property?"

  "I'm not a killer. Or a kidnapper. So I have that going for me."

  Again, that lip twitch. "Are you going to be mouthy all night, or are we going to have a conversation?"

  "I seem quite capable of doing both."

  I got an actual chuckle out of him at that, a deep, rolling sound that seemed to glide over my skin, leaving goosebumps in its wake.

  "I don't doubt that. But for the sake of saving both of us some time and aggravation, how about you drop the clap backs and give me some straight answers?"

  "Why would I give you what you want? I have nothing to gain here."

  "Your freedom."

  "Right. Because anyone who has come down to this basement has made it back out."

  "Actually, no one's been in this basement."

  "Just like you're not a boss of the mob."

  "I'm not the boss of the mob," he corrected, and there was a ring of truth in his words.

  "An underboss then," I told him, summoning up some lingo I'd picked up from a mob movie I'd seen years before. I knew I got it right when he didn't respond to that. "Why is there a fresh coat of paint if you haven't spilled some innocent person's blood here before?"

  "Because there was water damage from a burst pipe," he told me, smirking. "And I think we established that you aren't innocent here, Romy."

  "I'm not the kind of guilty you seem to think I am. I'm not a threat to you."

  "Anyone snooping around my docks is a threat to me."

  This was the part where I had to seriously consider what my next move was.

  There was a lie, of course. But a part of me instinctively knew that I wouldn't get away with that, that this man would be able to smell dishonesty on me.

  But what would happen if I gave him the truth?

  Could he be trusted with it?

  Would he let me look for what I needed to find?

  Or was he in on it?

  Did he not give a damn?

  No one wanted to believe the person who was currently in control of their freedom was a ruthless, evil person.

  But what would it mean for me if I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and it backfired on me?

  "Romy," he called, pulling me out of my swirling thoughts. "Make this easy. Talk."

  "And what do I get out of that? What happens if you don't like what I have to say?"

  "No offense, sweetheart, but you don't exactly seem like a hardened criminal to me. Which makes me think someone is making you do this. Which means I am after them, not you."

  "And what if who I am involved with and what I am looking for is something that is related to you, that you have been a part of? What then? Do you really want me to think that you will just let me walk away?"

  "I guess I can't answer that until you start talking."

  "And I'm afraid I can't start talking until you answer that."

  "Christ," he grumbled, raking a hand down his face. "Fine. You can sit here and think it over for a couple hours. See what you come up with," he said, getting up, and making his way up the stairs.

  The door closed.

  And locked.

  I didn't know anything about picking locks, but I might have given it a try after a while.

  But then I heard footsteps and voices, making
it clear it wasn't just a lock.

  I had an armed guard as well.

  On a sigh, I looked around my makeshift prison.

  Barred windows.

  No door.

  Nothing that could be used as a weapon unless I decided to wield a chair or a paint can.

  Maybe Luca Grassi was right.

  I needed to use this time to think, to decide who to trust, what my best move might be.

  Because I had to get out of this basement.

  I had to get back to work.

  So I had to hedge my bets, figure out which story was the most likely to grant me my freedom, then toss that story at Luca Grassi.

  If he found me sometime down the line, after all this was over, after I got what I came to New Jersey to get, well, that was okay.

  I would deal with those consequences when they came.

  And there was not—absolutely not—a small thrill of excitement at the idea of him tracking me down some day.

  Nope.

  Because that would have been absolutely insane.

  Chapter Five

  Luca

  "What are you smirking at?" I grumbled at Lucky as I paced the small kitchen with its tan linoleum floor, white tile countertops, and pine cabinets. There was a small, forgotten Easter egg window cling stuck to the side of the window over the sink overlooking the mostly wooded backyard.

  The house was mostly empty save for a few pieces of furniture the owner had left behind when my father requested it. There was a full-size bed in each of the two bedrooms, towels in the bathroom, an old couch in the living room, and a small card table under a brass chandelier in the dining space. That was it. The cabinets were empty as were all the closets. The only reason we had bottled water was because we'd left some behind the last time we'd used the house.

  "She's got a mouth on her, huh?" he asked, leaning back against the counter, tucking his hands into his pockets.

  "This is the part where I am supposed to tell you that you can't eavesdrop on my conversations."

  "Yet you won't because you know it is a waste of breath."

  "Yeah, that," I agreed, sighing.