The Woman at the Docks: A Mafia Romance Read online

"Are you so sure she's not a pro? She could just be a good actress."

  "No. When I showed up in her hotel room, she was terrified. She didn't even try to hide it. She's just had some time to pull herself together."

  "So what now? Just let her sweat?"

  "I imagine what she is looking for at the docks is time-sensitive. She will talk before long."

  "And if she's right and what she is looking for is something that belongs to you, or someone we do business with?"

  "Guess that depends. If she's just an innocent who is being forced to do this, that's a different story than if she orchestrated this. If the former, we find who is controlling her, and we handle it."

  "And if it's the latter?" Lucky asked, brow arching.

  Gritting my teeth, I found it hard to even get the words out. "Then we handle it," I told him, shrugging, even though nothing about this was a shrugging matter. We didn't murder women. Just the idea of it made my stomach turn. But if Romy was a leader of some sort of opposing force, she couldn't be allowed to continue on, risking our livelihood, risking our lives.

  "We handle it," he repeated, tone hollow.

  Knowing Lucky, he was thinking about his sisters, about his mother and aunts and cousins, all the women he vowed to keep safe, about the fact that we had a reputation for leaving women out of our business.

  "I'm hoping it doesn't come to that."

  "Not gonna lie, I am too."

  "So, she sitting all night? You need me here? What's the plan?"

  "I'm gonna let her sit for a while. You can head out. Sounds like you have someone to meet."

  "Well, you know me, I hate to break hearts by leaving 'em hanging," he said, smirking. "Oh, and, yeah, you're welcome by the way, asshole," he told me, making his way toward the door.

  "I'll be sure to tell my old man," I called back, getting a dismissive wave as he left.

  Lucky had been the one to call and suggest moving the containers, making the maze, driving her into the center, so we could get her if she showed up.

  Apparently, he'd gotten the idea when he'd dropped into his brother's place to find him watching a movie about a murderer in a corn maze.

  It had been a pain in the ass to pull off, but had been worth it in the end. No one had to sweat through their clothes chasing her around. We just set the trap and waited.

  "You have the door," I told Michael, one of my men. "I am going to go lay down for a bit. She doesn't come upstairs. If she starts throwing a fit, come get me."

  "Got it."

  The bedroom smelled like dust, and the mattress was no better than sleeping on the floor, but it had been a long-as-fuck couple of days, and I was asleep before I could even kick out of my shoes.

  I woke up to a knock at the door.

  "Yeah? What?"

  "She said she needs to use the bathroom," Michael called through the door, making me sigh as I unfolded out of bed.

  "Alright," I answered, opening the door. "Go ahead," I added, moving toward the front door, going around the house, waiting.

  I didn't have to wait long.

  It would have been dumb for her not to try, after all. What prisoner didn't try at least once to escape?

  The door closed, the water went on, and the window jacked open.

  I slipped back around the corner of the house as she carefully popped out the screen, then wedged her body out, pausing, then throwing her weight forward.

  Clearly, the woman had never snuck out of the house as a teenager.

  Because if I hadn't stepped out and grabbed her, she'd have fallen on her head.

  A gasp, shriek hybrid caught in her throat—shock and fear mingling together. "Let me go," she demanded when she got her breath back, her body wiggling, trying to break free.

  "It was worth a try, right, sweetheart?" I asked, turning her, pressing her back against the house, hands on her shoulders. "What's the matter?" I asked when she whimpered.

  "I hurt my ankle," she told me, wincing. "No, don't touch me," she snapped when I stooped down.

  "Just twisted," I decided after feeling it.

  "What are you, no," she snapped when I dropped down a bit to scoop her up, pull her against my chest. "Aren't you supposed to be making me suffer?" she asked, shooting daggers at me.

  "I am hoping to avoid that," I told her, arms tightening around her.

  "You say that as though you don't have a say in it."

  "Depends a lot on you, Romy," I told her as the pounding started inside the house, the men figuring out that she wasn't using the bathroom like she'd claimed. "It's alright. I got her," I called as they burst into the room.

  "Fuck, sorry, Luca," Michael called, shaking his head.

  "It's alright."

  "You need a hand?"

  I bit back the strange impulse to tell them that no one but me would ever be allowed to put their hands on her.

  "I got her."

  "I can walk," she insisted when I started carrying her around the house.

  "I don't figure I can trust you on one leg any more than I can on two," I told her, watching as her lips twitched before she set them in a firm line.

  Under different circumstances, I would have liked to try to find a reason to make those lips do more than merely twitch.

  Lucky was right; it had been too long since I'd had a woman. And not even just sex. I hadn't taken a woman out, shared a meal, had a conversation. My life had been consumed with work and my men. Just seeing a lip twitch from a woman who might have been after my business was the highlight of my fucking week.

  "Did you decide if you are going to talk to me or not?" I asked as we made our way through the house, down the stairs, grudgingly placing her back on her chair.

  "I don't really have a choice, do I? If I want to get out of here eventually, that is. And if I want to avoid you calling your men down here to beat the truth out of me."

  "Talking is always the best option in this kind of situation."

  "Yeah? Do you think that way when the cops pull one of your men in for questioning?"

  "That's assuming any of us ever get pulled in."

  "Hypothetically."

  "Hypothetically, they know what would happen to them if they spoke, so they would never think about talking. I figure the same goes in this situation, except if you don't talk. So talk. Save us both a long day."

  "And me a lot of pain," she half-asked, half stated, holding fierce eye contact.

  "Let's not let it come to that. Why are you at the docks? Who do you work for?"

  "I think you are having memory issues. I've told you who I work for like three times."

  "Right. The state of California. I mean who else are you working for? Who sent you here to New Jersey, to my docks?"

  "My aunt," she told me, nothing about her tone or delivery making me think she was lying.

  "And who is your aunt?"

  "A child care worker in Venezuela," she told me. And, again, there seemed to be only truth there.

  "Why would a child care worker from Venezuela send you to Navesink Bank?"

  I was getting the feeling she was deliberately trying to tell me only part of the truth, only a small sliver of the whole picture.

  To what end?

  To buy more time?

  Did she have partners out there?

  Had she called in reinforcements when she thought she was in trouble?

  Could they have possibly followed us here?

  "Romy, I am going to need some straighter answers from you."

  "A week or so ago, I got a call from my aunt who told me that she hadn't seen my sister in a while. In a long while. And since they live in the same house, it was cause enough to worry. I flew down there, only to find she was right. My sister was gone. And no one seemed to know where she'd gone to."

  "I'm sorry to hear that, sweetheart, I really am, but this has nothing to do with me."

  "I'm giving you context," she snapped, wounds raw. Understandably. I might not have known where Matteo was the vast majority
of the time, but I couldn't imagine the fear and anxiety of him being truly missing.

  "Alright. How'd you get from there to here?"

  "By asking around town, finding some people who claimed that trafficking had picked up recently. That young women and girls around town had been going missing at alarming rates. I did some more digging, and it seems they are being trafficked out of the country. To the States. On shipping boats. In containers."

  "Romy, no one could survive in a shipping container," I told her, shaking my head.

  "They can if they cut breathing holes up near the top corners, hidden just well enough that no one would notice, giving enough air to keep the women inside alive for the trip."

  I wouldn't claim it never happened. It happened. With trafficking on the rise in damn near every country in the world, traffickers found innovative ways of moving live bodies without tipping off the police all the time. Even, yes, in shipping containers.

  That said, we didn't deal with human cargo. We might not have been moral men in the most traditional sense. We allowed numerous different sorts of contraband—for a fee, of course—come through our pier unchecked. That included guns and stolen goods and even some drugs since New York needed the supply, but my father had drawn a line in the sand when it came to people. Even when the local skin trader in the area offered him an exorbitant amount of money to look the other way.

  Some things are a matter of humanity, Luca, he'd said to me about the issue once.

  And I happened to agree.

  "Okay, let's suppose they do drill the holes and get these people on a ship unseen. They are not bringing them into Navesink Bank."

  "Yes, they are. I was specifically told this pier. Not the one in Miami or Georgia or South Carolina or Virginia—all of which would have been closer. None of those. This is the one. This is where I was told she would show up."

  "We don't let people bring people in here, Romy. We let a lot of things come through here. But not people. All of the people who work with us know this, respect it."

  "I think we can all assume that criminals are not the most trustworthy group of people. Someone might be doing it without you knowing."

  "If that is true, they won't be doing it for much longer," I told her, already itching to get out of here, get back to Angelo, to look into the matter.

  "No," she snapped, holding her hand up. "No, you can't stop it right now. I have... I have to find her."

  "How long ago were you told she was put on a ship?"

  "There was no date for it. It was just a tip to get here and check the containers from Venezuela. I was told that sometimes girls get held for a while before making their way to the U.S.."

  A slow sigh escaped me, mind on a dozen things at once. The possibility of being screwed over, the repercussions of that should any of our enemies find out, if New York found out and wanted to take it over, if the commission got together and gave any one of those families permission to carry out the orders, what we could do about finding out who these people were who were supposedly using our port without permission, what we would do to them when we found them.

  And, of course, along with all of that, there was the issue of Romy. And her sister.

  "What's your sister's name?" I asked.

  "Celenia."

  "Okay. I need to figure some shit out tonight, Romy. And you need to come with me."

  "I can do that. Can you show me the containers I missed earlier? Because you moved them to make a trap for me?" she added, brow lifting.

  "Yeah. We can do that. Come on," I added, leading her toward the stairs.

  "What's going on, Luca?" Michael asked.

  "We have a situation. Call Lucky. Get him back from whatever bed he crawled into last night. And call my father. Tell him to meet us at the docks."

  "It's that kind of situation?" he asked, already reaching for his phone.

  "Yeah," I agreed, jerking my chin toward another of my men, leading them through into the garage to climb into the car.

  I'd climbed into the back with Romy instinctively, both of us sitting in tense silence as Michael made the phone calls, keeping the communication to a bare minimum as we always tried to do.

  When we arrived, the docks were empty save for the crowd of men Michael had called to assemble.

  My father. Leandro, Dario, Angelo, and Lucky were gathered around. The other men would be called in if and when it became necessary. But the serious shit, that was discussed among the six of us, seven should Matteo decide the issue was worth of his attention for a change.

  "Michael, you take Romy around, let her look at the containers she wants. Don't let her out of your sight," I ordered, getting a nod from them and a look from Romy that was somehow both thankful and annoyed at the same time.

  "You never drag me out of bed," my father started once Romy and the others were out of earshot.

  "I can't guarantee there is an issue right now, but if what Romy says is true, it is a big one."

  "What is she saying?" my father asked.

  "She is saying that some trafficking operation is bringing girls in through our port. She made it clear that they aren't hitting any of the ports South of us, that were closer to Venezuela."

  "Venezuela?" Dario asked, brows pinching. "Since when do they ship women into the States? Last I heard, kidnapping for extortion was a bigger business for them."

  "Trafficking is on the rise everywhere. But most people who are trafficked are stolen and sold in their own countries. It's not easy to get human beings into other countries," Lucky said, reaching in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Smoking was a habit he had mostly given up, only reaching for one when he was stressed. Hell, I'd never smoked, and I felt like I could use one.

  Because if we had someone shipping girls into our port, we all knew what was going to follow. An all-out war. After such a long period of peace, it was a daunting possibility.

  "How did she get this information? Is it reliable?"

  "Her sister was supposedly taken by these traffickers. She flew down to Venezuela to figure out what happened. Somehow, she got pointed here."

  "That's a long way," my father said, shaking his head. "Especially in this heat."

  "We've seen it, though," Leandro added. "More than we would like to say. That one time," he added, looking pale. "With the children—"

  "When was this?" I asked, stomach turning.

  "Probably when you were sixteen or seventeen," my father supplied. "I'll never forget that either. Someone heard crying. We called the customs guys over. Opened the container. And there they were. A dozen little kids bound and gagged, barely alive. Two of them didn't make it even after getting treatment. They came in from El Salvador. Took a long time to track those bastards down and handle it. If this girl is right, and someone is using our ports for this sort of thing again, there won't be any mercy. We made it clear then, and we will make it clear now, that we don't stand for that shit here."

  "Alright," I agreed, nodding toward Angelo. "We're going to need videos from all the companies picking up containers that came in from Venezuela for the past few months."

  "On it," he agreed, nodding, moving off.

  "What do you want from the rest of us?" Lucky asked, looking at my father.

  "See who might be in the trafficking business. Here and there. And look into this woman," he added, glancing at Dario. "And you," he went on, looking at me, "We're going to need to keep an eye on her," he said, tone clear.

  He wanted me to keep an eye on her.

  And not just checking in at her hotel now and again.

  He wanted eyes on her full-time.

  To that, Lucky chuckled. "Can I be there when you tell her that she's going to be a prisoner indefinitely?" he asked, smirking at me through a cloud of smoke. "Might make that nose of yours crooked."

  "Take her back to the rental," my father decided. "Though give her a bed this time. Call in some of the guys to guard, but, for now, this is between us. We don't want any loose lips with Lorenz
o visiting soon."

  I should have been frustrated with the job given to me. I should have been chomping at the bit to get into the field, to throw my weight around.

  But all I felt was relief and anticipation.

  My father threw out more orders, but I scarcely heard a word, inwardly making a list of shit we would need at the house if we were going to be there for any length of time. Bedding, plates, food. All the essentials.

  She had been staying in a shitty hotel, so it wasn't like she was expecting the Ritz, but I couldn't deny her the basic shit she'd need to get through a couple days, a week. I couldn't imagine this going on any longer than that.

  "Alright. I am going back to bed," my father said, nodding at all of us. "You all have your jobs. Keep me posted as you learn anything."

  "Will do, Unc," Lucky agreed, crushing out his cigarette.

  With that, everyone with orders set out to work on them, leaving me waiting for the men and Romy to come back.

  About forty minutes later, they did, a defeated looking Romy flanked with my men.

  "Where'd everyone go?"

  "To work on this issue," I told her.

  "Oh, well, that's good, I guess. Right?" she asked, eyes looking puffy, tired, making me remember that while I had stolen a few hours in one of the bedrooms, she'd likely been pacing the basement, trying to figure out a way to escape, trying to calm her anxiety.

  "We are going to work to find your sister. If she is in one of those containers like you've been told."

  "No, you're looking to punish whoever dared to disobey you. Don't try to make yourself sound more moral than you are."

  "You're not going to like the next part of this."

  Her arms folded over her chest. "You can't stick me back in the basement just because they weren't here tonight. I told you I didn't have an exact date."

  "You're not going back in the basement. But you are going back to the house."

  "Why?"

  "We need to keep an eye on you."

  "I have a hotel room. And I am not going anywhere without finding my sister. I'll give you my cell number."

  "I have orders, sweetheart. Just think of it like a different hotel."

  "Where I'm surrounded by armed guards, and am not allowed to move freely?"

  "The food will be better than that shitty continental breakfast you had back at your hotel."