I Hid a Mob Boss in the Stacks, So He Claimed My Nights novel · Chapter 8 of 24

Chapter 8: The Book Drop

I texted him on Wednesday afternoon to ask what time he wanted me that night, and my phone rang before I had put it down.

"I don't text," Lucio said.

"Everyone texts," I said.

"I take calls. I'll answer any call you make, any hour. But I don't answer a message with words on it."

"That's the strangest thing you've told me."

"It isn't in the top ten," he said, and I could hear that he was almost smiling, and I laughed.

That was at four.

At ten past nine I stepped out to the staff lot behind the branch for my thermos.

My bag was on my shoulder, and Lucio was waiting inside.

The lamp over the dumpster had been out since October.

A man stepped out from beside it.

He was about forty, in a leather jacket, and he did not hurry.

"Miss Dobrzyn," he said.

"The branch is closed."

"I know. I came for you." He took my arm above the elbow, not roughly, and turned me to face his white Chevrolet. The plates were from Mahoning County. "I'm a messenger, that's all. You tell your friend Castaldi he's dead by Christmas. Say it just like that. From Youngstown."

My heart was going hard.

"Let go of my arm."

"Say it."

I had a bag on my shoulder.

In the bag was the Rand McNally road atlas I had been meaning to return to the reference shelf for a week.

It was a hardcover as thick as my wrist.

I swung the bag with both hands.

It hit him on the side of the face with a flat, solid crack.

He let go of my arm and staggered, and I ran two steps toward the building and he caught me by the hair.

I screamed.

I had never screamed in my life, and it came out of me enormous.

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