The Mafia's Forbidden Captive novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Locked Room

She stitches Luciano in his river house and tells him about Lila's voicemail; he does not deny the name, and shows her a photo of her stepmother with the Corvi wife.

The house was stone, and it sat above the Potomac in Great Falls with the lights off.

Four men carried Luciano Sartori through a kitchen as big as my whole apartment in Chicago.

They laid him on a long table in a room lined with books.

Someone had already spread a clean sheet over the wood.

"Where's your doctor?" I asked.

"Dead," said the heavyset man who ran the others.

I would later learn he was the underboss, and that nobody used his name in front of me.

"The last one sold the boss's Thursday schedule to Corvi."

"Then bring me a kit."

They brought one.

It was a military trauma bag, and it had better supplies than half the hospitals I had worked in.

I washed my hands to the elbow while four armed men watched me do it.

"If I wanted him dead," I said, "I'd have walked away from the garage."

"If you wanted him dead you'd have shot him," the underboss said.

"Someone else got there first."

He looked at me for a long time, and then he nodded at the table.

I cut away the shirt and the shoulder was a mess, but a clean one.

The bullet had gone in high at the front and out through the back, and it had missed the bone and the big vessels.

"You're lucky," I told the man on the table.

He had not passed out.

He lay with his head turned toward me, and his eyes never left my face.

"I don't feel lucky," he said.

"Lidocaine. It'll sting."

"Do it."

I numbed the wound, flushed it, packed it and closed the exit side with a line of neat black stitches.

He did not make a sound after the first needle.

At some point the underboss sent the other men out, and then left himself and shut the door.

It was only the two of us and the smell of antiseptic.

His bare chest rose and fell under my hands, and he had a body that had been hurt before.

There was an old knife scar under his ribs and a round one beside his collarbone.

"Name," he said.

"Mara Tennison."

The room stayed quiet.

I felt it in the muscle under my fingers: the smallest tightening, then nothing.

"Tennison," he said slowly.

"Lila Tennison."

I put down the needle.

My hands had gone cold.

"You say her name like you've said it before."

"I know every name on my list," he said.

"She's on it."

I picked up the needle again, because the other thing I could have picked up was the scalpel.

"I'm going to finish your stitches," I said.

"Then I'm going to tell you what I know, and you're going to tell me why she's dead."

"Go ahead."

I tied off the last knot.

"She called me the night before," I said.

"She left a message. She said your men were in the parking lot with her."

"Play it."

"I'm not playing it for you."

He closed his eyes for one second.

When they opened they were flat and steady and hard to read.

"Sartori's men were in that parking lot," he said.

"Then you did it."

"No."

He said it quietly, and with no heat at all.

"I did not kill your sister, Mara."

I laughed, and it came out wrong.

"The police said she overdosed."

"Did she use?"

"Never."

"Then you already know what that report is worth."

"I know what you are worth," I said.

"I read about you for twenty days before I came to that garage."

"And you thought a revolver would settle it."

"I thought I'd look at you when you said it."

He studied me from the table with the lamp throwing half his face into shadow.

"Say you didn't send them," I said.

"I didn't send anyone to kill her."

"That isn't what I asked."

"I know," he said.

"It's the part I can prove."

It was a strange answer.

It was not a denial and it was not a confession, and I could not tell what he was hiding behind it.

I peeled off my gloves and dropped them in the bin.

"Then I'm leaving," I said.

"You aren't."

"You can't keep me."

"I can, and I'm going to," he said.

"A dozen men in this house saw your face and your gun."

"One of them already wonders if you work for Silvio Corvi."

"I don't."

"Then you're safest here."

"I'm safest at a police station."

"The police sat on your sister's file for four days," said Luciano Sartori.

I had no answer for that.

He sat up slowly, grey with pain, and I watched him choose not to show it.

"Dress the wound twice a day," he said.

"Check it for fever. I trust my own men to guard me, and I trust you not to kill me while I'm useful."

"I could kill you tonight."

"You could," he said.

"But you carried me behind a car to hear me say something, and I haven't said it yet."

My own words, back in my face.

I hated how much I admired it.

Two guards walked me up a staircase to a bedroom with a bed made up in grey linen.

I heard the latch click shut behind me.

I did not try the handle.

I sat down on the edge of the mattress and put my head in my hands, and I stayed that way for a long time.

When I looked up there was a framed photo on the nightstand that someone had put there while I was downstairs.

It was not a family picture.

It was a printout, and the ink was fresh.

A restaurant table, white cloth, two women with their heads together over wine.

The woman on the left had silver-blond hair and a pearl earring.

She was my stepmother, Marianne.

The date stamp in the corner said October second.

That was two days after we buried Lila.

← Chapter 1 · All chapters · Chapter 3 →

Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend