* * *
Alessia had a list of excuses she liked to use to get out of social engagements with her parents. Illness, work responsibilities, and non-life-threatening emergencies were her most used reasons not to attend parties and dinners.
But her mom called her at work the day after she met with the Irish to tell her to come over that night for dinner with her family and some of her dad’s “work associates,” she didn’t hesitate to agree. It could be an opportunity to discover more information about what her dad was up to.
Her dad liked to show off his family to those he did business with. It often felt like they were possessions on display, as if Alessia would be most useful if she was able to just exist as a pretty thing placed on a shelf. It always bothered her, but tonight, she was planning to use it as a way to learn more about his business. No one paid attention to her aside from telling her father how impressed they were that he had such a lovely family. That meant that things were said in her presence that probably shouldn’t have been.
Tonight, she was sitting at the dining room table across from a man that she’d never seen before. That wasn’t unusual. Her father was constantly forming connections with new people, basically finding ways to use anyone that could benefit him in some way. There were two other men that she didn’t recognize, and while her father had introduced her to them, showing her off, he didn’t bother to tell her their names.
There were familiar faces here too. Her brother, Dave, and another capo named Joe. He was younger than most of her father’s other associates, in his late thirties, and he was one of the few of her father’s men that she could stand to be around. He never leered at her, and he wasn’t known to be particularly cruel. Those weren’t exactly the marks of sainthood, but it made him far more tolerable than some of the others.
“They took over the warehouse district,” her father was saying. He’d been ranting about the audacity of the Irish mafia for the past ten minutes, and she was trying to tune it out, focusing on her food, but it was impossible. “But I’m not going to let that go. They don’t get to move into my territory without consequences.”
“We need to wipe them out,” Leo added, talking around a mouthful of roast beef. “Then, we’ll have the whole city ripe for the taking.”
There was a round of agreement at the table, but Alessia took a sip of her red wine to keep her lack of enthusiasm from being noticed.
“Owen is weak,” her father said. “We’ll get an opportunity to exploit that soon enough.”
Alessia bit her tongue to keep the argument from spilling out of her mouth. Owen didn’t seem weak to her at all. He was a decent man, and that was what her father detested.
If someone associated with the Irish mafia came to him, she was sure that he’d kill them without even giving them a chance to speak. But Owen didn’t even hurt her.
The two men couldn’t have been more different.
When dinner was wrapping up, she saw her opportunity to slip away and do a little investigating. Her mother left the table to supervise the housekeeper’s cleaning of the kitchen while her father and the men she didn’t know went into the drawing room, deep in some conversation with low murmuring that she couldn’t make out as they went. Leo started talking in detail about violent ways to get at the Irish with Joe and Dave.
They didn’t even notice when she left the table. She headed in the direction of the kitchen, veering to the right at the last minute and going down the hallway leading to her father’s study. If there was anywhere in this house that she could find information, it was there.
The room was huge, with bookshelves lining the walls except for where the marble fireplace was located. There was a chair next to it, but she’d never seen her dad use it. He wasn’t the type to relax by the fire with a good book. Every time she’d been in this room, he was behind his desk, a large fixture in the middle of the room with an empty wooden surface.
Her father had a laptop, but he didn’t use it much. He preferred to keep track of this on paper, which was why she headed straight to the desk and started rifling through the drawers. There were papers related to his legitimate business holdings, the waste management company and his real estate holdings, but not much about the shadier side of his business practices.
Then, she came to the bottom drawer on the right. This one was locked.
Shit.
She probably should have anticipated that. Standing, she looked around the room, wondering if there was any way that her father would have the key hidden here. It didn’t seem likely.
The door of the study suddenly opened and panic flooded her system. There was nowhere to hide, and she didn’t have a good excuse if her father caught her here. What was she going to do?
But it wasn’t her father that walked into the study. She held her breath as she watched Dave come in, leaving the door ajar, and she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse for her.
He already had a lecherous smirk on his face as his eyes swept up and down her body, and she regretted the decision to wear a silk blouse with a plunging V-neck today. Dave licked his lips suggestively, and she suppressed the urge to shudder in disgust.
“What are you up to?” he asked, amusement dancing in his eyes. She could see the excitement he felt at having caught her alone, and it was clearly overriding his common sense. He didn’t even look suspicious about what she was doing in here. She needed to keep it that way.
Forcing a smile on her face, she batted her eyelashes at him as she thought quickly. She’d seen a bottle of expensive scotch in one of her father’s drawers, so she pulled it open and grabbed it.
“I was just hoping to sneak a few sips of the good stuff,” she said, holding the bottle up for him to see. She puckered her lips into a playful pout that was probably laying it on a little too thick, but Dave’s eyes flashed with lust, so she knew he was eating it up. “You won’t tell, will you?”
Dave was already walking toward her, and now he came around the desk, stopping way too close to her. Apparently, he’d never heard of the concept of personal space, but she resisted the urge to step back. She needed him too distracted to ask a lot of questions, and if that meant flirting with the creep, she was going to do it.
“Of course, I won’t tell,” he replied, taking the bottle out of her hands and twisting off the cap. He tipped it back and took a long drink before handing it to her.
Alessia was more of a wine drinker, and just the smell of the scotch was overwhelming, but she was committed to this lie, so she shut her eyes and forced herself to take a sip. The alcohol burned going down her throat and she couldn’t hold back her grimace, but it just made Dave laugh.
He took another drink before he stepped even closer, so that she was stuck in place between him in front of her and the edge of the desk pressed against her lower back. The alcohol did nothing to soothe her nerves, even as she took another sip.
