Chapter
One
It wasn’tevery day that I got to ride in the trunk of a car with a dead guy.
A dead billionaire to be precise.
And if we wanted to be really precise: aspiring senator Bruce Davenport.
My job was a fixer. I was supposed to bury scandals. Not get buried with them.
I had a sack over my head. A flimsy barrier, but still a barrier that was a dividing line between forced calm and the hysteria that wanted to tear out of my throat.
I was raised in the mafia. My brother was the boss of the De Lucci crime family, and my uncle was the most powerful don in the country.
The first time I witnessed a mafia execution was by accident. I was five years old and had been sneaking around in my grandfather’s garden when I saw him shoot a guy by the fountain. I had tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Because that was what evil men did on television.
The vehicle lurched, and I rolled into Davenport’s body.
So you see, I should be used to dead bodies, but it didn’t dispel the suffocating urge to lose my shit or throw up.Thankfully, he wasn’t cold or stiff yet, and he felt like he was rolled in plastic, probably painter’s plastic drop cloths. He’d been killed less than two hours ago at the Russians’ exclusive dance club.
In my estimation, we’d been on the road for thirty minutes.
But my lizard brain focused on survival. Crashing out could wait.
The biggest question was why Viktor was keeping me alive. His thugs had held me down while others restrained Davenport as Viktor delivered the lethal dose of heroin. I’d been screaming and yelling. But when he turned to me, my brain and body froze while words died on my lips.
But someone murmured in his ear and stayed Viktor’s hand.
That was how I ended up in the trunk of a car.
My shoulders were sore from my wrists being tied behind my back. I sported a couple of cuts and bruises, but other than a few scrapes, I considered myself lucky to be still breathing.
Though breathing had become a chore with the limited oxygen courtesy of the hood and my mouth taped shut, not to mention the bottled-up panic arising from being wedged beside a body and the back of the car seats.
There was a chirp of a siren, and the car lurched again before it stopped.
Cops?
My heart rate skyrocketed. The hysteria I was keeping in check threatened to break out of my skin because men like Viktor Koshkin were unpredictable. He was the enforcer for the Moscow mob. He’d kill a cop first rather than get arrested.
I heard the opening and closing of car doors.
I heard the muffled voices of newcomers.
I heard labored breathing.
Mine.
My mind spun and failed to access all the survival skills I’d learned throughout my life. I couldn’t thump the back of the vehicle knowing my captor’s unpredictability. I’d risk being turned into Swiss cheese by a possible shootout. Armed with only his service weapon, the cop would be no match for Viktor and his minions, who I’d seen toting Uzis and submachine guns.
Tense minutes passed, or it could have been only seconds. Every thread of cloth itched on my skin.
The pop of the trunk was either my salvation or damnation.
“What the fuck?” someone shouted.
“I can explain.” Viktor’s smug, condescending, and unbothered voice rattled open my caged anxiety. This couldn’t be good. It sounded like he’d decided to leave no witnesses.
