“What’s the chance she shows up in the same apartment as the woman we’re looking for and has the same name as Bianca? Too many coincidences are never a coincidence.”
The landing opens becomes a corridor of white walls and wooden floors.
“Take anything that might be useful.”
“Got it, boss.” Andrea snickers, entering a bedroom.
I follow a whiff of the floral scent to an open door on the left. A bed draped in fabric faces a view of Naples. The room is simple—a mirror and a few frames hang on the wall, a single bookcase, and a chair in the corner—to match the place of a woman who wears a bonnet outside.
Shoes spill from inside a small closet stuffed with sundresses, shirts, and pants on hangers. Who knows what the fuck I’mlooking for. Evidence. Something to prove she’s not the person we’re looking for. The clothes in here are unexpected for a woman who showed up to my property in pajamas.
It didn’t stop me from digging deep in her guts.
The things I still want to do to her and that fucking mouth… The thought of her stretched wide—under me, on top of me, on her knees with tears streaking that pretty face—taking inch by inch tempts me to fist my dick right here.
A green book is next to a pen on her nightstand.Journalscrolls across the textured cover in gold foil. The diary entries date back over a decade and thin as the years stretch.
Excitement for a new job.
Bad dates.
Burnout.
The last entry was June eighth, seventeen days before Simone and a local team grabbed her. She came to Italy for an adventure, a departure from the life she’d wasted working at a job that never valued her.
Human resources management.
“Aren’t you full of surprises, Trouble.”
Maybe she’s who she says she is, which works to my benefit.
My attraction to Bianca is primal. She arouses a foreign instinct, an urge to be closer.
I grab the journal and bag with her purse beside the door. Anything I don’t trust is a threat, regardless of how beautiful she is.
Chapter 15
Mirror B*tch & Right Hooks
Bianca
When I get out of here, I’m laying hands on somebody, starting with the gargoyle who enjoys using those damn syringes.
“It’s me and you when I catch you,” I croak, mouth full of cotton. My head isn’t throbbing like the first time he drugged me, so that’s a win.
I wiggle my toes over a quilt that looks like it hasn’t seen the inside of a washer in decades. Dust floats in the air, ashes for all I know. How many times could someone drug a person in a day before permanent damage occurred? On second thought, I don’t want to know.
What I do know is Benny and his goons got me fucked up, keeping me chained in this dusty-ass room. The iron cuff on my right ankle isn’t tight, but it’s heavy as hell. There’s just enough slack to go to the shower and sit in the tattered chair next to the bed. Overkill, if you ask me, from a man who literally had a body suspended from the ceiling.
I’m a flight risk, but I have no shoes or a passport. I also don’t know where I am or what time it is. There’s no clock on the barestone walls or any way to tell time, outside of sunlight trickling in from two small windows too high to reach.
Mama Vee didn’t want me “playing out in the wilderness” as a Girl Scout. Look what good that did me.
“I’m getting out of this room,” I say to myself, the steel door, Jesus, and whoever else is listening. “After I pee.”
Metal clinks with the shift of my weight off the twin bed. It unfurls into a long trail to the bathroom, where it stops in front of the toilet. Light filters in through frosted glass above a small tub, warming the stone tiles beneath my feet. My knee bounces to the rhythm of my bladder relieving itself.
What did Diana do for Benny to put a kidnapping hit on her? Are kidnapping hits a thing? Maybe he doesn’t want her dead, but it’s hard to tell, being fucking chained in a cell with area rugs.
