Page 2

She scanned again, slowly taking everything in and thinking hard of where he could be. As her gaze took in the rear entrance of Gino’s nightclub for the second time, Elio emerged from it and crossed the street. There was something so purposeful about the stride of her brother’s walk that instead of calling out to him, she looked at the figure his stare was fixed on and blinked.

Was that Stefano?

No sooner had she registered that it really was Mattia’s right-hand man, the Esposito loyalist who’d disappeared ten nights ago, than a hand clamped around her mouth.

She was being lifted into the air and thrown into the back of a car with such speed that there was no time to even think about fighting back, and no time to register the hulking shadowed figure waiting in the car for her before a black cloth hood was rammed over her head and face.

Her belly dipped, the screech of tyres rang in her ears, and then the car sped away.

* * *

Elvira fought the sense of claustrophobia grabbing at her. She was disoriented, her world pitch-black, but she was damned if she’d let fear grab her any more than the claustrophobia. God, though, it was hard. They were hurtling through the streets of Naples, but she had no sense of the direction they were going or how long they’d been travelling. She didn’t know if they were even in Naples anymore. For all she knew, they could be in Verona.

The only thing she knew for certain was that there were at least three other people in the car with her, two sandwiching her in the back and someone driving. The few words exchanged between them had been low, the hood muffling their words.

Elvira hadn’t spoken. Not one syllable. Instead, she’d clamped her jaw tightly and forced herself to pay attention and to think with her brain and not with her fear, just as her grandmother had always said.

This wasn’t a hit. If whoever had taken her wanted her dead, she’d be dead. They wouldn’t have thrown her bag with her phone in it out of the car window minutes after setting off. She’d been taken for a purpose.

Fury coursed through her veins, and it was all aimed at herself. Elio had warned her their new circumstances meant she should always have physical protection, and while she was perfectly capable of taking care of herself, she’d grudgingly agreed.

For this one damned night though, she’d wanted to let her hair down. As if anything could happen to her in the city her brother owned! Everyone knew she was Elio Ranieri’s sister. Everyone knew that to touch her in any unwanted way meant a bullet in the head.

The car stopped moving. A door opened. A large hand clasped the top of her head, and she was being dragged out of the car. She barely had time to feel the ground beneath her feet before she was being slung over a broad shoulder.

She made herself go limp. Fighting was pointless. She was outnumbered. Whoever had taken her – and she was pretty certain about who that was – wanted her alive, at least for now. Elvira was tough and smart. Her grandmother had made damned sure of that. Theirs was a violent world, and Elvira’s mother and two aunts were proof that being a woman counted for nothing when the wars started.

Think with your brain and not your anger, and never with your fear. That’s what their grandmother had drilled into Elvira, her two brothers and Renata, their only cousin to survive the Espositos’ slaughter of their family. The four Ranieri children had been spared precisely because they were children; their grandmother allowed to live so she could raise them. Their world didn’t have much in the way of a moral code, but killing children was the one red line no one crossed.

With her personal world currently black from the stifling hood, Elvira forced herself to pay close attention to everything happening to her with her other senses, muffled though they were. There had been two competing colognes in the back of the car that had seeped through the hood’s fabric. Whoever was carrying her was the one wearing the woody, expensive-smelling one, which was a small mercy as the other kidnapper’s scent reminded her of toilet cleaner.

She felt herself being carried indoors and up three flights of stairs, heard a door open and then another, and then she was being placed on a hard chair. Her arms were pulled behind her back, followed by the sear of cold metal clasping around her wrists before the tell-tale click of handcuffs locking together. Large hands she sensed belonged to the man who’d taken her out of the car and slung her over his shoulder made a quick but reasonably thorough sweep of her body. It would have been much more thorough if he hadn’t avoided touching her breasts or stopped his hands straying too close to her vulva.

The figure stepped away. There was a muffled murmur of deep, male voices before a door opened. Footsteps echoed away.

She held her breath, keeping her ears craned. She was certain only one of the kidnappers remained.

There was a long moment of silence before the air moved around her and a hand pulled the hood off her.

Even before she’d blinked rapidly at the sudden exposure to light, she knew who the man was and experienced not a jot of surprise when her vision cleared enough to see the hard face of Mattia Esposito glowering down at her.

Chapter Two

Mattia took a moment to compose himself. This was the bitch who’d put a gun to his mother’s head and would have pulled the trigger with a smile on her face if his sister hadn’t threatened to take her own life.

Their father had always said Siena had been born with invisible balls. Mattia should have listened to him.

He’d underestimated his sister. Now that bastard Elio Ranieri would learn he’d underestimated him. And so would Elio’s bitch sister.

He smiled coldly. “Hello, Elvira. Surprised to see me?”

In response, she gave him the look of someone who’d just discovered dog shit on their shoe after they’d trailed it into their home.

He crouched down in front of her. “How much does your brother love you, do you think?”

She jutted her chin. “A hell of a lot more than you must love your sister.”

He smiled again. “Shall we find out?” Rising to his feet, he pulled his phone out of his back pocket and made the call.