Page 18 of Mafia Doctor

That didn’t sound good at all.

Deciding that discretion was the better part of valor for now, Aurora followed meekly behind Gennaro as he led her deeper into the bowels of his secret lair or whatever this place was.

After a few minutes walking down cement-floored hallways lined with steel doors leading to rooms of unknown purpose, they reached a drab-looking office, where he took a seat in a cushy, leather-bound chair behind a wooden desk. Gennaro motioned with his hand, and her cab-driver-turned-abductor took Aurora’s arm in a rough grip and forced her to sit in a far less comfortable metal chair before quickly and efficiently binding her hands to the chair behind her back.

“Is that really necessary?” she worked up the courage to ask.

In response Gennaro simply nodded, not to her but to the goon who’d just tied her up. Before she even knew what was happening, he’d backhanded her across the face. The blow would have knocked her from the chair if she wasn’t bound to it, and she instantly tasted blood from a split lip. Then, without a further word, Dante gestured toward the door and the goon left.

“As I think you can tell now, puttana, you’re not here to ask questions.”

Deciding that asking what she was here for would probably count as a question, Aurora just stared at him, fear and hatred mingling in her gaze.

“Don’t look so worried, little sunflower. I hear your man had to kidnap you anyway. Once I’ve dealt with him, I’ll send you on your way.”

He got up and left the room then, shutting the door behind him and leaving her there alone.

Aurora gave herself a moment—really it was more like five minutes—to cry, feel sorry for herself, and ponder the possibility of her impending death. After that she began testing the bonds that held her arms.

It was a sign of Gennaro’s total disrespect for her as anything other than a damsel in distress that he hadn’t even instructed his minion to bind anything other than her wrists, and the goon—apparently equally unimpressed by Aurora—had done a barely half-assed job at even that simple task. Despite having no prior experience with freeing herself from bindings of any type—she’d just lain there and taken it when it had been Dante tying her up, after all—within moments Aurora was able to loosen the knot and slip first her right hand free and then her left.

Climbing gingerly to her feet, she looked around the room. Unfortunately, she quickly realized, her kidnapper doing a shit-tacular of tying her up didn’t actually mean she was suddenly a secret agent, and she had zero clue what to do next. Pounding on the door was a horrible idea for obvious reasons, and the room had no windows. The air vents were six-by-twelve inches at most, so even the spy movie go-through-the-vents option was out, not that she would have been able to reach the ceiling anyway.

Sitting back down on the chair, temporarily defeated, she allowed herself another brief time to bemoan her bad luck before she resumed pondering her situation. Then an idea struck her.

On the off chance that there was something useful in one of its drawers, Aurora made a quick search of the desk. Her string of bad luck was apparently coming to an end, because she found something very useful.

A gun.

Aurora wasn’t even going to pretend to know what kind, but it was a handgun and it clearly wasn’t a revolver, so it must be a semi-automatic of some kind. Whatever it was, it gave her at least a fighting chance if Gennaro came back in by himself.

Cognizant of the fact that she hadn’t fired a gun since her dad had taken her to an indoor range at the age of ten or eleven, and that she’d certainly never fired one at a person, let alone one or more people who would themselves be firing in her direction, Aurora tiptoed to the door. After putting her ear to it, listening for a few moments, and hearing nothing, she very, very gently opened it just a crack, listened some more, and then stuck her head out into the dimly lit hallway.

Still hearing and seeing no one, she took a few tentative steps, only to discover that even her softest footfalls seemed to echo off the walls. Kicking off her booties, she took a few more steps. The floor felt slippery under her socks. Realizing that wasn’t going to work either, she grumpily peeled those off as well and resumed her journey.

Finally happy with the stealthiness of her footfalls, she gradually picked up her pace until she reached a T in the hallway, where she paused to rack her brain, hoping to remember the route they had dragged her down on the way in. Sadly, she had no recollection of this particular spot.

Fuck.

Dante had counted on Gennaro being an arrogant fool, and his instincts—honed by years of dealing with the asshole—had proven correct.

Upon his arrival, he’d found Gennaro and several of his goons waiting, and had promptly surrendered himself as both he and presumably Gennaro had planned. What Gennaro had not planned for, however, was the fact that Dante didn’t just carry a back-up weapon.

He carried two back-up weapons.

Gennaro had known Dante would be armed, of course, and he’d made him drop his gun before even entering the warehouse. Then, as Dante had expected, he’d been patted down, revealing his back-up weapon in an ankle holster. That find had prompted exactly the smug, self-satisfied look from Gennaro that Dante had expected, and in his haste to savor his victory, Gennaro had let it go at that.

Which meant he had not found the switchblade hidden in the sole of Dante’s right shoe. Obsessive over-preparedness had never failed to pay off for Dante, and today was shaping up to be no different.

After a few minutes of haranguing about all of the over-the-top horrible things he was going to do to Dante and his bride-to-be, Gennaro instructed one of his men to bind Dante to a chair, then turned to leave the room.

Knowing that his chance of survival—and Amy’s—would drop precipitously once he was restrained, Dante surveyed the situation. Three thugs, all armed, against one man with a knife that was going to require some acrobatics to get out of his shoe before he took a bullet to the head.

These were some terrible fucking odds, but they were the best he was likely to get.

Pretending to play along for now, Dante sat down in the chair and waited.

Fortunately, Gennaro’s hubris had rubbed off on his men, because while Goon Number One bent forward to begin the process of restraining Dante as instructed, the other two hadn’t even drawn their weapons. One had gone so far as to pull out his phone, and now seemed to be texting.

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