Page 59 of Protected By the Mafia

He arched back, head angled toward the sky, sucking in air. It didn’t help him maintain his balance but he didn’t give a fuck. Ten goddamn minutes. “What about the man I sent to pick her up?”

“Dead.”

Well, he would have been if he hadn’t already been. Cristiano supposed it was better that the enemy had done it. But they’d probably done it in front of her, and he was less satisfied with that.

“The doc has a security camera in her foyer,” Dante said. “Mikey’s headed over to take a look, see if we can identify the guy. I did text her the picture we have of Garcia, she says it wasn’t him. She got a look at his profile; this one has facial tattoos.”

Cristiano’s fingers dug into the brick of the building he was still using to hold himself up. He’d heard that description before. “Sonofabitch.”

“Whatever you need, Cris. We will find her. I’ve already initiated the emergency message system; I just didn’t want you hearing this from a text.”

In his peripheral vision, Cristiano noticed an SUV swing into position behind Ryoma’s car. Three men hopped out as he forced himself to straighten, two of them angling for the alley, the third coming to him. “Romeo’s here. I’m hitting the road.”

“We’ll be in touch,” Dante said. “Don’t get yourself killed.”

Cristiano lowered the phone and faced Romeo, struggling suddenly to hold himself still.

Romeo clapped a hand on his shoulder. “I’ll clean this up,” he said. “Just don’t get too reckless out there.”

Cristiano scoffed and shoved past his well-meaning cousin. “I’m not the one you need to worry about.” He should have been nicer, but knowing Felicity was in danger and had been for the past ten minutes already, he didn’t have a lot of nice in him. “Ryoma! You’re with me.”

His friend and sometimes partner loped up to his side, craftily retrieving the phone from his grip and tucking it away. “Thought for a second you were having a stroke or something. Who we gotta kill?”

Cristiano pulled his keys from his pocket. “Everyone who gets in our way.”

Her grumpy kidnapper hadn’t bothered putting any kind of blindfold over her eyes, and Felicity very much disliked the implications of that. He drove her through town, obeying every traffic light and even using his blinker, until the city was behind them. He’d pulled off the main road, onto one that was not as busy and curved enough to disorient her mental map, so all Felicity was positive of when he hauled her from the car was the general direction of Newark and which river it was, she could hear so close by. She didn’t really feel any better about hearing the Passaic so loud than she had about not being blindfolded.

“This way, princess,” Grumpy said, dragging her by her elbow toward the industrial-looking building ahead of them. He walked her through the first door he came to, not bothering to reach for his gun, and paid no mind to the pair of bodies lounging on the ratty sofa in the first room that opened beyond that. Nor did the two seem to even notice them through the literal haze surrounding their heads.

A terrible, petrifying suspicion crawled up Felicity’s spine. Her feet stumbled.

Grumpy gave her a jerk, forcing her properly upright with a grunt. “Don’t start playin’ games now.”

She gasped, barely biting back a response, and willed her feet to straighten. She was not taking the chance that she was allowed to speak yet.

He said nothing more—to her or any of the sporadic, peripheral people they passed—as he pulled her down an adjacent hall. Then they entered a room with a full-sized, four-poster bed in the center of the space. A kitchenette was against the far, long wall, and one corner of the room had been cordoned off with a curving curtain. There was also a single, worn-out recliner shoved between the bed and the far corner diagonally opposite the suspiciously separated space.

Seated in the recliner was the individual Felicity would have done nearly anything to never see again. Her half-brother, Tristán.

Felicity jerked back on instinct, her fight or flight instinct snapping full-force in the other direction. “No!”

Grumpy growled audibly and the next thing she knew her back was slammed into the wall, a gun in her face. “Don’t get stupid, princess. Get that uppity ass in the room … or choke.”

She curled her hands into fists, his meaning crushing her. She let herself glare at him, but fought back her instinctive need to struggle this time. As soon as her compliance was clear, he lowered the gun and shoved her into the room.

“She’s your problem now, T. You owe me.”

Tristán stood, his glare focused on Felicity. “Yeah, Cezar. Thanks.”

Felicity held herself still, forcing herself to listen. Cezar? Cristiano had mentioned that name before. She was sure he had. Grumpy was someone important to the gang waging war with the De Salvos, then.

The room echoed with the hard slam of the door as Cezar closed her in. Trapping her alone, without any reasonable hope of a rescue, with her greatest fear. Tristán.

Her half-brother stood in front of her, raking his all-too familiar, wild-eyed stare over her. His lips thinned into a displeased line. Tristán was three inches taller than her, visibly leaner, and boasted perpetually messy brown hair that had always been a couple shades darker than hers. She hadn’t seen him in the better part of a year, but he looked exactly how she remembered. Dangerous, unkempt, half-feral—like he was one wrong word away from lighting her skin on fire just to see if it burned.

For nearly all of her life, she’d cowered to her fear of him. Yes, she’d struggled in the moment when he’d tried to assault her when she was seventeen, but that hadn’t been something she’d thought about. It had been instinct. Every other debatably aggressive thing she’d done had involved establishing and fighting to maintain distance.

Moving to California, changing her number, neglecting to share her address. Refusing to move back into the family home when she did let herself get guilted back to New Jersey, and instead taking an apartment of her own choosing. Keeping that apartment when her parents moved to Trenton. Refusing to attend functions where she knew she would only be ignored or insulted at best.

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