Page 25 of Protected By the Mafia

Taylor sighed. “Girl, you could do anything you put your damn mind to. I’m still allowed to worry about you. Why do you even stay out there? Just come back to Cali.”

Felicity had to bite her lip for a moment. She probably would have just said “screw it” and dumped whatever she had saved on a plane ticket for California if her story were true. From Taylor’s point of view, Felicity was being more stubborn than smart. Someday, Felicity hoped, she would get to tell her friend a modicum of the truth—at least about the impossibly sexy man who’d effectively rescued her, even if she had to leave out some sketchier details. “I’m not dumping my problems at your doorstep, Tay. I’m a big girl. I’ll figure this out.”

“Well, don’t drop off the face of the earth again, okay? I was already pricing tickets so I could be in Jersey when they started the missing person’s search.”

Felicity laughed. “I’ll do my best. Maybe stretch your overprotective big sister tendencies for two days instead of one?”

“Don’t ask unreasonable things, chica.” Taylor’s voice held her grinning tone now. “I gotta get ready. Can you email me that link? Or do you have the name?”

Felicity quickly rattled it off, silently thanking timing for keeping Taylor from asking how she knew about the app in the first place. Or maybe Taylor assumed Felicity had hunted it down in light of the events she’d been told about. Regardless, it worked in Felicity’s favor.

When the call was over, Felicity lowered the phone to her lap, her thumb hovering over the screen. She couldn’t help but chuckle to herself. Cristiano had personalized her wallpaper, too. The picture was an angled ab selfie that caught the delicious V of his hips and displayed the beginning trail of dark hair that tapered down, out of sight. If not for the visible scars, he would arguably not be identifiable from what he’d shown. It was certainly a tease, even more so because she was positive, he’d been nude when he snapped the picture.

If she could get her hands on his phone again, maybe she’d see about reciprocating.

“Is that one of our guys behind us?” Ryoma asked, his head turned toward the passenger side mirror.

Cristiano flicked a glance in the rearview mirror to verify the vehicle. “Yeah, should be.”

Ryoma grunted. “So Garcia’s break-out was an inside job, huh?” He sat back in his seat, attempting to stretch his legs. He wasn’t as tall as Cristiano, but at six-foot even, leg room was still an issue for him. Though since Cristiano had paid out the ass to have his car customized to better suit him, Ryoma probably actually loved riding shotgun in this case.

Cristiano put the pointless reflection aside. “There’s no other explanation. The brothers are investigating that end for now.”

This seemed to get his companion’s attention. “Then why the trip to Trenton? You don’t really think Garcia ran home to Mommy, do you?”

Cristiano flexed his fingers over the steering wheel. Felicity’s strained, choked voice replayed in his ears. “We’d be stupid to rule it out. Besides, even if he hasn’t, he needs to understand that he can’t.”

“Ah.” He jerked a thumb toward the side mirror. “You’re giving them the nasty job.”

“Test of loyalty,” Cristiano said. No one liked popping random, vaguely associated relatives. The boss had ordered it, and tensions were running higher than usual, so it needed doing. Cristiano was plenty willing, for entirely different reasons, but if he acted on that bloodlust too directly it would be noticed. He could only excuse making this road trip because he knew it suited Dante’s goals and it gave him the opening to make contact with one of the guards at the local prison they’d paid off. That he would do himself, when he was done squeezing the adults who’d abused and neglected his Felicity.

“Be a whole fuckin’ lot easier if my lead on Ramires hadn’t dried up, too,” Ryoma muttered.

He wasn’t necessarily wrong.

Cristiano flipped on his blinker as he prepared to exit the interstate, giving the team behind him enough time to catch on. The second time in as many days he was having to drive in tandem. He did not like this pattern. “Maybe,” he said to his friend. “Or maybe Ramires would’ve clammed up.”

Ryoma shrugged. “What if Mr. and Mrs. Garcia aren’t home?”

Cristiano barely kept his lip from curling. He knew Ryoma’s titular speech was only sarcastic, and still it grated through his ears. “If one is home, you stay with the team and work on them while I go play fetch. If neither of them is home, you stay at the house in case they come back and I take the team with me to go play fetch.”

“Sounds like you’re taking the fun part, regardless.”

“Perks of being blood.”

Ryoma barked out a laugh, the sound immediately filling the car with its disturbingly natural levity. “Damn, you’re in a mood! Sure you don’t want the kills, too?”

He definitely wanted them. But being grumpy was easier to defend than being bloodthirsty. “I’m sure. But you can cut in if you want.”

“Cris, brother, I don’t know if you’re still pissed over yesterday or if there’s something else twisted up in there, but only a suicidal man takes a kill from you when you want it.” He leaned sideways and rested his elbow on the doorframe, up against the glass. “I have to think even the boss understands that?”

This time Cristiano did grin, slowly. Yeah. He was pretty sure his pyromaniac of a cousin did know that. “We’ll see what happens,” he said as they slipped into the city proper.

Trenton wasn’t technically their home turf, but Cristiano was far from unfamiliar with it. He’d located Armando and Aracely Garcia’s address back when he’d originally been tasked with breaking their middle son and ultimately ending the entire family. That was when he’d learned Armando Sr. had taken early retirement after his eldest son’s incarceration, and that he and his wife of thirty years had pulled up roots from Newark and leased a home closer to the prison.

It was also back during that original investigation when Cristiano had first laid eyes on their only daughter, Felicity. His job was to destroy their family, but one look at that young woman and he’d known he would never hurt a hair on her fucking head. At twenty-three, her youth was still evident in her face. Anyone who saw them together would be able to tell he was too damn old for her. But he didn’t give a shit. And now that he’d held her, tasted her, fucking been tasted by her—there was no goddamn way he was letting her go. Not while he still lived.

Ryoma chuckled again, drawing his focus. “All these years I’ve worked with you; I never knew you liked to daydream when you drive.”

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