Page 4 of Courting Danger

It wasn’t my first fight, not by a long shot. It was, however, the first time I’d been rescued by a complete stranger. Simply saying “thank you” seemed too cheap.

Should I offer compensation?

No. That might make it look like I was trying to get rid of the man as quickly as possible.

Quite the opposite.

I really wanted to drag this man home with me.

Before I had the chance to say anything, however, the ringing of my phone interrupted my musing. Resisting the urge to snarl in frustration, I brought the phone to my ear without looking at the identity of the caller. Only a few people had my personal number.

“You’d better have some answers, because someone just tried to kill me.”

To my shock, my mother’s familiar voice greeted me from the other end of the line.

“Alex, you need to come home.”

Her words were smooth and unhurried. To anyone else she would have sounded relaxed. I knew better. Her accent was heavier than normal, indicating how much effort she was putting into maintaining her calm facade.

I gripped the phone in both hands. “Mother? What’s going on? Did you hear what I just said?”

“I heard. Our enemies are moving even faster than I feared.”

“What are you talking about? Why would anyone suddenly try to kill a member of our family? That’s basically suicide.”

“Your father... ” My mother’s voice wavered in a moment of uncharacteristic emotion. “Your father’s been arrested.”

CHAPTER 4

Alex

A few hours later, I found myself sitting at the end of a long table facing my mother. The Mariano family owned over a dozen houses in almost as many countries, so there was no one location that I considered home. When my mother requested that I come home, what she actually meant was to meet her wherever she was at the time. At first, I’d feared that meant traveling to our house in Venice where she usually preferred to stay during the spring. Luckily, she had already flown into their Matoloking residence, so I only had to travel an hour and a half from Newark.

Serafina Mariano was a petite woman with the look of a strict schoolteacher. Her dark hair was pulled into a tight bun without a single hair out of place. Despite being over forty, she showed not a hint of gray, though I couldn’t be certain if it was a result of good genetics or hair dye.

I sat in a high-backed chair, one leg crossed over the other and my chin braced on my fist. There were three other people seated at intervals down one side of the table, but I ignored them for now and kept my attention on my mother at the far end.

“So, how exactly did father get himself arrested on human trafficking charges when he’s already in prison?”

The Matoloking house, like most of the Mariano homes, was a mix of antique and modern design. This meant a lot of clean lines and open spaces, complemented with older details around the edges. My voice echoed just a little too much for comfort, though not enough to be truly uncomfortable.

At the other end of the table, my mother shifted position so her fingers intersected like a steeple, allowing her to peer over them and create the illusion that she was bigger than she actually was. “I’m wondering about that myself, but I’ve held off on this conversation until you were here.” She glanced over her shoulder at the man standing adjacent to her chair. “Valente? Surely you have an answer.”

Valente Guerra. Bodyguard, gopher, and all around right-hand-man to my father. He reminded me of a panther, dressed in a deceptively simple black suit that easily concealed half a dozen weapons. In his entire life, I couldn’t remember once seeing my father without Valente just a step behind.

Looking at the man now, standing alone in the vast room, he looked like half a person.

Tipping his head in a slight bow, Valente addressed the room in general as though speaking to a crowd.

“The Boss was out on a day pass and we were conducting an inspection of one of our facilities in Baltimore. We’d received reports where the numbers didn’t add up. Product going missing. Delayed payments. That sort of thing. Unfortunately, during the inspection, local police conducted a raid of the facility. The Boss was caught on location and arrested. That, alone, we could have handled, but it turned out that some of the products were minors from other countries, which drew the attention of Interpol.”

I tapped the toe of my polished shoe against the leg of the table, a staccato of irritation that matched the twitching of my eyebrow. “On a day pass… It turned out... ” I repeated, putting just enough emphasis on the words to make my mockery of Valente’s words clear.

“You say that like my father didn’t know he was trafficking literal children. He couldn’t even wait till he’s gotten out, for fuck’s sake? He only had a few months left! I hope you aren’t foolish enough to think this whole thing was a coincidence.” I rolled my eyes, knowing my disrespect would piss the man off. I didn’t care.

This time it was my mother who responded, snorting daintily through her nose and waving one hand in the air like batting away a fly. “Of course not. The police showing up right when your father was visiting is too coincidental. It was obviously a setup. At first, we thought it was only an attack against your father, someone trying to take him out of the game permanently, but now that someone’s made an attempt on your life, it seems they’re after the entire Mariano family. Until we figure out who is behind this attack, we all have to be extra careful.”

For the first time, I paid attention to the three people seated along the side of the table. Bloody and bruised, one of them was barely conscious, kept upright only by the ropes binding him to the chair. Another bled profusely from both ears, likely the result of punctured eardrums, and sobbed quietly to himself through a gag. Only the third person, seated closest to me, remained fully cognizant. He said nothing and barely moved as he glared daggers at me, his teeth grinding against the gag and his hands repeatedly flexing into fists.

---