Page 23 of Married to the Mafia

Mikey blew out a breath. “I was referring to a word that makes everything come to an immediate end.” His hand curved, fingers trailing down and under the backside of her knee at a slow, tantalizing pace.

The breath caught in her throat and hours seemed to pass before Brandi managed to find an answer beyond the utterly ridiculous pleasure from his simple touch. “Casino.”

He glanced over at her, one eyebrow arched. His hand didn’t move.

She licked her lips and forced herself to meet his stare, sure that her face was not so bruised as to hide the flush. “I hate them.” A feeling she decided not to have toward the less-than-innocent, though still feather-light caress of his fingers that had run between and beneath her legs.

His lips lifted in a faint smirk. “Good to know.” He drew his hand back up, following the same path as he had originally, and gave her knee another gentle squeeze. Only then did he look away and reach once more for the mouse. “Now you know what to say if this becomes too much.”

It’s already too much! She had thought, maybe, there was a slight chance his hand had moved on some subconscious instinct. A reflexive stroke or touch that he hadn’t been truly aware of. But if that had been the case, he wouldn’t have—couldn’t have—perfectly reversed it and repeated the tender squeeze at the end. He’d known precisely what he was doing and she had no capacity for handling that. The idea that he had purposely, willingly, touched her that way left her speechless. The idea that he’d done so when she was the beaten-up mess she was? He really is a dangerous man.

While her brain was distracted, Mikey opened the email.

His low, discontented growl helped refocus her and Brandi leaned forward again. She aimed her gaze at the larger monitor over his desk instead of the one for her laptop that he’d helpfully partially lowered, and her mouth went dry. There were only two lines of text. Both of them felt angry, even though he hadn’t even used the social standard of all caps.

Did you think I wouldn’t notice?

Where’d you run off to, sweet Brandi?

There were two images attached to the email.

“I’m going to open them,” Mikey said in warning as he moved the cursor over the first. He didn’t actually wait for her to respond before filling the monitor with a slightly grainy, too zoomed in candid shot of Brandi. It had obviously been taken the morning before, as she recognized herself immediately despite the oversized sunglasses and blatantly visible dark spot on her face. Also plain to see was the suitcase she remembered struggling to lift into the Uber that had come to idle only about halfway up her drive.

Brandi barely registered reaching out to curl her fingers into the back of Mikey’s shirt. She wasn’t trying to stop him. She just needed to borrow some of his strength, and maybe the reminder that he was with her.

Another monitor lit up and blinked once as the image popped up on that screen, followed by a series of rapid, overlaid partial windows indicating various scans. Brandi watched that for only a second before dropping her gaze back to the previous monitor, in time to catch as he opened the second image.

The second image was far more jarring than Brandi was prepared for. It was a picture of a man she didn’t immediately recognize, sitting in a simple wooden chair, his mouth duct taped and blood smeared across the side of his head. Rope was tied around his shoulders and his legs, holding him in place, but he was conscious, holding a sign in his lap, and facing the camera. She read the sign before she finally realized why he was vaguely familiar.

“Don’t even think about it,” Mikey said, as if she might heed the sign’s instruction to be back at her condo that night—alone—because of the implicit threat.

He gave her too much credit.

Not that she didn’t feel like shit. “That … that was my Uber driver.”

Mikey tossed the second image up onto the other monitor, triggering another series of scans. “I don’t care if that guy’s your best friend in the whole fucking world, you’re not going.”

Tears threatened for a second and Brandi dragged in a breath. “I don’t even remember his name,” she said, feeling like dirt. “I don’t remember if I even tipped. I was so … I just wanted to run. He offered to take me to the police and I was afraid I’d get us both killed if I took him up on it, so I told him to drop me and forget me.” She swallowed hard. I’m getting him killed anyway.

Mikey turned away from the computer setup and faced her again, this time raising both hands to carefully wipe the tears off her cheeks with his thumbs. “The only thing you could possibly have done differently to protect whoever showed up to drive you from this asshole would be to have stayed in that condo and waited for round three. Can you look me in the eyes and tell me that was an option?”

She shook her head as fiercely as his grip allowed. “No.”

“Then the next best thing you can do, now, is to fight back. And for that you have me.”

Brandi pulled in a deep breath and willed the rest of her tears away. “Thank you.”

Mikey’s phone buzzed as he turned back to face the computers again. He dipped his hand into his pocket, glanced at the screen, and swiped to connect the call before setting it on the desk. “You’re on speaker. You better have something useful.”

There was a pause before the caller, who Brandi quickly recognized to be Miguel, said, “Fuck, I hate bein’ on speaker. Always gets me in trouble.”

“Probably because you start with ‘fuck,’” Mikey shot back. “Imagine if I was with my mother.”

“You’d never put me on speaker if you were with your mother.”

Brandi felt her lips twitch.

“Get to it, Miguel.”

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