Page 7 of Married to the Mafia

She couldn’t breathe well enough to snap at him, so she settled for a glare.

He didn’t acknowledge the defiance in her eyes. “My boss ain’t interested in a loan from some third party. Your old man needs to pay up, in full, or this gets worse. But I’m not unreasonable. I need to be able to tell my employer I have the cash on hand in ten days.” He dropped to a knee and leaned close, whispering in her ear as if imparting a delicate secret. “But I’ll be back to see you every other night in between, sweet Brandi. You’re welcome to offer me cash payments toward that larger installment at every visit, or not, just as long as it’s your daddy’s money.” His lips brushed the shell of her ear and the bile bubbled up her throat again. “Either way, I’ll be here, keeping you company.”

Fuck. She could breathe again, but the fight had frozen in her veins.

He released her hair and stood up without stepping back. “I don’t recommend involving the police. Our visits will become a lot less pleasant if you do that.” He patted her head as if she were a child, then suddenly his hand dropped to her neck and darkness washed over her.

When Brandi opened her eyes again, her phone’s alarm blaring in her ears, her entire body was stiff and a distinct chill had settled over her. She sucked in a sharp breath, realizing she’d been knocked out, and shoved upright—only to find herself still on the floor beside her bed. She was still wearing her nightshirt and her underwear, but that did very little to stave off the sense of violation that was already choking her.

“I’ll be back to see you.”

Tears rushed to her eyes even as her stomach heaved, and it was all Brandi could do to dash to her bathroom in time. She sank to her knees when the dry heaves subsided, her throat still swollen from the sobs that had risen alongside. What the fuck had her father gotten mixed up in this time?

How the hell was she going to get out of it in just one day?

three

Searching…

Mikey was skimming over another dead-end report when Miguel sauntered into the office with the morning’s coffee delivery. It had been a long night of tag with a few straggling Ink Blots for much of the family’s night shift, which meant Mikey had been on call later than he’d intended. The worst, though, was that all they had to show for it was two captured punks who probably didn’t know shit worth dragging out of them and hours’ worth of security footage he and Berto would have to scrub.

“Got your caffeine fix,” Miguel said, already setting the cup down. “Heard rumor last night was a blast for the street crews. Anything fun?”

“You really want to know?” Some days Mikey liked the guy, other days he wanted to throttle him. Usually it depended on how much sleep he’d had. This was not going to be Miguel’s best day.

Miguel shrugged in Mikey’s peripheral vision. “Prob’ly not.” But he didn’t make himself scarce like he usually did during these conversations, either. Instead, he blew out a breath and said, “You know how yesterday Richardson was just kinda … out of it?”

The question drew Mikey’s attention and he turned his eyes from his display. “I remember.”

Miguel glanced down at his own cup. “She’s definitely weirder today. I mean, she basically blew me off for the morning coffee run. She’s never done that.”

Mikey scowled and quickly called up the footage from her arrival that morning. He’d glanced over it earlier, but he’d only been looking for obvious things. She hadn’t raced into the parking lot, though she had walked briskly from her car to the building. She never once looked around or eased her grip of her purse. When he switched to the elevator view, he saw Brandi stood in the back corner with her arms around herself and her eyes closed. Was she tired? Upset about something?

He closed out of the footage and leaned back. “Let’s see if she pulls out of it by noon. Keep me updated if you notice anything concerning.”

“Yeah, sure,” Miguel said. This time he did turn and let himself out.

Mikey drummed his fingers on the desktop, gaze drifting toward the half-glass wall of his office, in the direction of Brandi Richardson’s desk. She really was a puzzle. It drove him crazy that he couldn’t figure her out with a simple keystroke.

He knew where she’d gone to college, he knew what she’d majored in and the GPA she’d maintained. He knew she’d attended an all-girls primary school, then been pulled into home school through her high school years. He knew her parents had divorced when she was six, and for reasons no logic could define, Wesley had been awarded full custody. As far as Mikey’s search had revealed, Brandi’s mother had run up to Canada and eventually moved clear to the west coast. He couldn’t even say for sure if Brandi had ever heard from her mother again. He knew Brandi had moved back to Newark after college and gone to work for her father, in a job that neither properly employed her technical skills nor paid her what she was worth. He knew she had moved into her current residence only the summer before, not even six months before Wesley had sold to Dante.

He knew all the technical information. None of it revealed what drove her.

There were no candid photos of her out on the town with her no-good father, or maybe with a date. He couldn’t find any indications that she’d inherited her father’s gambling habit, or even a recent online dating profile. She’d had one during her college years, and she of course had deleted all her information from the site when she’d left it after a sparse three months of use. All he’d found was a trace of a record that she’d been there.

Mikey dragged a hand through his hair and forced his attention back to the work that waited for him. Dwelling solved nothing. Inevitably, the information he needed would present itself. He just needed patience.

He lifted his coffee and paused again. It really was unusual for her to decline the free coffee delivery. Was she just not feeling well? He sipped at his drink and flicked a glance at his phone clock, her words from the day before replaying in his mind.

She’d said she only needed two hours to finish her active project. She’d already been at her desk for over forty minutes.

I’ll give her the morning. It was more than she’d asked for. If he didn’t have the project on his desk before she left for lunch—or if she tried to work through it again—he’d step in.

She wasn’t sure if she felt sick from having been punched in the ribs, if her stalker had hit some kind of nerve when he’d knocked her out, or if it was psychological. If she were a betting woman—which she was not—she’d put her money on the pit in her stomach being psychological. It wasn’t as if she’d never been hit in the torso before.

What she’d never had to deal with was a dangerous psycho breaking into her home in the dead of night, roughing her up and threatening worse, all to get a message to her goddamn useless father. Who wasn’t answering his phone. She’d tried him twice that morning already and it was pissing her off.

She didn’t finish her project until it was time for lunch. Miguel had already shut down for break and she waved off whatever probably friendly thing he said, desperate to finish proofing the code so she could save it and deliver it. She’d promised her boss she could have it done in under two hours, and she’d been working on it for four. The minor bug she’d encountered on her first go-through half an hour earlier wasn’t even the hold up. She just couldn’t focus.

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