Page 58 of Forced Arrangement

“I need to know if Guiseppe or any of his buddies owns a shipping company, or has a ship that they might be using for human trafficking. I think he might try and take her out of the country to force my hand. He wants to take over the Agostini family and he’s crazy enough to do anything to accomplish his goal.”

“I got out,” Rudy reminds me.

I blow out a breath. “I know. You can say no. I would understand.”

“Fuck,” Rudy says quietly. “That’s the thing about you, Angelo. You’re so fucking nice that it’s hard to say no to you.”

I grin to myself as we drive toward the docks.

“I’ll check it out. Dig up anything that I can,” Rudy tells me. “I’ll book a plane ticket too. You need someone like me and I know you don’t have anyone.”

“Don’t do anything crazy on our behalf,” I urge him, worry lancing through me. Rudy was a good dude. He didn’t need to come back to the life for me or for Sophia. I was already asking too much of him by calling in a favor.

“I’m goddamn bored,” he drawls in my ear. “You can take the life out of the mobster, but you can’t take the mobster out of the mob…or something like that. Plus, Sophia is a good person. I’ll be in touch.”

“Thanks, Rudy,” I say to him just before he hung up. Calls with Rudy were always brief so that no one could trace the call. I was used to him hanging up without saying goodbye.

“Rudy doing some digging?” Franco says sagely.

I nod. “Good guy.”

“The best,” Franco echoes, navigating another turn.

I only hope his help won’t be too little, too late.

Chapter Twenty

Sophia

Everything hurts.

They have been torturing me for hours, asking for access codes, safe codes, the information about various businesses. I don’t know any of the information that they want. I haven’t had time to do anything other than marry Angelo and best Guiseppe at a duel.

It’s ironic that I don’t have the answers they sought. I would have given them up. I didn’t give a flying fuck about my father’s legacy or our family holdings. I would give them all up just to keep the baby in my belly safe and to get them to leave me alone.

I struggle backward to lean against the wall. One of my eyes is swollen shut, and my lip is painfully split. I winced as I breathed. Guiseppe had kicked me in the ribs in a rage when I didn’t even know the gate code to the family estate outside the city. I thought I had a few broken ribs.

Did he think he was going to set himself up at the compound and lord it over everyone from there? He truly was mad. Hedidn’t need the gate code for the compound anyhow. He could have just gone there and snapped his fingers and gotten inside.

I wasn’t sure if he remembered the good old days with my father in charge differently, or if he just didn’t want to admit that he was beating me for the fun of it at this point. He wasso angrythat I had bested him and so hurt that no one around him but his few friends seemed to think that he was don material.

I manage an internal smile as I think about the late, great Guiseppe Costa angrily beating a woman because she’s better at being a man than he is. How my father would have laughed at his rage.

I feel an unexpected quiver of sadness wash over me at the thought of my father. I had made sure never to think of him for most of my childhood and then I had almost forgotten about him as I got older. It feels strange to be so sure of what he would have wanted, what he would have thought, now that I was walking in his shoes.

I wasn’t sure if my mother would have been happy that I was so comfortable in the role of female don, but it couldn’t be helped. There was no one left to save us all from Guiseppe. I had to do what my father had not been able to do.

I knew that I was at the docks. I also knew that I was on a ship that was docked there. I could smell all kinds of human smells, all unpleasant, and I had a sneaking suspicion that this was the ship that Guiseppe and his people used to traffic people back and forth from other countries.

I wondered where I was going to be taken to. Russia? South America? Just another port of call in another state?

I didn’t know much about human trafficking. Normally, I would have said thank God to that, but right now, it was an issue for me. I had a large blind spot for the situation I was in and it was making me nervous. I knew that Angelo would have the same blind spot.

My stomach turns over as the fishy smell of the harbor washes over me through the tiny crack in the window well above me. I try to resist, but can’t. I lean over and wretch, my stomach long empty.

I thought I had a concussion to add to my morning sickness and I knew that my dehydration wasn’t helping my cause either. I press an aching hand to my belly. One of my fingers is angled the wrong direction. For a while, they had held my hand down while someone slammed a hammer on the table near my fingers. Occasionally, they had let the hammer smash a finger.

Guiseppe had been cackling and telling me all about how I should be tough enough to handle this because I was a don now. Between the ridiculous stories about his glory days and his enjoyment of my torture, I had come to hate him with an entirely new passion.

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