Page 1 of The Woman with the Target on her Back (Grassi Family)

CHAPTER ONE

August

The chips clacked together as they were tossed into the pile at the center of the table, the black felt disappearing under the blue, red, gold, and purple. The lowest increment started at a hundred bucks.

You didn’t go to an underground casino to fuck around with dollar bids.

“You need to get that?” the guy to my left, an investment banker with an ankle monitor under the leg of his thousand-dollar trousers, asked when my phone buzzed in my breast pocket for the fourth time in a row.

There were no secrets at this table.

We all knew who we were playing with.

A crooked investment banker, a madam of a very exclusive brothel, a drug dealer, and me. A member of the local mafia.

“There’s a rule,” I said, shrugging as the madam decided to fold.

Across the room, the owner of the casino seemed to be casually swirling his drink that he hadn’t taken a sip of in the hour that I’d been sitting at the table.

I wasn’t fucking with the rules about phones with him around and risking my chance of getting invited again. High rollers were a dime a dozen in Navesink Bank. He wouldn’t miss my money. But I would miss the outlet that, for once, didn’t involve hanging out with my family.

Who might very well be calling me.

Because who the fuck else would call that many times in a row?

But the hand was almost over. And once it was, I would excuse myself and see what the hell was so urgent.

Things with theFamilyside of things had been calm for a long time now. But that didn’t mean my mother, sister, one of my brothers, or my cousins wasn’t trying to get in touch with me about something else.

I was about to miss dinner at my ma’s place.

And to her, early was on time. And ten minutes late meant we were dead in a ditch somewhere. So she could be ringing my phone. Or one of my brothers who wanted me there so she stopped talking about my absence.

“Fuck, not my night,” I said as the investment banker pulled the pot toward him. A cool fifty thousand.

I’d won one hand when I first sat down. It had been a losing streak since.

Maybe I should have taken the incessant buzzing of my phone in my pocket as a sign.

“I’m out,” I said, pushing away from the table, and reaching for my phone. “I know, I know,” I said, nodding at the owner whose brow was quirked as he watched me pull it out.

But I was already out the door before he could say anything.

Outside, the air was a humid slap to the face, making me feel immediately sticky in my suit, especially after the shock from the cold casino.

I was just about to swipe to my missed calls when my phone started buzzing in my hand again.

With an unknown number.

The fuck?

I mean, yeah, sometimes we used burners on jobs and shit like that. But as far as I knew, there were no current jobs that would require that.

Curiosity piqued, I swiped the screen to answer the call, pulling it up to my ear.

“Yeah?” I said, hearing a sharp intake of breath.

“August?” came the squeaky, panicked trill of a female voice.

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