Page 2 of The Woman with the Target on her Back (Grassi Family)

My stomach tightened, my mind running through the names of all the women in my life that could be in trouble, that could have been trying to get in touch with me for over half an hour while I played fucking cards.

“Who is this?” I asked, hearing a tightness in my voice.

And then came a name that I never could have guessed, not if given a fucking year to rattle off possibilities.

“Traveler.” Her own name sounded like the sound was being squeezed out of her, high and breathless.

“Traveler?” I asked, feeling my stomach tighten.

Because I knew one Traveler. I mean, of fucking course it was only one. Who the fuck was namedTraveler, of all things?

But, yeah, the Traveler I knew would never willingly ring me up. In fact, she would call literally anyone else before me.

We’d only met briefly over the course of a job my brother was working on up at the State Capital involving some criminal organization and a chick whose life he had fucked up inadvertently years before. A chick who was now his wife.

Traveler had just been the owner of a little coffee shop we frequented in the area. And she and I hadn’t exactly been fast friends.

The only reason she had my number was in case Cammie, the woman we’d been working with, came to her for help.

I figured she’d purged my number from her phone as soon as the job was done and we left town.

Clearly, she’d been holding onto it.

There was a long pause, then another breathless sound, “Yes.”

“What’s going on?” I asked, already walking toward my car.

The Traveler I’d met had been irritating as fuck, sure. But she’d also been calm, confident, and fearless. This woman with the hysterical-sounding voice? That wasn’t the woman I’d met. The one I’d snarked back and forth with for several days.

I mean, she’d known I was in the mob, but still nettled at me relentlessly.

A woman like that didn’t sound this fucking freaked out over something small.

“I, ah, I… I think you need to pay me back for helping you guys out way back when,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

The car was already on, and I was pulling away from the curb.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“My shop,” she whispered, and I thought I could hear some sort of crashing sound. “For now,” she added in a smaller voice.

“What’s going on?”

“I can’t… I have to go,” she said, then before I could even object, she ended the call.

“Fuck,” I hissed, heart starting to hammer.

It didn’t take a genius to figure that if she was in her own damn shop well after closing, whispering and sounding freaked the fuck out, that someone was probably in that shop with her.

And I was a goddamn hour away.

Well, doing the speed limit, I was.

And with a woman sounding that freaked the fuck out, I wasn’t about to be going the goddamn speed limit.

I knew there was a chain of command for shit like this.

I called Luca. Then Luca told me if I could go and handle this situation or not.

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