Italian Mafia Boss, My Cell

Chapter Two: The Cell Assignment

He was younger than she expected. That was the first thing that registered, an absurd detail to fixate on given everything else happening in her body right now, her pulse hammering, her palms damp against the rough fabric of her scrubs.

He couldn't have been more than thirty five. Dark hair, cut short but not military short. A jaw that looked like it had been carved rather than grown. And eyes, Isabella would think about those eyes for a long time afterward, so dark they seemed to absorb the weak fluorescent light rather than reflect it.

He was studying her the way she imagined a predator studied something it hadn't decided yet whether to eat.

"I said," he repeated, "you shouldn't be here."

"I didn't exactly choose the accommodations." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, which she counted as a small victory.

Something flickered across his face, surprise, maybe, that she'd talked back. He didn't respond immediately. Instead he crossed the small cell in three unhurried steps and rapped his knuckles against the bars, twice, sharp.

"Guard."

Nobody came.

"They'll be back," he said, more to himself than to her, and something in his tone suggested this wasn't the first inconvenience someone had tried to hand him lately.

Isabella stood frozen near the door, acutely aware of how small the cell actually was. One bunk bed against the wall. A metal toilet with no privacy partition, which she refused to think about right now. A small desk bolted to the floor, covered in what looked like legal documents, meticulously organized.

"You have a name?" he asked finally.

"Isabella. Marchetti."

Something changed in his expression at the surname, so brief she almost missed it, before it smoothed back into that same unreadable calm.

"Marchetti," he repeated.

"It's a common name."

"Not in here it isn't." He turned away from her, moving back toward the desk, dismissing her with his posture in a way that stung more than she expected. "Bottom bunk's yours. Don't touch my paperwork. Don't talk to me unless I talk to you first. We'll survive each other that way."

"That's it? That's the whole conversation?"

He didn't turn around. "What else did you want, an orientation packet?"

Anger flared in her chest, unexpected and almost welcome after the numbness of the last three weeks. "I want to know why every guard in this building looked like they were handling live explosives when they walked me down here. I want to know why nobody's said your first name once. I want to know what exactly I've been shoved into a cell with."

Now he did turn, and the look he gave her made the anger in her chest curdle into something colder.

"You don't want to know that," he said quietly. "Trust me."

"I think I'm entitled to an opinion on who I'm sleeping four feet away from."

The corner of his mouth twitched, not quite a smile. "Sleeping. Is that what we're calling it."

Heat rushed to her face. "That's not what I meant."

"I know what you meant." He sat down at the desk, picking up a pen, effectively ending the conversation. "Salvatore Cosa. Now you have a name to go with the paperwork you're apparently not touching."

Cosa.

The name detonated something in the back of her memory, a headline from months ago, something about a racketeering indictment, a family name that got mentioned in hushed tones on financial news segments she used to half watch while eating lunch at her desk. Cosa. As in the Cosa family. As in one of the five names her old firm's compliance department had a standing policy about never, under any circumstances, doing business with.

"Oh," she said quietly.

"There it is." He didn't look up from his papers. "The face everyone makes eventually."

Isabella sank down onto the bottom bunk, the thin mattress barely cushioning the metal frame beneath it, and tried to process the fact that she, a wrongfully convicted auditor whose entire crime had been asking too many questions about a client's books, had just been locked in an eight by ten cell with a man whose family name alone had been enough to end careers at her old firm.

The lights in the block dimmed for evening lockdown. Somewhere down the corridor, someone was screaming about something, the sound swallowed quickly by slamming doors and shouted orders.

Salvatore set down his pen, finally, and looked at her properly for the first time since she'd entered, not dismissive now, but assessing, in a way that made her skin prickle.

"Word of advice," he said. "Whatever brought you here, keep it to yourself. People in this place will use anything they can get. Doesn't matter how small."

"Is that a threat?"

"It's the only kindness I'm going to offer you tonight." He stood, moved toward the upper bunk, and paused with one hand on the ladder rail. "Get some sleep, Marchetti. Tomorrow's worse."

He climbed up without another word, and Isabella lay rigid on the thin mattress below him, staring at the underside of his bunk, listening to the sounds of a building full of people she now had to survive.

She had almost drifted into something like sleep when she heard it, the cell door's electronic lock disengaging with a soft click, far too late for any scheduled guard round, far too quiet to be official.

Above her, she heard Salvatore go completely still.

"Don't move," he whispered.