THE DON’S CAPTIVE

Chapter One I was seven minutes from the end of my shift when my life ended. That is not dramatic. That is exactly what happened. Seven minutes. I know because I checked my phone right before I cut through the alley, the way I always did, the way I had done a hundred times without a single problem. The alley behind Rosario’s was nothing. A shortcut. Fifty feet of shadow between a shift that had broken my feet and a bus that would take me home to my sister. Seven minutes and I would have been gone. I was not gone. I heard it before I saw it. A low, wet sound that I felt in my teeth before my brain caught up with what it was. I stopped walking. I should have turned around. Every instinct I had screamed at me to turn around, and I stood there like an i***t, frozen, staring at the far end of the alley where two men held a third between them. The third man was not standing of his own accord. His head was dropped forward, his knees bent, his whole body a dead weight in their grip. And then the fourth man stepped into the light. He was tall. That was the first thing I registered. Tall and unhurried, dressed in a suit that cost more than my rent, dark hair, broad shoulders, moving with the particular ease of someone who had never once in his life been afraid of a dark alley. He stopped in front of the man being held and said something too quiet for me to hear. Then he reached into his jacket. I knew what was about to happen. My foot scraped the ground. Just the smallest sound, rubber on wet concrete, barely anything at all. His head turned. He looked straight at me. Dark eyes, sharp jaw, completely still. The gun was in his hand. The man between the two guards was still hanging there, not even struggling anymore, and this man in the beautiful suit was looking at me like I was a problem he was calculating the cost of. I ran. I made it maybe fifteen feet. Something caught my arm and spun me and I was against the alley wall with a hand around my wrist before I could scream. Not him. One of the others. Big, fast, silent. My bag hit the ground. My phone skittered across the concrete. “Let go of me.” My voice was steady. I don’t know how. “Let go of me right now.” The man did not let go of me. Then the footsteps came. Slow. Unhurried. The way he moved when he thought no one was watching, which told me he always moved this way because the concept of rushing was simply foreign to him. He stopped two feet away and looked at me. Up close he was worse. Not ugly. The opposite of ugly. Angular face, jaw like it had been carved out of something unyielding, eyes so dark I could not find where the pupil ended and the iris began. He looked at me the way you look at a math problem you have already solved. Detached. Assessing. Finished. “What is your name,” he said. Not a question. A collection of information. I said nothing. Something moved in his face. Not quite a reaction. More like a noting. “You are going to tell me your name,” he said, in the same tone, “or I am going to find out another way, and that takes longer and is less comfortable for you.” “Aria.” My voice was still steady. I hated myself for how steady it was, because steady meant I was thinking, and thinking meant I understood what was happening here, and I did not want to understand. “Aria.” He said it like he was filing it somewhere. Then his eyes moved over me, not with heat, with assessment. “You work at Rosario’s.” It wasn’t a question either. “You cut through this alley every night,” he continued. “You take the 11:40 bus. You live on Carver Street. You have a sister.” He paused. “You should have taken a different route tonight, Aria.” The way he said my name was the most frightening thing that had happened so far, and a man had just been shot twenty feet behind him. “What do you want from me,” I said. He looked at me for a long moment. Then he reached out and took my chin in his hand, tilted my face up, examined me the way a person examines something they are deciding whether to keep. “I haven’t decided yet,” he said. He let go. He stepped back. He said something in a low voice to the man holding my arm and the grip changed, moved from my wrist to just behind my elbow, steering rather than restraining. “Where are you taking me,” I said. “Somewhere quiet,” he said. “Until I decide.” “You can’t just take me. People will notice I’m gone. People will look for me.” He glanced back at me over his shoulder as he walked, and the corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. Something colder. “No,” he said simply. “They won’t.” And the worst part, the part that settled into my stomach like a stone dropping into still water, was that I believed him. The black car at the end of the alley swallowed us whole. I pressed myself against the door and watched the city lights streak past the tinted windows and tried not to think about the man he had left in that alley, or about Lucia waiting for my call, or about the fact that no one in the world knew where I was. The man in the suit sat on the other side of the car and did not look at me once. He did not need to watch me. He already knew I was not going anywhere. I stared at his profile in the dark and thought about the way he had said my name. Filed. Stored. Kept. And I understood, with a clarity that was almost calm, that I was not just a witness anymore. I was his. The question keeping me awake for the rest of that drive was not how to escape. It was what, exactly, Dante Romano planned to do with what he had decided to keep.