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Taken by the Mafia King Nightmares
Paige“Yeah,” I said to a family member of one of the new arrivals on the phone. “We can definitely pay for plane tickets as needed, but that’s going to limit the size of your party. Can you manage it with just two?” I scrubbed a hand over my face and forced myself to sound chipper. Despite falling asleep in Tom’s arms last night, I still had intense dreams that kept waking me up. Sleep dragged at my limbs, but the shelter needed me at my best.“I…I guess,” the dad on the phone said. “Anything for my baby girl.”“Fantastic.”We exchanged information, and I sent an email to the remote admin I kept on hand for when we needed to do a lot of organizing at once like this. She’d have the plane ticket in the guy’s inbox before I even stopped for lunch. I shook out my hands, tried not to dwell on how far away lunch felt, and strode out of my office.The common room was a riot of activity again. Now that the women had been through basic triage, we’d moved Dr. Martinez to one of the rooms we’d
Taken by the Mafia King Hal
TommasoI stood in the mouth of a dark alley, the full moon overhead casting the brick walls and trash cans in stark relief. Technically, I was supposed to meet Hal inside the alley, but I wasn’t stupid enough to corner myself when meeting an unknown element. In the back of my mind, I kept picturing my dad, hitting the ground in an alley just like this one and never getting up again. Stan swore up and down that Hal’s dad said he was a good kid, basically, just a little thick. I trusted Stan, trusted his sense of others. But I still placed my back against a wall and didn’t walk more than a foot into the alley. I owned enough cops in the city that I wasn’t exactly going to get picked up for loitering.A few minutes after the chosen time, someone sauntered up to me. A younger man, maybe a couple of years older than Paige, with a dense thatch of blond hair that stood up at all angles and a haze in his eyes that told me he’d imbibed something before our meeting appeared. I swallowed down a
Taken by the Mafia King Turning the Tables
PaigeA couple weeks of quiet passed. We cleared out all the women from Tom’s midday rescue that had other places to go, and the remaining few who didn’t settled into life at the Haven. I started to itch for something to do. That anger boiled in my veins nearly daily, even when women from other situations came to us. Lauren had to talk me down from facing one woman’s abuser myself when he stood outside our building for a few hours.The week of the auction, I sat down to dinner with Tom on the patio outside.“We’re moving on Marino on Friday,” he said.I swallowed hard. Friday was the day of the auction. My skin crawled as I remembered waking up in the dark, cage-lined basement. I’d cried at first, something that pissed me off to remember during the rest of my captivity. But I hadn’t known how much my life was going to change then. Now, thinking about it just made me sick. I pushed my dinner a bit away.“That’s when all the women will be there,” Tom continued.I remembered that, too. F
Taken by the Mafia King Friday Night Lights
TommasoI tapped my fingers on the steering wheel of one of the many vans positioned a couple of blocks away from the Mansion on Friday night. Stan sat in the passenger seat next to me, and a team of hand-picked men occupied the back. Over an earpiece Lyle had given me, I listened to what Killian was hearing on the inside through a call he had open in his pocket.“Yeah,” he murmured to one of his allies. “We’ve got the numbers. You’ll know when it’s going down.”“Long live the new king,” the man replied.I took a deep breath. Killian had smuggled in more of his men than Marino would normally allow in other crews, and all of his allies had been willing to appear. I’d brought a fairly small strike team—for the balls of what we were about to do—counting on support once we made it inside.Room noise filled the speaker for a long moment. I only caught snippets of conversation, low music. I could picture the whole setup. The low lighting, the quiet music, everyone in masks. With that anonym
Taken by the Mafia King It All Hits the Fan
TommasoStan looked at me. I looked back at him. My heart pounded in my ears. Marino knew exactly what we were going to try to do. He was ready.And forty or fifty women sat in cages in his basement, to be sold to God-only-knew-who if I didn’t save them. I unholstered my gun and kicked open the door.A hail of gunfire split the air before I took another step, and I dove out of the doorway. Something squelched as I landed in Hal’s blood. Stan took position on the other side of the door, and as one, we leaned in to divide the target and fired.Half a dozen men in the room beyond the door, all armed and standing in front of a second door. The room in question looked like a goddamn mudroom, except for the blood and automatic weapons. I clipped a man leaning out from behind a shoe rack in the shoulder, and Stan landed a headshot on the one behind the sink. We ducked back out.I tightened my bulletproof vest and whispered a prayer that I’d make it home to Paige as I leaned into the doorway
Taken by the Mafia King Waiting in the Wings
PaigeI sat in one of the many vans outside of the Mansion with Sera. We could just barely hear the few remaining gunshots, and Sera flinched almost every time. I sighed and fiddled with the radio.“It’s better out here,” Sera said.“No the fuck it’s not,” I spat. I would’ve given almost anything to walk in there with Tom, but he said that while my shooting was getting up to par, this was going to be all-out war. I wasn’t ready for a combat situation, so I had to sit in the fucking car. Again.She met my gaze steadily. “Let’s say you’re not gonna get hurt. Let’s say you can tolerate watching him get hurt. Would you really be able to walk back in there?”I swallowed and looked at my hands. Last night, I dreamt that Gamal, our house guest, was chasing me through the basement I remembered from my night at the Mansion, and all of the bastards I could remember bid on me when I accidentally stumbled onto the auction block. Once again, though, the dream ended before anyone won. But realistic
Taken by the Mafia King Clean-Up Crew
TommasoI slipped my phone back into my pocket and looked around the basement. Dead bodies lay everywhere around me, but thankfully, all of them were men. When I left Stan, he’d taken the guys directly down here and cleaned up before any of Killian’s allies—who might be supportive but also might not take the same care—could reach the room first. A few of the men milling around were just piling bodies off to the sides so the women could exit their cages onto something other than dead flesh.They reminded me of Hal, on the ground outside in a puddle of his blood. He might not have been the brightest bulb in the box, but he was ultimately a good kid who’d gotten roped into this mess by nothing more than a couple unlucky family ties. I made a mental note to take care of Hal’s mom. Anonymously, of course.“Conti!” one of the men called.I looked at him, and he tossed me something. I caught it on instinct. A sparkling ring of keys he’d clearly found on one of the bodies. I nodded to him and
Taken by the Mafia King Deja Vu
PaigeStanding in the basement of the Mansion, I handed the last woman a set of clean sweats and stepped back as she began to change. The ceiling, padded to reduce noise traveling upstairs in a way I hadn’t understood last time I was here, pressed down on me.No, it didn’t. It just felt like it did. I scrubbed my hands over the goosebumps on my arms and forced myself to stop looking. I didn’t need to see this place through all new eyes. Riccardo Marino was dead. No one else would ever be kept in the tall, metal cages I hadn’t known to appreciate when I was last here.That was another train of thought I didn’t want to follow. I turned to a couple of women, who’d already been checked out by Sera, sitting on the floor together and crying.“Is there anything I can get for you?” I asked. “We’re moving out soon”—as soon as Sera finished checking over the last few, if I had my say—“but if there’s anything immediate, I’ll see what I can do.”One of them looked up at me with her lower lip quiv
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Taken by the Mafia King Epilogue
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Taken by the Mafia King Perfect Fit
Taken by the Mafia King Beginning of Forever
Taken by the Mafia King The Only Ones
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