by Kitty Thomas
Mafia Captive
Kitty Thomas
Digital Edition
Copyright 2013 © Kitty Thomas
All rights reserved.
Digital Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be resold or shared. If you did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Respecting the hard work of this author makes new books possible.
Publisher's Note:
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Disclaimer
This is a work of fiction, and the author does not endorse or condone any of this book’s content in a real world setting. This work is intended for an emotionally mature, adult audience. Do not try this at home.
About Mafia Captive
Faith Jacobson was in the wrong place at the wrong time. After witnessing a mob hit, she’s only moments from death when Angelo Raspallo decides to give his brother an unlikely gift.
Leo has avoided involvement with the family business, but it doesn’t make him a saint. He’s troubled and ashamed by his darker sexual desires, one of which is to own a slave. But when his brother throws Faith at his feet, repainting the scenario to make Leo the hero rescuing her from certain death, his moral fortitude will be tested. If Faith were kinky, it would be easy to live out his fantasy, but she’s not. Not even a little bit. Even the mildest spanking sparks terror in her that Leo can’t bear.
The gift soon becomes a burden as he fights with himself over how to handle the addition to his home. He could release her, but his brother doesn’t do loose ends. The only thing keeping her out of the bottom of the harbor is Leo’s mercy. She’s like a beautiful piece of art he keeps in a glass case but can never touch. Is possessing her enough?
Prologue
Leo Raspallo regarded St. Stephen’s from across the road, overwhelmed by the grandiosity of the architecture and all its history. It was a building one could believe the creator of heaven and earth might actually deign to live in.
He pulled out his cell and pressed Angelo on speed dial. He’d spoken rashly to his brother. Whatever must be done, Leo mustn’t play a role in it. He cursed when the call went to voice mail. Angelo never checked his voice mail. He didn’t want to be reached, and there was no telling when he’d turn it back on.
After the first human life on his conscience, Leo vowed never again. His face was scarred forever by that night. He knew people must whisper. How did he get that scar? He deserved it, no doubt.
Leo had hoped the reminder of his sin would keep him on the straight and narrow, but there were too many roads that wound around him, all leading into Hell.
This time, it was a woman on his conscience, and there was no physical scar to carry. He’d used her and broken her, and in the end, he was responsible for her death.
But they say confession is good for the soul.
Chapter One
Seven months earlier…
Faith huddled in a dumpster surrounded by garbage, her breath coming in quiet, desperate gasps. Heavy boots thudded nearby. Please keep moving. Please please keep moving. Her face was wet from silent tears gliding down her cheeks.
I should never have gone this way. She’d almost stayed home, snuggled in bed with her cat, a sappy movie, and a bowl of popcorn. But it was too pathetic for a Friday night—especially so close to Christmas when she was all alone. The general holiday malaise and depression had already started to set in, and it was only the first week of December. Grudgingly she’d gotten dressed and met some girlfriends at a club. But the others had wanted to party later than she had.
It was just a few blocks to a subway station. She’d comforted herself with knowledge of the pepper spray tucked away in her purse—the pepper spray her pursuer now had possession of.
Faith closed her eyes, trying to shut out the sound of the shot, the image of the body falling, her stupid gasp that had turned sharp eyes on her.
She hadn’t had the presence of mind to retrieve the mace before he’d grabbed her purse. But with the way the wind was blowing tonight, it would have just as likely blown into her eyes as his. And then where would she be? Another corpse.
The footsteps stopped. His breath sounded as if it were blowing right in her ear. His cologne put him in the cramped, dark space with her, drowning out the scent of rotting food and alcohol. He was a professional, not some random street tough. Poor, desperate people didn’t bother with cologne. And if they did, it wouldn’t have been such an expensive brand.
She bit back a scream until it rattled around and echoed so loud in her mind she feared he’d hear it. There was a snick of a lighter and then cigarette smoke filled the air.
It was as if he were trying to smoke her out, as if he knew she couldn’t stand the stench. He took drag after drag as she watched the faint light through the cracks of her metal cage. He was toying with her.
She heard the pull of a zipper, and for one sick moment thought it was his pants, but the sound that followed was the snap of a wallet being opened. Her wallet.
“Faith Jacobson. 580 Flatbush Avenue. Brooklyn.” His voice was relaxed, casual, because murder was casual to him.
She didn’t want to stereotype, but a nicely dressed Italian man in Brooklyn standing over a dead body required no leaps of logic. This guy had mob written all over him. Letting go of the purse had been necessary to save herself, but now he knew who she was and where she lived. For a moment she continued to pretend he didn’t know she was in the dumpster. She tried to think about where she could go, how she could stay safe from someone who would no doubt relentlessly pursue the only witness to his crime.
“Pretty. Brunette, though. Too bad.” He must be looking at her driver’s license photo. She’d dyed her hair right before that was taken. Now it was back to her natural red. She didn’t know what he meant about her hair color, why it should matter one way or the other.
He let out a heavy sigh. “All right, come on out. If you make me come get you, I might have to play with you first.”
That was it. She’d held it together as long as she could, been quiet as long as she could manage. “Please, let me go.”
“Sorry, I can’t do that. You’ve got too much information in that pretty head.”
“I don’t know anything. I don’t know who you are. I don’t care. I won’t get involved. I swear to God. Walk away. Please. Whatever happened back there, it’s not my business. I don’t care about it.” All Faith wanted was to be safe in her bed at home with her cat.
The silence stretched on like he was considering it.
“Sorry. Your number’s up tonight, baby.”
Although he’d made vague reference to torturing her first if she inconvenienced him, she couldn’t make any part of her body move. Everything had shut down. How could a person step outside their hiding place, knowing a bullet was waiting on the other side?
She was frozen between a rotting burger and a bag of empty beer bottles. Faith squeezed her eyes shut and willed herself to be in her cozy apartment.
The lid of the dumpster flew back, and she screamed for a savior she knew wasn’t coming.
The Italian aimed the gun at her. “Shut up, bitch. You want to be responsible for someone else’s death, too? I can shoot witnesses all night.”
No one would reach her before he pulled the trigger. “Please don’t hurt me. I swear I don’t care what happened back there. I just want to go home.”
“Fuck it. I shoot you in the dumpster, and I don’t have clean up. Works for me.” He took a step to the side, linin
g up his shot as light from the opposite wall hit her in the face. Instead of pulling the trigger, he just stared. “If you want to live, get out here right now.”
“I thought you said …”
“What I said was to get your pretty ass out of the dumpster before I change my mind.”
He might torture her. Might rape her. There was no way this could end well. Wouldn’t it be better to stay where she was and die quickly? The logic of the situation didn’t matter. She couldn’t help holding onto the thin hope that she might survive the night if she complied with his demands. In spite of the warnings shouting through her brain, she hoisted herself over the piles of trash and clumsily climbed out of the dumpster.
She had to grip the brick wall to hold herself upright.
“Stand over there in the light.”
Faith wasn’t sure how she’d managed to run in three-inch heels, because now she could barely walk in them, wobbling as she did, a few feet to the left to obey his order.
“Please…”
“If you say please once more I’m clipping you.”
She shut her mouth.
“Tell me, baby… does the rug match the drapes?”
Out of the million horrible things he could have said, “does the rug match the drapes” wasn’t in the top thousand. “I’m sorry, w-what?”
“Are you deaf, honey? It’s a simple enough question. Are you a natural redhead?”
“Y-yes.”
“Show me.”
She turned to run again, but he was too fast. He pressed her against the wall and pulled her panties down while he shoved her skirt up and awkwardly aimed her body into the light. She thrashed and fought him. She expected he’d throw her down and violate her, but after he found proof of what she’d said, he covered her back up.
“You may be the luckiest dumb slut in the world.” His arm went around her throat, pressing, pushing her consciousness down a dark well until the world shrank to a tiny pinpoint of light, then blinked out of existence.
***
Faith didn’t expect to wake up. She especially didn’t expect to wake up unclothed in a bathtub of water, with her pursuer, now captor, sitting on the closed toilet lid, staring down at her. She struggled to cover herself.
“You don’t gotta worry about me. You’re not my type.” He motioned to some soap in a dish on the rim of the tub. “Clean yourself up. If you smell like a sewer, even Leo won’t have mercy on you.” He flipped open a cheap prepaid cell phone. “Pray this goes in your favor.”
His eyes didn’t waver from Faith as he dialed. The call connected, and his features softened, breaking out into a smile that made him almost attractive. If he hadn’t been trying to kill her, that is.
“Leo!” he said.
Faith took the soap from the dish, too scared not to do whatever he asked. She tried to ignore her nudity, focusing instead on the man’s conversation.
“… yeah, it’s been awhile. I’ve been busy. Listen, I have something here you might be interested in—think of it as an early Christmas present. Remember what you told me last time I was out there? That thing you’d have if it weren’t for your moral code?… I’m not suggesting that… Stop and listen for a goddamn minute, Leo. I had to fire one of my crew tonight. I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, but I’ve got someone out there doing cleanup now. There was a witness. She’s your type. Redhead. Slender. Big green eyes. I don’t know what it is with you and Irish bitches, but she’s perfect for you. You can have what you wanted. All you have to do is come collect her.”
There was a long pause where Faith heard indiscernible shouting on the other side of the phone.
“Calm the fuck down. Look, what you do with her once you get her is up to you. But if you don’t take her, she’s dead. If you let her go, you know I’ll find her, and once again, she’s dead. Her life is in your hands, and once you see her, I know you’ll take her. I’m doing you a favor, giving you what you want, and saving her life. I’m a regular saint. I could have shot the slut… yeah, I’m at the house… Yeah, well don’t pretend your hands are clean. You may not be in the family business, but you know where the money came from. Don’t forget that… Honest business my ass… You couldn’t have started that business without your family. Now get down here.”
Awful images flashed through her mind, even worse than the scene of the murder she’d witnessed or the recent threat of death. He was going to prostitute her out. What then? Would she be passed around until she was used up and then left in a gutter? Faith wrapped her arms more tightly around her body. Despite his personal lack of interest, she’d never felt so sexually exposed.
He closed the phone, his gaze raking over her, assessing her like a horse he might sell. “You’re a lot more trouble than you’re worth. My brother is an ungrateful ass.”
The bathroom door opened and another attractive man in a slick suit walked in. Faith rushed to cover herself.
“The fuck?” the man said, spotting her in the tub.
“Relax, baby. She’s for Leo.”
“Oh.”
He chuckled. “Did you think I’d switched teams?” He turned hard eyes back on Faith. “Get out. You’re as clean as you’re getting.”
He held out a robe and she stepped into it, trying to figure a way out of this mess.
If this guy Leo saved her, it wouldn’t make her safe.
Chapter Two
Leo stared at the phone in his hand, not sure what to think. Myriad emotions rolled through him: disgust, guilt, excitement. The guilt was premature. The disgust was warranted. The excitement was the problem. As repulsed as he was by his brother’s twisted gift, his cock had twitched in his pants the moment the scenario had unfolded over the phone. He hadn’t seen her yet, and already he was fantasizing about his very own slave, existing only to please and obey his every sexual whim.
Angelo ran a crew out in Brooklyn now. He wasn’t bluffing. He would kill her. The family didn’t like having to kill women and avoided it whenever they could, but Angelo’s dick didn’t swing in that direction, which made a woman just another man to him. He was the least likely to hesitate, the least likely to give a shit what kind of genitalia his victim had. Bad luck for the girl.
Leo was the first person Angelo had come out to. His brother had worried the others wouldn’t follow him if they knew, but it had turned out to be a nonissue. He was so brutal, his orientation didn’t make the slightest difference in the level of respect he could command. And Uncle Sal hadn’t blinked when he’d promoted him. All he cared was that Angelo was a big earner and family.
In a drunken moment of twin-bonding and secret-telling, Leo had confessed his own alternative sexual leanings—a choice which in hindsight may have been a mistake, given the way his brother’s mind operated.
Leo had had a few long-term kinky relationships. They’d gone okay, and they’d ended without much trouble, but the thing he wanted was the thing he’d never been able to have: a true slave.
Could he do the things he fantasized about? It was one thing to wank to it; it was another to do it. She was a living, breathing human being. Frightened. Losing everything in her life. Could he be that callous and cold? Did he have a strong enough moral leash to stop himself?
Angelo’s words echoed in his mind: What you do with her once you get her is up to you.
Easier said than done. Once she was in his care, dependent on him and vulnerable, would he be able to resist training her? Taking her? He doubted he had such saintly self-control. Going to his brother’s home guaranteed he’d become as amoral as Angelo. But if he didn’t show up, she’d be in the harbor before dawn.
***
Angelo opened the door on the first knock and Leo stepped inside. Chaos greeted him: a broken vase, smashed bottles on the floor, upturned tables. In the midst of the maelstrom, sat the girl in a white bathrobe, bound, gagged, and blindfolded. Bruises were forming at various points on exposed flesh, while blood dripped onto a towel from her feet.
“Fo
r God’s sake, Ange, what did you do to her?”
Her head jerked in the direction of his voice, and a sharp pain jabbed at his chest. Even so, seeing her bound state aroused him. It shouldn’t, but it did. How could he go through with this? His brother had backed him into a corner, and a part of him wished Angelo had killed the girl without Leo ever knowing of her.
Angelo shrugged. “She struggled. I almost thought, ‘to hell with it’, and clipped her, but I knew you’d be upset. Look her over, see if you want her. Makes no difference to me one way or the other.”
Of course it didn’t.
Leo sat beside her. Her hair was a brilliant red, his favorite. He couldn’t stop himself from running his fingers through it. It was still damp and must be even more vibrant dry. She shrank from his hand and whimpered.
“Shhh. I’m not going to hurt you.”
Was he going to hurt her? He didn’t know yet. Everything inside him laughed in triumph at what he had. A real slave. A woman at his complete mercy. And yet, he hadn’t taken her from her life. His brother had orchestrated the scenario so Leo could play the hero, rescuing her from certain death.
“Did you or Davide touch her inappropriately?”
“Of course not. She’s got the wrong parts for our taste.”
But not for mine. His fingers itched to stroke every inch of her, to feel her surrender beneath him.
Leo pulled the blindfold from her eyes, unsurprised to find a luminescent green shining out at him. She was so young it made his heart hurt. Obviously legal, but at least fifteen years his junior. Probably more. Too young to lose her whole life.
There was a muffled scream from behind the gag as she tried to escape his touch. His hand pressed against her cheek. “Shhhh. I’m not him. Look.” He motioned toward his brother. “We’re twins.”
Leo was always conscious of his scar, but perhaps it wasn’t that obvious. Or maybe she was so scared that the idea of a twin hadn’t occurred to her.
She was perfect in every way. The right thing was to take her to the police where she’d be protected and turn his brother in, but that was never going to happen. Family came first.
