by Cindy Skaggs
The man was as wide as the door and had the face of a bulldog. “Miss Victoria Calvetti?”
He knew full well who she was. “Yes.” Her voice was steady, but fingernails were scratching a chalkboard in her nervous system. She shivered, a knee-jerk reaction to the shock.
The man pulled a white envelope from his jacket pocket. “You’ve been served.”
She reached out and took it, much like the Fed had taken her coffee. She was too stunned to sputter. What the hell?
The ox in a suit left the small building before Vicki found her voice.
She stood along the wall of post office boxes and slit the end of the envelope. The thick wad of papers summoned her—damn, she hated any word that implied she didn’t have a choice—to testify in an ongoing trial against one or another of her brother’s associates.
The mother of all headaches twitched behind her eye, but she maintained focus and kept her visible reaction subdued. She stuffed the summons into her oversize leather handbag and headed the long way home.
Manitou was adrift in artists and musicians and hole-in-the-wall bars. Marijuana was as much a part of the culture as the mineral springs that attracted people from all over the globe. The old brick buildings housed psychics and tarot readers and crystal shops. She blended in here. No one cared about one more woman wearing gypsy skirts and peasant shirts and bangles up and down her arms.
The last hill to her house climbed straight up a mountain, and she was huffing by the time she reached her short drive. Manny no longer stood across the street. Instead, a young man with long, unwashed hair pounded on her door. The ancient door didn’t give under his abuse.
He wore a thermal shirt and skinny jeans. An angry wave of energy swirled around him. He was a client, but they weren’t scheduled to meet, and by the force of his fists on the old oak, he was not a happy man. She reached into her purse for her key chain, her secret weapon.
“Aaron, I didn’t know we were meeting today.”
He turned, his face mottled red. “What did you do to me?”
“Do?” She gripped a long metal cylinder in a tight fist.
“Everything I smoke tastes like dirt.”
She nearly laughed. “Wasn’t quitting the point?”
“Yes.” He tromped down the stairs like a scarecrow with sticks for limbs. “Are you smiling? What did you do to me?”
“Helped you quit smoking.”
“Fuck that.” He stood trembling in her yard, throwing a fit and using four-letter words most often reserved for family holidays.
Usually, clients were thrilled when hypnosis helped. This guy was a raving lunatic. “Why don’t you come inside? I’ll make tea and we’ll figure out the problem.” If she could get him under, she’d help him calm down so he could explain what had him so upset.
“Stay away from me.” He yanked at a belt loop, pulling his skinny jeans higher on his lean hips. “You’re fired.”
The guy ran down the hill with a vapor of ugly following him. The middle-class kid with shaggy hair and skinny jeans worried her. Why? Because he’d fired her? She couldn’t afford to lose a client, but added to Manny, the Feds, the cranky barista, and the Justice Department summons?
It was like someone had put a hex on her. The jitters turned to full-blown panic that stole her breath. No way was all this bad luck a coincidence.
An ache throbbed at the base of her skull.
She released the tight grip on the key chain and climbed to her porch with shaky legs. The solid oak door from the late 1800s couldn’t be blasted open with dynamite, but when she put the key in the dead bolt, it was already unlocked. Yep, her day was going to get worse before it got better.
The living room had been tossed. Carefully stacked mail was strewn on the solid oak floor. Chairs and dressers were upended. She closed her eyes against the violation.
“Well, damn it all to hell,” she muttered under her breath. What was the point in an FBI tail if someone trashed her house right under their noses? A loud crash echoed from the back. She whispered a curse. Someone was still in the house. Tiptoeing, she stepped around the corner to Fuzzball’s bed, but it was empty. Another crash followed by curses from her bedroom, getting closer, sent her back across the living room. She grabbed her cell phone off the mahogany sideboard and tiptoed out the front. She left the door open so Fuzzball could escape. He was a street cat. He’d be fine. Adrenaline pumped tension through her blood as she rushed to her car.
Maybe she should let Manny kill her and put her out of her misery.
Today wasn’t just a bad day. It was Friday the thirteenth bad.
Chapter Two
The address written on Manny’s clipping led to a dance club on the skeezy side of Aspen Springs. A sprawling city of half a million, Aspen Springs was the nearest big city and boasted everything from country clubs to housing projects. The address was closer to the latter. Barren yards surrounded neglected houses with boarded-up windows. The cars parked out front were more valuable than the homes.
The main road was heavily trafficked, with an odd mix of industrial shops, used appliance stores, and thrift shops. Foot traffic was minimal. Even the locals kept their distance until night when the bars opened and a whole new set of clientele walked the streets from one bad club to the next. While mainstream citizens worried about legalized pot, the denizens of these dark streets knew heroin was the drug of choice in the worst part of town.
The atmosphere of deep poverty and hopelessness played on her nerves like bad disco. In downtown Manhattan or any of the boroughs, no one would mess with her out of respect for the family, but in Colorado, she was just another person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, she refused to leave. Desperation did that to a girl. She circled the block, looking for a place to keep watch. She didn’t know what else to do, where else to go. No use denying the bad omens. A storm was coming, and she needed information.
When an SUV pulled out of a street parking spot, she pulled in and rammed the gear into park. Her car blended with the traffic on the busy street, but even more important, the space across from the club had a perfect view of the front doors and a partial view of the bar’s empty parking lot. The place didn’t open until nine, and wouldn’t start hopping until close to midnight, but she hoped to see something of value while waiting for the three-thirty deadline Manny had given her. The wind buffeted the car, rocking it like a cheap motel mattress. An hour passed with nothing more than cold air and bad radio filling the car’s interior.
It said a lot about her place in the food chain when she was staking out a dive bar in the bad part of town. She had tried to get out of the mob, but apparently leaving wasn’t so simple. She had survived, but she wasn’t as out as she wanted, as evidenced by Manny’s presence this morning. There should be a twelve-step program. Mobsters Anonymous. Vicki shivered. She’d taken off her bulky jacket in order to drive, but now the cold permeated the car. She turned on the engine to get the heater running and recharge the battery. While keeping an eye on the club, she scrolled through her phone.
No one had entered or exited, giving her way too much time to think. Did Manny want to meet where the Feds weren’t watching? If so, he should have approached by now. The place gave her the heebie-jeebies even though she’d never been inside. She couldn’t ever recall driving past this neighborhood, yet there was something familiar about the concrete facade and the dark neon sign that would soon light up the night.
Déjà Vu. The illusion of having experienced something before. Was it an illusion? Because this whole situation felt eerily familiar. A knot twisted in her gut. Maybe the name of the club was the clue?
The throbbing pain in her temples pulsed, vibrating her skull. The longer she waited, the more likely the ache would turn to a full-blown migraine, but she couldn’t take her meds and drive. The headache worsened as she waited and worried. Unease tempted her to drive off and never look back, but she couldn’t back down. The only way she knew to survive was to control. The first ste
p in any situation was to know more than the other guy, and right now, she didn’t even know if the other guy existed outside of her paranoid imagination.
She glanced back at her phone’s screen, but didn’t know who to call.
Knowing what was going down, when and where and with whom, was of primary importance. Controlling the webs of intrigue surrounding her family had kept her alive during her father’s reign. Her brother’s, too. She often knew what was going down before they did.
It was her mother who had warned her. Pain and untended grief hit her in the solar plexus. Her mother’s death had changed everything, because her mother had protected her, or tried, most of her life. The day it happened, her mother was bleeding out from a late-term miscarriage, talking too fast because she had known she didn’t have much time. She’d told the ugly truth about the Calvetti family. The one-sided conversation, with Vicki in tears and denial, had torn her apart like a wild animal set free in her soul. The awakening had been painful and permanent, costing her youth and the only man she’d ever cared for. Loved, if she wanted to be honest. In this situation, honesty was overrated.
The words from her mother had fractured Vicki’s perception of the world. Innocence would not keep her safe. Ignorance would get her killed. It had been time to grow up. She never once dipped her fingers into her brother’s illegal activities—her mother’s warning there as well—but Vicki always knew enough to stay safe. Knowledge was the only protection she had. The need for information kept her parked in a spot outside the club for another quiet hour.
At three thirty, a silent whistle blew. Across the street, the bar’s parking lot filled with rough-looking men who weren’t shopping for used appliances. Goose bumps spread up her arms. She’d turned off the engine to save fuel, but seeing her brother’s men—hired muscle—chilled her to the bone. She double-checked the door locks.
Five minutes later, a biker in a black leather vest roared into the lot, his tattoo-covered arms impervious to the cold. He parked the Harley and unlocked the front doors of the club. Once it was open, the street beasts swarmed the entrance like sharks to chum.
No way Déjà Vu was just a nightclub. No way the local PD didn’t know. It didn’t take an exiled mobster to recognize the signs. Someone organized was running the club and the men showing up in groups of two and three. The daytime meeting meant they blended with local traffic, while a middle-of-the-night meet—when the streets were empty—would draw attention.
Several of the stragglers were from her brother’s band of misfits, the ones he’d had with him when her nephew Eli was kidnapped. The boy had been used as a pawn in a battle over territory. Her brother Nick was a crime boss and a psychopath. He hadn’t ceded territory to the kidnapper, but rather risked his son’s life to maintain respect. The little boy meant nothing to Nick. Sick prick. If Sofia, Eli’s mother, hadn’t stepped up and chased down her son with the help of an FBI agent, the situation might have ended badly.
Why were Nick’s men here? Nick was dead. Shouldn’t his men have disbanded? Worry turned the ache in her head to a full-blown migraine. She was out of her element. Vicki tossed the phone in her bag and started the engine, ready to leave before someone killed her for breathing their air; however, before she could pull into traffic, she saw him.
The long, sure stride kicked her in the gut, a memory and an attraction. She slumped low in the seat and dropped her hands from the wheel. What the devil was Blake doing here?
The idiot. He didn’t belong in this place with these people. Many of the men who entered the club were taller. Most were broader and bulkier, but the man walking up the sidewalk was the leader, whether the rest of the men knew it or not. He’d been born to lead. There was a cocky air to the sway of his hips and the scoot of his black boots. Soft brown hair flowed to his collar like a rock star, and under his arm was the biggest whore Vicki had ever seen. The other woman wore a crimson velvet dress most often reserved for lingerie and stripper poles. The five-inch stilettos didn’t slow her sleazy stride.
Hatred toward the woman boiled in her veins. She wasn’t real happy with Manny, either. Her mother’s uncle had to know Nick’s men would be here today. He had to have known she’d be unable to resist finding out why, but Manny had no idea of her relationship with Blake, of that she was certain. One look at Blake and she became an irrational mess. She could no more stop her reaction than stop the rotation of the earth. Never once taking her eyes from the entrance where he had disappeared, she turned off the engine and stepped into the cold. If there was a higher power, he’d better be watching, because she needed all the help she could get.
She clutched her key chain into a tight fist and crossed the street in a trance.
What the fuck had she walked into?
…
Unrest swirled through the club like an unholy fog. The place was packed with more drug dealers than a pharmaceutical convention, and the participants were a lot less civilized. Blake Reilly let the risks heighten his senses and soup up his body with an adrenaline rush. Too many volatile personalities in one place were a recipe for violence, but respect kept the masses from acting out their hedonistic desires.
Not respect for him. He wasn’t a person. He was a position: midlevel manager on the rise, easily replaced, but as long as he had the power, he wielded it like a medieval king. To do less invited a long and painful death.
The men had entered in groups and went straight to the bar for free booze before Blake even arrived. Blake entered, but stayed apart from the group, standing on the stage to keep an eye on the collective, taking note of alliances and apparent discord. Calvetti’s former men stayed off to the side. They didn’t drink. Blake pulled Dez to his side to get her take. She was hard where many women were soft. Her hip bone dug into his side through the slight fabric of her dress. Her hand fisted the fabric of his shirt, a reminder that she had his back. Always. Knowing she kept watch made his job easier.
He was one step from achieving what he’d set out to do more than a decade ago. The long road to revenge held a lot of bumps and detours. He’d broken too many of his own rules to fail now. Time to progress to the next level. This meeting would solidify his move, but it was a gamble. Beside him, Dez appeared at ease, but he knew different. Adrenaline rode her skin like an electric eel.
The music thumping through the sound system was low by club standards, but loud enough to keep conversations private. Still, he and Dez didn’t speak. They’d worked together long enough to read each other. She wanted to get the meeting started as soon as they walked inside. She hated the unpredictable nature of this many volatile men in a confined space.
The men had settled into factions at different cocktail tables across the room. Mick cut off the free flow of liquor as soon as Blake arrived. Mick was the size of a truck with a tattoo sleeve of Celtic symbols climbing from wrist to shoulder. Mick was neither mobster nor innocent bystander. He owed fealty to no man. Blake and Mick went back to the old neighborhood, bonding over a common goal. They obeyed one law: watch your buddy’s back. From the moment they’d opened the club, Mick was never more than a step from the nearest weapon. He kept his eyes and ears on everything happening in the bar.
Between Mick, Dez, and Blake, they could shut down the club before the men at the tables knew what hit them. But now was not the time.
From his position on the stage, he motioned to Mick. The other man tucked the bottles behind the bar and turned off the music. Blake was about to call the room to order when an unnatural hush settled. His gaze flashed like clockwork to the most likely sources of trouble—the back entrance, the kitchen, the front.
The past stepped over the threshold and landed solidly in his present.
What the hell? The daughter of one of New York’s most feared crime families stood at the entrance to the club. In Colorado. The sight was so counter to the situation that his brain blanked.
“Victoria?” He reached out to verify the woman before him was real, but Dez gripped his arm to hold hi
m back.
Victoria Calvetti was wicked-smart, high energy, and high maintenance. He’d met her in college, and she’d completely blown his mind before disappearing, leaving him to wonder if he had imagined her. Yet here she was, more beautiful, more elusive, just…more than he had remembered.
Time had been good to her. Age polished her witchy green eyes like gems, and the hair she had meticulously straightened in the past now hung in loose dark curls. The fitted white top she wore was tucked into a flowing sapphire skirt that skimmed her boots. Standing with her back to the door, hair windblown, Victoria looked like a vengeful goddess, unarmed and about three seconds from a world of hurt. The daughter of a dead mob boss was an easy target. No one had her back.
Had she followed him? Because her appearance so soon after he’d walked into the room wasn’t a coincidence. Fear grabbed him by the throat. He didn’t have time to react before the first man approached her with what promised to be a vicious attack.
“Look who we have here. The dethroned princess without her bodyguard.” The man went at Victoria straight on, no doubt depending on his larger size to intimidate her right back out the door. He didn’t understand the woman he was insulting. She didn’t back down, and definitely not after a public gauntlet was thrown. Victoria was the size of a pixie, at least a foot shorter than her attacker, but she didn’t even flinch when the beast grabbed her wrist.
Dez squeezed Blake’s hand in warning, but the words died in her throat.
Victoria moved like a spring thunderstorm, volatile and unexpected. She used the arm the man held like an anchor, lashing them together while she attacked with the other, faster than he could respond. It was like watching a piranha take down a beast with lightning-fast bites rending flesh from bones.
The man had been cocky, and she handed him his ass. She jabbed with her left—he had forgotten she was a lefty—while using her right to move the man where she wanted him. The idiot was too stunned to let go. In short order, she’d hit his throat, cutting off his airflow, and his ear, which bled like a broken dam, and then she hit him so hard in the sternum the sound echoed in the now-shocked room. Time seemed to stop. The goon’s face was open and undefended, and the woman kept moving.
