by Raven Dark
Owned by the Mafia Bad Boy (Book 5) by Raven Dark
Copyright © 2016 Raven Dark, all rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Please purchase only authorized editions of this book, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials.
Cover by MW Burt
Cover image courtesy of Canstock
Editor: Avril Stepowski
Dedication
For anyone who’s ever loved a bad boy.
Table of Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
1
“Ah. Just as I thought. I’ve seen enough men hooked on a woman to know it when I see it. If Daniella Montrose is your slave, I’m the pope.”
I knew Agent Hadler was just trying to bait me, but I also understood the dangerous implications in his words. Not only did he know Anika’s real name. Not only did he somehow know someone had tried to kill her father, but he also knew she wasn’t my slave. Never mind how he knew it. He knew way too much. If he told the wrong people what he knew, we—Anika, her father, and me—were as good as dead. Which only left me with one option.
Fuck. Hadler was an FBI agent. My insides twisted at the thought of the only way this could end.
I kept my face deadpan, refusing to give in to his baiting. “Tell me the name.”
“Fuck you.”
“Then open wide.” I crossed the space between us and forced his mouth open. He screamed, but didn’t spill the information I needed. I released his jaw and pulled his head back, aiming the pliers for his eye. “If pulling out your teeth isn’t going to work, perhaps you’d like to lose something else. An eye?”
Agent Hadler thrashed and his terrified screams bounced off the freezer walls.
“Stop! You can’t…the rat…”
I backed up, waiting.
Hadler’s breaths sawed in and out. He didn’t sound quite so smug when he spoke again. “You have to protect me. Do you get that? Ferrara—”
“The name!”
“Davros, you don’t understand! This is bigger than you think.”
“What are you talking about?”
His throat worked heavily. “Dominic Gavini doesn’t have a rat in his crew.”
“You lie! Tell me the truth. Now.”
“I am. Davros, there’s no rat in his crew. Dominic Gavini is the rat.”
The words slammed into me like a battering ram. I gripped the pliers in my fist. He had to be lying.
But I also knew he wasn’t. No way in hell would he beg me to protect him from the Family if he was lying. That information was too damaging, too huge, to give without being one hundred percent sure it was the truth.
It was my turn to swallow. “How do you Know?”
“There isn’t enough time to explain. Release me. If—”
“You were supposed to deliver the identity of the rat to the other Dons at the summit tomorrow.” Once more I stepped forward and jerked his head back until he winced. Stiffening, trying to turn his face away. He knew what was coming next if he didn’t spill. “You wouldn’t be going to the Dons without proof Dominic has been talking to the authorities.” I aimed the pliers for his eye. “Where’s your proof?”
“Okay. Okay.”
When I lowered the pliers, he licked his lips. “There’s a hard drive. It’s got information, detailing dozens of interactions between Gavini and the FBI. He’s an informant. He’s been fucking the Family over for months for his own purposes.”
Hiding my shock, I tightened my hold on him. “Where is the drive?”
“Let me go and I’ll–”
“NOW!”
He thrashed when I put the pliers closer to his eye. “It’s in my shoe. In the heel. Look in the heel.”
I released him and looked around. Then I saw them. Both of his shoes lay across the room near the wall, where David must have tossed them when he started breaking Hadler’s toes earlier in the interrogation. Pocketing the pliers, I was about to cross the room to grab them, but I didn’t get the chance. The heavy door to the meat factory’s freezer banged open, hitting the wall. I spun.
“Hands up, Davros!” Two men in suits busted into the room, and the one in a brimmed grey hat and a red tie pointed a pistol at my head.
In the split second before I acted, it registered that these men were not FBI. Their builds, blocky and grizzled, screamed wiseguy. Besides, the gun had a silencer. They could only be Vincent Ferrara’s men.
“Shit.” The training David insisted on giving me years ago kicked in, telling me to use whatever I had at my disposal to survive. I grabbed the heavy metal meat packing table that took up most of the freezer and heaved it up, shoving it at the men as they barreled toward me. It slammed into them and they shouted. One hit the wall, the other, the floor. There was a clatter, the gun dropping, I hoped.
I couldn’t leave here without that drive. I dove sideways toward the wall and grabbed up Agent Hadler’s shoes.
One of the men flipped the table sideways, because its top hit the wall to my left. Taking away my barrier, and my advantage. I scrambled to find the drive, feeling for an opening in the shoes, searching for a place the drive could be hidden. Fuck, secret flash drives, hidden compartments in shoes, this was hard core FBI spy stuff. David’s forte, not mine.
“Get him!” Hadler shouted. “There’s a drive in my shoe, he can’t leave here with it!”
“Fuck.” I whipped out my gun just as I saw the one in the top hat pull out another one of his own. The agent’s shoes in hand, I leapt aside and rolled, hoping he wouldn’t adjust his aim fast enough. Gunfire went off, ricocheting off a wall. I came up on one knee the way David taught me, and fired at him. He fired back.
Gunfire deafened me, and it registered that Anika and David could hear everything that happened via the recording in the hotel. An image of my perfect angel, my beautiful Anika, flashed in my mind, like my life flashing before my eyes an instant before death.
What happened next became a blur.
As soon as the gunshots went off, filtering through the recorder like staticky firecrackers, David and I looked at each other. My face drained of blood. Who had fired the bullets? Had Kane been shot?
“Shit, David…”
He nodded and switched off the recorder. Knifing to his feet, he checked the guns in the holsters that hung at the sides of his chest and threw on his grey uniform blazer, hiding the weapons from view. I was already scrambling to the bedroom, throwing off the slippers and housecoat I’d tossed on after Kane and I had made love last. Thoughts racing, I pulled on the first clothes I could find.
“Don’t leave yet, David.”
“You’re staying here, Miss Anika. Mr. Davros would never forgive me for letting you near a gunfight.”
“He’ll get over it.” I pulled on my shoes while dashing to the door in a T-shirt I was pretty sure was inside out, and a pair of jeans Kane had expressly forbidden me to wear. “He loves you, David. He’ll forgive you. I’m not staying here while Kane may be bleeding out. Nurse, remember?”
He opened his mouth as if to argue, then empathy softened his eyes before his expression returned to its usual unreadable professionalism. “Let’s go then, nurse.”
In minutes, David had Kane’s black limousine speeding down the New York streets. We hit the Tenderloin, and I checked
the time on my watch. A half hour before midnight. Kane and I had a half hour to meet Gavini before he’d have my dad killed, and then he’d claim me for himself.
If Gavini was the rat in his own crew like Hadler had said, we had a much bigger advantage over him than we thought, if we reached him in time. True, we had my father hidden away in a medical facility in Bel Air, which likely would make it harder for Gavini’s men to find him. But it would only buy us so much time before they found him and put a bullet in his head.
Panic tried to take hold of me, made worse at the thought of losing Kane. I’d just realized I loved him. How painfully ironic it would be if I lost him now.
I leaned forward in the back of the limo and David looked over the front seat at me. “Hurry, David. I can’t lose him now.”
“You won’t lose him.” David gunned the gas, jerking the car into a darkened alleyway. The limo bounced and banged over a manhole cover. “We won’t lose him.”
When he pulled into the lot of an old, rundown meat packing plant, headlights off, I took note of the cars parked there. A white limo stood out in the night—the car belonging to the men that had come for Hadler?—along with a black Porsche I guessed was Kane’s, and a Lincoln Town car I guessed was Hadler’s. So, everyone was still in there.
Without waiting for David to open the door for me, I got out of the car. David shook his head at me with a mix of irritation and amusement.
“Mr. Davros is right, you are a handful.” He came around the car, pulled out one of his guns, and handed it to me. “You know how to use this, right?”
Well. David certainly didn’t treat me with as much kid-glove handling as he once did. I wondered how pissed Kane would be with him, but I also couldn’t help feeling a rush of appreciation for his not cutting me out. I cocked the gun and cupped it between my hands, the way I’d seen my dad do once or twice. “Yes.”
He smirked. “Just a nurse, my ass.”
I grinned. Then, heart in my throat at the idea that I might have to shoot someone again, I followed him to the front of the warehouse.
The reality is, while my father used guns, and he taught me to shoot when I was thirteen, mostly we used rifles for hunting, and now on the farm he’d sold to Kane. Until recently, I’d only used them on dear or elk and small game. I knew how to use buckshot and long range rifles on rabbits and dear, and once to put down a lame horse. My father had used a pistol once, firing at what we thought was a burglar outside our house when we lived in another city, but it turned out to be one of Gavini’s men.
The first and only time I’d even shot at a person, much less taken a human life, was the day before yesterday, at the hospital. The guy had tried to shoot my father, then Kane. I’d shot the mobster to protect both men. The thought still sickened me, almost as much as having helped cut the guy up to cover up the evidence. Now, I might have to kill someone again. It sickened me a little less knowing it was to protect the man I loved, but the thought of the ever increasing amount of blood on my hands still made my stomach try to come up through my throat.
What the hell was Kane turning me into?
Inside the doors to the factory, the air was a few degrees below normal. The chill made me shiver. One of the lights in the ceiling flickered.
Further into the plant, something clattered and a man shouted. Gunfire ricocheted off something. Hope sprang to life in my chest.
“If someone’s shooting, Kane has to be alive. That’s good, right?” I whispered with a glance at David.
He nodded once, gun pointed forward like me. We hurried to a freezer in the back. Inside the room, I froze. One man with a grey top hat stood behind Kane, who knelt on the floor with his hands up. A second man stood in front of him, gun pressed to his forehead.
Execution style.
For about an instant, the horror at the thought of losing Kane gripped me. Then I heard shots fired and I almost screamed. Until, slowly, I realized where the shots had come from.
The man standing in front of Kane gurgled and dropped the gun, then slammed into the floor face first. I saw David move forward out of the corner of my eye, the smoke coming from the end of his pistol. Then the man behind Kane let go of him, drawing a gun from his blazer. Kane turned his upper body and threw his foot into the man’s chest with a yell. The man flew back, jostling the body hanging close behind him—Agent Hadler?—and crashed into the floor. Kane whipped out a gun and shot him in the head.
It all happened within a few seconds, before Kane turned, holstered his gun, and nodded his thanks to David, clapping him on the shoulder. His features were cool, stoic, as if what he’d just done didn’t phase him at all. Relief swept over me like a tidal wave.
Before I could consider my actions, I rushed to Kane’s side.
“Anika.” He pulled me close, folding me in his arms, into the warmth of his huge frame. He radiated the heat of a long battle, smelled of male and adrenaline and violence. I loved the smell, and hated that I loved it.
“Kane, are you all right?” I looked him over, but he didn’t appear to have been shot. Other than a swelling black eye, where one of those thugs must have punched him, he didn’t appear to be injured at all.
“I’m fine, angel.” He took my face and kissed me hard on the mouth until my senses reeled and my blood raced hot, the way only he could make it do. Fuck, I really loved this man. Damn it.
When he pulled back and released me, his face hardened. “What are you doing here, girl? David, what the hell is she doing here?”
“She’s a nurse, Mr. Davros. We weren’t sure whether you were the one hit.”
He tsked, but appreciation flickered in his eyes. Then he noticed the gun still in my hand and he snatched the pistol away. “Gimmie that.” He shoved it in his waistband with a glare for his driver, then one for me, then David again. “We’ll discuss this later, both of you. David, I did not pay off her father’s debts so she could become a gun-wielding gangster.”
He didn’t say it, but I knew that tone. I was in for it later, and not just the lecture he would give David for arming me with a gun. We’d both be punished, though the kind of punishment he gave me for doing what was normally man’s work would be very different from what he’d do to David. My penance would leave me panting and sweaty, with my ass sore and my pussy thoroughly used.
“I didn’t fire it, Davros. And even if I did, this isn’t the first time I’ve shot someone for you. You didn’t seem to have an issue with it last time.”
“That was different. Just stay out of the way.”
Before I could rebuff him, I caught sight of Agent Hadler, who’s mouth twisted in a bloody, broken smile. A sick, knowing smile. He, a man who was supposed to believe I was Kane’s slave, had just seen us hugging and kissing like a couple. My gut churned. “Kane…”
Kane turned to look at the agent and I allowed my first real assessment of him. My eyes widened. Barely conscious by the look of him, Agent Hadler hung by his wrists, his face bruised and bloody. Blood had run out of his mouth, dried onto his chin and shirt, from where Kane had pulled his teeth, I guessed. His feet barely touched the floor, both bare, the toes looking nearly pulverized.
I didn’t know what scared me more, what Kane and David had done to him, or realizing that the agent had seen Kane and I interacting in a way that clearly displayed I was anything but a slave. His smile widened, as if he knew what was spinning through my head right then.
“Is that how slaves interact with masters these days, Davros?”
Kane ignored his jibe and picked up the agent’s shoes, which had been lying on the floor. He handed them to David. “He claims he has a flash drive in his shoe with informant sessions between Dominic and the FBI, but I can’t find it.”
David took the left shoe, immediately discarding the right, flipped it over, and, without missing a beat, turned the sole of the shoe sideways, revealing a hidden compartment. I peered closer, but he turned the shoe over and a small black drive dropped into his palm. When he caught both Kan
e and I staring at him, he gave a lopsided smile. “Old FBI trick.”
“How did you know which shoe?” I looked at the shoe, fascinated.
“The sole of this one is made of different material. See?”
“You’re gonna gave to explain yourself to me sometime,” Kane said, pointing at him as he took the drive and pocketed it.
“Daniella.”
I spun to the agent.
Hadler’s eyes gleamed. “You know, you’re as gorgeous as she said you were.”
“She who?” I demanded. This was the second time he’d spoken of a mysterious ‘she.’ The first time, I’d heard him say over the recorder, ‘she won’t let her live long enough to learn the truth.’
“Don’t you dare talk to her,” Kane growled at him.
He only chuckled. “So protective.”
Listening to him, it occurred to me to wonder why Kane had allowed us to act like a couple in front of him. Then it hit me. It didn’t matter what he knew, because the dead didn’t talk. My stomach heaved at the thought. More death, more violence. But I pushed the disgust down, refusing to give Kane an excuse to push me further out of this part of his world. Hadler was not a good man. He’d murdered witnesses and let rapists and killers walk free for the mob. Torturing him had also been the only way to get the information we needed to save my father from Gavini’s chopping block, and killing him was necessary to protect us all. Still, I couldn’t help wondering where the bloodshed would end. I took another step toward him without thinking.
“No, stay back, Anika.” Kane pulled me away from him. Hadler’s eyes sparkled with knowing and irritation squirmed in me for Kane’s protectiveness. Not because Hadler would see it, but because it only reminded me of where I still stood in his eyes.
While Kane marched over to the agent, Hadler lifted his head and turned his manic smile on him.
“She who, Agent?” I demanded again. I wasn’t about to let Kane kill him before I found out what his involvement with my father was, what Vincent Ferrara wanted with me, and who the woman was behind my father’s almost having been shot.
