Inked in Betrayal (Marriage Ink #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

It wasn’t every day that I got to ride in the trunk of a car with a dead guy.

A dead billionaire to be precise.

And if we wanted to be really precise: aspiring senator Bruce Davenport.

My job was a fixer. I was supposed to bury scandals. Not get buried with them.

I had a sack over my head. A flimsy barrier, but still a barrier that was a dividing line between forced calm and the hysteria that wanted to tear out of my throat.

I was raised in the mafia. My brother was the boss of the De Lucci crime family, and my uncle was the most powerful don in the country.

The first time I witnessed a mafia execution was by accident. I was five years old and had been sneaking around in my grandfather’s garden when I saw him shoot a guy by the fountain. I had tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Because that was what evil men did on television.

The vehicle lurched, and I rolled into Davenport’s body.

So you see, I should be used to dead bodies, but it didn’t dispel the suffocating urge to lose my shit or throw up.

Thankfully, he wasn’t cold or stiff yet, and he felt like he was rolled in plastic, probably painter’s plastic drop cloths.

He’d been killed less than two hours ago at the Russians’ exclusive dance club.

In my estimation, we’d been on the road for thirty minutes.

But my lizard brain focused on survival. Crashing out could wait.

The biggest question was why Viktor was keeping me alive. His thugs had held me down while others restrained Davenport as Viktor delivered the lethal dose of heroin. I’d been screaming and yelling. But when he turned to me, my brain and body froze while words died on my lips.

But someone murmured in his ear and stayed Viktor’s hand.

That was how I ended up in the trunk of a car.

My shoulders were sore from my wrists being tied behind my back. I sported a couple of cuts and bruises, but other than a few scrapes, I considered myself lucky to be still breathing.

Though breathing had become a chore with the limited oxygen courtesy of the hood and my mouth taped shut, not to mention the bottled-up panic arising from being wedged beside a body and the back of the car seats.

There was a chirp of a siren, and the car lurched again before it stopped.

Cops?

My heart rate skyrocketed. The hysteria I was keeping in check threatened to break out of my skin because men like Viktor Koshkin were unpredictable. He was the enforcer for the Moscow mob. He’d kill a cop first rather than get arrested.

I heard the opening and closing of car doors.

I heard the muffled voices of newcomers.

I heard labored breathing.

Mine.

My mind spun and failed to access all the survival skills I’d learned throughout my life.

I couldn’t thump the back of the vehicle knowing my captor’s unpredictability.

I’d risk being turned into Swiss cheese by a possible shootout.

Armed with only his service weapon, the cop would be no match for Viktor and his minions, who I’d seen toting Uzis and submachine guns.

Tense minutes passed, or it could have been only seconds. Every thread of cloth itched on my skin.

The pop of the trunk was either my salvation or damnation.

“What the fuck?” someone shouted.

“I can explain.” Viktor’s smug, condescending, and unbothered voice rattled open my caged anxiety. This couldn’t be good. It sounded like he’d decided to leave no witnesses.

Everyone was going to die, including me.

“Stay in your vehicle, sir.” The high-pitched voice of the second person bled nervousness with every word.

“Come on, sweetheart,” the first person seemed to be addressing me, but wariness tinged his tone too.

The trunk was safer at the moment, but I had no choice because I was rolled over Davenport’s body, lifted out of the trunk, and stood up on my feet.

Call for backup. Why am I not hearing police radios?

The man freed my wrists.

Escalating arguments swirled around me. Everyone was talking at once. I reached for my hood, aggravated that my rescuer hadn’t removed it first, but he stopped me.

“Don’t. Not yet,” he whispered.

What the hell? What was going on? Was I being pawned off to another faction? To make matters worse, I still couldn’t speak or object or ask questions.

“Don’t move another step!” the second person shouted.

I was being hurried away.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Viktor called out.

“Sir! Stay where you are.”

A blast of gunfire had me scrambling for the ground.

I gritted against my scraped palms and knees.

“Not yet” be damned. I yanked the hood off me and choked back a scream when I saw someone on the ground, his lifeless eyes staring at me, lit by the ambient lighting of headlights.

Law enforcement, but not the NYPD. Gray uniform.

Purple tie. State trooper. The man who rescued me.

Crunching footsteps approached.

My eyes fell on the dead trooper’s hand. Beside it was a gun. He’d drawn his weapon but wasn’t quick enough.

Viktor’s ominous silhouette split through the glare of the headlights, his features vaguely becoming discernible, but his intent was clear.

He stopped about two feet away.

“Now what do we do with Moretti’s niece?”

“My name is Lucy.” My chin came up defiantly even when my mouth had trouble forming words. A henchman came forward and whispered in Viktor’s ear.

He nodded before returning his attention to me. “I don’t like feisty women. You’re going to give me more trouble than you’re worth, but you fit perfectly into my plans.” He grinned. “But not alive. Sorry—”

Two successive gunshots echoed between us.

Viktor’s shocked eyes stared at me and the gun I used on him before lowering to the hole in his chest. His henchman had already dropped right beside him.

He had other men around, but I was already on my feet, diving into the wooded area behind the traffic stop. Shouting erupted behind me. I wasn’t waiting around for the aftermath of my actions. I had no clue where I was except I was no longer in Manhattan.

I was an experienced runner who had run trails before—that was my advantage over them. The problem was I’d never done them barefoot. I lost my shoes when I’d been thrown in the car's trunk.

More shots reverberated in the night, and it almost sounded like a shootout. Did more cops arrive? I wasn’t hanging around to find out.

I took cover behind a tree and patted myself down to check for injuries. I wasn’t hit.

My mind scrambled about what to do next.

Viktor confiscated my phone and disabled the tracker in my body.

He was thorough, but not enough. I sneered.

If there was one thing I learned in my life, men outside my family were quick to dismiss me as a pretty face, and I derived immense satisfaction from using their prejudice to bite them in the ass.

I needed to call Dom. My brother was going to assign me another security detail after I’d fought so hard to be free of one. The condition was I’d be outfitted with a subdermal tracker, but that went kaput quickly.

Zio Luca would be concerned since he was the one who asked me for the favor of talking Davenport down from confronting Viktor. I figured it was an hour past our designated check-in.

It was imperative to get under my family’s protection. My brain couldn’t even process the gravity of my situation and its dire consequences.

It was self-defense, but self-defense didn’t matter when it came to the mafia.

Viktor Koshkin was not only a high-ranking official of the Moscow mob, he was also its pakhan’s brother. Whether Viktor was dead, clinging to life, or suffering lasting damage remained to be seen.

Vehicles zooming back and forth on the roadway twenty yards uphill to my left drowned out the rustling noise of the woods.

I peered around the tree one more time before I resumed walking briskly, sometimes jogging.

I wasn’t going to flag down a vehicle, but I should reach a town soon where I could call for help.

The crime family hotline had been the same ever since I could remember, but it was the first time I was using it.

It’s going to be fine. It’s going to be fine. I repeated those thoughts in my head.

I tried to block out the state trooper’s face.

Thankfully, I had no image of Bruce Davenport’s lifeless body.

A shiver ran through me. But the feeling was there.

Dammit. Maybe it was time to give up this fixer shit and put the law degree to a better use.

I fixed political scandals and protected the reputation of my clients.

Bruce Davenport was running for the senate. He had the money, the connections, and a beautiful wife. But he had one weakness. His male lover. He’d been ready to throw it all away for love and divorce his wife. A critical blow during the election year with accusations of adultery paving the way.

The Moscow mob made its position known by sending Viktor Koshkin.

Davenport’s lover disappeared.

The blast of a rig horn tore through the night, followed by the screeching of brakes.

It was a relief to have the sound of traffic for company.

But when it all died down, a whiff of alarm raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I whipped around, heart slamming into my throat.

Behind a tree, a silhouette of a man emerged.

No.

Without hesitation, I fired.

A force knocked my arm upwards, and my gun went flying. At first I thought the recoil of the gun got me, but I was yanked against a hard chest. A thick vise applied brutal pressure to my neck.

I struggled, kicked out, and before I could scream, I started to lose consciousness. My nails dug into the unrelenting arm depriving my brain of blood.

“Now you’re mine to deal with, Lyutsiferka,” a familiar voice said in my ear.

And as blackness claimed my vision, I wondered if it would have been better if Viktor had killed me.