Taking Savannah (Vicious Kings Mafia #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One: Emilio

The bartender threw a lamp at my head.

Not a small lamp. A floor lamp, brass base, heavy enough to crack a skull if her aim had been two inches to the left.

It sailed past my ear and shattered against the wall of the Delaware apartment, and the woman standing in the corner with her fists up and her teeth bared was already reaching for the nightstand.

"I'm not with them," I said, hands up, grinning because I couldn't stop. Because this woman had been locked in a shithole for two weeks by men with guns and her first move when the door opened was to arm herself with furniture. "I'm the rescue."

"Bullshit."

"Carmelo," I called over my shoulder. "Tell her I'm the rescue."

Carmelo filled the doorway behind me. Six-four, shaved head, arms that made the door look narrow. He looked at the woman, looked at the broken lamp, looked at me.

"He's the rescue," Carmelo chuckles, leaning against the doorframe.

The woman didn't lower her fists. Her eyes moved between us.

Goddamn, she had brown eyes, big, and dark, framed by lashes that didn't need help.

Honey-brown skin, curves that the oversized t-shirt couldn't do anything about.

She was beautiful in a way that hit before I was ready for it, and I wasn't ready for it.

"Who sent you?" she asked.

"The Bonaccorso family."

"That supposed to mean something to me?"

"It means we're getting you out of here before the men who put you here figure out we found you.

" I stepped over the lamp debris. Glass crunched under my boots.

"You've got about four minutes to decide if you're coming with me or staying to throw furniture at the next guys through the door.

And I promise you, the next guys won't think it's charming. "

She stared at me for three seconds, then grabbed a jacket off the chair, shoved her feet into shoes that were too big, and walked past me without another word.

In the car, she sat in the back with Carmelo and didn't speak for twenty minutes.

I drove, and the quiet sat between us with its own weight.

I could feel her behind me, not nervous, not grateful, not any of the things civilians usually are after you pull them out of captivity.

She was watching. I caught it in the rearview every time I checked.

Her eyes on the road, then on the back of my head, then on the road again.

One hand stayed in her jacket pocket, her thumb working against something small, rolling it back and forth.

"You hungry?" I asked.

She looked at me in the mirror. "What?"

"Hungry. Food. The thing humans do to stay alive."

"I know what hungry means."

"Then answer the question."

A pause. "Yes."

I pulled into a diner off the interstate. Carmelo stayed in the car because Carmelo in a diner scares the waitstaff. I held the door for her, and she walked through without thanking me, which I respected.

She ordered eggs, bacon, toast, hash browns, a side of pancakes, and coffee.

She ate the way someone eats when they haven't been sure food would keep coming.

Fast and thorough. She cleaned every plate, mopped the egg yolk with the last triangle of toast, and drank three cups of coffee before she spoke.

"Those men in the apartment. The ones who were guarding me."

"Two of them. Yeah."

"They dead?"

"Before we got there. Carmelo cleared the floor while I found you." I watched her across the table. The information didn't bother her. She took it in and moved to the next thing. "Who put you there?"

"I don't know their names. Three guys with military builds and cropped hair, no insignia on anything they wore.

They showed up at my apartment in Baltimore two weeks ago, said I needed to come with them, and when I said no, they put a bag over my head and shoved me in a van.

" She wrapped both hands around the coffee mug, absorbing the heat through the ceramic.

Her thumb kept moving, rubbing against the edge of the cup now, the same repetitive motion I'd seen in the car.

Her nails were bitten short. Not manicured, not neat.

Bitten down, the edges ragged, two weeks of locked-room anxiety worn into her fingertips.

"They didn't hurt me. Didn't touch me. Just locked me in and brought food twice a day and told me someone would come for me eventually. "

"And did someone come?"

"Nah, the wait was fucking boring though."

I leaned back in the booth. The vinyl squeaked.

The diner was mostly empty, a trucker at the counter nursing a plate of fries he'd stopped eating twenty minutes ago, a couple arguing in whispers by the window, body language that said the fight was older than tonight.

The overhead lights buzzed. The coffee machine behind the counter gurgled and spat.

Normal people doing normal shit at 1 AM on a Tuesday.

We weren't normal people. The woman across from me had overheard something at a mafia-owned nightclub that got her disappeared, and I was the loud twin of the two of us and the one elected to ‘put her at ease’, sitting in a diner booth with egg on my sleeve and a gun in my waistband and the beginning of a headache in the form of a brown-eyed doe.

"You're staring," she said.

"You're interesting."

"You're rude."

"I'm honest."

"Nah, you’re fucking rude. Don’t stare at me… freak." She took another drink and set the mug down and pushed her plate to the edge of the table for the waitress. "You work for the family that owns the club?"

"I work for the family. The club is one of our properties."

"So the men I was pouring drinks for, the ones in the back booth with the thousand-dollar shoes and the guns under their jackets, those were your people."

"Some of them."

"And the ones I overheard? The ones having a conversation about delivery schedules and names and a marina south of the waterfront?"

Everything in me locked up, though my face didn't show it.

Leone hadn't given me specifics about what she'd heard.

He'd said she was a witness. A liability.

Someone who knew too much to be left in a Delaware apartment and too much to be cut loose.

But a marina, delivery schedules, names.

That was operational intelligence, not background noise.

"Those weren't our people," I said. "Not all of them."

"I figured." She reached for the cream, poured a thin stream into her fourth cup of coffee, and stirred it with the handle of her fork because the spoon was dirty.

"Because the conversation I heard wasn't about your business.

It was about your business being someone else's business.

And the men having it weren't nervous about being overheard by your soldiers.

They were nervous about being overheard by each other. "

I looked at her across the booth. Behind the exhaustion and the bitten nails and the oversized jacket, there was a brain that didn't match the diner or the hour or the situation.

She'd spent two weeks locked in a room and she'd used that time to think, to replay what she'd heard, to sort it and build a picture she was now parceling out in pieces she chose and in an order she decided.

A bartender. Right. And I was just the charming twin.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked.

"Somewhere safe. The Bonaccorso compound. You'll have a room and food and security, and nobody touches you."

"And in exchange?"

"In exchange, eventually, you tell us everything. The conversation, the names, the marina. But not tonight. Tonight you eat and sleep and stop worrying about whether the next person through the door is here to kill you."

"How do I know you're not here to kill me?"

"Because I bought you pancakes. Assassins don't buy pancakes."

"That's the worst logic I've ever heard."

"And yet here you are. Eating the pancakes."

Her eyes held mine. Brown eyes with something underneath that wasn't fear and wasn't gratitude. She was deciding, right there, whether the man with the easy smile and the gun and the egg on his sleeve was worth the risk.

"My name is Savannah," she said.

"I know. I’m Emilio."

"Emilio." She said slowly, as if talking to a small child. "You always rescue women from apartments at midnight?"

"Only the ones who throw lamps at me."

The corner of her mouth moved a fraction before she killed it, and the effort of killing it told me everything the smile would have.

She wanted to laugh. She didn't trust the impulse.

Two weeks of locked silence had stiffened the muscles required for humor, and she wasn't ready to stretch them for a stranger no matter how good the pancakes were.

I paid the check and took the take-out I ordered for Carmelo. She watched me count out cash, leave a tip that was too big, fold the receipt into my pocket.

In the car, Carmelo was in the back seat with his arms crossed and his chin on his chest. I handed him his doggy bag and got in the driver’s seat.

Savannah got in the passenger side this time. Didn't ask. Just opened the door and sat down and buckled her belt and looked straight ahead.

"The compound," she said. "How far?"

"Three hours."

"Fine."

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out the thing she'd been rolling between her fingers. A bottle cap. Silver, bent at the edges from years of handling. She set it on her thigh and pressed her thumb into the center of it until her finger went white.

I started the engine. The highway opened up in front of us, dark and empty, and the woman beside me stared through the windshield with a bottle cap under her thumb and two weeks of captivity sitting behind her eyes.

I should have been thinking about the mission. The debrief with Leone. The intelligence she carried that could crack Kreiss's network open.

Instead, I was thinking about the lamp. How heavy it was, how close it came, the fact that she'd been locked in a room for fourteen days and her first move was to fight.