Dirty Indiscretions: A Dark Mafia Romance Read online

  I stayed in that position for a moment after he was gone, then cautiously opened my eyes. I counted a minute, and when nothing happened, I slowly sat up, holding the covers to my chest. I glanced at the pile that was my clothes. My purse was in that pile, the one with the gun. Why hadn't he taken the chance to look through it? It made me feel kind of sleazy for going through his things when he was sleeping. Or was he just in a hurry?

  Whatever. If he was in that much of a hurry, he was going somewhere. How long had we been absent from the party? I wasn’t sure if I could leave yet or not because I suddenly wanted off this stupid island.

  I was still more than a little defeated about the whole mission. I'd been doing well, too, or so I thought. It wasn’t anywhere near my first real mission, and I'd mostly only had success. I could pretty much count this as a fail, though.

  I got off the bed and went for my clothes, dragging them back to the bed where my shoes already sat on the floor beside it. I pulled some wipes from my purse and wiped my body down. Then I wrapped the dirty wipes in more of them and left them in my purse. I pulled my panties on, feeling icky and uncomfortable, but I'd have to wait to be off the island before I could have a desperately needed shower.

  I got dressed, made sure I looked presentable, and made my way out of the room and back into the party, melding seamlessly into the crowd, and then walked around to see if there were any groups leaving. I couldn’t sneak off, but maybe if I just went with a crowd, no one would notice. These were proud people, after all. They wouldn’t take well to anyone assuming they were crashing such an important party.

  To be fair, though, I really had been invited to the party. I hadn't been lying to Luke when I said that. I just didn’t have an invitation, and I never had the intention of getting one, because my reason for attending was less than pure and I didn’t need to complicate things for myself by having my name added to some neat little list.

  Even after all that, though, it was pointless. I caught sight of Greco as I moved outside behind a group of people, but I quickly ducked out of his sight. I found myself unconsciously looking around for Luke as I was moving outside and I couldn’t anymore. I could have cursed myself for it, but at this point, I was feeling resigned.

  I was unclear why a total stranger could make me lose my focus so easily. I'd have to think about it once death wasn’t imminent.

  Chapter 13

  Luke

  Dammit!

  This was getting ridiculous.

  My lungs burned after all the running I'd just done. I was still fit, and twenty-seven was young, but I must have been going for maybe an hour. I didn't want to risk slowing down to get a vehicle, and I didn’t have one of my own. Usually, I just rented under some fake name, but I had someone to drive me this time, so I hadn't bothered to look for one.

  Once I was sure I could stop running, I found a dark alley and walked into it, but not too far in just in case. The last thing I needed was to drive myself into a corner. I took a minute to catch my breath and then reached for the phone in my pocket. It was a burner with only one number, and I made the call.

  It was picked up on the second ring. I didn’t wait for any pleasantries. The guy on the other end was waiting for the call anyway.

  "Tell the boss the job is done," I said the seven words, then disconnected the call and dismantled the phone. I'd dispose of the parts later, putting them into different pockets. I took a few more minutes to catch my breath and then slunk out of the alley.

  I had on a leather jacket over a hoodie, and I pulled the hood over my head as I walked down the street, keeping my head down and shoving my hands into my pockets.

  At least I had good news to send back this time.

  I was good at what I did. I didn’t brag—there really wasn’t anything to brag about being a good killer—but I had a good track record.

  It was getting shot to shit lately, and that wasn’t normal. Not for me.

  It all wasn’t my fault. My last two missions had gone so badly. Every time I was supposed to meet someone, they were not there, or there were a couple of people waiting for me. I was a paranoid kind of guy, so I didn’t go into situations recklessly. It was why I'd survived so long doing what I did. And today… I'd just made the kill when I heard voices getting too close and I had to hot-foot it out of there.

  I remembered what it used to be like, being in the army, going on missions, executing them flawlessly. I served to the best of my ability and beyond, and I was good at it. I'd made the IRA my sort-of home until it came to a point where I didn’t agree with what the army stood for anymore.

  And my old general, a man I had not quite trusted but I was forced to follow his orders because he was the leader of my unit, had decided I deserved punishment for my defection. He felt I was weak, and anyone that was defined as being weak in his eyes should be executed.

  He’d hunted me down like a dog, and when he couldn’t find me, he went after my family. Finding him, taking him out, was all I lived for now. But it couldn’t shield me and I couldn’t live on that alone; I needed money and a good sum of it.

  Then I ended up working for an Italian mafia boss in the US.

  I knew the only way for me to survive was to be anonymous and with someone powerful. I got to know the most powerful mafia bosses in the States and chose Greco by chance. He'd liked me from the first moment he met me, supposedly, and a mutual trust was established between us both when I started working for him.

  It wasn’t quite what I'd pictured for my life, but in a way, it was better than what I did before. So far, anyway. Greco hadn't sent me to anyone innocent. Usually, they were people he had deals with that either went bad or were dishonored. I didn’t feel sorry for them. But I wondered what I would do, the day he asked me to harm someone who didn't deserve it, simply because he wanted something that they either didn’t have or didn’t want to give up. I'd thought of it plenty, but I was going to properly think about it when I got there. No point in playing around with what-ifs. Until then, I would go about business as usual.

  Not that what was currently going on could even count as that. Not every mission could be a success. Shit happens, there were coincidences, and plans go out the window.

  Two missions in a row, though? And then tonight. I could feel my paranoia working overtime, but I didn’t think I was overreacting. Just because you were paranoid didn’t mean there weren’t people aiming for your back. It was a philosophy that had kept me alive in the time since I left the army, left my country, took on a job as a hitman.

  I was starting to get suspicious that something was going down.

  I didn’t need to go look for the boss. Typically, he would let me off for a day or so after a job, but I suddenly very much wanted to meet with him. I decided to head back and confront Greco about the failure of my missions. Maybe he would have something to tell me that made some sense.

  Chapter 14

  Elda

  I used to have dreams, once.

  My problems used to be light ones, things that would be trivial now in comparison. I'd always dreamed of being a lawyer, and I had worked toward that dream since before I hit high school. I was guilty of being a bit naïve, too, thinking that if I were a lawyer, I could help people. I was raised by my grandparents after my mother died giving birth to me. My father left my family before I was born, and I had no other family.

  I was good at making friends, though. I was sociable, not quite the life of the party but I attended plenty of them when my grandparents allowed me to, from the time I was in high school. I was self-conscious about my looks, but guys seemed to like me well enough, and I lost my virginity at the tender age of sixteen.

  Life had been so simple. I achieved what I set my mind to, and I made it into the school of my dreams. I might have grown a little wilder in college, but I never lost sight of my focus.

  It all came crashing down on me, that day I went to visit my grandparents. It was my birthday, and I was dropping in unexpectedly. I always wonder
ed, afterward, if I had just called ahead instead of trying to surprise them, would they ever have told me? I'd like to think so, but it was colored by heavy doubt.

  So, I got home to find strangers in my grandparents' house, and they suddenly had these guilty expressions. An older couple, and three other people, two males and a female, both younger, and none of them familiar.

  "What’s going on," I'd murmured, feeling confused.

  Then my grandmother was there, leading me to a seat with grandfather taking his single seat, the guests seating around the room, my eyes on the older couple sitting across from me looking back at me with teary, determined faces.

  I'd thought it was odd, how the woman's face, though aged, looked like the single photo of the woman who was supposed to be my mother, how the man had her eyes.

  "Baby, we need to talk," grandmother had said gently, and stumbled her way through the whole story.

  I was startled by a sudden, sharp sound, my hand reaching automatically for the phone. It was a message, and I opened the notification.

  Nothing yet. I'll keep you posted.

  Dammit. I sighed and ducked my head for a moment, then erased the message and put the phone back down.

  I looked around, blinking at the room I found myself in, still thinking about that night. The room was tiny, cramped, with poor lighting, but it was a clean place to stay with a bed and I could pay for my stay in cash. I didn’t plan to stay long, already impatience clawed at me.

  Again, I blinked at my surroundings, finally waking out of my daydreams; reminded myself of where I was.

  I was back in Italy, still smarting after that failed mission, but I knew all I had to do was wait for a different opportunity. In the meantime, I trained some more, kept my ears, even the virtual and borrowed ones, open for any news that would give me a new lead.

  Besides that, I was trying to figure out Luke.

  I'd searched around for him, and found nothing. There was an existing record, I'd been surprised to find, but it was British and the man pictured may have been close to Luke's specs, but the face wasn’t similar, beyond the beard. The name was obviously an alias, and it pretty much cemented everything for me.

  I wondered if Luke was even his real name.

  More than that, I wondered about him. I'd guessed he was Irish, and he hadn't refuted it. I wondered about where he grew up, how he ended up where he did working for Greco of all people. He was an Italian mafia boss, I was sure there was Irish mafia in the US and he could have easily found a group to work for. Unless he was running from something, something he didn’t want people he shared an ancestry with knowing.

  But there was no way for me to find out about any of it. Maybe a picture would have gotten me something, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be handing out pictures of him, anyway. Not only was it dangerous for me, it could potentially drag me into whatever he was escaping, but it felt like a betrayal just thinking of it.

  Those thoughts were muddy and complicated because they kept running over each other with broken theories. What I knew I needed, was money. I had enough to get by, but I always needed more, especially with the traveling I was doing. Since I really had only one devotion left in life, getting the cash wasn’t so simple. I worked a couple of jobs to save something, but nothing that would take over my schedule. I needed the money so I could get next to Greco, beyond that, it didn’t really hold much meaning for me, not for the moment.

  At some point, I would have to build some life for myself after my vendetta was taken care of. But until then, I was going to keep my focus. The mission came above everything; I'd been working toward it for the past four years after all, instead of completing my college education. When I was a young girl, at twenty-one, trying to go to my classes, then finding out a lot of harsh truths about my family, my past, was more than I could imagine or handle.

  That was when the fire that lit within me after I digested it all, and the vow I made.

  Chapter 15

  Luke

  I confronted Greco.

  It wasn’t something I'd ever really had the need to do before, but I needed answers, and he was where all my information was coming from anyway.

  "I don’t see the problem."

  I stopped my pacing to send him an incredulous look. I was sure I'd explained myself well unless he just wasn’t listening? But he didn’t say more, just stared back at me, and I took a deep breath.

  "I've been working for you for a while. Not every mission goes well, but I've never had it this bad before."

  "Isn't it just two, though?"

  "Two in a row and the one that I just barely completed. There might have been a witness but I'm almost sure he was armed and he didn’t get to see my face. Out of pure luck because the idiot was incompetent enough I could hear him coming. I'm not exactly careless. This many flukes worries me."

  He still wasn’t saying anything.

  Why wasn’t he saying anything?

  I started pacing again, my nerves getting the better of me. I would have held myself still no matter if it killed me if there were any other people in the room, but Greco had made the decision to excuse everyone else when I walked into the room. It was one of the parlors in the mansion, with large windows that had the curtains drawn even though it was dark outside. It had a good view of the water, especially during the day, but I wasn’t particularly interested in the view just then.

  "So, what exactly are you suggesting? That I'm giving you false information?"

  I froze in place, facing away from him. The thought had crossed my mind, of course, only I couldn’t think of why he'd lead me into these situations on purpose. Usually, he sent me after people he wanted dead enough to hire a hit on them, which didn’t happen often, surprisingly.

  I only killed people that tread on Greco's toes or were starting to get out of line. No nice, innocent people would do that to a mafia boss, so I never minded taking the jobs. Usually, he told me the reason, or I heard from one of his men, or the people I was sent to kill when I had to get up close and personal. I liked being undercover, and I loved my job as a hitman, strange as it would seem to many.

  But I knew better than to tell him I was suspicious of him, even for a second. Greco was a stickler for loyalty; he would not appreciate it.

  "If I thought that, I wouldn’t have come to ask you. I was thinking more of a leak somewhere. I know even in the tightest organization there is a possibility, and it’s the only thing I can come up with. Because lately, it's starting to look as if my marks are expecting me, even waiting for me."

  Except for this last one, because he was most certainly surprised. But I remembered, he hadn't tried to run off exactly, just glanced around like he was looking for someone. It was possible I moved too fast for them and that was why because I hadn’t taken the time to fake an alibi like Greco wanted most of the time. And the guy I got to drive me, I'd had to drag him along with me instead of waiting for him to do whatever the hell else he wanted. But it only gave me a minimal head start, so I wouldn’t bank on it being useful all the time.

  "Only three people know when I'm going to have someone offed, two of them are in this room, and the other is a man I would trust with my life, he's been with me longest in this business. Maybe the guys I'm sending you after know they've done something wrong and they've heard about all the other people I've worked with that ended up dead after they… crossed me."

  I slowed my pacing as I thought it through. It was actually very plausible. Most of them were kept hush hush, but I was sure news traveled in the underground circuits. Most of these guys had hands in several pies so that kind of news couldn’t be kept hidden for long.

  "Maybe you're right," I said slowly. "But what do I do about it? If I meet my mark and I think the situation can be compromised, can I turn away and go after them later after some recon? Like with the other two, I've been keeping an eye on them for the next chance I get."

  He shrugged, looking entirely unconcerned for a man that paid me a lot of money
for each mark he gave me. "Do whatever, so long as you get the job done. You haven't disappointed me yet and I know you don’t plan to. I'll tell you when one of the names I have for you is someone I need to be taken out quickly, but other than that." He shrugged again, leaned back in his seat and crossed his legs. "You can make them sweat for all I care. It would serve the bastards right."

  I knew better than to say anything to that, nodding along. It was the best I was going to get out of Greco, any more and I might begin to annoy him, I could tell just by looking at him.

  While talking to him, I started to think about the woman that I saw at the wedding. Elda, my mind supplied helpfully. It had been over a month since the day, and I found myself thinking of her often. Usually, I was alone, and I shoved the thoughts away because there was no use thinking of someone I would likely never see again.

  But the more I looked at Greco…

  "There was a woman at the wedding…" I started without thinking.

  His eyebrows arched, surprised at the sudden change in topic, but looking blandly interested. He waited for me to go on.

  "There was a woman at the wedding that had the same eyes as you. I was just wondering if she was from back in Italy."

  Because her accent had been more obvious than mine, and it was easy to pinpoint, seeing as how I was subjected to it a lot around my boss. I didn’t know if he was originally from Italy and just moved to the US, or if his parents had been old-fashioned enough to make him learn the language and the accent was just there, but I was sure he'd gone there on at least a couple of occasions, though I'd never been.

  I also didn’t make the habit of asking my boss about his personal life, beyond what he wanted me to know when he introduced me to his family, as an afterthought, while telling them I was new security joining the ranks.