Page 3 of The Mafioso's Virgin
“You'll want to sit for this.” Lucaenters my office without knocking.
“I am sitting."
He drops a photograph on my desk.
A young woman smiles shyly at the camera. She’s pretty. No, she’sbeautiful.Golden blonde hair, pale blue eyes, and cupid’s bow lips.
Something about her face captivates me, and I can’t seem to pull my eyes away.
I must stare for a while, because Luca clears his throat.
"Polina Lebedev," he explains. "Twenty-one. Daughter of a Bratva officer. She vanished ten days ago. Kidnapped.”
"Tragic. Why is it on my desk?"
"Because she surfaced." His voice stays even. "In a trafficking cell tied to Lombardi."
“Fuck.” I close my eyes as I process this development.
After taking over as Don of the Chicago outfit when Alessio Moretti was killed, I faced two main challenges.
First, I shut down human trafficking operations, but not all members of our organization are happy about that. Moretti loyalists, led by Tommaso Lombardi, continue to operate trafficking cells under my radar, despite us working to stomp them out.
The second challenge has been making peace with the Bratva. Not easy after Moretti painted kill room walls with Russian blood for sport.
Now Lombardi may have a Bratva daughter in a shipping container in my territory, bound for god knows where, and every Italian-Russian bridge I've built is at risk of burning.
“Do we have a location?"
“Meatpacking district. A place off Pulaski."
“Intel?”
“We need to move asap. Get me Mattia and Dario and eight more. Silencers. I want it clean. I don't want to be inside longer than necessary. I’ll lead.”
Luca looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
"Peace is at stake.” I run a hand down my face. “Volkov needs to hear that I came for her myself. Not that I sent men. We’ll recover the girl, patch her up if necessary, and return her to her father wrapped in apologies and the heads of the men who took her.”
He doesn’t argue. That's why he's my underboss.
When we arrive at the Pulaski site, my men take the exterior guards without a sound.
Inside, gunshots last for no more than twenty seconds, and then it's done. I step over the body of a mafia soldier I've been paying wages to for two years—fucking traitor—and follow Mattia’s flashlight down a corridor of chain-link holding pens.
Empty. Empty. Empty.
I start to think they got the drop on us when Mattia stops at the last pen, his eyes widening.
I step briskly to the pen and look through the chain link.
There's a girl on the concrete.
She's pressed into the corner, knees to her chest, arms wrapped around them, and she’s folded so small that for a moment I don't see her.
Her feet are bare and filthy. There's a yellow-green bruise on her cheekbone, and fresher ones on her neck and shoulders. Her wrists are ringed raw where she was clearly bound. She’s been through two weeks of hell.
Luca takes bolt cutters to the lock. The sound makes her flinch so hard her shoulder hits the wall.
