Page 37 of Forsaking All Others

Chapter Eleven

Fiammetta

He wasn’t coming.

It had been four days, and I was still alone, locked in a room somewhere in South Shore with a stained mattress on the floor and a bucket to do my business in.

They’d killed Frank.

Shot him in the head the moment we pulled up to the building.

Frank Petretti, only forty-six years old, husband to Beatrice and father to their three-year-old girl Ashley. I’d attended her birthday party just last month and watched as Frank sat her in his lap to blow out her candles.

Only then did the terror start to sink in, but it didn’t take firm hold until the end of the third day when I realized that maybe Dario wouldn’t come.

He said himself the morning I was taken that he didn’t want a wife.

Maybe this was a convenient excuse to get rid of me.

Blame it on the Russians.

Which was another thing I couldn’t get out of my head, something I used to preoccupy myself and puzzle over as I sat with nothing to do in the musky, dank room, waiting like some forgotten damsel for my rescue.

Why were the Russian Bratva moving against the Outfit?

Dario didn’t tell me a damn thing about his operation, but I heard snippets through my gossiping household staff and Mafia wives. Once, years ago, there had been a tentative truce between the Bratva and the American Cosa Nostra, and then something had happened to turn the tide toward animosity. Rumor had it, Dario had almost single-handedly killed every one of the top Bratva soldiers before the new boss, the Pakhan, had struck a deal with Lando and Dario. Since then, they had been quiet, carving out their own section of the city without interfering in Mafia politics or territory.

And now, they’d thrown down the ultimate gauntlet by kidnapping the capo dei capi’s wife.

I knew a smattering of Russian words thanks to Katya, but not enough to catch what the various thugs were saying the odd times two of them came into my isolation chamber to feed me.

Happily, the young man they left primarily in charge of my care spoke decent English.

His name was Petyr. When I asked, he lied and told me he was twenty-one, but his adolescent acne and baby face told me he couldn’t have been older than seventeen. His eagerness to please was palpable, and, happily, it didn’t extend just to his bosses.

I might have been dirty from days without a shower, but I was still pretty enough to make him blush whenever I made idle conversation with him.

Do you have a girlfriend?

A blush so lurid I thought he might burst a blood vessel.

What does a young man like you do with yourself cooped up all day just watching me lie in bed?

Red cheeks, a bitten lip, and, when he spoke, a stutter that made it impossible for him to finish his sentence when he tried to explain that he liked to play games on his phone.

His attraction to me made the way his older associates treated him especially humiliating.

“If he does not agree, we kill her,” one of the thugs, the thick-necked, fleshy-faced man who had held the gun to the back of my head argued on the fourth morning when Dario still hadn’t granted whatever terms they laid out.

“Sh-she could still be useful,” Petyr suggested, straightening his thin shoulders after looking at me from the corner of his dark eyes. “Maybe the Sicilian Cosa Nostra will pay for her instead.”

“Unlikely,” the other man, whom Petyr called Daniil, scoffed. “She’s only got extended family left over on that rock, and none of them are powerful enough to play with.”

My chest panged as it always did, even after all these years, to hear the murders of my father and brothers spoken of so dismissively.

“This was stupid idea,” the third guy huffed with a thick Russian accent, kicking at the metal base of the bed I sat on. I struggled not to flinch. “Everyone knows the capo does not care for wife.”

“You did not say so when they offered one million dollars for this kidnapping, Afansay,” Daniil groused. “Do not be baby like Petyr. If Ferretti does not pay, we will kill girl and be done with this. One million dollars richer than we were, dah?”