by Ava Bloom
Risky
A Bad Boy Mafia Romance
Ava Bloom
Copyright © 2018 by Ava Bloom
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
* * *
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
Contents
1. Lance
2. Josephine
3. Josephine
4. Lance
5. Josephine
6. Lance
7. Josephine
8. Lance
9. Josephine
10. Lance
11. Josephine
12. Lance
13. Josephine
14. Lance
15. Josephine
16. Epilogue - Lance
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1
Lance
The oppressive heat of the Houston summer had just begun to die off, and it couldn’t come any sooner. Nothing was worse than staking out a target while dripping with sweat. And the heat meant no one spent any unnecessary amount of time outside, which made it even harder for me to blend in to my surroundings. People saw me sitting outside of an apartment building for multiple hours and assumed I was begging for money. A few people even tossed money at me through their car windows. Sure, I picked it up, but it was still demeaning. And wearing all black? Not going to happen. I was very likely the first hitman in history to take someone out while wearing white summer linens.
But nowhere in the country could beat Houston in the winter. The constant fifty to sixty-degree weather made it the perfect time of year to carry out hits. Dumping a body in the bay at midnight while wearing jeans and a dark gray t-shirt was the closest I’d ever come to enjoying my job. The night air over the water felt amazing, and if I hadn’t been trying to avoid being seen, I would have floated there for hours. As it was, I had to dump the body and haul ass back to shore. But still, it had been nice.
I was daydreaming about that perfect winter night while sitting outside the apartment complex of my current target, Josephine Reed, a criminal defense lawyer who lives on the third floor of the Riverside Heights apartment complex. No pets, no roommates, attends a cycling class three times per week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, and was currently sitting in her apartment eating takeout from the Chinese place three blocks over. I’d watched her walk inside less than a half hour before carrying the to-go bags. Despite the heat, she had on black leggings, a loose long-sleeved shirt, and her dark hair was pulled into a messy bun high on her head. She wore a large, dark-rimmed pair of glasses, but her beauty was still apparent. I felt a pang of disappointment that I’d have to kill her.
It was important to understand the regular movements and habits of my targets before I could strike. I needed to know which entrances I could safely pass through to get into her building, how many cameras I’d be captured on, which exits were closest to her apartment, and which doors would put me on the busiest streets. I needed to be able to blend into traffic and disappear after the job was finished. I also needed to know who she spent most of her time with and when visitors were most likely to call so I could avoid them.
Movies and television shows depicted hit men firing bullets from cars as they raced past houses or walking into buildings and snapping necks. It wasn’t as dramatic as that. If I behaved that way, I would have been arrested after my first hit. No, it was an art form. One I’d become quite adept at.
My phone vibrated in my pocket and I pulled it out. The words “unknown caller” flashed across the screen just as they always did. The calls from the soldiers were always blocked.
“Yeah?” I asked in lieu of a greeting.
“The capo wants to make sure you are carrying out his orders.” Graham was speaking in an unnecessarily deep voice in an attempt to disguise his identity. He was a skinny, pale kid who was younger than me and spent all his time in front of a computer. But he was the cousin of a cousin of someone in the Petrov family, so he commanded a small group of associates, myself included.
“Working on it right now, Graham,” I said, taking a bite of the apple I’d brought with me. I always felt like a villain in a cartoon movie eating an apple outside of a target’s house. I’d throw the core over my shoulder when I was done and imagine Josephine walking past it on her way to grab breakfast in the morning, seeing it and wondering what kind of delinquent would litter outside her apartment. Maybe she’d even pick it up and throw it in the trash, having no idea the person who ate it would be coming for her when she least expected it.
“What have we said about using our real names, Lance?” Graham asked, dropping the fake voice.
I smiled to myself.
“When can we expect a progress report?”
A “progress report” was proof I’d completed the hit. It could be a driver’s license, a lock of hair, a finger.
“Tomorrow or the next day,” I said, giving myself a little wiggle room. I’d been following Josephine Reed for almost a week, so I could make the hit any day now. The truth was, though, I enjoyed her neighborhood. It was clean and old ladies walking by let me pet their tiny dogs. Everyone trusted me here. Normally, I ended up in sleazy neighborhoods taking out drug dealers who had failed to hold up their end of a deal or down on their luck businessmen who made a few bad bets. I enjoyed those the most. Something about coming full circle was satisfying.
“Hello? Lance?”
I blinked a few times and tried to recall what Graham had just said. “What? Sorry, you cut out,” I lied.
He sighed. “Make the hit tomorrow. We’re growing impatient.”
The phone beeped in my ear, signaling the end of the call. I pocketed the device and finished my apple, chucking the core over my shoulder and listening for the soft thud as it landed in the grass.
“See you tomorrow,” I whispered at the light shining from between Josephine Reed’s white curtains.
2
Josephine
My cycling instructor would be appalled at the amount of Chinese food I’d eaten in the last several months. Hell, I was appalled at the amount of Chinese food I’d eaten. I wanted to be an adult and cook food in the kitchen I paid several thousand dollars every month for, but the Martinetti case had consumed my entire life. I was constantly reading over documents, cross-referencing testimonies, and doing my best to gather as many witnesses as I could. I had to crush this case. It was my first homicide, and I was representing a known mafia member. It was a case even the most experienced lawyers were clamoring to get.
And if I don’t do well, they just might get their chance, I thought as I bit off the end of my egg roll.
Valente Martinetti had hired and fired three lawyers before hiring me, claiming each one was incompetent for one reason or another. I had to prove myself competent. No one in their right mind could deny Pauly had murdered Steven Petrov, a member of a rival mafia family, but if I could keep him off of death row and get him a sentence with the possibility of parole, that would be a huge win.
A huge win for me that is. Not necessarily a huge win for justice. As a lawyer, I’d had to come to terms with the difference between doing my job and seeing that justice was carried out. If I always fought for justice, I’d toss the bumbling idiot that is Pauly Martinetti at the mercy of the court and let him be sent to the lethal injection chambers. But I couldn’t do that because I go to work every day to fight for my clients. I represent them to the best
of my abilities, which involves having charges thrown out and placing the tiniest seeds of doubt in the minds of the jurors. That is what I had to do now for Pauly Martinetti.
I’d followed the case closely, even before being hired as Pauly’s lawyer. My boyfriend had told me I was obsessed with it, claiming I spent more time glued to the local news than I spent talking to him, which was not true in the least, but that didn’t stop him from saying it every night. Michael never liked that I was a lawyer. He was obsessed with the idea of a stay at home wife. Someone to have dinner on the table when he came home and who would raise and homeschool his children. He never understood why I was so opposed to his antiquated ideas of what a woman was capable of, and he certainly didn’t understand why I refused to quit my job even after he was promoted.
“I’m making twice what I was before,” he shouted one night after pillow talk had morphed into talk of our future. “You don’t need to work anymore.”
“That’s great, but I want to work,” I said.
“Who wants to work?”
“Me. I do,” I said, waving at myself dramatically. “I just told you I want to work. I love my job.”
“Yeah, I know you do. You love it more than me,” he said, rolling his eyes.
That hadn’t always been true, but it had become true over time. As our relationship progressed, Michael became controlling. He wanted me to bow to his every wish without argument, and in every other aspect of my life, I had. I’d replaced my favorite red work dress with a gray linen one when Michael insisted I was drawing too much attention to myself. I quit going to my cycling classes when Michael complained that I couldn’t cook him a hot breakfast three days out of the week. And I traded in my steamy romance novels for speculative science fiction and historical non-fiction when he claimed I must only read those books because our sex life wasn’t satisfying enough.
I wish I could say I kicked him to the curb, but it had taken Michael dumping me for me to wake up and realize how unhappy I’d been. He came home from work and when I told him I’d been hired for the Pauly Martinetti case, he flat out told me I had to choose between him or my job.
“I’m not going to stay in a relationship with a workaholic,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion.
“I can’t turn down the opportunity. It will make or break my career,” I begged, reaching for his hand.
He pulled out of my reach and looked down on me as though I were an ant in his picnic basket. “This decision will make or break our relationship. Choose wisely.”
“I have to take the case, Michael. I have to.”
So, he left that night. The speed at which he moved in with another woman made me believe he’d been cheating on me the entire time, but I was shocked at how little I cared. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment I’d fallen out of love with Michael, but it had happened way before the breakup. I hadn’t been in love with him for a long time.
So, with Michael gone and my family living twelve hours away in Kansas, the Pauly Martinetti case became my entire life. I devoted every minute of my time to it. When I got out of the shower every morning, I had to run across my apartment completely naked in search of my case file, so I could make notes in the margins about interviews I needed to reread and questions I needed to ask witnesses before I forgot.
A knock on my front door startled me out of my thoughts. I quickly threw my favorite throw blanket over the coffee table to cover the sensitive case information that was spread out everywhere and the days old Chinese takeout containers that I had neglected to throw away. Once that was done, I padded barefoot to the door, peeked through the peephole, and then threw the door wide and walked back to the couch, Sadie following behind me.
“Girl, it is a Friday night. Are you seriously working on a Friday night?” she asked as if she was surprised, though we had gone through the same routine every Friday for the last few months.
“I’m not working, so much as I’m having a leisurely browse through some of my case files,” I said, collapsing back to the floor with crossed legs and uncovering my dinner. Sadie had seen far worse than a few empty takeout containers scattered around my apartment. I knew she wouldn’t judge me.
“I’m judging you right now.” She shook her head and swept her hand over the landscape of my life. “This is sad.”
“Hey!” I argued, taking another bite of my now lukewarm egg roll. “I’m a successful lawyer. There’s nothing sad about that.”
“When was the last time you left this apartment?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but she cut me off.
“Sorry, let me clarify. When was the last time you left this apartment to do something other than go to work, take a cycling class, or pick up dinner?”
I closed my mouth.
“Jojo, you’re in a funk.” Sadie grabbed the paper takeout container out of my hand and took a bite of the butter noodles.
“Well, you’re over here at my apartment on a Friday night. What does that say about you? What are your big plans?” I asked.
Sadie gave me a wicked smile and then put her hand near her mouth, making a rude sexual gesture.
“Ew,” I said, squishing up my face.
She laughed. “He’ll be here in an hour.”
“Who is he?”
“Jason,” she said confidently, and then furrowed her brow. “I think.”
She pulled out her phone, swiped through a few screens, and then nodded. “Yes. Tonight is Jason.”
“Does Jason know you have to search through your calendar to keep track of all your dates?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We don’t talk about it, but we aren’t exclusive. I don’t do exclusive.”
“You’re so modern, Sadie,” I said acting impressed. “If you have a date in less than an hour, why are you over here? Come to rub it in?”
“Oh, right,” she said as if she only just remembered. “I’m actually here to see if I can get my red heels back.”
“Those are my red heels,” I said. “You just returned them to me last week after having borrowed them for three months.”
“First of all, we both know I got way more use out of them than you ever have. Second, just like a wand chooses its wizard, the heels choose their wearer. Those heels want me.”
When I didn’t look convinced, she pressed her palms together in a prayer and silently begged me.
I rolled my eyes and pointed to the hall closet. “They’re in the rack hanging on the back of the door. Why do you need heels tonight, anyway? Based on your rude gesture, I assumed you were staying in tonight.”
“We are,” she said, slipping the heels on her bare feet and admiring them.
“Okay, my question still stands. Why the heels if you aren’t going anywhere?”
She struck a pose in the closet door, her arm laying flat against the door frame, her hip pushed out sensually to one side. She flipped her long red hair over her shoulder and batted her eyelashes at me. “Jason likes it when I answer the door in heels.”
My forehead wrinkled. “What? Like a 1950s housewife?”
She shook her head and bit her lip. “He likes it when I answer the door…in only the heels.”
“Um, ew,” I said, shaking my head, trying to dispel the mental image. “Are you telling me you’ve had sex in the red heels I wore to work yesterday?”
“Once or twice,” she said.
“Keep them,” I said. “I’m not ever going to be able to wear those again without thinking of the horrors they’ve seen. They are yours now.”
Sadie beamed. “Really? That’s great, because honestly, I’ve had sex in these at least ten times in the last three months. I just didn’t want to tell you.”
“My pleasure,” I said, standing up and pushing Sadie towards the front door. “Now leave before I decide to find myself a different friend.”
She barked out a laugh. “You’d have to leave the house to do that.”
“Out!” I commanded, pointing to the door. “Don’t keep Justin waiti
ng.”
“Jason,” she corrected.
Just as I had managed to push her into the hallway, she peeked her head back in. “I also came to ask you to go out with me tomorrow night.”
I shook my head. “I’m busy.”
“Doing what?” she asked. I started trying to think of an excuse, but she didn’t wait for a response. “You never have plans, and I’m going to this new club tomorrow. It’s supposed to be amazing. Hot guys, amazing drinks, killer music. You deserve a little fun in your life, Josephine.”
“I’m not really a club person,” I said.
“That’s because you’ve never been. Come with me tomorrow, and if you hate it, I’ll never ask you to come with me again,” she said.
I thought about it. That was a pretty good offer. Sadie was always trying to drag me to some bar or club. It would be nice not to have to come up with fanciful excuses all the time.
“You promise?” I asked, holding my pinky out.
She looked at my pinky and rolled her eyes before sticking out her own and wrapping it around me. “Yes, I promise,” she said. “I pinky promise that if you don’t have any fun tomorrow, I will never ask you to come to a club with me again.”
“Then I’ll come. One terrible night will be worth you never begging me to come out with you again,” I said.
“That’s only if you don’t have any fun,” she said. “And I know you will. Tomorrow night is the night you learn that there is a party animal deep down inside of you just waiting to come out, Josephine Reed.”
I nodded my head, unconvinced. “Sure, Sadie. Sure.”