Taken For A Debt: A Mafia Romance (The Taken Duet 1)

Chapter One

When you wake to a hand over your mouth and more hands tugging on your elbows and ankles, dragging you out of bed on a night with no moon, and your first thought is, not again…

Well, it might be time to start thinking seriously about the choices you’ve made in your life.

I didn’t have time to do that right that minute, though. I started kicking and squirming and biting.

My head jerked back so hard from a slap it took me several seconds to confirm my neck was still in one piece.

“We’ll have none of that,” growled a voice I was sure I’d never heard before. “How do you think you’re going to fight three of us off when there’s nobody to come to your rescue?”

Not just opportunist criminals, then, as if the fact that the security alarm wasn’t screaming and they were coming for me instead of raiding the house didn’t give it away. They knew my parents were away, and they’d taken every other precaution to make sure nobody else would know what was happening to me.

Too professional to be an ex-boyfriend and I didn’t deal with the sorts of guys who had money to spend on hired goons: basically, I had no idea who these men were. That meant it wasn’t safe to just let them take me… but as they lifted me, raised my arms over my head, wrapped my wrists and ankles fast and began to carry me off trussed like a pig ready for spit-roast, I realised I didn’t have a choice for the moment.

The men moved me out of my own bedroom like I weighed nothing, a shiver running through me as I floated barely dressed down the hallway, down the stairs towards the back door that led into the yard. There, my head turned for reasons I couldn’t make sense of at first. Something about a shadowy corner had triggered my subconscious…

Not something, someone.

I felt a strange calm fall over me, and took the opportunity to start taking mental inventory of the men I definitely knew were there. Two carrying me and the third helping to guide them while he kept one hand over my mouth as much as possible… yes, that man had lied to me. There were four of them who had come for me, and maybe it was convenient for them to let the one who wasn’t taking direct part in my kidnapping remain in reserve, in the shadows.

Did he know me? Was he avoiding getting too close to me so I wouldn’t notice?

Whether familiar or a stranger, it seemed likely he was the mastermind, the one who could stand back and watch while others got their hands dirty. And once I was whisked away to a location of his choosing… I would find out what he really had in store for me.

Chills ran through my body. A few years ago, I was kidnapped by a boyfriend who’d flipped out because… well, I was a flirt back then and I messed with boys’ heads as a hobby, so I was probably asking for it a bit, but how was I supposed to know he was going to go off like that? Anyway, I’d learned my lesson when it came to teasing men. There’s no safe level.

But though I’d been scared during that experience, I hadn’t been totally hopeless, because I knew the guy who’d taken me and at heart he was a good guy. Someone who could be brought around with a bit of persusasive action, tears and whatever sounded like a good apology.

There’s no shame in crying to a man’s face if it gets you what you want. But this time, the tears were filling my eyes without my choosing to let them. I had no idea if I was going to get through this alive, if they were going to rape me… or something worse I couldn’t even put into words.

I let the tears fall hot across my cheeks and disappear beneath me, because the only thing I could think to do at that moment was to try to get my fear under control before they had me somewhere they would see. If there’s something I know about tears, it’s that the only way to truly suppress them is to let the pressure off now and then. Everyone who manages it cries, or smashes things… or some people make other people cry instead. Anyone who acts like they don’t need an outlet like that is just lying because they’re ashamed of the form it takes for them.

There was a chuckle that sounded muffled by a mask of some kind. “Don’t cry, little girl, you’re going to be looked after.”

One of my tears must have dropped onto him or something. I didn’t try to speak, because a hand was still hovering over my mouth, and I wasn’t sure I could do myself any justice by using my voice at that moment anyway. If they thought I sounded scared, that was just fine with me, but it seemed like I stood a good chance of convincing myself I had no hope of getting out of this, and I couldn’t have that. I needed to lower their suspicions if I wanted any chance of getting away.

My captors carried me straight out the back door, and when they were halfway across the yard I heard a click. The fourth man must have closed the door… but it didn’t seem to me he could have wiped for fingerprints effectively in that time. There was bare skin against my face, not latex, and none of them had been particularly careful.

So, they didn’t mind if they left evidence of their presence. That seemed like another reason for me to be afraid. They had to know from the size of our house that my parents could afford to hire whatever detectives they needed to hunt them down, but if they left obvious prints just the police would suffice. Why would they willingly hand over their identities?

At the end of our yard there was a halt as one of the men climbed over the fence, and then the other two handed me over to him, raising me high over the rear edge of the fence and sending my head swirling as they tipped me almost completely upside-down. I tensed, feeling cold air on my belly as my pyjama shirt started to slide up under the force of gravity. It turned my stomach to think of being exposed to them.

Then a strong body pulled me upright, one arm wrapping right across my chest and another over the bare skin below. Someone caught my feet and helped me to stand, then something cold on the inside of my leg made me flinch against the man behind me, and I was able to shift restlessly as the bonds around my ankles were cut away. I was out in the unused reserve land behind my house, rough dry grass pricking my bare feet.

Two masked figures rose over the line of the fence and dropped in front of me, shaking out their limbs before striding out across the field. I did a quick inventory: the man whose arm was bearing down with a vice-like force on my breasts had to be the silent fourth. When had he climbed over the fence?

One thing was clear to me now: he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty after all. There was something about his confident grip, the warmth of his body so close, that was making me shake fitfully.