Caged: A Dark Mafia Romance

I looked up to see Dylan Bush—the district attorney—rushing toward me. “Nayla! Are you hurt? You’re bleeding,” he said as he knelt down to where I still sat. His words blended with the sounds of sirens in the distance coming too late for our rescue.

I looked down and saw that I was covered in blood, though none of it belonged to me. “I’m okay. It’s not mine.”

Physically I was fine.

“Who was it? Moretti or Vasco?” I asked.

Dylan shook his head as he helped me to a standing position. “I don’t know. But whoever it was, aimed to kill.”

“This isn’t Eddie Vasco’s style,” I said as I stared at the dead priest and then looked at all the other countless bodies.

I didn’t know everything about the boss of the Vasco family quite yet, but since Dylan Bush had his hands full working on an indictment of Leon Moretti, he had handed off the Vasco case to me. I had spent day and night trying to build a case on the man, and if anyone could call themselves an expert on someone, I would be in regards to Eddie.

“He’s religious and wouldn’t dare disrespect sacred ground like this,” I added, realizing I sounded more like an FBI profiler than an assistant D.A. “He’d save his killing for a dark alley. Someplace where innocents couldn’t get harmed. His reputation of a ruthless killer stops when it comes to women and children.”

“Agreed. This screams Moretti,” Dylan said as he cast his eyes around the carnage of the cathedral. “Fucking monsters. They’re all fucking monsters.”

This battle was over… for now. This song, this ballad of death had turned to an eerie sound of silence as the surviving mourners in the church stood to assess the damage.

“The good guys are losing this war,” I mumbled to myself as my body began to shake.

“Yes,” Dylan agreed, clearly hearing my words.

The Vasco and Moretti families were stronger, more ruthless, and after today’s deadly attack, outnumbered us. Something had to be done. I was close to having enough information to indict Eddie Vasco. I would do whatever it took to end this war. The Vasco and Moretti families would pay with their freedom. But I would personally take great pleasure watching as they put Eddie Vasco behind bars and threw away the key because of me. I would bring him down. The good guys would come out of this as the victors, and the animals would be put away in a cage forever.

Chapter One

Nayla Bell

I had stared at the wall of pictures in my apartment so many times, I could see every single detail of every single picture, even with my eyes shut. The entire wall of my living room—floor to ceiling—was covered in over a hundred pictures of Eddie Vasco and his crime syndicate. For over a year I had been working on this case with a revolving door of different detectives, but my obsession had kept it alive when others may have let it go cold. For a mafia crime boss, Eddie Vasco kept his nose clean… on the surface. I couldn’t get enough to indict him, even though I knew the man was guilty of every possible crime I could imagine and even some I couldn’t. But I had one shot to bring Eddie down, and I would need all the evidence I could to make a conviction stick.

For a man who was feared by so many, the pictures on my wall spoke of a different story. There was no bloody mayhem or torture. There was not a single picture of Eddie holding a gun or weapon of any kind. Though he was over six feet tall, muscled from head to toe, and had tattoos on every part of his arms, the pictures never captured him in any form of violence or intimidation. The man was a killer, yet the pictures didn’t reveal that fact in the slightest. There were pictures of Eddie dressed in an expensive suit going in and out of a black town car, or into five-star restaurants. There were also pictures of him dressed far more casually as he entered the local Italian restaurants that had been in the neighborhoods for decades. I had pictures of him going to Catholic mass, or buying a hot dog at the corner stand. Pictures of him had been snapped as he sat by an old Sicilian hitman by the name of Bobby Dancer—long retired—in Central Park. That was about as close as I could get at having anything worth mentioning in an indictment.

I even got the feeling that Eddie knew the pictures were being taken. There were some pictures on my wall that haunted my dreams—pictures where Eddie stared directly into the camera, his dark brown eyes locking with mine as I gazed at the four-by-six rectangles taped in the center of the photo collage. I don’t know why I’d organized them so that every picture where Eddie stared directly at the camera were in the center of the wall, but I had. His face often mesmerized me as I tried to find his secrets that eluded me. How could I bring him down? Where were the bodies hidden? Who was Eddie Vasco, and how could he rule the Vasco family and the streets of New York with such an iron fist, and yet we had nothing on him? How could this be?