The Woman in the Trunk

Her gaze went to me, then the box, then me again, giving me a defeated little nod. "One peep and the goddamn thing goes back on, and won't come off again, got it? I don't care if you're hungry."

To that, I got another nod.

And, it seemed, we had a momentary truce.

Of course, it wouldn't last.

The girl lived up to the nickname I'd given her.

She was pure fucking evil.

And determined to scratch and hiss every step of the way.

And me?

Well, I had to respect that, didn't I?Chapter FourGianaHe thought I was a kid still.

And, I guess, that worked in my favor.

Even if it didn't stop me from rolling around in a trunk for hours, every part of me getting bumped and bruised. The skin under the duct tape was sore. And I had needed to pee for hours.

Mix that with the fear of rape or other bodily harm, and I was ready to claw his eyes out when he dropped me on the bed in the motel room.

In the daylight, I was annoyed to find him ridiculously good looking. Bad guys, in real life, were supposed to be balding and pockmarked with hangover waistlines and beady eyes.

This man was nearly six-and-a-half feet of well-built handsomeness from his fit body to his sharp bone structure to his deep green eyes.

The scar was maybe the only thing that gave him away as a bad guy. Not many normal people walked around sporting a scar that ran through their dark eyebrow, upper eyelid, and then about an inch under their eye. I couldn't think of an accidental way someone might get a scar like that.

It made him serious and menacing.

And, somehow, even more attractive.

It took me an almost embarrassingly long time to put the pieces together. The nice car. The designer suit, the expensive watch. The New York accent.

In fact, I hadn't even started to put the pieces together until he started talking about who he was.

Then it finally clicked.

He was a member of the Costa family.

And knowing what I knew about the mafia in New York City—which was a lot given that my idiot father was wrapped up with them—the Costa was the top family. Arturo Costa was the Capo dei Capi—the boss of all bosses.

There were five New York City crime families. There had been for nearly a century.

Each family had its own structure.

Associates, soldiers, capos, underboss, and boss. Each family did their own hustles.

But one always had slightly more power than the others.

That family was the Costas.

And had been since Arturo violently stole power as a young man.

I wasn't sure if I should have been relieved that this wasn't some random rapist-murderer, or pee-myself scared that the Costa family was holding me hostage to get something out of my father.

But, as the food arrived, I decided that making sure I was fed was going to help me keep my wits about me, which might help save my life.

So I agreed to a truce with the devil.

In doing so, he moved over toward me, freeing my sore wrists, making my shoulders cry in relief. He even reached up and carefully peeled away the duct tape.

"Do you have a name?" he asked, offering me the folding chair, taking one of the containers with him to sit off the edge of the bed.

"Gigi. Giana," I corrected immediately, not sure I wanted this stranger to use my nickname, to be allowed to have that kind of intimacy with me. "You?" I asked, taking a set of the plastic utensils and cutting into the eggplant parmigiana.

"Lorenzo," he offered, surprising me.

Lorenzo.

I knew of a Lorenzo thanks to all the mafia research I had done.

"Lorenzo Costa?" I asked. The son of the most violent mafia boss since the seventies.

"Yes. And you're Leon's daughter."

I just barely held myself back from saying "unfortunately."

"Why wasn't he in the beach house with you? Who leaves their kid in a house all alone all night?"

"I'm not a kid," I objected before catching myself. It was a knee-jerk reaction from having people confuse me as younger for so long.

"Yeah okay," he agreed, rolling his eyes. "Where is Leon?"

"At the bakery right now, I imagine."

"Hopefully earning the money he needs to get you back."

That was unlikely, but I kept my mouth shut about it.

"This is the part where I'm supposed to beg for my life, right?"

"I imagine so. I don't exactly kidnap kids on the regular, so I'm not sure how all this plays out. You can roll your eyes all you want, Gigi, but the mafia usually doesn't deal in children."

"Gee, lucky me, then," I mumbled, lip curling as I took a bite of the eggplant parm that had clearly come from a frozen patty.

"I know. Not great," Lorenzo agreed. "One positive to getting back to where we need to go is the food will be good. And the bed will be less dubious under a blue light."